With thanks to N.T. Wright, George Fox and Walter Wink, whose influences can all be detected in the message below, based on….

I Cor. 15: 21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. 24Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27For he “has put everything under his feet.” Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. 28When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.  29Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them? 30And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? 31I die every day—I mean that, brothers—just as surely as I glory over you in Christ Jesus our Lord. 32If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus for merely human reasons, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised,
“Let us eat and drink,  for tomorrow we die.” 33Do not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.” 34Come back to your senses as you ought, and stop sinning; for there are some who are ignorant of God—I say this to your shame.

Did you just hear the trumpet call to battle in this passage? The summons to war? It was there in Paul’s words in verses 24-26: “Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

Before I call us into ranks and send us out marching to battle, I must first deal with a couple of enticing, intriguing side-tracks and detours in today’s passage, that we may all be wondering about, that may be distracting us from the main message of this passage. One is Paul’s curious words in verse 29: “Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them? Does that mean that some early Christians were getting baptized repeatedly, standing in for their deceased friends and relatives? Like the Mormons do, in their temples, with all their genealogy research? Maybe. But this obscure, tangential mention is the only biblical clue to such a practice. Paul doesn’t explain it, he doesn’t even condone it, let alone approve of it, he simply asks, if some of you in the Corinthian church don’t believe in a real flesh-and-blood resurrection, what would be the point of you getting baptized for the dead? Now, that reference alone hardly provides the case for a full-blown, industrial strength assembly line practice of looking up everyone’s ancestors and getting dunked in their names. If somebody was doing that in ancient Corinth, they seem to have stopped it pretty quickly, because there are no other mentions of it anywhere in either the Bible or Church history until you come to the Mormons, starting a hundred and fifty-plus years ago. Faith in the resurrection is the main point of this reference, not the baptisms themselves.

Secondly, if you’re scratching your heads over verse 32, so am I. Paul says, “If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus for merely human reasons, what have I gained?” Does that mean that, because of his faith, Paul got thrown into the local coliseum with some hungry wolves, lions or leopards, for the entertainment of the crowds, perhaps along with other prisoners and persecuted people? If so, then this Paul is one very impressive rabbi. Because he obviously survived and lived to tell the tale. Paintings, icons, and movies about St. Paul usually portray him as rather small, bookish and old, maybe also stooped and limping from having been whipped so often and pelted nearly to death with rocks. If he also survived lions, wolves and leopards in the coliseum, perhaps he should be portrayed in movies by famous gladiator actor types, like Charleton Heston or Kirk Douglas. Oops, I’m showing my age. Today, the gladiator figures of Hollywoods’ toga and trident pageants would be Brad Pitt or Russell Crowe.

Much as I’d like to believe that the Apostle Paul, when he wasn’t writing parts of the New Testament, was wrestling lions to the ground in the Coliseum of Ephesus and tying their jaws shut with their tails, there’s more than one problem with that. For one thing, the Acts of the Apostles tells us that Paul spent three years in Ephesus and not once does it so much as hint at anything so important and impressive as Paul bare-handedly taming lions, without even a whip and a chair.

But the story of Paul’s time in Ephesus does include a city-wide anti-Christian riot, because the idol-makers in the Temple of Diana feared for their business if more people became Christian. And the leaders of some of the Jewish synagogues also seemed to have had it in for Paul. Sorry to break it to you, but it seems more likely that Paul is comparing the people who gave him so much grief in Ephesus to wild animals. Like whenever we say, “Its a jungle out there.” They certainly acted like wild animals. Any way, the main point of this word about wild beasts in Ephesus is again the resurrection, Jesus’ resurrection and our resurrection, and the meaning of it in our lives. In Paul’s case, it gave him the courage even to face death daily by wild animals. Uh, wild human animals most likely.

All of these distracting little side-tracks point back to the main point of the passage: the resurrection, and its meaning for us before it happens to us. Remember, the issue Paul is discussing is not simply whether there’s life after death, but what kind of life there is after death, and what that means for us here and now.

Now, death is a very personal matter. I’m talking about facing our own mortality, as well as about facing the deaths of friends, family, and loved ones. Whenever we stand at a graveside and say our last goodbyes to a dear and departing friend or relative, our focus is naturally very powerfully personal. What will become of us with this person gone from our lives? What will become of him or her? Will he or she be present to God in some way, conscious of God and others while awaiting the resurrection of the body and the renewal of all things? Will we meet again? If so, will we know each other the same way we did, until recently? These are the kinds of personal, intimate questions that occupy us as we deal with the reality of death and dying.

Paul’s words speak to those very personal concerns. But he is also putting the whole matter of life, death and resurrection into a much bigger perspective, one that ties us in together, one that even ties us in with all of creation, one that even ties us in with God’s great and grand project of restoration, re-creation and reunion for heaven and earth. Every life, death and life thereafter is therefore a major, vital action in nothing less cosmic, grand and glorious than what, from John’s Revelation at the end of the Bible, we might call, “The War of the Lamb.” That was the phrase that pacifist Quakers often used to describe their faith and their mission in the world, and I find it useful too: a war, but not the kind you fight with guns or swords. Rather, its “The War of the Lamb.”

John’s Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is a war story, about the great cosmic fight between a many-headed dragon and “the lamb that was slain.” To the surprise of all the universe, as a surprising reversal to all the “dominions, authorities and powers” that oppress, exploit and divide us, the lamb wins because he is also, “The King of Kings and Lord of Lords,” because he is also “The Lion of the Tribe of Judah.” He wins not by shedding other people’s blood, but by shedding his own blood to redeem for his God and Father a people of every tribe, tongue and nation. And his soldiers, the redeemed, also win by “the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; for they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death,” says Revelation 17:14.

John the Revelator was not the first one to describe Jesus’ mission in terms of a war. When Paul told the Corinthian Christians that, “[Christ] must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet,” he was using military and imperial-type language with which the Corinthian Christians were probably very familiar. Jewish Christians among them would have heard echoes of some of the Psalms, which speak about God putting pagan enemy nations under King David’s feet. “Sit at my right hand,” says Psalm 110, “until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.” But in Jesus’ mouth, and in the writings of Paul, the meaning of that language has been interpreted to say that its not the human enemies of the new Son of David who are to die, but death itself.

And the Gentile Christians would have heard in Paul’s words echoes of Roman imperial propaganda in these words, “He must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” Corinth was a Roman colony, where people would regularly have heard that Caesar reigns and is putting all enemies under his feet. In addition to hearing it, they could read it on their coins. Even while the emperor reigns, he is expanding and extending his domination, authority and power by means of worldly warfare.

But in this passage, Paul turns that imperial and militaristic language upside down and stands it on its head, when he says that, in this War of the Lamb, the Lamb is not imposing his authority, power and domination over others; he is making war against all authority, power and domination. If that sounds like an attack against the titles, hierarchy and power structures whereby people achieve superiority, domination and exploitation over others, I assure you, it most certainly is. A worldly society of fallen, sinful people may rely on some hierarchy, inequality and superiority of titles and power in order to keep some semblance of order. But in the kingdom of God, Jesus said, it is not so to be. The last shall be first, and the first shall be last; whoever would be greatest among you must be the servant of all; and even “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” We carry on this war against “dominion, authorities and powers” by our works and witness of love, service and faith.

What an odd reign this is. What a stranger conquest, when viewed from the perspective of the world. The Anointed King of Israel was anointed not by a high priest, as he should have been, but by a woman who was despised by her own community. His crown: not of gold but of thorns. His throne was a cross among criminals. Whom he conquers, he gives new life and hope, by dying for his enemies rather than killing them; by his conquest their hearts are melted, their spirits converted, and they willingly surrender their arms to him. Victory takes the form of softened hearts, reconciled relationships, and a just peace between former enemies and between the exploiters and the exploited. One by one, the tribes and nations of the world fall before the wounded lamb, as members of these communities repent of their oppressive and divisive tribal idols and acclaim the Crucified One king. When the last human tribe and community has been invaded on those peaceful terms, then there will remain one last bastion of oppression, injustice and domination to break down, the most oppressive, unjust and dominating one of all: death itself. That final victory was assured not by his enemies’ deaths, but by the king’s own death. And by his resurrection. Though the war is not over, death is already as good as dead.

This War of the Lamb, leading inexorably to the death of death itself, is the bigger context in which we live, die, and shall live again. For the resurrection of Jesus is our resurrection as well. We didn’t earn it; he bought it for us. And the Lamb’s way of making war is ours as well. As Paul told the Corinthian Christians in his next letter to them, Chapter 10:4: “Though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” To which I would add, to remind us, “Beginning with ourselves.”

That makes of everyone here, and every saint we have known, living or dead, a soldier and a hero in the peaceful, anti-violent, domination-free War of the Lamb. That means that all our acts of loving and serving and testifying faithfully through life and death are not just tiny, insignificant little things, as pointless and impermanent as footprints in the beach at low tide. They are all major, crucial actions in the cosmic, earth-quaking, eternity-changing, soul-shaping War of the Lamb.

I thought about this last week as Becky and I walked and rode through the streets of Washington, D.C., where there is a monument at every corner. Some of them are huge, taking up entire city blocks, like the Lincoln Memorial or the Holocaust Museum. Others are smaller, like statues or mere plaques. Most of them have to do with war. Even as a pacifist, I honor the bravery and the ideals which these monuments commemorate.

But then I remembered a farmer in the congregation that I pastored in Kansas. Off to the edge of his pasture were three graves, side by side. Whose they were, no one knew, or could tell, because there were no tombstones marking them. You could only see the little mounds they still made in the earth, most visible in the early morning, when the sunrise cast long shadows and the dew still glistened on the grass, especially after the hay had been mowed. Perhaps they were pilgrims on the Santa Fe Trail over a hundred and sixty years ago, for it ran through the other side of that farmer’s field. The wagon tracks were still visible, too.

Though unknown to us, those buried along the trail are known to God. If they were enlisted in The War of the Lamb, then we can say of them, as Paul said to the Corinthians, “in Christ all will be made alive.” Then we will know who they are, and they will know us. As the words of the old revival hymn put it, “We shall know each other better when the mist has rolled away.”And as we contemplate the unique and priceless life that each person is, we will see each other for what we are: eternally living monuments to our own battles and victories of faith, hope and love, living and eternal monuments, fought on our front in The War of the Lamb, monuments that will make the mute stone monuments of Washington, Moscow or Paris look puny by comparison. For as C.S. Lewis said, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations–these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit–immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

That’s the big picture in which Paul wanted his Corinthian friends to think about the Resurrection—that of Jesus, their own, and that of their loved ones as they died and were committed to the hope of a future resurrection, together. More than a reason for the private hope of a personal life beyond death, the resurrection of Jesus is the promise and the down payment, or the first fruit, of a coming restoration, a renewal, a recreation, and a reunion of heaven and earth, at the conclusion of the peace-making, life-giving campaign to which we are called and enlisted today: The War of the Lamb.

I Cor. 15: 1Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2By this gospel you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.  3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. 6After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.  9For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 11Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.

Two men adrift in a lifeboat for the seventh day at sea are staring at the last cup of water in the jug. The food’s been gone for three days. Their jokes and stories are all used up. The camradery by which they held up each other’s morale is wearing thin. Thirst is making the older of the two men reconsider his previous offer of letting the younger man drink the rest of the water, when he gallantly said, “you would still have so many more years ahead of you, should rescue ever come.” As hunger, thirst and despair take their physical and emotional toll, and as each person retreats into his survivalist, animal self, an observer would start to wonder, if these two are not rescued soon, will they both die natural deaths?

But just before sunset, one of them spots smoke on the horizon. That distracts their attention and delays the inevitable showdown over the last swallow of water. Suddenly, options to dying of thirst, or of one pitching the other overboard, become thinkable and possible. Its amazing the difference that a little bit of hope can make. Then, come nightfall, they can see a light in the distance. “This is our last chance,” the older one says. “Fire off the last flare.” Just after sunrise, they hear a chop-chop-chop sound, and soon they see a helicopter approaching.

“We’re saved!” the younger of the two men yells. And the two men who were about to kill each other over the last teaspoon of water are now hugging each other.

Technically, they’re not saved yet. That will come a few minutes later when the guy descends on the rope and hauls each of them back up into the helicopter. It would be more correct to say that they “are being saved.” And that’s the phrase that Paul uses for the gospel he taught to the Corinthian Christians. “By this gospel,” in verse 2, he says, “you are being saved.”

Like the smoke of that ship on the horizon, or the light in the darkness at sea, the Easter morning rescue of one man from the dominion of death is a hope-giving sign. It serves notice to all us other mortals, that rescue is coming for us as well. And good thing too, because death and the fear of death do all sorts of ugly things to our conduct and our consciences. You would think that with life being so precious, temporary and vulnerable, we would treat it and each other with care. You would think that, since we know we don’t have each other around forever in this shape and way, that we would therefore do all the more to love each other and treat each other accordingly. And some people do. I’m thinking of the hospice nurse I once met whose gracious, gentle way with terminally ill patients inspires me still.

But its at least as true that the impending reality of death also drives people into the most callous and brutal behavior. Some people come away from funerals or hospice centers or even battle fields believing that life is precious, resolved to treat it that way. But just as many come away thinking life is cheap, including their own, and therefore, the only thing to do is to amass as many treasures and pleasures as one can before the whole gig is up, whatever the cost to others, like the two men in that lifeboat, each one ready to kill the other over the last drop of water. I’ve spoken with several survivors of war who tell me that, even now, many years later, its hard to open up and make friends, hard to make lasting, binding commitments like marriage or friendship, hard to care about themselves and others, because they learned not to do that while they were getting bombed out of cities or while trying to stay alive in combat units. It was just too painful to make friends and lose them in battle, or to fall in love and then lose the beloved to a bombing raid. So just withdraw and hide within the safety of your daily duties and distractions. In which case you wonder, Is there life after birth?

Then there are people who embrace death as the biggest economic opportunity of all. Gangs and the peddlers of dope, guns and drugs. Or the biggest, baddest gangs of all, the international arms cartels, the makers and sellers of guns, bombs and bombers, land mines and nuclear weapons, profiting from the fear of death even while causing it.

Why some give in and surrender to death, to embrace it or exploit it or cause it, while others respond by treasuring life all the more and cultivate it, its hard to say. “There but by the grace of God go I.” But I’d go with what Dr. Victor Frankl said, some fifty years ago. He should know, because he spent several years in Death Central: in a Nazi concentration camp. There he saw strong, healthy, vigorous people die surprisingly quickly while some weak and unlikely people survived, or at least survived longer than you’d expect. The difference, he said, depended in part on whether they had some reason to hope for a better future, or whether they chose to cling to some sort of hope.

Paul’s immediate concern, in reminding us of the resurrection, is not as much the death-derived misconduct of the world, but misconduct and false teachings in the church. As we’ll see in future sermons this Easter Season from I Corinthians 15, their conflicts and misconduct come from a memory lapse. They’ve forgotten the gospel. More like, they have denied and down-played the gospel, deliberately. Paul started the letter by reminding them of the cross. Some of them were denying or down-playing that. Now he ends the same letter reminding them of the empty tomb. Some of them were denying or down-playing that, too. With disastrous consequences. Just as the cross makes a moral statement, about how we are to live and relate, so does the empty tomb. Get that right, understand what the resurrection really truly means, and they’ll unplug their conflict from its source of power.

Like that light on the night-time horizon is the resurrection of Jesus. Just when we thought we were abandoned, alone and forgotten by everyone but the Grim Reaper, there appears an approaching rescuer: the Risen Jesus. Because of his faithfulness and power, we are as good as saved. We are being saved, even now, by the hope that gives us reason, power and purpose to amend our lives and to treat life and each other with the love, the grace and the goodness they deserve. With confidence in our Risen Lord we can say that we are saved from a pointless and eternal death. Saved even from a pointless life. Saved from an existence dominated and diminished by the fear of death, or even the worship of death. Or the commerce of death. We still have to deal with death, and with the dehumanizing and distorting fear of death. But as we do so, we can say with Paul that we “are being saved.”

Two hundred years ago, if you had asked a New England Puritan, “Have you been saved?” his or her answer would have been, “I have been saved; I am being saved; and by the grace of God and not my own, I will be saved.” I think of something similar at every memorial service, or every grave side service I have officiated. We are entrusting this loved one to God’s power to save him or her from death and the dissolution of the body. That salvation was already underway as he or she was already saved in this life from from death’s numbing effect on our spirits and consciences. Saved from death’s claims to our worship and our fear. The empty tomb is God’s guarantee that this salvation is accomplished, its taking shape even now in our lives and loves, and it is coming. What a difference such hope makes, now and forever.