1 Corinthians 15:51-57 Easter Festival
Pastor Ron Koehler
Grace—Tucson, AZ
April 20, 2025
DEATH HAS LOST ITS STING Imagine you’re out on a hike, walking through a desert canyon—a box canyon—you know, the kind you walk through but eventually ends at a mountain face, so there are walls on all sides except the one you came in on. Now imagine reaching the closed off end of that canyon and having a large swarm of bees descend on you! And imagine your friends running out and leaving you as the last one to deal with the horde of black and yellow, flying demons! I actually don’t have to imagine that! And my friends? Well, you know who you are. Anyway, how would you feel if that happened to you, but you knew they were stingerless bees? I don’t know about you, but I still wouldn’t love them. Even if I knew that they couldn’t hurt me, and I was going to come out on the other end just fine. Death is kind of like that for a Christian—and that’s because of Easter. God is here to tell us this morning that we are going to come out of this world just fine because the stinger of death has been removed. Why is Death So Scary? Still, thinking about death may be a little scary because, well, we’ve never experienced it before, obviously! And we’ve never spoken to someone who has been through it because it’s not something you come back from. And thinking about the process of our death—how it will happen and how it will feel—can be scary. But finally, because we have faith in our resurrected Lord, we might think about death kind of like stinger-less bees. It doesn’t seem great. It looks menacing. We don’t love it. But deep down we know it can’t spiritually, eternally, hurt us at all! This is the stuff the Apostle Paul wrote about in this letter to the Christians who lived in Corinth. Apparently, their world wasn’t so different from ours when it comes to thoughts about who Jesus is, what he did, and what happens to a person after they die. There were different teachings that caused those Christians confusion and challenged their faith. So, Paul spends a chunk of his letter—chapter 15—talking about the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection to eternal life for those who trust in him. This is why we sometimes call this the “Great Resurrection Chapter” of the Bible. A Mystery Many of us like a good mystery—a book, a movie, a play. We like trying to figure out what happened, and we don’t want the ending spoiled! Paul wrote about what he called a mystery, but he wasn’t talking about something we were supposed to figure out or even that we have to wait for the very end to know. He simply meant something that God was finally revealing. It was this: that some people will be “sleeping,”—that is, dead or in the grave—when this world comes to an end, and some will not be, and that either way, when Jesus returns on the Last Day, every one of us will be changed.