Fr. Kyle’s Trinity XI Sermon

Brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand.

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As many of you know, some years before I went to went to seminary and became a priest, I attended graduate school and earned a PhD in history. A good historian will spend plenty of time puzzling over that mysterious subject known as the human person, which is a task that can be done just about anywhere. In order be a historian, all you really need is the time to read and to write. And the desire to study something very, very deeply. But it also helps to have what tenured professors call a research budget. Maybe you’ve heard about these things. It’s what affords the historian the means to go on research trips.

And on these research trips, the historian goes to special libraries called archives where there are the collected papers and effects of people long since dead—usually historically significant people. These items are found in folders and kept in tall narrow boxes, sometimes hundreds of them in long rows on a shelf. Just about anyone can go to an archival library.  You don’t have to be an academic or a professional historian. Usually you have to fill out some paperwork and establish an account and then you make a request to see a particular box or a folder. And then the fun begins: you settle down at a table in the reading room, which is sometimes a very fancy and ornate room, and a librarian will bring a cart out with the boxes and folders that you request.

I went on many research trips at places like the National Archives in Washington, state historical societies in Kansas and Wisconsin and other places, presidential libraries like the FDR library in Hyde Park, New York, and archival centers at Princeton and Columbia and the University of Chicago. It’s a special experience in part because you really never know what you are going encounter. You’re there to find a bit of information, some more context, a fuller picture of an event or a person. And you might have something very specific you want to read that you can’t find anywhere else. But then when you open those boxes, you find all kinds of things: not just letters from the president or to some other very important person but also letters to a friend or a wife, doodles and hand-drawn pictures from a meeting, family pictures, drafts of speeches, condolence cards and invitations to Christmas parties, a receipt from a lunch or a bit of pipe tobacco or a baseball card, projects unfinished, goals never met, plans that may or may not have been fulfilled, all of the this and the that of a human life. And almost always the archival collection of a well-known person will have a final folder with funeral programs, who spoke and where the service was held, and information about the final resting place.

It is a strange experience going through such things. It feels like entering someone’s house when they are not there—when they’re long dead—and nosing around, letting curiosity take you wherever. One of the impressions that it left me with was the ultimate frustration that marks the life of any human being. However powerful, however famous, however “in control of the situation” a person might have been in their day, the best they might hope for by the end of their life is that they are significant enough to have their papers thumbed through by a historian decades or centuries later. And eventually those papers, too, will begin to crumble, and the librarians will put them in special plastic sleeves to protect them or maybe only let the historians look at copies of the original.

I have to confess that from the perspective of the historical archive, the doubts of the Corinthians are understandable. They write to the Apostle Paul with questions about the resurrection. It appears that there is some contingent in the church at Corinth that have come to believe that there is no resurrection of the dead. Perhaps they, too, were struck by the march of history, the apparent end of each and every life. Faced with this reality, resurrection might seem implausible. It would seem like an interruption of everything that we know about this life. And the Apostle Paul does not dispute that fact. He is going to tell them in this Epistle reading from the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity that, yes, the resurrection is an interruption of the lessons of history.

Brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. 

Notice how the Apostle begins answering this question. He begins with the Gospel message. He has already preached this message to them. And notice he says that they have already received it. This is the sort of message that we in the church receive. We receive it like a gift. And we receive the message in an active way. It is something in which we stand. This might remind of us of Psalm 1, which describes the righteous man as one who does not “stand in the way of sinners.” We are called to stand in the way of the Gospel. And the Apostle is going to declare this Gospel once again to the Corinthians. By this Gospel, they are saved. But Paul includes an important qualification—an important conditional. They are saved by this Gospel only if they “keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.” To stand in the Gospel is to keep it in memory: to be mindful of it, to hold to it.

And here the Apostle preaches the Gospel again. This is one of the most important passages in the New Testament. It is so important that some people have called this the “Fifth Gospel.” It is a short summary structured in four parts about what the Church declares in her announcement to the world of what Christ has accomplished.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures;

Notice that the Apostle makes clear that this message is not something that he invented. Just as they received it from him, he also received the message from the Apostles and from Christ himself. The first point is this: Christ died for our sins. His death was intended to answer and remedy the problem of sin. He does this in two ways: first, by cleansing us of the effects of sin and, second, taking our sins away from us, separating them from us as far away as the east is from the west. He died for our sins according to the scriptures. His death was foretold by the prophets who taught in various places the message declared clearly by Isaiah that he was “wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isiah 53:5).

And that he was buried.

This is the second point in St. Paul’s summary: he was buried. He did not appear to die. His death was like every other death in that respect: it was complete and total. Furthermore, the custody of his body was maintained. It wasn’t hidden away. He was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. His family, his disciples, and the authorities knew where he was laid.

and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. 

This is Paul’s third point: he rose again. He rose again on the third day. And this was accomplished according to the Scriptures. Like the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, Our Lord was vindicated in his suffering. Like Job who endured such profound pains and was restored by the Lord, the inheritance of Jesus was restored to him. Like Jonah who died in the belly of the whale and was brought back to life, Our Redeemer liveth and stands at the latter day upon the earth. This was no mere resuscitation. This was a resurrection according to the Scriptures, a reversal of the power of death.

The Apostle goes on:

And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: after that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the Apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time. 

In this fourth point of the Gospel summary, St. Paul wants to establish the facticity of this resurrection. It did not happen in private. It was not some purely spiritual or secret experience. It was not the warm feeling that his disciples felt when they remembered their teacher. He literally rose from the dead and the evidence of this resurrection was established by many witnesses.

He appeared to Cephas, which is to say Peter. Peter is probably mentioned here because he was the well-known leader of the Apostles. Then he was seen by the twelve disciples. And then he says something striking: Jesus was seen by over five hundred people all at once. This might be reference to what the Evangelist St. Matthew reports in his account: “The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many” (27:52-53). The resurrection of a large number of people was evidence that something powerful had occurred—it was a sign of the reversal of death. Or, this might be a reference to another large group of people who witnessed the Risen Lord. Either way, Paul wants to emphasize that these people are known. Many of them are still alive at the moment that he writing these words. You can ask them about it!

Then, he says, he was seen of James, the brother of Jesus, and of the all the Apostles, and last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time. His self-deprecating description is made clear: he is least of the Apostles because he had persecuted the Church.

But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. 

This may seem like a personal aside, a turning from the topic at hand, but it is actually central to his point: the power of God is made manifest and works effectually through his grace. If you want to know about the meaning of the resurrection, look to the life of the Apostle Paul. Everything about his life was headed in one direction: a Pharisee of Pharisees, an enemy of the Church, a violent man. But God transformed him. He turned his history in a completely different direction.

And this is what the Apostle wants us to see: look around at the typical course of mankind, the frustrated ends to which we arrive, whether in the grave or in the papers that we leave behind. If you have doubts about the resurrection that we have to look forward to, look to Christ. Look to what the power of God accomplished in his resurrection. This is the great reversal. This is the great interruption.

And it is a great interruption that we understand according to the Scriptures. Which is to say that it is more than an interruption. The resurrection is the great end and purpose that God has planned for each and every one of us in and through Jesus Christ.

If you look around at the world and its sufferings and you have doubts about where all of this is headed, look to Christ. If you observe, as the Apostle says elsewhere, that outwardly your own body is wasting away, do not lose heart: inwardly we are being renewed day by day by the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. If you have become disheartened by the same old frustrations either physical or spiritual that you can’t seem to overcome, remember the grace of God working in the life of the Apostle Paul: the grace of God is with you. Remember what you have received; keep it in memory; stand in the Gospel and, one day, the Lord will raise you up out of the dust and the dirt of the Virginia soil and cause you to stand in the light of his New Creation.

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