IF THAT'S ALL THERE IS

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

            One of the most poignant songs I’ve heard is the one Peggy Lee sang, “Is That All There Is?”  She tells a story in the first person, as if it were her own story, although I don’t know whether it is imaginary or not.  She sings about when she was a very little girl and her house caught on fire.  She stood there shivering in her pajamas and watched what was her whole world go up in flames.  And when it was all over, she said to herself, “Is that all there is to a fire?”  And when she was twelve years old, the song continues, her father took her to the circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth.”  Even as she sat there watching this great spectacle she had the feeling that something was missing.  She didn’t know what, but she asked herself, “Is that all there is to a circus?”  After each of these vignettes, she sings, “Is that all there is?  Is that all there is?  If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing.  Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.  If that’s all there is.”  In the final vignette, she speaks of the time she fell in love, head over heels, with the most wonderful boy in the world.  “Then one day,” she sings, “he went away and I thought I’d die, but I didn’t, and when I didn’t I said to myself, ‘Is that all there is to love?’”  Then the chorus again:  “Is that all there is?  Is that all there is?  If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing.”  Suddenly the music stops, and Peggy Lee says, “I know what you must be saying to yourselves.  ‘If that’s the way she feels about it, why doesn’t she just end it all?’  Oh, no, not me.  I’m in no hurry for that final disappointment, for I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you, when that final moment comes and I’m taking my last breath, I’ll be saying to myself, ‘Is that all there is?  Is that all there is?  If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing.  Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.  If that’s all there is.’”  I always thought that this was such a sad song, the thought that the life we have here is all there is.

            Well, to read Paul’s letter, it seems that some Christians in Corinth believed that.  Is that all there is to life, what we have now?  Some in the Corinthian church apparently answered yes to that.  They did not believe, it seems, in “the resurrection of the body.”  That is opposite to what we say we believe in the Apostles’ Creed.  We say, “I believe in . . . the resurrection of the body.”  From what we can tell, reading Paul’s side of the conversation, “the resurrection of the body” is the part some of the Corinthian Christians didn’t believe.  Oh, make no mistake.  They did believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  They indeed believed that God raised up his Son Jesus Christ from the dead.  They seemed to have no doubt about that.  What they couldn’t swallow was “the resurrection of the body.”  It seems that this segment of the Corinthian church was influenced by the Greek notion that the soul was good but the body was evil.  Or they may have believed that we indeed are “raised from the dead,” but that this is merely a this-worldly, spiritual resurrection from death to life.  In other words, resurrection was only in this life as some kind of a spiritual experience, not the resurrection of the body to eternal life.  Apparently some of the people in the Corinthian church believed that this life was all there is.

            Of course, in our spiritual journeys, perhaps all of us have spent some time in Corinth.  That is to say, we probably have wondered from time to time if that segment of the Corinthian church may have been right.  Maybe this life is all there is.  Surely we have all wondered that.  After all, didn’t Paul say about baptism that it is a kind of “death and resurrection”?  He did.  He wrote the Christians in Rome this:  “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”  That, at least, sounds like a this-worldly, spiritual reality, that “newness of life” is the Christian living new life the moment he or she begins to follow Christ as represented by baptism.  The writer of First John said this:  “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”  Notice the use of the present tense “has life,” not “will have life.”  This life, called “eternal life,” whatever else it may be, is a present reality.  Surely we have all considered the possibility that all there was to eternal life was in the here and now.  Probably we have all wondered about that.  Some of us have even worried about that.  Is that all there is to life?  We long to be wrong in our worry.  We long for a heavenly reunion with our dead loved ones; we even imagine such a reunion.  The thought of never being able to see our loved ones again is a very painful one.  But that thought does occur to us from time to time.  Is that all there is?

            Would you listen to us!  What a pitiable lot we join when we overly wonder and worry.  How sad when we lose our faith in God, for that is what it is when we worry that this life is all there is.  What a pity party we mingle in when we lack faith in the God who raised up Jesus from the dead, when we worry that those Corinthians might be right, that Peggy Lee’s song might be right.  When we join that pity party, it affects our whole life.  We come not to trust that God has the power to raise us up.  Maybe we don’t even believe that God raised up Jesus from the dead, although that we might believe.  It may be that we think like some of those Corinthians that God raised up Jesus all right, but there won’t be a general resurrection of the dead, the one for you and me.  What a pall such an outlook puts over our whole life.  The longer we live, the shorter we understand life to be.  Life is like a car speeding by, soon out of sight.  Is that all there is?  When we think that it is, life loses much of its energy.  We fret over the fleeting days and years and decades.  Many of our plans and projects are now behind us.  What of the future?  I’m always thinking about what I want to be doing ten to fifteen years from now.  I’m sixty-four now.  Both of my parents died at the age of ninety-four.  If I reach the age of ninety-three, what plans can I make for the future?  None, if I have come to conclude that this life is all there is.  What a depressing thought to come to the end of life and believe that when this life is over there is no more.  How sad!  You know what Paul would say to us when we get like this?  He would say to us exactly what he said to those doubters in Corinth:  “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

            Let’s get one thing clear:  Paul was certain of Jesus’ resurrection, and that clearly made him equally certain of the resurrection of the dead.  Paul knew that God raised up Jesus from the dead.  He was sure.  So he put it to the Corinthians as strongly as he knew how:  “. . . in fact Christ has been raised from the dead.”  Paul had an experience of the risen Christ.  He tells the Christians in Galatia about it in his letter to them.  He tells them that the gospel he preaches is not of human origin, nor is he passing along something that he had heard from other people.  No.  He tells them that he received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.  Paul tells the Galatians how he had once violently persecuted the church, and tried to destroy it.  Then he adds that God was pleased to reveal his Son to him.  He doesn’t give details here, but the account of his conversion is told in the book of Acts.  Indeed, as Paul was on his way to have Christians arrested and brought back to Jerusalem—one can only imagine what would happen to them then—he suddenly saw a light from heaven.  He fell to the ground and heard a voice calling out him name, his Hebrew name, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”  Paul asked who was speaking to him.  “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” came the reply.  “But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”  Paul obeyed, and that was the first step in a remarkable journey of him turning from being a persecutor of the church to an apostle of Jesus Christ.  That’s how Paul was able to say with such certainty, “. . . in fact Christ has been raised from the dead.”

            “But,” someone may be saying, “what’s that got to do with life after death for us?”  “Everything,” Paul would answer back.  Here’s the full of what Paul said in that sentence expressing his certainty:  “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.”  You’re not impressed yet?  That’s because you don’t understand the notion of “first fruits.”  In any of several ways “first fruits” is understood, the same point is made.  First, in Bible times, “first fruits” would point to the practice of consecrating the whole of the crop by offering the “first fruits” to God.  Much in the same way, when we offer to God our money in the offering plate we are also offering the rest of what we have and all that we are to God.  One guarantees or pledges the other.  Second, if farmers go out to harvest the crop, what comes in first are the “first fruits.”  That part of the crop in the barn is a sign of the full harvest to come.  That’s what Paul is saying.  The resurrection of Jesus is “the first fruits of those who have died.”  His resurrection, Paul insists, signals the rest of the “harvest” yet to come.  An illustration closer to home:  When you purchased your home, if you didn’t pay cash for it, you made a “down payment.”  Those dollars were offered in pledge of the rest of the payments yet to come.  When Paul refers to Jesus as “the first fruits of those who have died,” he is saying that Jesus’ resurrection is a kind of “down payment.”  Full payment—the resurrection of the dead, yours and mine—is yet to come.  God’s power over sin and death, displayed in God’s raising up his Son Jesus from the dead, is the same power that will raise the rest of us from death to eternal life.  Jesus’ resurrection guarantees that, Paul wants us to understand.  He would go so far as to insist that the two categories of resurrection are inextricably tied together.  If you believe that God raised up Jesus from the dead—and all of the Corinthians believed that, it was the reason for their conversion—if you believe that God raised up Jesus from the dead, then you cannot deny the resurrection of the dead for the rest of us.  To deny one is to deny the other.  To believe in the first is to affirm the latter as well.  You cannot separate the two, Paul insists.  “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.”