The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost - November 9, 2025

St. Pauls - Proper 27- November 9, 2025

The skeptic confronted the priest. He said, If you really believe what you preach, then I make you a challenge. Drink this poison here and if you don’t die, I’ll believe. The priest retorted, I have a better plan. You drink the poison and I’ll raise you up.

We’re going to talk about the resurrection, something we hope is considerably down the road. Concerning the resurrection, there are two major points to make. First, when we recite the creed and proclaim, I believe in the resurrection of the dead, most of us, I suspect, mean what Plato meant, I believe in the immortality of the soul.

And that is not the Christian belief. Christian belief is not that the soul, apart from the body, lives on. No, the Christian belief is that the whole embodied person lives on. Who and what we are now, as an embodied person, will live on. Just as Jesus’ resurrection offered the entire Jesus as risen with a glorified body that ate and to which he invited his apostles to feel and touch, so, like Jesus, the total we, will be raised up, not just the soul.

This profound sense of embodiment, you need to recall, is fundamental to our religion and is its underlying motif. It structures our liturgical year where we have the three 

major embodiments of the Christian faith: the incarnation, God taking our flesh; the Eucharist, my body given for you; and the resurrection, the raising of Jesus, the victory over death and limitation—all dealing with the body, Christ’s and ours. So, once more, we as a totality, body and soul, will be raised up, not just our souls.

The second point is that, in talking about the resurrection of the dead, the focus must be entirely on God and God’s promises. This is critical to grasp. God is Emmanuel, God with us. That description was given at Jesus’ birth— You shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us— and closes his death and resurrection, after which he reminded us, I am with you all days, even to the end of time. Jesus added, So do not be afraid. I go to prepare a place for you. And those promises, in fact, resonate with us.

Why? Because we all have a deep down hankering not only to survive but also to find completion and permanence in an ever-changing world. We have an almost genetic capacity, a yearning, for growth. Becoming is never finished. All these yearnings suggest a place prepared for us, a resurrection, an eternity. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, if a duck has a yearning to swim, well, there is water; a flower to grow, well, there is sunlight; a child to love, well, there is mother. Likewise, if we have a yearning to live forever, to be, to become more beyond this world, why should there also not be something to satisfy these longings? Some may scoff over people declared clinically dead who describe having seen a bright light and feeling a deep sense of peace, but they cannot explain or deny the universal expressions of life after death.

So we Christians resonate with God’s promises to love and cherish us, to be with us beyond the grave, knowing such promises are not conditioned by boundaries, space and time. God is faithful and that is all we need to know and that is cause enough for joy. Having created us, God is simply unwilling to let us go—ever. Remember that!

Otherwise, if we lose this insight, this truth and shift our focus from God to ourselves, then we get bogged down in all those me questions. Will I still need glasses? Will I look like I am now or when I was twenty-six and tall and straight with jet-black hair? What about those cremated, those eaten by sharks, those pulverized by explosives? Will, Cubby, my dog be there? Will I know my friends?

As curious as we are about these things and fruitlessly wonder how God can reassemble bodies, we must accept the fact that these are really not primary questions 

because, as I said, the resurrection is not about us. The resurrection is about God and God’s fidelity, God’s promise never to abandon us. god will work out the logistics.

True enough, Hollywood offers us its solution of ghosts, ghouls, zombies, and dead baseball players on fields of dreams, and literature offers us Hamlet’s father and 

Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman, but these concoctions really don’t say much about people of the resurrection.

And Jesus himself, you notice, doesn’t reveal much either, except to say that eternal life will be different, a dimension beyond our comprehension. So he tells the Sadducees who bring him the absurd case of the seven men with one wife, a parody on the first reading of the seven brothers. Jesus simply tells them that they are wrongheaded. The 

continuation of life through marriage and children is not needed in the afterlife where extinction is not the issue. People will be more like angels. It will be a whole new 

order of existence.

Occasionally, though, we get hints of that new order. We get intimations of closeness and contact. For example, I know a woman who had lost her husband, Bob, and was deep into grief and anger.  One day she lost her car keys. She searched everywhere. She began to cry over her loss of Bob and the keys. Suddenly she became angry with bob for leaving her alone and she found herself yelling at him, Find my damn keys! If there’s anyone out there, if there’s any love left in this universe, find my keys! She calmed down and a year later she found her keys in a most unexpected place peeking through a hole in a poster hung on the inside of her closet door. How silly. How in the world could they have gotten there? Who would be so mindless as to put them there?

Of all the speculations, she did not dismiss the thought that it might be her husband. Bob had a tendency to 

procrastinate, and he had a unique sense of humor and it would be just like him to have taken a year to get around to giving the keys back in a clever fashion. She’s not 

saying it was Bob, or wasn’t, only that life sis 

unpredictable and uncertain and that it there is 

uncertainty there is also, as she put it, ravishing mystery. In other words, she was not ready to put a period to death.

Nor should we. Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me shall live forever. That’s a promise that will be kept.

I would like to close with a prayer poem by John O, Donohue called Entering Death…..At the very end, he uses a term Anam cara. It is the Gaelic term for soul-friend, a special form of love and belonging that transcends categories and conventions.

I pray that you will have the blessing

Of being consoled and sure about your death.

May you know in your soul

There is no need to be afraid.

When your time comes, may you have

Every blessing and strength you need.

May there be a beautiful welcome of you

In the home you are going to.

You are not going somewhere strange,

Merely back to the home you have never left.

May you life with compassion

And transfigure everything

Negative within and about you.

When you come to die,

May it be after a long life.

May you be tranquil 

Among those who care for you.

May your going be sheltered

And your welcome assured.

May your soul smile

In the embrace

of your Anam Cara.

AMEN+