1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50
35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” 36 Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. 38 But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.
42 So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. 44 It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48 As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.
50 What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.
Claiming the sure and certain promise of the Resurrection while looking into the casket of someone we love is an act of profound courage. To those who choose not to believe it, we must look like complete fools. How can we entrust our lives, and the lives of all those we love to God based on a promise with no physical evidence? The answer is that we do so in faith.
Faith believes without proof because faith is born from the depths of God’s perfect love. When we know that we are loved, we trust the One who loves us. It’s that simple and that unfathomable.
In a couple of weeks, many of us will come forward to allow a Pastor to mark us with a cross made of ashes. The Pastor will say, “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return”. We will receive those haunting words in peace because the ashes will be traced over the cross that was placed on our foreheads at Baptism. The words, you are a Baptized child of God sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked with the Cross of Christ forever cover the ashes and calm our fears.
Prayer: Lord Jesus, in you is life in all its fullness now, as well as in the life to come. AMEN