Remade with Imperishable Quantum Particles

1 Peter 1:23

You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.

“To dust we are from and to dust we shall return.”  One of the optimistic lines that comes from the funeral service.  From Genesis 1, God essentially created a free standing mud pie and called it us.  What gave the spark of life was his breathing into our nostrils.  So, a divine breath, maybe even a divine spark if we want to slide the metaphor, but in the end, back to the earth we go.

Well, back to the earth we went.

Because this ‘anew’ birthing process involves a fundamentally different pile of matter.  It is imperishable.

One of the more esoteric (out there) discussions I ever had in Seminary was the emphasis placed on the Creator/creation distinction.  He (yes, sexless deity given a gender) was God, we were muck.  God and muck, God-muck, God-muck…  I am not saying it didn’t make sense.  It does, kind of, but I have a tough time wrapping my head around the importance of the notion as it was presented.

Because this passage seems to be showing us that the division has been overcome.  Perishable stuff is creation stuff.  Imperishable is the stuff of heaven, at least to my way of thinking.  And it is not some kind of ‘do over’.  We are not wallpapering our mud-man forms with something imperishable.  It goes to the seed, to the very basis, the beginning of how it is we are made.  If Stephen Hawking were writing it, he might talk about the imperishable quantum particles.

We are going to the very building blocks of creation.  The seed is what Peter understood in his time and place.  The point is, the makeover is complete.  We are remade imperishable.  That is pretty darned cool.