Answer:
It's a good question and I think you would be helped by knowing how God's people have dealt with it in the past. In Biblical times, the Jews used a two stage burial process because they believed that only the bones were resurrected. So they would place a dead body in a tomb and leave it there for a year. Then they would reenter, gather the bones which is all that remained, and put them in a bone box. This way a tomb, which was very expensive, could be used by a family for generations. And the much smaller and more discreet bone boxes could be stored wherever. (This by the way is the origin of the biblical phrase, “he was gathered to his fathers” – since a man’s bones would be gathered and placed in the exact same place his dad was.)
The early Christians were very serious about resurrection, and so they refused cremation, which was what the Romans did most often. They saw it as a pagan practice because they retained that Jewish idea that if you were being raised on the Day of the Lord, you wanted to leave God something to resurrect! Early on though, they realized that the way some Christians died ruled out the possibility of anything being left for God to raise. For when some were burned at the stake or devoured by Lions, even the bones were consumed. So if God needed something of us left to raise us, these Christians (some of the most highly revered martyrs) wouldn’t be raised from dead on the Day of the Lord. How could that be? Scripture was silent.
So opinions started to shift, but the heavy weight of Christian practice was always toward burial. Only witches or really bad criminals were burned through much of the Christian Era. Christians read Paul who seemed to talk about our physical bodies being like a seed in the ground (1 Cor 15) which would blossom one day into new spiritual bodies. So Christians carried the idea of wanting a trace of our bodies around to be raised. Therefore, to this day the Catholic church is very against it.
Most other churches today are generally neutral on the subject because of a lack of explicit scriptural instruction. I would therefore agree that the gesture of burial is valuable in a symbolic way only. If one cannot be raised becuase nothing of their body remains on the Day of the Lord, then that rules out resurrection for people involuntarily burned to death, but also for many who may have been buried, yet whose bones have still decomposed due to time. Will God refuse to raise those who endeavored to “seed” their body into the ground, while nothing of that seed remains on the Day of Christ through no fault in the preparation of their corpses? It doesn't seem likely or logical
Clearly an omnipotent God is able to make us new bodies out of nothing. Frankly, if he MUST make them out of the material of our old body, then that material technically will still exist! It’s just turned into recycled materials since the date of our decomposition.
If Scripture made some definitive mandate, I’d feel we have less freedom here. But there’s no prescription against cremation, only descriptions of how burial preparation was done by the Jews (John 11:44).
So for me then, this falls inside the many areas of freedom for believers where we ought not to legislate for another’s conscience and where you just do what we think is right. Burial has the same advantages as full immersion baptism - it perhaps better illustrates or symbolizes the hopes and truths the Christians believe are contained in the actual event - but it’s not specifically required. Cremation is cheaper so many lean that way in our day.