God who turns acorns into oaks also turns natural bodied into spiritual bodies.

Saturday, 9/22/12

Our first reading from Chapter Fifteen of First Corinthians gives us real answers to what we all wonder about, namely, what we will be like in life after death.

Paul’s says that just as in this creation God worked the little miracle by which a simple acorn buried in the earth can be transformed into a massive oak, so in the new creation he devises things so that what is put down as a corruptible body arises as an incorruptible body. He says you can bet on it that God who gave us natural bodies will also give us spiritual bodies.

There was a Belgian priest of the O.M.I Order who wrote a book called Inuk. In it he told how he travelled due north from Canada with his team of huskies. For eighteen days of hopping from one isolated village to the next he settled in the farthest north of all human habitations. Building his own igloo there, and living by harpooning his own seals for meat and oil he settled in.

The Inuk villagers were fascinated by his wooden cross, and they asked what kind of bone it was. He told them it wasn’t bone. It was wood. But they had never seen wood, and they wouldn’t believe his story about acorns turning into oak trees. We believe in oak trees, and we believe that the God who gave us that miracle, can also give us new bodies that will be powerful and glorious.