Morning Devotion for the Season of Eastertide
April 22, 2022
Invitatory
On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.
Alleluia. The Lord is risen indeed: Come let us adore him.
Reading: I Corinthians 15:51-58
Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: “Death has been swallowed up in victory. “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
Meditation – Peter Vanderveen
I have always thought that death is a consequence of sin. I was taught this. Everything was fine in the world – it was, in fact, outstandingly great – until a wily serpent beguiled Eve, and Eve beguiled Adam, and the order inherent in our idea of “everything” fell apart. Chaos returned, and in its wake came anger, vengeance, and penalty. The cost of disobedience – sinning – was exile from life within a garden and the tragic introduction of mortality. So the story goes in the book of Genesis. And the logic seems obvious. The more sins you accumulate, the closer to death you’ll be. Hence the impetus to be good; for to be good is to improve your chances of being safe and more secure. Your life won’t teeter on the edge.
Paul, however, seems to reverse this basic understanding. If the “sting of death is sin,” doesn’t this imply that sin is a consequence of death? Paul might easily have written, in line with our common understanding, that the “sting of sin is death.” This would make sense to us. One leads to the other. (If you anger bees they’ll sting). But he didn’t. He thought otherwise. For Paul, death makes itself present – it stings – in all the ways that sin intrudes in our lives. Thus, to sin is to invite death into our lives prematurely. Sin is a partial diminishment of who we are now that will eventually become complete in our dying.
Following the Genesis story, we tend to think of many sins as enticing, things we’d like to do if there weren’t a wagging finger warning us off. Paul’s reframing takes the charm away. Sin is simply that which takes away our liveliness. It deadens us. And the law, far from keeping us on the straight and narrow, serves to reveal just how much of ourselves we’ve lost. We’d think of morality in a wholly different way if we kept Paul’s statement before us.
The exuberance of Paul’s witness to the resurrection, and our corresponding transformation from mortality to imperishability often overwhelms his claims about sin. And we’re poorer for this – because both death and immortality can then seem scandalously far off, at the very, very end of our life. We can ignore both. But Paul would have us see that death is a very tragic presence in a thousand ways in all of our time. It continually steals something of us from us. Nothing could be more relevant.
Except, perhaps, the knowledge that when Christ defeated death, this, too, isn’t a far off promise. For it gives us life more abundant in all the ways that sin less effectively robs us.
The Lord's Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
