On Not Settling

On Not Settling--May 16, 2019

[Paul said:] "...As to his raising him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, he has spoken in this way, ‘I will give you the holy promises made to David.’ Therefore he has also said in another psalm, ‘You will not let your Holy One experience corruption.’ For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, died, was laid beside his ancestors, and experienced corruption; but he whom God raised up experienced no corruption...." [Acts 13:34-37]
Don't settle.

Don't settle for less than a hope in real resurrection of our whole selves.

Don't settle for a smaller promise than life breaking out into a whole new creation.

Don't settle for a faith that says God cannot hold onto you and me beyond the grip of death.

And don't settle for a God (god?) who doesn't love us as embodied beings, whose bodies, however fragile, are also of precious worth to God on their own terms, and not simply as vehicles for souls.

That, in so many words, is what Paul is trying to get across in this passage from Acts where he compares the risen Jesus to the legendary great king of Israel's collective memory, the faithful (mostly), devoted (mostly) David. Paul is telling us not to settle for anything less than a God who raises the dead and can bring about a whole new creation.

Paul's argument is this: the Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) talk about a promised "Holy One" who would be vindicated in the face of death--who would "not experience corruption" (we're not talking about criminal kinds of corruption, like bribery and extortion, but the way that death brings decay to things). He quotes one of the psalms to make that point. Paul continues by saying that David (the one who was remembered as the voice speaking in the psalm) couldn't have just been talking about himself--because he ended up just as dead as the rest of us will. No offense to David, but his bones were buried the same way the peasants and beggars of his day were buried. So, Paul, concludes, there must have been some bigger hope, some deeper promise, some future fulfillment to which David was pointing. And Jesus, Paul insists, is that hope, that promise, and that fulfillment. What good old king David dreamed about, God actually did in Jesus--a resurrection from the dead, such that decay and "corruption" would not get the last word--indeed, they wouldn't even get a word in edge-wise. If we had only pinned our hopes on David himself, we would have been settling for far less than God's big promise--real resurrection of our real selves.

What is interesting here is that Paul won't let his hearers be satisfied with anything less than real resurrection. The Scriptures are all empty talk unless at some point in history God actually raises the dead--brings physical, flesh-and-blood bodies with real selves in them back to real, flesh-and-blood life. Any lesser hope is too small. Anything less than the restoration of this life and this world of touch and taste and sound and smell is settling for too little. And Paul does not want his hearers to settle for less than what God is promising, which is indeed the resurrection of the dead.

We should be clear here just what that means for Paul, and what it is that is being promised, as well as what we are not to settle for. Paul describes resurrection as something that happens with bodies--that is, with the full selves of mind and heart and spirit and sinews. In the Hebrew mindset (which Paul comes from and to which Paul is speaking here), people do not merely have bodies--we are bodies. We are spirit-and-body unities, not souls that are caged in cumbersome physical shells. For Paul, God has made us to be spiritual and physical beings, and both dimensions are part of God's good creation. Being human, in other words, is just as much about the soles of our feet as it is about the souls we cannot see. God is not done restoring us until the whole self is put back together--not just floating heads or ghostly apparitions floating on clouds, but whole persons of body and spirit together. That--and nothing less--is resurrection. In other words, as Paul talks about it, the goal of resurrection is not to leave behind the physical--the goal is for these physical-and-spiritual selves that are to be preserved and restored even after death has done its worst.

So when Paul talks about David's words in the psalms, you'll note that he doesn't talk about their fulfillment by saying, "But even after he died, David's spirit floated up to heaven." This bit about "not experiencing corruption" is not a promise to take David's (or our) soul(s) into heaven so much as it is a promise to raise us--body and soul and everything--from the dead at some point. Or, more to the point, it is a promise that God's Holy One--Jesus--would be raised from the dead, and therefore, all of us who belong to him are given the same promise. Paul would have us believe that just going to heaven as disembodied floating spirits is not enough to hope for--that may be in store for us as part of how God handles death, but it is not the last word. The last word is God's resurrection word that restores us in our fullness--fully human selves. So often we settle for so much less than God would give to us. We think that God is merely in the business of giving tickets to heaven where individual souls float around and play their harps, when Paul would have us hear that God has undertaken a much larger project: the restoration of all creation, and the resurrection of the dead, not merely the collection of our souls into a corral in the sky like helium balloons herded together against the ceiling in the corner of a room.

Where does this meet us today? Well, for one, it changes our picture of what God has to offer the world today. If we can work up the nerve to share our faith with someone else, it means that there is so much more to be given away--we are people who announce not just that the souls of the saved float up to heaven, but that God's vision is for resurrection and restoration of all things. We are people who announce that God is not just opening up a think-tank in the sky for disembodied heads, but a whole new creation--a creation brought to you by the same God who thought up--and made in the first place--the juice of a peach running down your chin, the smell of the rain, the sight of purple clover spreading out across a field, and the sound of mourning doves cooing in a tree. Our hope is not for a life stripped of such beauty and blessedness in a cloud-city called heaven, but of a whole new creation that includes "a new heaven and a new earth."

This bigger hope to which Paul calls us also means that we are dared to express our faith in concern and compassion for the whole selves of people. If God's promise is about resurrection of whole selves--bodies, spirits, souls, and sinews--then the way we witness to that hope is in care for the whole selves of others. We will not be people who just preach at people hoping to "win souls" while letting them go hungry, nor will we be people who just hand out canned food on the street corner and think we have brought the fullness of God's good news to the world. We will be people who announce the big hope of resurrection by caring for bodies and souls as whole selves, because Paul here has dared us to believe that God's promise to restore is just that big.

Please, today, don't settle for anything less.

Lord Jesus, keep our vision big enough to see your care for our whole selves--body, spirit, mind, and heart... and to love the whole selves of others, too.