Shane Hughes 9-27-26

To come the word of the Lord. Please be seated.

Man. I don't know if you've ever baked bread, like, for the first time, but it is extraordinarily fun experience. I thoroughly love to make bread. But before I tell you that story, I want to tell you another story. When we first moved or moved into a house, Abilene, it was in Canterbury Trails, where all of the street names are named after Chaucer.

And I noticed something because this is the first time that I'd been ever been uniquely responsible for my own lawn. Like it was my job. And I noticed that from, like, Nelson park, moving across the neighborhood was this new variety of grass. Now, I cannot. I don't know the name of this grass, but you know exactly what it is.

Because if you don't mow your lawn, like every week in Abilene, you get these, like, tall stalks that shoot out of nowhere with this little wispy head. It's the ugliest grass you've ever seen. And I saw in my neighborhood those stalwart people that were like, I am going to defend my turf. This grass will not survive here. But for the most part, it just spread across, infected us all.

I don't love that grass. Every gardener I know has kept kind of this mental list of things that got into their garden without being asked. Now you know what I'm talking about. It's that vine that came over from the backyard, came through the fence, and it is now living in your roses. It's that volunteer tomato plant in your compost pile that just sprang up, and now it's taken over.

It's every weed and seed that you ever seen getting into my watermelons like, you know exactly what this is. You did not invite it. You cannot remember when it arrived, but now it's taken up too much of the bed. So Paul, in Romans, he has two verbs that he wants to use when he wants to talk about the introduction and the proliferation of death in our world. How human story got this way.

He says that sin entered and death passed through, and both of those are verbs of arrival. But neither is a verb you would use for someone or something that always belonged there. And it seems worthy for us to spend a minute before we say anything else about death. Because most of us have made kind of peace with death. Like it's part of the furniture now.

We call it natural. We call it the circle of life. It's something that we see every time. David Attenborough is trying to introduce a new documentary, but Paul will not let Us have that death, he is telling us, came over the fence, and it's not welcome. And he starts this sentence, in fact, and it takes forever to finish it.

He begins by saying, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin. And then if you're reading with any attention at all, you notice he does not get around to finishing that sentence for six verses later. It's kind of like a person that begins to tell you a story about something that happened in 1987, and they just get lost and wander through, and before you know it, you've drank your entire cup of coffee. But Paul takes his time here, and this is an important sentence in his work because it matters.

It takes a while, because what he's describing is not a simple transaction. It is a whole world that got occupied by something it did not choose. I don't want you to notice that the occupation of death did not wait for the paperwork. Right. There's a stretch of history that Paul acknowledges, from Adam to Moses, before the law was written down for anyone to break.

And Paul says death reigned there, too, reigned with people that did not commit the sin of Adam. He did not sin the way that Adam sinned and against the command that had never been handed. And I got to tell you the truth, that is not how a courtroom works. In a courtroom, you must have a law and then be able to demonstrate that somebody else broke the law, and that's how you know you're guilty. But from Adam to Moses, people died anyway.

What Paul is describing is not a courtroom. It's something much more sinister. It's an occupying army. Occupying armies don't wait for the treaty before they take territory, they just take it. And I imagine that's closer to how most of us have actually encountered death, if we're honest.

It's not a verdict that we can trace back to specific things, but a foreign flag over territory that used to be ours. Your body functioned in one way until all of a sudden, it didn't. There's a chair in your house that's empty now that used to be filled. It's a name that you still say out loud, but there's something that catches in your throat. Nobody handed you a ledger explaining exactly which sin earned exactly which loss.

And it doesn't really work that way. Death came in like an army, not like an accountant. Which is why Paul's letter to the Corinthian Church does so much work. And up until the point that we saw this morning, he has spent an entire chapter arguing about what happens if Christ was not raised? Because apparently there's some people in that church that are kind of saying, well, I'm not sure I believe in resurrection.

I'm not sure we're really going to come back from the dead. And Paul says, like, if Christ was not raised, he keeps piling up. If on top of if, if Christ is preached, is raised from the dead, how can you say there is no resurrection? If the dead are not raised, then Christ is not raised and your faith is futile. And if so, we should be the people most pitied.

But then he turns the entire chapter and says two simple words, but now.

Or your translation might say, but in fact.

But in fact, something has happened. And everything before that sentence was the world without it. And then he proceeds to call Christ the first fruits. And that might sound strange way to kind of create a metaphor around resurrection, because most of us have never stood in a field. Maybe you've never baked bread.

If you've gone through the process of breaking bread, you know, it's a lot of fun. You put in flour, you put in water, you put in yeast, you mix it all up, you stir it, and then you let it rest and it grows on its own. It's kind of this magic process. And then you do it again and you put it in the oven. And after you put it in the oven, eventually the whole house smells like baking bread.

It is the most amazing smell because that is your bread. And then you pull it out and you cut it open and the steam escapes and someone gets that first piece of bread. Who gets that first piece of bread?

I used to live in California, and we lived about 20 miles away from where almost all of the strawberries in America are grown. But there's a very big difference to when you go to Watsonville to get a strawberry than if you go to H E B to get, like a blister pack of them. And if you were to go to Watsonville at the beginning of the first harvest of spring, Watsonville has live soil that's eight feet deep. And every year, that first harvest of strawberries tastes amazing. Now HEB has great strawberries.

And maybe you get one in your pack that's like, this is perfectly ripe. This is perfectly good. This is what strawberries are supposed to taste like. Imagine that. Only it's every strawberry you ever taste, that's Watsonville in April.

It's amazing. Most people don't realize how good strawberries are supposed to taste because it's picked too early so they can ship it to you.

But that's the first fruit, or about 10 miles from Watsonville is Gilroy. And Gilroy is the. Is the garlic capital of the world. And during garlic harvest season, even though San Jose is like 30, 35 miles away, if the wind's blowing right, you smell the garlic like it comes wafting over the town. It's not a particularly good smell.

It's kind of a pungent smell. I don't know if you've ever had garlic everywhere all the time. But in Gilroy, during the harvest festival, man, they make garlic bread, they make garlic ice cream, they make garlic cheese, they make fried garlic, they make garlic dip. Everything's got garlic in it, and it is everywhere. And as you drive closer to Gilroy during the first fruits of harvest season, the smell just gets stronger and stronger and stronger.

And if you were to stop to anyone that lives in Gilroy during harvest season and you were to ask them, what do you think of this smell this time of year? They would say, it smells like money to me. It smells like home.

But that. That whiff of garlic is the first fruit in the book of Leviticus. It depicts how the priest would come to the the first sheaf of grain that's been harvested from a field, and he would take it and he would hold it up. It's not just a symbol. It's the first fruit.

It is the promise that the rest of this field is going to be harvested. It means that we're going to have food for the winter. It means that God has been faithful. The rest was coming. It was only a matter of time, it was only a matter of when.

And so when Paul in Corinthians is trying to reassure his congregation of a fear that maybe resurrection doesn't really matter. He says Jesus was the first fruit. Jesus was the first. But there is a great harvest that is coming. And you may remember when we started this series a few weeks back, we talked about how Jesus talks about a grain of wheat, and the grain of wheat must die and fall before it can produce anything at all.

And Paul has not moved off that metaphor. He stands firmly next to Jesus in that same field. Christ is not the exception to what happens to human beings. He is the first, the first to go into the ground and pledge and proof in one that the rest of the crop is on its way. So let's go back to Romans real quick.

And what Paul was trying to describe is two households. He says, in Adam, all die, but in Christ, all will be made alive. Every one of us was born into a family. We didn't choose. We talked about that a couple weeks ago.

We have genetics we can't control. You can't control the shape of your nose or the way that you gape. You can't control all that stuff. We were born into sin. We are sinners, and that's why we sin.

But Paul says that that's on a scale that we don't even imagine. There is the Adam family, and everyone arrives into that family simply by being born. But there is also a Christ family, and this one you do not arrive in by birth. You are grafted into it. You are invited into it.

And then at the end, Paul gives us something closer to a battlefield report than doctrine. He says each in their order. And what he's describing is the way that the Roman armies would process into a town when they were victorious, when they return to Rome. And he says Christ would be at the first and then at his coming, the ones belonging to him. And then at the end, when the kingdom gets handed over and the fight is finished, Christ must reign, Paul says, until every enemy is put under his feet and the last enemy to be put down, not befriended, not accepted, not welcome to the table, as though it had been on our side all along.

The last enemy is death.

And Paul is clear. Death must die.

And I want you to notice that Paul will not let death be anything other than the enemy. Death is not a stage of life. Death is not nature taking its course. It's not something that we need to learn or should learn to be at peace with, as though it were a difficult relative. We have just simply decided to stop fighting an enemy defeated.

And here's the strange part. He writes it in the present tense. Death is being destroyed, not will be someday, eventually, when we get around to it, is being right now. Which means that the vine that came over the fence and that is ruining your garden has already been pulled up and is already dying.

And I think these two texts in Corinthians and Romans 5, they fit together as one story. Sin lets death into the world. Death takes the throne. Christ rises from the dead as the first sheaf of a new harvest. And he reigns until death itself is dethroned.

And let me begin by a claim.

Let me start by saying a claim that should be so obvious we wouldn't have to say it, but I feel like I have to. It's so simple. The church is not for itself. The church is for God. In fact, anytime a church has lost its focus on God and becomes an existence for its own self, that's when the church gets in trouble, but the church is not for itself.

We are for God. And the God we are for is, from the first page of Genesis to the last page of Revelation, is stubbornly, relentlessly for life. Not just survival. Life that means bread on the table, children learning to read, an old woman being called by her name, laughter at a dinner that goes a little too long. It's the whole flourishing thing.

It's not just that you exist. It's that you have been given a purpose and a reason and a pleasure. And it's God's good pleasure that you live. If God is going to destroy death as the last act of Christ's reign, that means that we would be in the process of destroying death and in our lives every day.

And so I want to tell you some true stories, and I probably have too many stories to tell you, but I can't cut one. I want to tell you true stories about what it looks like when it costs something to be for life and enter into the battle against death.

The first happens in the ancient city of Alexandria. It's the middle of the third century, and it happens to be the middle of a plague. Now, there was something that happened a lot of the times when plagues hit cities. Now, this would come through every so often to a lot of different places. If you had wealth, if you had means, if you had money, if you had somewhere else to go, you would flee the city.

And so everyone that was rich and powerful would leave. And the reason is pretty simple. They don't want to get sick. And so they would leave. And if they had family members, if they had come, people in their household, slaves and servants that looked like they sicked or they just needed them to stay to wash the house, those people would be forced to stay while I fled to safety.

Now, we know about this particular plague because a man named Dionysus, he was the Bishop of Alexandria, and he wrote an Easter letter about it.

He says that when the sickness came, people did what people do. They ran, they pushed away their friends who started to shake with fever. They left the sick half alive on the road to save themselves. And I think the reality is that fear will do that. When death sits at the head of the table, most of us learn how to bow.

But then he goes on to say that the Christians in that town, they did something strange. Some of them fled, but many of them stayed. And the ones that stayed, they carried water to their neighbors, and they washed bodies, and they brought food, and they sat beside people who were not their relatives. They were just their neighbors. And when those people died, they closed their eyes and buried them.

And some of the Christians caught the sickness, and they also died. Dionysus remarks that it looked very much like martyrdom. And then he goes on to reflect, were they braver than their neighbors? I doubt it. I suspect that they were just as scared.

But they had heard on Sunday morning that the last enemy was already on his way out, and the first sheaf of the harvest had come up out of the ground. And when you believe that death does lose a little of its authority in the room and you can walk in and care for someone else. So you can imagine what happens when the plague ends, as all plagues do, and the rich and the powerful and the important return from their summer houses and return from other places, and they come back to their own families, whom they abandoned. But the person that was there to give them a cool cup of water and give them food to eat and wash their body was their Christian neighbor.

You can imagine what happens when that neighbor invites them to hear about Jesus. About a century later, the church got the most unlikely witness. It was the Emperor Julian. And he believed that the power of Rome was. Was fading because they had abandoned the old gods.

And so he wanted to revive pagan worship and to reignite the old temples. And so he did everything he could to stop Christianity and to revive the Roman faith. And he's writing this letter to one of his priests, and he's complaining about the Christians. He complains about something that clearly stung him. The Galileans, he writes, take care of their own poor and ours as well.

And everyone can see that our people get nothing from us. And so he tells the priests, do better, he says, act like Christians. I love that. I mean, the church's most determined appointment is grumbling his way to recording the resume for what the Christians were doing at the time. When your enemy has to admit you feed the hungry, including his hungry, at least you're standing in the right place.

All right, two more.

There's Basil. And he was a bishop in Cappadocia around the year 370. And there had been a famine, and Basil had spent the year preaching against those that were hoarding their grain, waiting for prices to go higher so. So that they could make more money. But then Basil goes and takes his sermon where his body is.

And he begins. He creates this center. It's this place on the outside of town, a great complex for the sick and the traveler and the poor. It included people with leprosy. And everybody knows you get Leprosy from touching them.

And Basil, he hugs the lepers as they come in. He gives them kisses. He doesn't just greet them with a wave. He embraces them. And historians point to that place and to Basil as one of the ancestors of the modern hospital.

Okay, one more. 1948, in London.

There's a young woman named Cicely Sanders, and she's working as a hospital social worker at a hospital in London. And she was kind of a new and somewhat unsure Christian, and she was trying to figure the whole thing out. And. And she meets this man at the hospital. His name is David Tasman.

Now, David was a. Was a Polish Jew, and he had immigrated to England after World War II, and he escaped kind of the. The Warsaw Ghetto. And now he was dying of cancer. He was mostly alone in a country that wasn't happening his.

And they talked for about two months. They talked about what a dying person needs, which turns out to be more than a bed and a schedule of medications. And when David died, he left her in his will about 500 pounds. In the modern US it's about $35,000. And he told her he wanted to be a window in your home or a way for light to get into a place that didn't exist yet.

And so Cicely, she spent the next 19 years building that home. She became a nurse, and then she became a doctor. And then in 1967, she opened St Christopher's Hospice in London, which is where the modern hospice movement began. You may not know this, but before Sicily, doctors questioned whether they should give medication to dying patients because they were just going to die anyway. Like, why should we treat their pain if they're going to die in the next couple of weeks?

Cicely changed that through her influence and her conversations with David.

She would tell her patients that they mattered because they were them, and that they mattered to the last moment of their lives. And I want you to realize this isn't a person pretending death isn't real. Ms. Saunders stared. Look straight at it. But she refused to let death make anyone smaller before it arrived.

She thought pain deserved to be treated and loneliness, too, and that a dying person was still a whole person, still made in the image of God, right down to their last breath.

And that's what it looks like to be on the side of life, even when life is almost over.

Okay, I know most of us will probably never walk through a plague or build a hospital or found a hospice. I get that. But I think that death does come in smaller costumes. And I Think when you see it. It's time to remember that Christ has been raised from the dead.

I think it looks like an empty chair at the table. I think it's a child that nobody notices. I think it's a man that's quietly decided that he is a burden.

It looks like anywhere someone is being told hundred quiet ways that they are less than the image of God they carry. And whether it's just a ride to the doctor that gets arranged or a child is fed and welcomed, or a mom that gets a break on Tuesdays and Thursdays, whether it's the quiet dignity of walking with someone to the end of their life, or a worker that's equipped for a new job so that they can have flourishing they couldn't have imagined, or a seat that gets made at the table, or a hand held in a hospital room, or somebody saying yes to life. That's what it is.

I am convinced that the church has always been better at casseroles than almost anything else. And I've begun to think that the casserole may be one of our most underrated pieces of theology.

That the kindness that you can offer to someone else in the moment of their final death or the little death along the way, that's Jesus.

That's the body of Christ, that's proclaiming to the world that one day death will die.

So here is who we are, Highland. We are the people of God.

Excuse me. We are a people of a God who is for life. Our God met the last enemy, and it did not hold. Which means that whether we planned it or not and whether we feel brave or not, we find ourselves always standing on the side of life.

Would you please stand for our benediction?

I want to challenge you today, Hyland. You may not face death in a palpable way this week. That may be where you're at. But my guess is you're going to face a small death along the way. And when you encounter that death, remember that you serve a God who is fundamentally for life and human flourishing.

And so take the brave step to be for life in that moment a voice of grace, a voice of kindness, a voice of hope, a hand that's willing to help others. May you be filled with God's presence and may you go in peace.