Oblivion

Scripture: The Resurrection of Our Lord, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. AMEN.

Death is about a lot more than biology. We reduce death when we think about it in a purely material sense: the loss of a pulse, the cessation of brain activity. Death is actually a lot scarier than that.

When people talk about death in the Bible, what they’re really talking about is the loss of their future, the loss of their purpose. It is impossible for a human being to bear the burden of mortality without the promise of some sort of immortality. That’s why human societies create culture. Culture is the way that we connect with generations before us and with generations yet unborn: a democracy of the dead. Culture is how our stories, our values, our customs—even our songs, our language, our names—might continue beyond ourselves, might live on after we have died.

If we believe that the things we value will live on, if we believe that our families will continue the work begun by our ancestors and to which we ourselves have contributed, then we have hope, we have purpose, we have a future. There is the promise of life, and so we find the motivation to go on with the hard work of living. Without that promise, all we can muster is a sort of living death.

We can see this in history, in psychology, in all the world around us. Ancient Egyptians believed that a man’s soul lived on so long as one living person remembered his name. Freud claimed that we are on the one hand driven to reproduce, and, failing that, on the other hand to destroy ourselves—hope versus despair. In the Bible, Abraham’s great fear was to die without any children who would carry on his legacy. And in modern nationalism we are promised that the sons and daughters we lose to war will live on in the flags that they carried into battle. It’s all about being part of something larger: some family, some community, some ideal. If that larger thing goes on, immortal, then some part of us goes on as well. But if that larger thing were to perish—well, then, what was it all for?

In the Bible, to die is to be forgotten, to pass on nothing, to lead a meaningless and fruitless life. That’s far more terrifying than the loss of a pulse or the quieting of a brain. We can only live in the present if we are promised a future. Culture, ideologies, nations: these things live on beyond the short lifespan of a man. But we lie to ourselves when we do not confess that these things, too, will die.

Think of the Hittites, the Hurrians, Dacians, Scythians, Moabites, Edomites. Think of the thousands of nations and tribes given passing mention in the Bible or the histories of Rome. What’s that? You’ve never heard of those nations? Someday people will never have heard of England or Russia or America. Ancient peoples long since forgotten lived in our lands centuries before we set foot upon their shores. And new peoples of whom we know naught shall inhabit our homes and countryside long after we’ve been forgotten. Death is not the loss of your single life. Death is the loss of everything that gave to your life purpose and meaning.

That, brothers and sisters, is the real power and terror of the grave. It robs us of our future, which robs us of our present, which robs us of our past. “Oblivion” means “forgotten”. And there is no power on earth that can stand against it. All shall rise, and all shall fall, and all shall be lost to time. No one will remember. No one will carry on our story. No one can give to our brief lives the meaning we so desperately require.

No one, that is, except God.

We are taught that death entered into this world when human beings, both man and woman, tried to become our own gods: tried to judge our own rights and wrongs, tried to create our own eternities. You can see how well that’s been going. But the God Who loves and creates us would not be content to let us fall into darkness unmourned and undone. Instead He hatched a plan to save humankind from ourselves. And it all started with a simple promise to a simple old man. “Leave your country and your family,” God said to Abraham. “Leave behind all the things that you think will outlive death. Come and follow My Voice instead. I will be your God and you will be My people. I will make of you a new family, a great nation, and through that nation I will bless all the peoples of the earth!”

Abraham had faith in this promise, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. He had faith even when he grew very old, beyond fertile years. He had faith even when his wife Sarah seemed unable to bear him a child. He had faith even when commanded to offer up his only remaining son as a sacrifice to God. And that faith was not in vain. Abraham became the father of many nations, with many peoples to carry on his name and his customs and his memory. But through Isaac, Abraham became the father of God’s special chosen people: the nation of Israel, called out from the peoples of the world to be a holy, priestly nation, God’s own.

And this Israel, she wasn’t like the other nations that rose and fell. Giant empires trod upon her, neighboring nations sacked and raided her, peoples great and small beset her on all sides—but whereas her enemies eventually fell, never to rise again, the little nation of Israel, impossibly, kept rising from her own grave. She was not like the other peoples, who lived and died and soon were forgotten. She was an eternal people, a people who perished and rose, perished and rose, ever continuing the story of God and His promise, ever witnessing to the world a life that outlives death. And the nations hated her for that. Other nations wanted to be the chosen people, the eternal people, but on their own terms. And so, like Adam and Eve before them, they failed and fell, lost to time.

Israel even told the story, every year, of how she had been rescued from slavery, called from out of the nations, to witness to God’s mercy and love and faithfulness to His promises. They called this story Passover, when God’s people passed through the waters of the Red Sea from slavery to freedom, from the death of their people to the life of their people. But Israel did not exist for herself. Israel existed, remember, so that God would bless the world.

And so one day a promised King arose from the people of God: an Anointed One, a Christ, Who appeared as a Son of Man yet was really descended from Heaven. He was not like Israel’s earlier kings, violent and nationalistic. He was someone new. This Prince of Peace came not to conquer the world, not simply to exalt one people, but to be the Savior of all nations under heaven. He came to forgive the sins of Jew and Gentile alike, to bring back to God both God’s own people and also the pagans who surrounded them. Jesus came to the holy city of Jerusalem to share the Passover. But as He told the old, old story of God’s faithfulness to Abraham, of God’s loving promises to His people, Jesus made the story new again. He fulfilled the Passover in ways that it had never been fulfilled before. And in offering Himself up to the unwarranted hatred of mankind upon the Cross, Jesus opened the family of God to the entire world.

By baptism into His death and Resurrection, we are adopted into the people of Israel, the eternal nation of God. By sharing in His Body and Blood, we share in the Passover Meal, in the Lamb of God Who marks us as God’s own. We are called out, each of us, from the nations, to take part in the eternal story of God’s love for humankind. And we are freely invited to bring with us our families, our stories, our traditions—ancient customs now made new by being offered up for the glory of Christ our King.

We are not Germans or Finns or Norwegians or Swedes anymore. We are not even Americans, at least not for more than a little while. We are in this world but not of this world. We are a new people called out from among the nations: a new tribe of Israelites, the tribe of the Christians, grafted onto the story of God’s people like wild olive shoots grafted onto a cultivated tree. We are adopted into the family of Abraham and into all the blessings God promised to him and to his children forever.

When Christ arose from that tomb, we were not just freed from biological death. We were freed from existential despair. We were freed from futility, from purposelessness, from passing into oblivion. We are now part of the eternal story. We are part of the eternal people. Everything that we do, here and now, resonates forever in the mind of God and in the life of His people. We will pass this story and these promises onto our children, and our children’s children, for all time, knowing that they are the inheritors not only of our legacy but of Jesus Christ Himself. Our offspring shall be children of the King of Kings!

What you do matters, both to God and to His family. You will never be forgotten. You will never be abandoned. And you will never die. That is the promise of Easter. That is the end of death and Hell. And that is what we celebrate on this day and throughout all of eternity. The Resurrection has come and He has come for you. Thanks be to Christ, firstborn of the dead, Who raises His saints in His glory.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In Jesus’ most holy Name. AMEN.