This Tuesday I turn 48 years old. On Monday I will be reminded that as my age progresses, my body falls apart. Little by little. I will have a very irritated nerve in the bottom of my left foot excised. No longer part of my body, and no longer causing me pain, it will be in a jar (I suppose? Will I get to take it home?) and while my foot will be better, I won't have the same feeling in it anymore. It will be forever slightly numb, which is better than slightly killing me each Sunday when I'm preaching and standing on it for long periods of time. My podiatrist tells me I tore up my foot playing on astroturf in the early '80's. All those years playing football and I thought I was never seriously injured, but as the years go by my neck, my back, my legs think otherwise, and remind me with each creak, "you are falling apart".

When I turned 40, I was diagnosed with adult onset asthma. I inhale a steroid into my lungs each day. Yesterday I had to wait until 11:00 a.m. because my prescription had run out the previous night. I was not gasping for breath, but breathing was certainly more difficult. Each struggling breath reminded me, "you are falling apart". With a mother who suffers from COPD, I'm also thinking my breathing will one day resemble hers. Not a pretty picture.

Are you discouraged yet? I haven't even told you about my nasal polyps and sinusitis! And how trying to be gluten free is helping my heartburn! And of course all of these ailments are nothing compared to what so many of you or your friends and families may be facing. I know they are minor ailments, but major in one way: they confront us with our mortality, our finitude, and our weakness, and that's either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your worldview.

I was speaking with a very wealthy man once a few years ago. He has, as my dad would say, "more money than a show dog can jump over". I have no idea what that means other than he has no financial worries. He looked at me after a medical scare and said, "All this wealth, all this power, is an illusion. I'm a nasty microbe away from losing all of it." Reality can be sobering.

Here's where our gospel resources must be pulled out of course. Christians believe not only that their are two lives, and this one is the short, nasty, and brutish one (to quasi quote Hobbes), but that the life to come is a physically restored one as well, as physical as Jesus' resurrected body. Toss those notions of floating around with wings and shooting arrows to the side. We are headed for a new heavens and a new earth replacing an old heaven and an old earth, bound to decay. God will fill it with his love, his presence, and his purposes and we will be unhindered "agents of his love in new ways, to accomplish new creative tasks, to celebrate and extend the glory of his love" as Tom Wright reminds us in his book "Surprised by Hope".

The early Christians spoke of this present life realistically, and held to a hope tenaciously. In Romans 5 Paul puts it this way:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Here's another reality. To the degree that we grasp this hope, understand this hope, live on this hope, we become sober people, grounded people, and growing people, even as our bodies decay. In fact, the decaying of our bodies can become the portal to renewed lives that are repurposed to see this very physical world experience the life of the age to come right now. Those early Christians, with this worldview, became so valuable to the communities and cities in which they lived, that no one could argue with their lives, and as a result it became eventually hard to argue with their beliefs of a God who loves the physical, is out to redeem the physical world that he made, and calls us to join him in the reclamation project.

It's happening right now in San Francisco through many of you. The fresh grass of the resurrection of Jesus is growing through the concrete of corruption and decay in the old world. And we are watering it together as we gather in groups to support one another, engage in the broken parts of our city to bring it healing, and remind each other often of the hope that does not disappoint, all the while hobbling and limping along.  Now that's a picture of the church. Hobbling, limping, watering the grass of resurrection, with a hope that does not disappoint.