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please join with me in prayer and now Lord May the words of my mouth and the meditation of each and everyone gathered together in your presence be acceptable in your sight for you are indeed our strength and our

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redeemer. Amen. So mommy, when is stan coming back? Sandra asked me, there's a couple of weeks after easter and stan hall, our friend and professor of liturgy IX and Hommel Edixon Austin seminary

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had died in early february. He's the liturgy lab person when he walked in literally the lab and look to your left a letter to him is the lab is dedicated to his memory and his teaching The year

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was 2008. Sandra was five years old Honey. I said the sad thing is that when people die we never see them again in this life. I figured I was qualified to answer his theological question,

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we will see but mommy, he answered me, you said stan will be resurrected like jesus. Yes , that's right honey, but that won't happen in our lives on this earth. We hope that there's

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something called resurrection after death but not in this life . No mommy, he said more insistently this time jesus came back to this world and ate dinner with the disciples stan wants he needs to come over for

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dinner, he said don't you remember this story sometimes I think it would be easier if Christianity didn't make it such a big deal about bodily resurrection. I mean body bodies are kind of a pain, they're

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high maintenance. They get old and rickety jesus rising from the dead after three days, the resurrection of the body. I mean how are the dead raised ? People don't come back to life, do they

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? Well, not very often anyway, there's Jarius , his daughter and of course Lazarus, he gets a lot of press and that story about Elijah and the reason of that young boy in the old testament

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and oh yeah, there are those bones in Ezekiel , those bones get a lot of attention. They come back to life. I mean, wouldn't it be easier if there weren't a body involved in resurrection

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, then we could just look down our noses at someone who asked us how the dead are raised and say pause thoughtfully, Oh dear. Whatever gave you the idea that resurrection is about the body, our

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bodies are just containers, they're not important in and of themselves. Whatever gave you the idea that resurrection is a body thing and not a soul thing, but we can have hope. Our bodies are perishable

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, but they will put on the imperishable, we might add capping off with hopeful words from the Apostle paul. These perishable perishable bodies might be dishonorable, weak and dust. Text heads, but our imperishable

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bodies by contrast are glorious, powerful bearing the image of jesus himself have hope someday. We'll be able to get rid of this and move on. I once went I was once brought up on heresy charges

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for denying the bottle of resurrection. It was to put it mildly kind of surprising given first that I didn't know we still did heresy trials. And second because it happened just after I published an article in

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the Presbyterian outlook with a revealing title, the significance of bodily resurrection. I was at the time in an especially embodied state of my life that had not yet reached his glory. I was pregnant with our

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daughter Jessica who was now 16 and terribly, terribly nauseous with morning sickness. It was lent and I was trying to get through a lecture in my Histology class held in 105 McMillan and where I teach this

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semester, I was surreptitiously eating saltine crackers which I always had in my curse. I thought it was surreptitious. Everyone could see me doing it, but you can to pound down the nausea. A distraught

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student who was not in the class suddenly burst into the room, interrupted the lecture and and was sobbing , holding a letter that had been sent by someone who had gotten the old directories from the seminary and

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sent this letter to all the graduates in recent years of the seminary, asking them to report back any heretical teachings that they have heard from me in private or private conversations as well as in uh public lectures

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. I hazily and nauseous lee consoled. The student finished the lecture, went up to President Border laws office and promptly burst into tears. Ted was rushing out the door to pick up his daughter Claire who

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was then in middle school. But he's going to be married in this chapel in a few months but made the bold move of putting me into his car along with him so he could give me a pep

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talk along the way. He told me I needed to stop crying, put on my big girl pants and that he would call the seminary lawyer and figure out what to do. I'm happy to say.

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I managed not to throw up in his Prius. Mm hmm. And I was very calm by his his total support. Even through my tears and nausea , I didn't notice I did notice that he didn't

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ask me what I had written in the article. Didn't ask me. I realized that though this was mainly because he trusted me. It was also that he would have defended me in any case because we

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have a president who protects the academic freedom of his professors would always be so. But of course I went over and over what I had written that provoked such an accusation. Trying to look to the logic

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of it even though my good friends and advisers told me to give it up already. And I'm going to share that with you today. I never did figure it out but I figure it couldn't have been

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.1 that I made in the article and what I said in 0.1 is that the God who met us in Bethlehem did not simply pay us a visit, but is eternally with us participating in the joys and

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sorrows of our creature early existence and it couldn't have been point number three, which says our confession of the resurrection tells us that the cross and the suffering and death associated with it are not the end of

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the story, But maybe it was.2, it was.2 and this is point to and I quote , bodily resurrection matters because it communicates the bodies and this world and this day in which bodies live matter

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to God in confessing that jesus christ bodily roads, we recognize that resurrection is less about conquering the world , and more about embracing and healing it and the person of the resurrected one. God takes into God's

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own life or historical embodied existence, exalting us to participation in the very life of God. Our confession of the resurrection then should lead us to resist and to challenge trajectories of the christian tradition that emphasizes the

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insignificance of this world in relation to the next. To live into the reality of the resurrection as those whose lives are hidden with christ in God, is to celebrate the beauty of creature existence and to care

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deeply about the healing of the world. This end , quote at this point, I think can be threatening to us, not just to my abuser, It takes less energy to police doctrine and to submit

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to what's true about and to explore and trying to find what's true about it. This doctrine of the bodily resurrection, resurrection means we don't need to wait around until future resurrection to change. As paul insisted

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to the Corinthian Church, we are to live as resurrected people. Now, we've heard that, what does it mean you're gonna hold on explains that the future moves from eternity into time and breaks, like

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ironically hire us into time transforming us so we can in actuality move forward into the reality of the future . Did you get that? An eternity breaks in now? Reservation starts now, and this means that

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we need not only to put up with these bodies not only to care for them, but to recognize their glory, the Corinthian Church, and apparently gotten the idea that we too often have in our day

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, the resurrection is only about receiving spiritual bodies in the future and that these physical bodies are therefore expendable , eat, drink and be merry. The text says just before our reading for for tomorrow, we

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may die. And if these bodies are perishable anyway , why take care of them at all, why not even abuse them or at least wear them out since they're going to end up this warm food?

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Warm food. Anyway, paul's answer is this because there's continuity between these bodies that are perishable and those that are imperishable. The imperishable ones who will have post resurrection. He uses the analogy of the seed

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, to convey this carrying the metaphor through in such a way that he is actually not contrasting our current dishonorable and weak bodies with the splendid powerful bodies who will have in the resurrection. Instead, he is

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marveling that these bodies will grow out of these seeds and he is suggesting, insisting in fact that that should change the way we think about these seeds, it should change the way we treat others. That

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should change the way we live, Verse 34 directly perceiving or reading will come to a sober and right mind and sin no more. It is then I believe that he suggests that the glory of our earthly

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bodies can be experienced in relation to our heavenly bodies . When he says that the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable and then goes on to talk about how we will inherit the imperishable perishable. I believe he's saying

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that there is some part of these earthly bodies and it is already imperishable. Something that has a distinct human form distinct from the glorious forms of the birds and animals and fish, something that is splendid in

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a different way and the sun and the moon and the stars, something that is not the stork or the assets of the company Or the lion or one star another star From some at 104 that we read

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the beginning or anything else that surrounds us in this bright and beautiful world. Our bodies are distinct from the imperishable ones, but they are alongside in relationship to all other types of bodies. Always to be

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honored. May I make a confession that may be helpful or may not be. But it may open a discussion with my fellow ministry friends as we enter into like what I tire of social justice sermons that

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said theological doctrine to this side, in order to argue for social justice, in order to argue that we should care for bodies with no reference at all to following resurrection. This lack of reference stems I

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think in part from a misreading of paul that understands him to be describing resurrected bodies, in contrast to the bodies we have now in order to diminish them . Maybe if we understood that he's trying to convince

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the Corinthian Church that these bodies are splendid, splendid . We can make a better theological case for why we should do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God. Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing

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if we could work with the spirit this coming winter season to shape the new normal in which christians are known not only as people who have their eyes set on something better, but rather as who rather those

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who live into the glory of these perishable perishable bodies and all the bodies around them. Now believing each one carries a sea that is imperishable, wouldn't it be great to be known as life embracing world,

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enjoying glory appreciating flesh, nurturing lovers of this world , which God continuously be created by the spirit that have already been taken into God's glorious life. Maybe