“If For This Life Only –
A Sermon About Life After Death”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
February 11, 2007

I Corinthians 15:12-20

            Paul has a problem. There are members of his congregation in Corinth teaching that there is no resurrection of the dead. If this is true, Paul protests, then Christ has not been raised from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:13).  What has always interested me about this passage is that Paul’s not saying that Christ being raised from the dead is proof that the dead are raised. He’s saying that Christ’s resurrection is confirmation of a pre-existing belief that the dead are raised. In fact, this was the subject of hot debate in Judaism at the time of Jesus. Some believed in the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Others did not. Paul clearly did. So when somebody identifying himself as Jesus – somebody who was supposed to be dead as a doornail – unceremoniously introduced himself to Paul on the road to Damascus, Paul’s prior belief in the resurrection of the dead was confirmed.

We don’t know exactly when this belief came into existence. Biblical scholar Dom Crossan traces it to 2^nd century B.C.E. Jews watched helplessly as the Empire slaughtered their people. Why would God allow this? If it were a just world, then God would act to vindicate their deaths – not only by defeating the Empire, but also by restoring the integrity of the slaughtered bodies themselves. There would be a physical resurrection of these people – with bodies restored.  Now, Paul didn’t believe in a physical resurrection, but he did believe that we have a spiritual body that survived death.

Life after death? The topic doesn’t get much airtime in the United Church of Canada, which is a bit surprising. Our own Susan McCaslin preached about it here last year, and wrote an excellent article about it for the United Church Observer. But by and large we don’t venture into the territory of eternal life, immortality of the soul, or in Christian language, the resurrection of the dead. Why not?

            I can think of a couple of reasons. First, we have brothers and sisters in the Christian faith who use this as a kind of theological hammer. If you believe the right things you get the door prize – eternal life. When I became a Christian I was asked: “Do you know that you have eternal life?” The implication was that if I didn’t know I probably didn’t believe the right things, and I was bound for hell. It’s a highly coercive strategy for increasing numbers.  Some Christian denominations piggybacked on the military invasion of Iraq with an ideological invasion. They saw it as an opportunity to bring people to Christ and to do so primarily using the threat of eternal damnation. So, we have bent over backwards to distinguish our faith from these belief systems.

A second reason we don’t talk about it much is that we’re proud of our tradition of engaged spirituality. We are more likely to say that we cannot know what happens to us after death, but we do know that God calls us as Christians to help make this world more just and peaceful. We have tended to focus more on the external or social dimension of faith as a liberal denomination. Our own private salvation, and what happens in an “afterlife” seem much less important to us in a world so many are struggling to simply survive, let alone “be saved”.  In the process we have developed a fairly sophisticated understanding and critique of the social, political and economic systems. The downside of this is that the interior dimensions of the Spirit often take a back seat.

            Perhaps we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water.  Paul hits the nail on the head when he responds to those who do not believe in a resurrection of the dead: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are a people to be most pitied (v.19).  The truth about the human being is that while we are embedded in the realm of time and space – the temporal dimension – yet we intuit, and sometimes experience, another timeless dimension. This timeless dimension goes by many names in various traditions – the Unoriginate Origin, the Cosmic Void, the Sea of Being, Non-Duality, The Womb of the Divine – choose your metaphor. Each is a linguistic stab at what is essentially beyond language. It is the face of God before the Flaring Forth, or the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago. The mystical strands of all major faiths have intuited that we are one with this timeless dimension.  The pitiable quality of life without a sense of eternity is that we can feel like the realm of time and space is, in the end, not much more than a death sentence.  The philosopher Wittgenstein got it right when he wrote: “If we take eternity to mean not everlasting time but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”  As we learn to enter this timeless dimension we bring a certain freedom with us into the realm of time and space.

So there is a vertical dimension to Christian spirituality – the urge to realize a unity with this Sacred Dimension of Timelessness – and there is a horizontal dimension – the urge to engage as fully as possible at the temporal dimension. Just a quick word about this temporal dimension – when we learn to identify over time, less with this separate bag of bones, the self we normally think of as ourselves, and more with the evolutionary thrust of the Spirit moving through us, we begin to understand our purpose on earth. As well, we are given the power to realize our purpose – which is to be in service of this evolutionary dynamic in the universe, known most fully for Christians in Jesus of Nazareth.

The symbolism of the cross reflects an ultimate truth – that we all are suspended between these two dimensions, the horizontal and vertical.  In this realm of time and space we are born, we evolve in consciousness, we suffer the agony and ecstasy of life, give our lives to serving the evolutionary purposes of the universe (ideally) and then our physical bodies die – we “shuffle off this mortal coil” to quote Shakespeare. In this realm physical death is real. Jesus was crucified and died as the ancient Creed puts it. But in the vertical dimension of timelessness death has no reality – there is only the timelessness of Eternal life.

Unless we are cultivating increasing awareness of both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of reality we won’t be living in reality. Ancient and modern mystics dwell within both realms simultaneously. Through meditation, focused awareness, and right thought, they experience the timelessness of eternity. This experience has the effect of removing all fear of death.

When Moses asks God’s name before the burning bush, God tells him that the sacred name is “I Am”.  In the gospel of John, Jesus uses different metaphors to describe his nature and purpose, Light, Bread, Truth, Way, Life. But he begins each sentence by using the same divine name: “I Am the bread of life; I Am the light of the world, etc. This “Isness” of the divine, the timeless now of divine presence is available to us within the realm of time and space, as it was for Jesus. 

To experience this realm is to know bliss and joy. As we begin to identify with this dimension – cultivate the vertical dimension of our spirituality – it begins to inform our life in the temporal realm. So Bishop Tutu of South Africa and the Dalai Lama can get together and spend a good part of their time giggling at the sheer joy of being alive. They have tasted eternity. On the other hand, both are absolutely committed to social and political transformation. Both have lived through and experienced horrendous suffering. Yet they haven’t lost their deep joy. Their lives are cruciform – the vertical and the horizontal are in balance.  Fourteenth century mystic Julian of Norwich penned the famous line: “All shall be well, and all shall be will, and all manner of things shall be well”.  This wasn’t pie-in-the-sky sentimentality. She lived in the real world of suffering. Yet because she also lived within eternity, she had a sense that all suffering, including death, was set within the larger context of the heart of the divine.

When Paul speaks of the “resurrection of the dead” it is a metaphorical way of affirming the vertical dimension of faith. He was trying to get across that to deny it is to become a prisoner of time and space. It is either to succumb to the fear of death or attempt to stoically face into it. In either case, maintaining a joyful predisposition in the face of the evil, suffering, and death becomes very difficult. In the United Church we tend to get very earnest about our social causes and very judgmental about those whom we think are to blame. Is this because we haven’t spent as much time in the Timelessness of Eternity?  Last week I preached about the prophetic dimension of our faith – the capacity to speak truth to power. But if this is done without a cultivated sense of the Eternal it creates as much violence as it solves.

What about the soul? Well, the soul is not a thing that enters us when we’re born. In the horizontal realm of time and space the Spirit of God animates us, and with the animating spirit of God we are given 80 years or so to co-create the inner self, our interiority. By this I mean the energetic aggregate of all our life experience, decisions made and unmade, the character and qualities we’ve developed in our lifetime, and the quality of consciousness we’ve arrived at by the grace of the eternal Spirit. This energetic body – the soul –  survives physical death. This is what happens when a loved one dies and they “come to us” in an image, a voice, or even in what can feel like a physical presence.

The soul, then, is the field of consciousness that we create during the time we inhabit the realm of time and space. Souls don’t properly belong to this timeless dimension of eternity.  Yet as an energetic or subtle form of energy, neither does it deteriorate. When Paul experienced Jesus on the road to Damascus he experienced Christ’s own field of consciousness. Moreover, we can still tap into the field or the soul of Jesus today. In fact, this is what we’re doing when we tell stories about him, pray in his name, and receive communion in his name.  We are “downloading” the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. In this sense, he is still helping those who gather in his name to evolve in compassion and in truth. When Paul exhorts us to “have the mind and heart which was in Christ Jesus”, this is what he was talking about. Paul also talks about the “great cloud of witnesses” – the souls of our dear departed ones – who are cheerleaders for us. We can also tap into their souls for our sustenance.  The soul, then, exists in an intermediary position between the physical realm and the realm of Spirit, between Timelessness and Time. Christians tap into the soul of Christ, Buddhists into the Buddha’s soul, Hindus into their pantheon of gods and goddesses; indigenous people tap into their ancestors.

Each of you sitting here this morning is a manifestation in time and space of the Timeless One, whom we call God. Most of us have forgotten this, but when we hear somebody remind us, there is often a deep resonance. We need to know this about ourselves. We have two homes in a sense – the timeless heart of God that we long to return to, and the home here on the planet that we long to inhabit as deeply and compassionately as possible. Our roots go deep into this planet we love so much, and our branches reach high into eternity. You can’t separate the root from the branches, and so we shouldn’t separate our commitment to this evolutionary journey from the eternal. Such a beautiful and wondrous journey! Praise God!