Shane Hughes 3-15-26

Apostles Creed, it was a, it was an early baptismal confessional in the first century church that became their confession of faith. This is what we understand. This is the story and the shape of the Gospel. Now we're in the season of Lent, but today we get an Easter sermon. And I know it's not Easter yet.

My friend Cliff that preaches over it that way, First Presbyterian and, and David Ramanik that preaches over at Heavenly Rest, they would just feel sad and kind of shake their heads today because it doesn't feel right to them. But for us, it's okay. Easter's coming, it's going to be good. And here's the thing about the Apostles Creed. This baptismal confession we are, we're looking at today is not going to give you list of do's and don'ts.

It's not going to tell you how to live your morality. It's not the wisdom of my grandfather that said, you know, don't cuss or dip or date girls who do. It's also, it's not going to give you a doctrinal checklist either. It's not going to help you navigate kind of the points of pressure in your life about how do I deal with questions of abortion or gun control. But it is a story.

It's the story. It's the shape of the Gospel, and we live into it together. And I think that's actually more valuable than a list of do or don'ts or a checklist of doctrinal statements. And I want us to sit in this passage for a minute today. You've heard this passage probably at funerals, you've heard this at Easter, you've heard this in, echoed in our hymns and even quoted in our songs.

And I think sometimes familiarity has a way of making us miss the most explosive texts. And, and, and it makes it feel like background noise. So if you slow down and look what Paul is actually doing here and the moves he's making, the sources that he's drawing on, and the sheer kind of rhetorical audacity of it, it's really quite something. So if you have your Bible open up to First Corinthians, chapter 13, because I want you to see Paul's argument as we move forward. So let me set the scene first.

First thing that Paul does, he spent the most of 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, making a very carefully constructed argument. There are people in Corinth probably who are denying the resurrection of the dead. And I don't think he's necessarily talking about the resurrection of Jesus, they would have been fine with that. And I don't think they're denying some sort of future resurrection at the last day, that they may have been fine with that as well. I think what they're rejecting is a bodily resurrection, that their bodies, their physicality would be raised.

And that's probably because they come from some sort of Greek background. And, you know, part of the Greek philosophy is to kind of escape this mortar coil, to get rid. To shed this body. And so it seemed to them as either philosophically absurd or theologically unnecessary. The whole point in that worldview was to get rid of your body, get out of it, not get back into one.

And so Paul has been pushing back on this hard for 53 verses, and now he's arriving at his conclusion. And one would think that rather he would make a careful, logical summary. But he doesn't do that. He does something that's very unexpected. He bursts into something that reads almost like a song.

It's not a song. It's a taunt. It's a victory chant. It's the argument that he's been building with such pressure, finally breaks out into celebration. And so there's.

There's a couple of parts of this that you need to understand. The first part is about clothing. Before we get to the taunt itself, I want you to notice that Paul. What Paul does in verse 53 and 54, because it sets everything up, he uses the image of putting on clothes. And he writes, for this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

It's a simple image, but it's doing a ton of work. He's not saying that the body gets discarded. He's not saying that we get to shed our skin like a snake might shed theirs, and then float away as a pure spirit. What he is saying is the body gets clothed, it gets transformed, it gets put on whatever is already there. And I want you to think about it, about what this means.

The resurrection is not an escape from an embodied existence. It's the glorification of it. The same body that you are, that gets tired, that gets hungry, that gets sick, that gets old. That body's not thrown away, but it is clothed in something it could not generate on its own. And I think Paul is reaching back here to Isaiah 52, where God tells weary, humiliated people to put on their beautiful garments.

The image is someone who's been stripped of their dignity, being reclothed in glory. And there's obviously a clear reference here to the cross, where Jesus is stripped naked. And Paul is reaching back into that tradition and saying, yes, that that is what the resurrection is. It is God dressing in people what death tried to take from them. Then and only then, once that image is in place, Paul says, when this perishable body puts on imperishability and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled.

So clothing happens first, then Scripture is fulfilled. But he's building to something more. He's building to this quote that he's going to use. It's out of Hosea chapter 13. And we need to talk about what Paul does because it's, it's pretty amazing once you see it, because there's one of the most fascinating underappreciated moves in all of Paul's letters.

And now this is how Paul quotes it. He says, where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting? And it sounds triumphant, right? It's a declaration, right?

It sounds like Paul is quoting a text that has always been about God's victory over death. But here's the thing. If you go and read Hosea chapter 13, it's not about triumph over death. In fact, it means the exact opposite. And Hosea, God is speaking to a deeply unfaithful Israel.

It's a people that have abandoned their covenant repeatedly who have run after other gods who have, in Hosea's personal, painful metaphor, been like an unfaithful spouse. And in chapter 13, God says, Ransom from the power of Sheol. Ransom from death. Where are your plagues, O Death? Where is your sting, O Sheol?

What God is doing in context as Hosea chapter 13 is he is summoning death. He's not glorying in the conqueror of death. He's calling death in to do the job. He's calling death forward as an instrument of judgment. Where are you, Death?

Come and do your work. The questions in Hosea are not rhetorical celebration of death's defeat. They are a chilling divine invocation of death's power. And then Paul takes that text, that dark, judgment laden, ominous text, and he flips it completely on his head. He uses the same words, he uses the same rhetorical flourish, but they're not directed as death as a summons.

They're directed as death as a taunt. Death in which Hosea came to God's call with full terrifying power, now stands before Paul's readers, stripped and silent, unable to answer. And this is not an accident. Paul knows exactly what he's doing. He is a trained rabbi.

He knows Hosea, chapter 13. And the reversal is the whole point. He is saying what God used as the very instrument. And the judgment has been disarmed. The executioner has been executed.

The thing that came to call on can no longer come. And notice that Paul doesn't just state this doctrinally. He doesn't just say, death has been defeated. He taunts death. He addresses death directly and he mocks death.

Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? And this is what scholars would call a taunt song, and they're actually pretty common in the Old Testament. You know, Miriam does it at the Red Sea. She sings a song.

And Deborah's song after the defeat of Sisera. And the taunt is what you do when an enemy that you thought was going to overpower you is suddenly powerless and can no longer do you harm. The best example of this is, of course, in the 2021 smash hit Independence Day, where Will Smith, after battling an alien and spacecraft and his fighter jet, finally kills the thing and knocks it to the ground, kicks it and says, what now? Right? This is beautiful.

This happens in American sports all the time. This is why you scream air ball when the other team misses their shot, because you're taunting their inability. These are professional people doing incredible things, but you can mock them. I love it at a baseball game when the opposing team's pitcher gets called off and the crowd gets up and starts to slow clap him off. They're not congratulating that guy, right?

The Denver Broncos, every time they beat the Raiders at a Mile High Stadium, would sing, na na na na na na na na. Hey, hey, hey, you guys know the rest. Goodbye until the next time we beat you again. Right? This happens all the time in Europe.

It's even worse. Look up this afternoon, the story about would you like a chicken sandwich? Bobby Sands? And the history around that. It is brutal, the songs that they sing to one another.

And of course, the best taunt of all time in all history is the French soldiers taunting the English troops outside the castle walls in Monty Python. Thank you. It's the best one ever. This is what Paul is doing. He's essentially walking up to the corpse of Death and he's giving it a kick, saying, well, what you gonna do now?

Where's this great victory you're so famous for? Where's your sting now? I mean, there's something playful. It's clearly defiant. But what gives it teeth, what makes it more than just bravado, is the very next birth verse, because Paul immediately explains himself the Sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.

Now, this is the key. Now, Paul goes into greater depth than this in Romans and Galatians and a few other places. But what Paul is saying in this, this short verse is that death's real weapon was never biological in nature. Death's weapon has and always was sin. Sin.

Sin is what gave death the power to terrify, the power to condemn, the power to separate us from God and the law, not because the law is bad, but because the law makes transgressions visible and accountable, gave sin its power to bind. So the sting isn't the dying itself. The sting is the guilt. The sting is the weight of standing before the holiness of God with a life that doesn't measure up. There's a few animals whose toxins, venom, are deadly to humans.

And for some reason, they all live around Australia. I don't know why this is. It just doesn't sound like a great place to live. But box jellyfish, a cone snail, a blue ring octopus, the maricopa harvester ant. A box jellyfish.

If it stings you, it will almost certainly kill you. You're gonna die. In fact, if you read accounts, someone that gets stin on their hand or their leg, their extremity, they can actually feel the pain of the poison moving up their arm or their leg until it hits their heart and they die. And it's gonna happen in a matter of five or six minutes. This is scary to me, and this is terrifying.

That's why I'm never going to touch a box jellyfish. But it's this unstoppable reality. And that sting, Paul says, has been removed. It's been removed in Christ through the cross and the resurrection. Death has no sting anymore.

I don't know if I've ever told you this story before. I was in college and I was working at Camp of the Hills, which is outside of Marble Falls, and I was working in the kitchen to clean dishes one day, and I just. I grabbed a washcloth and I turned on the hot water to get it wet. I was about to put soap in, about to do some dishes, and as I put my hand underneath that hot water, suddenly my hand just burned. And so I jerked my hand away and I was like, whoa, that water was way too hot and my hands still hurt.

And I look at it and there's like these five little red welts that are forming up in the middle of my hand and couldn't figure it out. And then I looked down in that big sink and There was a scorpion. And the scorpion had been sitting on that washcloth. And when I grabbed it and put it under the water, it attacked, right? And I freaked out.

I'd never been stung by a scorpion before. We don't have those in Denver. And so we put some ice on it, and I sat still and. And, you know, it was fine. It was no big deal.

It just hurt for a little while. And because we were college students, and this is where the story gets gross, but you'll have to deal with us, we decided we would take revenge on said scorpion. And so we took the scorpion and pinned it down and cut off that little stinger, the end of its tail. And then we taunted it. We would put our hands down right in front of it.

And that scorpion did what scorpions know to do, which is sting, but it didn't have the stinger. And so it just went. And it was amazing. This impotent scorpion just slapping away. It was amazing, right?

Gross story. I told it in first. They kind of laughed. You guys don't think it's as funny, but that's fine. When death loses its stinger, it becomes impotent.

It has no power. The debt, the sin created, the verdict that the law required, the power that held us in captivity, the part of us that keeps us from truly becoming what we were created to be. All that has been dealt with. Which means that death no longer has anything to reach for. It comes at us and finds nothing.

So Paul can look death in the eye and say, go ahead. Where's your sting? Take your best shot. Try it. It's go.

And so here's what I want you to sit with. I do think we read this passage at funerals, and that's entirely appropriate, but I think sometimes we domesticate it into a text purely about what happens after you die. Kind of a, hey, don't worry. Heaven is real reassurance. But I think that Paul is doing something far more than that.

He is not just describing a future reality. He is describing a present reality. The sting has already been removed. The victory has already been won. The clothing of imperishability is still in the future.

You're. We're still living mortal bodies, but. But we still grieve and we still stand at gravesides. But the power that made death so an ultimate, final, condemning word, that power is already broken. Which means that we can live differently now.

That doesn't mean we live in the denial of death, not pretending that grief isn't real. We all know what that looks like when you Live in a hyper fixation of death, and you're always kind of checking about your health issues or the opposite of that, which is swinging from trapeze without a net, trying to prove that you're not afraid. But without the terror. We live without the terror, without the desperation, without the grasping that comes from believing that death gets the last word. And so Paul's taunt in First Corinthians chapter 15 is an invitation that you can taunt death too, because the one who rose from the dead has already done the taunting on your behalf.

And the silence from death's corner is the loudest possible confirmation that the victory is real. And so maybe we need to read this text backwards when we say on the third day he rose again from the dead, ascended to heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there he will come to judge the living and the dead. I think the instinct in most modern Western Christians minds is to read this as a story about escape. Jesus escapes death, Jesus goes to heaven, and eventually he'll come back and take us there too, so that we too can also escape this world once and for all.

But that reading is wrong. It's almost precisely the opposite of what the creed is claiming. And so let me try to put these words back in their proper order, because words mean what they mean in a world that produced them. And so in a world of the first century Judaism, in that world, these, these words would have detonated like a thunderclap. Begin with resurrection.

You know, there was in Second Temple Judaism a robust, widespread belief that at the end of history, a great climactic moment would come when God's power was finally revealed and set the whole world right. And the dead would be raised right, bodily raised. That was the hope. And this is what the Pharisees believed. This is what Martha meant when she's speaking to Jesus about her brother Lazarus.

I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. But what these first disciples are claiming, and it is this belief that takes them from hiding into upper rooms to preaching in public squares, was not that Jesus had gone to a better place. It was not that the memory of Jesus lived on in them or that his spirit was with them in some sort of vague sense. It was that in the resurrection, the, the greatest event that they had been expecting at the end of history happened in the middle of history to one man ahead of schedule. The resurrection of Jesus is an announcement.

And it's the declaration of a new creation that has begun, that God has inaugurated in the body of the risen Jesus, a transformed world that he always promised. And Paul says in Second Corinthians, if anyone is in Christ, the there is new creation. And that doesn't mean they are new creation. They mean there is here is new creation. And the word creation is not a metaphor.

Paul means it cosmically. Something has happened to the fabric of the universe. Jesus ascends into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the God, the Father Almighty. And I think this is where imagination and power impoverished imagination does the most damage because we picture Jesus going up, up through the clouds, up past the atmosphere, up to some celestial location somewhere above the sky. And we imagine heaven as a place that is far, far away and very, very different from us, where God lives.

And now Jesus is going to be there too, and wait. But this is not what heaven means in Jewish and early Christian worldview. Heaven in that world is not a location of great spiritual spatial distance from the earth. Heaven is a dimension of reality where God's will is fully done and completely. It's the great hope, the great aching longing of all Jewish and Christian prayer.

It's not that one day we leave earth to go there. It's that heaven and earth will one day be joined and that space, that's God's and our space will be united. That's why we pray in the Lord's Prayer every Sunday, asking for thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And so Jesus has harrowed the halls of hell. Jesus has walked the earth, and now Jesus has ascended. The point of this is not that Jesus is some faraway place. The point is now that there is nowhere where Jesus is not Lord and king. So the Ascension then is not Jesus leaving the story.

It's Jesus entering a mode of presence that's not confined to one location. You know, before the Ascension, Jesus could only be in the garden or on the road to Emmaus, or in the upper room with the disciples. He could only be in one, one place at one time. But after the Ascension, as the book of Ephesians puts it, Jesus is filling all things. The Ascension is an expansion, not a withdrawal.

And then finally we confess that from there he will come to judge the living and the dead. Now, I know that the word judge has been mishandled by our culture. I know that it's used to threaten and coerce others, to keep people small. And I want to suggest that we have systematically misread what judgment means to Jewish and early Christian tradition and that when we read it rightly, it turns out to be extraordinarily good news. When the Hebrew prophets longed for a day when God would come to judge the earth, they were not cowering in fear.

They were hopeful. They were singing. Let rivers clap their hands. Let mountains sing for joy before the Lord, for He comes to judge the earth. Why would rivers clap and mountains sing for joy at the prospect of judgment?

Because judgment in that tradition means setting right everything that has been wrong. There's a long history in the Old Testament of violence and oppression and. And exploitation. It's a history that seems to roll on and on and on with no ultimate accountability. And I think we live in that same world.

We live in that same world where you don't have enough control to take care of the things that you deeply care about. You can't control whether someone goes to war and drafts your sons and daughters. You can't control if an insurance company says no and you're suddenly stuck. You can't control those things. But what we can do is hope and long for justice, because one day God will come and make everything right.

And for the powerful, that is indeed a fearful prospect for those of us in control that have the ability to step on others for our own whims. For the CEO that sits at the top of the C suite that's just trying to figure out who he has to step on so he can add another zero. But to his bank account, this is a problem.

But for the poor, for the forgotten, for the ones whose suffering was never acknowledged, for the ones who cried out and only heard silence, the coming of the judge is a coming of their vindicator.

And here's the breathtaking specificity of the creed.

This is not a judge. This kind of abstract principle of justice, it's not an idea that you'll have your day in court and you'll be treated fairly. The judge is Jesus, the one who himself stood before a corrupt judge and was condemned and justly the one who knew from the inside what it is to be at the mercy of a rigged system. The one who on the cross absorbed the worst that human injustice could do and did not retaliate, but instead, said, father, forgive them. This is a judge that has wounds.

And those wounds do not make him soft on injustice. They make him the only judge in all of history who's simultaneously perfectly just and perfectly merciful. Because he is paid in his own body the price that justice requires.

And here's Easter. On the third day, he rose again. The new creation has begun. He ascended and he fills all things he reigns. And every power that claims ultimacy is already, in the deepest sense, dethroned.

He is coming to judge. And that is not the end of hope. It's hope's final, glorious fulfillment. And so we say the creed not as a checklist of propositions we're required to accept. We say it as a map of reality.

It tells us which way our true north points. We say it as people who have staked our lives on the claim that the grain of the universe runs in the direction of resurrection and the ark of creation bends not by some impersonal historical force, but by the personal agency of the crucified and risen Lord toward new creation, toward justice, toward the day when heaven and earth are one.

And I need you to hear today, brothers and sisters, that that day, that day is coming.

And that day. That day has already begun. Begun. Would you please stand for our benediction.