Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Today's church is a wizened old grandmother, bent and wrinkled, invited to the party more for propriety than for her company. Everyone is expected to talk to her, even if only for five minutes, even if only about the past. (We don't expect her to be up on things.) Sad, really, that no one remembers, that no one today can even imagine how ravishing she once was -- how she took the world by storm, captivated millions, cast her spell over emperors and kings -- how thousands fell at her feet, tossing aside family, and friends, and possessions, and life itself. Now she is old, but her beauty was once to die for.

Now and then, in some charming gesture or alluring glance, we catch a glimpse of the woman she was -- and are bedazzled again. It happened to me this week, when some words of Paul to the church at Corinth suddenly came alive, and I knew (when I read them) that his world was just like mine, and that the faith he advocated in his time was exactly the faith needed today: "For while we live," he wrote (the other apostles and I), "For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus….So death is at work in us, but life in you."

It wasn't clear in those early days who should be the leaders and teachers of the Church. Paul, of course, was not a saint to these Corinthians -- not yet -- he was a travelling evangelist, with a shady past. And, although it had been he who first brought the Gospel to Corinth, and he who had founded their very church, Paul now had rivals in Corinth. And these rivals looked for opportunities to complain about him. They grumbled that he had not visited them recently, as he had promised, and they portrayed him as a poor figure of a man, a foolhardy person who took unnecessary risks with his in-your-face version of the Gospel, a man who was always one step ahead of the law, who was publicly beaten and humiliated, who was in jail half the time, who flirted with death. Who needs such a loser for a leader? There are more elegant Christians we can follow.

In his letter Paul responds to this criticism, and his words are razor sharp. He is polite. He praises the Corinthians for their faith and apologizes for not coming to them. But as to the charge that his suffering, his dance with death, makes him an unfit leader, he doesn't give an inch. Instead, he takes them back to basics. He reminds them that now, because of the resurrection of Christ, there is no longer a clear line between life and death.

Ah yes, that was the nutty idea at the heart of Christianity, that is what scrambled the brain of the ancient world. For, if the ancients were sure of anything, it was this: that some things are alive and some dead -- two possibilities, and only two: animate and inanimate. (We suffer from the same myopia.) But Jesus hadn't bought this. He had taught that life and death were co-existing forces, always at work, two potentials within us. He described the Pharisees (who looked very much alive) as "whitewashed sepulchers" -- death painted to look like life -- while Jarius's daughter on her death bed and Lazarus in his tomb (who looked very dead -- Lazarus even smelled) were actually alive -- just "sleeping." Jesus co-mingled life and death all the time in his teachings, and (so we could not miss the point) in his resurrection. At the high-moment of our communion service this morning, just before offering the bread and wine, I will ask you to "proclaim the mystery of the faith." And you will answer, with the oldest of words: "Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again." There it is, at the heart of everything: the confusion of life and death.

In his great mind, and in his life, Paul put flesh on these teachings of Jesus. He lived the resurrection. True, I suffer as an apostle of Christ Jesus, he told those Corinthians. I give up my humanity. I make myself vulnerable. I may seem even to die, and (as the result) you live. "Death is at work in us, but life in you." When a person dies (that is, stops clinging to the illusion we call life), that person finds true life, and his "dying" brings true life to others.

A good spouse dies, surrendering something of himself or herself, but finds in the "dying" a richer, fuller life of love, and in the "dying, imparts life to her husband or his wife. Parents must die, giving up the illusion that happiness is found in self-gratification, but in the "dying" find a better life, and by the "dying," give life to their children. It's Good Friday when Jesus dies, not "bad Friday", for by his dying we receive life. Death and life -- the crucified and risen Christ -- both present in all of us.

Discipleship costs. We pay for it by dying. Sometimes that means the death of our old, selfish, fearful selves. Sometimes it means the death of the grave. (And many have paid that price.) If we avoid "the dying" we never experience "the living." The power of Christ is in his dying. The power of a great Christian, like Paul, is in his willingness to die. St. Francis understood this mystery: "It is in giving that we receive," he said. "It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life." But the death of a Christian is hardly a death without hope. On the contrary, it leads to heaven. For Christians, death is a briar patch: a place where our enemies sometimes toss us, where they themselves are afraid to go, but where we are delighted to be.