Daniel 12 "From the Dust" Scott Hoezee

Although I do not pretend that I fully comprehend the average story by Flannery O'Connor, I perceive enough in her fiction to know that over and over she wrestled with key theological concepts. Typically, O'Connor used the grotesque and the exaggerated to make vivid concepts or ideas that sometimes we Christians accept altogether too blandly and thoughtlessly. So in her short story "The River," which I mentioned some while back, she illustrates the true drama of baptism by having a young boy actually drown in a river while he attempts to baptize himself. For tonight, a similarly shocking set of images comes at the end of the story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." In this story a grandmother and her family have an accident on an abandoned country road. Shortly after their car runs into a ditch, the family is approached by a band of three armed men, one of whom is The Misfit, a wanted killer whom the grandmother admits to recognizing, thus sealing their fate.

One by one The Misfit's partners take the family members off into the woods and shoot them dead. Finally just the grandmother remains with The Misfit, pleading for her life and suggesting to him that he pray to Jesus. At one point, the old woman calls into the woods for her now-dead son. This prompts The Misfit to say, "Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead, and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance." The Misfit then goes on to say that if he could really believe Jesus had raised the dead, well then maybe he'd be a follower. But fact is, he wasn't there to see it and so can't really know one way or the other. Hence he figures that life is meaningless enough that you may as well do whatever you feel like with what little time you've got. When the grandmother tries one last time to reach out to The Misfit, he springs back and shoots her three times in the chest. "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life," The Misfit concludes. But the story's bottom line comes when one of The Misfit's friends claims that all of this killing and such was "Some fun!" "Shut up," The Misfit snarls, "It's no real pleasure in life."

Again, I'm not really sure just what all that bizarre stuff means! Yet the notion of whether or not Jesus raised the dead--and by extension, whether or not Jesus was himself raised from the dead--appears to be a kind of fulcrum in this story. If the dead are raised, maybe life would have some purpose beyond the moment. Maybe there could yet be pleasure in good things. But some think they can't know. Yet the very idea that Jesus may have raised the dead is enough to throw everything off balance. As we noted also this morning, the resurrection should throw everything off kilter. If it doesn't, then either it never really happened or we are failing to grasp its truest meaning.

"She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Maybe the meaning of that odd line is that it is only when confronting death and evil that we become sober and serious enough to ponder what we really believe. She had been all prissy piety before, urging The Misfit to pray and all. Yet in the face of this twisted and evil killer, at one point the old woman mutters, "Maybe [Jesus] didn't raise the dead." Perhaps that is another way of raising the same question I asked this morning: what do we really believe and is that faith able to withstand the harsh realities around us? Does our belief in Easter occupy so central a place in our hearts that it has a shaping effect on everything else we do, say, and think wherever we go in life?

O'Connor wanted to shock us into asking such questions. On this Easter evening, now that we have sated ourselves on a celebrative worship service this morning and on a too-big meal this noon, perhaps it is well to pause long enough to wonder a little more whether we even begin to grasp the full scope not just of what happened to Jesus, but what that ultimately will mean for all of us. Do we typically even begin to ponder the depths, the mystery, the mind-numbing thing we profess each time we get to that part of the Apostles' Creed where we say, "I believe in the resurrection of the body"?

To help us ponder this, I have this evening chosen a somewhat obscure Old Testament passage from the very end of the Book of Daniel. As most of you may already know, the first half or so of Daniel provides us with some of the most memorable and well-known stories in the Old Testament. Truth be told, in terms of Sunday school-like stories, there are huge portions of the Hebrew Scriptures that are rather barren and, hence, unfamiliar to many of us. Even the most devout Christians don't typically spend a lot of devotional time in the Minor Prophets or boning up on the lesser-known tales that can be found in Chronicles or Ezra. But Daniel is different (at least the first part). The story of Daniel's deportation to Babylon, his training at the royal court, his time in the lion's den, the story of the fiery furnace and what happened to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and the stranger stories involving Nebuchadnezzar's descent into bestial madness all provide gripping reading.

But then starting around Daniel 8, this book takes a sharp left turn into apocalyptic mysticism and puzzling dreams. And for many people, that is about the time their interest in Daniel begins to wane. Yet tucked away at the very end of this book is a passing reference that has long captured the imagination of scholars. Pointing to some end time, God tells Daniel in verse 2 that the multitudes of people "who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake." What's more, a dual destiny is depicted, the up-side of which contains lyric imagery of shining stars and bright skies. It is quite literally a very sunny image. And what so intrigues biblical scholars is that this is one of only maybe three or four Old Testament passages that hint at the resurrection of the dead in the way we tend to think of it.

As we have noted together on other occasions, the Old Testament, Hebrew view of the afterlife is quite different from what has become the Christian view. Too often we quietly assume that folks like Abraham, Moses, David, and Isaiah all had the same ideas as we have. When a person dies, he either goes to be with the Lord (in what we might call "heaven") or he departs into outer darkness (in what we might call "hell"). The dead remain spiritually alive either in felicity and happiness or in misery and loneliness until that final day when Christ returns. Then the dead will be raised and a final judgment will be rendered on all people. Everyone will get their bodies back but only for the righteous will this be a good and happy event. The wicked may gain a new flesh but only so that it can be tormented.

Broadly speaking, and I realize all the details and nuances I am glossing at this point, but broadly speaking that is a kind of Christian view. But it was not per se what Old Testament figures thought. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, and you see this reflected in the language of the Psalms especially, there appears to be a belief that the dead (both the good people and the bad people) all went down to Sheol. This underworld "place," although not necessarily what we would describe as hellish, was clearly not a pleasant place either. It seems to have been thought of as a dank, dark, stale, and drear place in which the souls of people were paralyzed, rather like a fly caught in a mass of sticky oil and mud or something.

It was not a place people were eager to go, as the pleas of the psalmists repeatedly make clear. They asked God to save and deliver them from their enemies precisely because they did not want to go down into the shades of Sheol where they could do no more work, sing no more praises of God, and where they would experience only discomfort. Again, Sheol looked to be a common destination for all who died. But it is unclear whether or not the average writer in the Old Testament looked for an eventual deliverance from Sheol in what we might call "the resurrection of the body" at the last day.

The Old Testament picture is, in short, fuzzy. It seems that theologically and biblically speaking, the full flowering of a belief in physical resurrection did not come together until the New Testament, and that was based chiefly on what happened to Jesus. Jesus on Easter morning becomes the sneak preview for all of us. He is the firstfruits in a harvest that will eventually reap in every one of us.

Let me try an analogy: Suppose that there was once a child born to a woman in prison. The child was raised in a cell that had only a small window up near the ceiling and so the boy had never seen the outside world. Maybe his mother over the years tried to describe to the boy what a mountain looks like. The boy knew, therefore, that there was such a thing as mountains and had formed some vague, but finally incomplete, images of mountains in his mind. Even so, however, he didn't really know what a mountain looked like and so would not be able to say much on the subject were a prison guard to ask him about it.

But suppose one day the mother and child are released from prison and the mother then takes the young man to a real mountain. Once he saw the mountain, he might immediately recognize it as that which he had been thinking about all along but the experience of actually seeing it would be so breathtaking as to be life-changing. Lots of information he had learned from his mother in earlier times would at long last come together, gel, make some sense. But he had to see the mountain in person for that to happen.

The resurrection of Jesus may be rather like that. All along there had been hints and whispers of such a thing, but until the apostles finally saw the genuine article, it did not click with them. In Christ alone God's truest determination to let life win the victory over death became clear in ways that were nothing short of startling. It changed the world. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, "If the resurrection happened, then it is the central thing that the whole human story has been about all along."

Even so, however, like the grandmother in O'Connor's odd story, so maybe we don't appreciate keenly enough most days how majestic, bizarre, and mind-boggling this is. Not only should this influence and affect everything for us as we said this morning, we should also be properly rapt and awestruck by the end destination of this world based on what happened to Christ Jesus our Lord.

Whether or not Daniel himself could grasp what he heard God say in his dream-vision, the very notion of "multitudes" being awakened from the dust of the earth is a stunning thing to consider. How can this be possible? If indeed one day God manages to recover and reassemble in some meaningful, new, yet still personally recognizable way all the billions who have ever lived, it will be a miracle every bit as complex as the creation of the entire cosmos in the first place. In fact, it will be a miracle more complex than even the cosmic creation.

Some time ago I mentioned to you a new development in science called "complexity theory." In part this theory recognizes the incredible high-order complexity that attends various systems in the universe, including certainly human beings. What goes into making you the person you are is not just this or that physical or mental feature but also the complex way by which all the components within you interact. Every person has a few trillion neurons in his or her brain. But what makes you unique is the way those neurons are connected, inter-connected, cross-wired, and cross-referenced to each other. It all forms a pattern and no two patterns are ever alike. Because did you know that the number of possible patterns within a single human brain exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe! (For those of you who like numbers, the number of possible interconnections within a single brain is around 10¹⁵, which is a 10 followed by 15 zeroes. This ten-quadrillion figure is also the rough estimate of atoms in the known universe.)

On the old TV series Star Trek the "transporter" is how Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock got around. They would get "beamed" down from the starship Enterprise to the planet below. The premise of this fictional machine is that a computer was able to scan Captain Kirk's body, memorize every single speck of energy in that body (as well as every single connection and pattern), translate all that physical stuff into a beam of pure energy, shoot that beam out like a radio transmission, and then re-assemble the whole kit-n-kaboodle in another place. Of course, scientists admit that it would be impossible ever to develop such a device. The amount of data in just one person could never be analyzed by, much less stored in, any computer. We are, each one of us, simply too complex.

The Christian faith claims that God, however, is able to maintain, store, and re-assemble your unique pattern and my unique pattern and everyone's unique patterns. If as Daniel foresaw in ways that he surely did not fully understand in that time prior to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, if God will awaken multitudes from the dust of the earth, this means that God can indeed recreate each one of us.

Is it a miracle of staggering, mind-boggling complexity? Of course, that's why we call Easter "the grand miracle." Christians of all people are not casual about what happened to Jesus. It was not inevitable that he be raised again and it was not automatic. This was no sleight-of-hand trick, no deception, it really happened in a way quite unexpected and exceedingly marvelous. And now it is our hope.

Faith gives us that hope but also counsels us to humility. Let's not pretend on Easter Sunday or any time that this is easy to believe or that we have all the details of this sewn up in our minds. But at least Easter should provide us with a focused chance to fan back into flame the embers of our wonder. "She might have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life," The Misfit sneered. Again, maybe that's another way of saying that we are, most of us, too casual in life. We hold our beliefs too loosely and ponder them too seldom. With a gun pointed to a person's head, suddenly everything comes into focus because it must. Without such a motivation, we tend to toss around our biblical beliefs pretty easily.

Easter is about many things, but today let it be a reminder also of this: the central tenet of the Christian faith is not just our hope and joy, it is also a source of unending mystery and puzzlement. There is, in fact, far too much mystery and might in all this for us ever to be casual or bland about it. We need to find ways by the Holy Spirit to keep these matters of faith fresh and alive, vigorous and vital. And we can. Because it is by that same Holy Spirit of God that we have even now seen the cosmic sneak preview of coming attractions: we have seen and encountered the living Christ of God. We know it's real and so we know that when one day God awakens from the dust of the earth those multitudes of people, we will be among them, raised back up to an eternal life in which all will be like the brightness of a noonday sky in springtime even as we ourselves pierce the cosmos with the stellar light of our holy shining in Christ! Hallelujah. Happy Easter, my friends, and Amen.