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January 6 - March 16, 2020
Baptism is the sacrament of new birth, and communion is the sacrament of the Christian life. The waters of baptism remind us of the waters of birth.
The sacramental life of the church is central to the goodness of our holy—sacred—life together.
heaven, hell, death, judgment, the second coming of Christ, and the kingdom of God. Last things are about God’s ends for creation, ends both in terms of time and in terms of goals—God’s good and final purposes for creation.
It is this deep sense of participation that sustains life and meaning beyond the individual, and that sustains the dynamic interaction between past, present and future, individual and community, spiritual
and material.
It is in this sense of deep communion across time that one can rightly say that the church does not have an eschatology (as if it were a set of beliefs distinct from its own existence); the church is eschatology.b
Eschatology practiced as though the kingdom were only a distant thing strips us of abundant life. Such an eschatology would suck the meaning out of life in the here and now. It is a crippled and crippling eschatology that fails to see and to act within the present reality of the kingdom.
When, in the practice of eschatology, we act as though those purposes have, in fact, been fully realized in the present, we make the mistake of an overly realized eschatology, one that forfeits future hope, discounting the fullness of the kingdom which has not yet been revealed.
And well might it upset faith, for to claim that the present—with all of its pain—is all that God has in store for us is to drain life of meaning and hope.
It is to believe that this broken life is all there is, to believe that sin and death will have the final word. An overly realized eschatology (all already, no not-yet) is just as deadly to the abundant life as one that forgets God’s work in the present. Indeed, Paul’s metaphor is one of rot, of death: this sort of error spreads “like gangrene” (v. 17).
Christ’s resurrection, in the past, is the power of our sanctification in the present and the certainty behind our hope for the future.
When eschatology neglects that future, we are opened to the danger of equating the church with the kingdom and to the pitfalls of hubris, overconfidence, and confusing human achievement, pride, and power with holiness.
The eschatological practice of the body of Christ must be lived in the tension between all that God has already done and all that is yet to come.
Life between God’s already and God’s not-yet is life full of meaning.
Eschatology is practiced between Christ’s coming in the incarnation and his second coming in glory.
A stance of eager expectation is not to watch the heavens; it is to live on earth, doing the work of the kingdom.
The eschatological life is the active life. It is lived in mission and service, in love and in worship. None of this activity diminishes our longing, as we join with the “Spirit and the bride” to say “Come.”
Jesus wants us to stop trying to figure out the “day and hour” of his coming.
Such practice fits squarely with the active and thirsty practice proposed above.
We are to live in the expectation of children on Christmas Eve, our sleep unsettled by the excitement of what is coming.
Ours is also the expectation of a people whose hope gives us power, allowing us to speak truth in a world of lies and to embody love in a world of hate.
As we live in expectation, active and thirsty, our lives are shaped by the character of God’s promises and the kind of future for which we hope.
Resurrection is not reanimation or resuscitation. When we meet the resurrected Jesus, we meet someone who has been transformed.
In the resurrection, we have meaty hope, hope that extends into every part of creation and every aspect of human being.
Where other kinds of hope might be escapist—looking to get out of this world and away from its problems—resurrection hope is redemptive.
Where other kinds of hope might look for meaning in some other life, resurrection hope reveals the meaning of this life.
In the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s resurrection, we learn a lot about resurrection hope. First, it is physical, embodied hope. The resurrected Jesus is the same Jesus who died on the cross. We see this continuity in his body and his actions. Like he did at the Last Supper, he breaks and blesses bread (Luke 24:30), and as he has always done, he opens the Scriptures to those who listen
There are differences between Jesus’s body hanging on the cross and Jesus’s resurrected body, differences that testify to his victory over sin and death. The way his friends recognize him changes. Sometimes they know him, but sometimes they do not until he reveals himself by action or by calling out a name
Most important, we see in Jesus’s ascension to heaven (Luke 24:51) that resurrected life is human life made fit to dwell in the presence of God.
the “first fruits” of our resurrection, we have good reason for hope that ours will mirror his.
When we look forward to the resurrection, thinking about the qualities of resurrected life, we may find fuel for the present life, lived in anticipation of the resurrection.
Nay, but there will be a greater deliverance than all this; for there will be no more sin. And to crown all, there will be a deep, an intimate, and uninterrupted union with God; a constant communion with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ, through the Spirit; a continual enjoyment of the Three-One God, and of all the creatures in him!b
Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. All the skills and talents we have put to God’s service in this life—and perhaps too the interests and likings we gave up because they conflicted with our vocation—will be enhanced and ennobled and given back to us to be exercised in glory.e
1 Corinthians 6:20
Embodied life now is vulnerable and mortal.
In the hope of resurrection, we begin to see death in the light of Christ.
The practice of eschatology is to know death for what it is: an enemy, a consequence of sin, outside of God’s good, creative intentions for us. The practice of eschatology, more importantly, is to live in God’s resurrection triumph over that enemy. To face death as
a conquered enemy is a peculiarly Christian way of being in the world.
“It is when Life weeps at the grave of the friend, when it contemplates the horror of death, that the victory over death begins.”[10]
The practice of eschatology is to tell the truth about death, not to sugarcoat it with platitudes. Death is horrible, and God is with us as we face that horror.
The human being will be made whole again, as God reunites body and soul in resurrection. A conscious intermediate state, in which the soul enjoys the presence of God and waits in hope for resurrection, makes sense in light of the communion of the saints, the belief that the whole church, living and dead, is in fellowship.
soul sleep in the interval between death and resurrection.
God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over.”[13]
Resurrection means that this life matters. Resurrection is power for the practice of discipleship.
16] That hope “is not an escape from the problems of
the world but the assurance that we can deal with these problems in the light of God’s grace.”[17]
