Help me to speak not about you, O God, but for you, that your people might hear your word for them. Amen.
Some of the things we learned as children simply aren’t true and with apologies to any schoolteachers who have said the opposite, there absolutely is such a thing as a stupid question. Case in point – imagine a woman dies after having been married seven times, which husband will she be married to in the Resurrection? It’s a bad question.
We all ask bad questions from time to time: “How exactly does the bread become the Body of Christ; What’s the minimum I have to believe to be a Christian; Doesn’t the church already have enough money, why should I give; Why does the Church have to be political; Haven’t we already done enough for that minority group?” And the problem with asking bad questions is that they limit our ability to hear a good response. Bad questions are like a coffee mug with holes at the bottom – it doesn’t matter how good the coffee is, we won’t be able to get much of it.
The Sadducees who confronted Jesus weren’t interested in learning anything or having a real dialogue, they were trying to publicly trap Jesus. They asked a stupid question, fishing for a stupid answer so they could say “Look how ridiculous this guy is!” We’ve all seen this happen. You’re at a public lecture and when it’s time for questions from the audience, there’s usually someone who stands up to speak, and either brags about their own experience or they play the game of “what-about” trying to outsmart the speaker. That’s what these Sadducees are up to.
Jesus though is having none of it. His response isn’t a deep theological truth; it’s a flippant response to a bad question. If we had been there to witness it, I think we would see everyone chuckling and saying, “Well, Jesus shut them down pretty quick.” Jesus’ response isn’t about revealing the mysteries of Resurrection or developing a theology of marriage. Instead, he’s exposing how bad and limiting the question is.
In other words, Jesus is saying “Why are you asking me a question about death in the context of life?” There is no answer to their question because, when it comes to Resurrection life, death isn’t in the equation. The Resurrection isn’t an extension of life as we know it, it is the transfiguration of all that we know. As CS Lewis describes it at the end of the Narnia series, the Resurrection is about going “further up and further in” to reality. We think we have a sense of what reality is like, but we only have a glimpse. The Resurrection is when we shall come to see things fully. So don’t apply limiting labels and assumptions to Gods’s grandeur. That is what Jesus’ response is about.
It’s like the story about a father and son who are in a severe automobile accident. They are rushed to the hospital and brought into the operating room. The surgeon sees the boy and gasps, “I can’t operate on him, he’s my son.” How is this possible? It’s quite simple – the surgeon is the boy’s mother, but we’re so conditioned to assume the surgeon is a male that many of us overlook the very obvious solution to that riddle. The Sadducees are, likewise, trapped by their assumptions. Part of what Jesus comes to free is from are our prejudices, assumptions, traumas, and even our deeply held, but flawed, beliefs. Jesus opens our minds to the wonder and possibilities of God.
I do want to offer a pastoral word about this passage because sometimes we do read it trapped by the mindset of those opposing Jesus. A lot of us are longing to again see our loved ones face to face. Parents who have lost a child can’t wait to embrace them again. Spouses that have been parted by death have been clinging onto the hope of seeing their beloved again. Jesus is not dismantling those hopes. As we know from Scripture, “love never ends.”
You might recall from physics class that the first law of thermodynamics states that “energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed.” Sometimes it’s called the conservation of energy. Well, there’s a first law of the Resurrection; we can call it the conservation of love. Because God is eternal and God is love, it means that anyone and anything loved by God can never be destroyed, only changed. The love that we have for those who have died does not get obliterated in death. The Resurrection does not erase our loves, rather it perfects them. We can hope for our joyful reunion with all those we love but see no longer.
So if the take-home message about the statement “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living” isn’t about explaining what relationships in the afterlife are about, what is the foundation of truth from which Jesus is speaking? He concludes his response by saying, “For to him all of them are alive.” That is, “Don’t worry about the dead, I’ll take care of them; you focus on living.”
Jesus tells us that he came that we might have abundant life, and that is the promise we have in him. That we are free to give without counting the cost, to love without worrying about worthiness, to forgive without requiring apology, to live not in the shadow of death, to know that we are already forgiven and always loved. That is the promise we have in Jesus. It’s the promise we heard in Haggai, which I’ll say more about soon, “Take courage… for I am with you… My spirit abides among you; do not fear.”
When it comes to God, death is not a part of the equation. As one poet has put it, “I will die, but that is all I will do for death.” Imagine what life would be like if we trusted that, in Christ, all are alive. That is the promise of eternal life, which, by definition, has already begun for each of us. How would our lives be different if we didn’t think of life as an hourglass with grains that are slipping away? What if the good life was not measured by things that could be counted – money, awards, successes? What if we made decisions based not on our fears, but God’s promise to be with us always and to bring life to all that is dead? What risks might we dare to take? What adventures would we go on for the sake of joy and not the result? Those are the good questions that we as individuals and as a congregation are summoned to ask in response to the promise of Jesus to be with us always.
In 1897, Mark Twain was in London on a speaking tour when rumors circulated that he had fallen ill and the Associated Press erroneously reported that he had died. Twain’s response was “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Beloved, you can read reports all over the place about the demise of the Church, and they are not only an exaggeration, but they are erroneous. Yes, I’ve seen the data and the charts. I can understand why when some look at the trends, they forecast the death of the church. But that’s the same error we heard the Sadducees making – applying the metrics of death to the living God.
I am so excited about joyfully embracing our future here at Grace and St. Stephen’s. In the past few months, our average Sunday attendance is up nearly 50 people, your response to our annual giving campaign has been strong, we had four baptisms last Sunday, Sister Marcella tells me that Children’s Church was packed last Sunday as well. This congregation is full of life and vitality, and I absolutely believe that God is giving us dreams to dream and because the Spirit is so clearly on the move here, we have nothing to fear. We can act boldly in confidence that our God is a God of the living and is giving us the promise of abundant and eternal life.
Receiving and reflecting this promise is our holy task, which is made difficult in death-wielding and life-denying world. This is why worship matters so much. When we come to church, we are enveloped in the promises of God given to us in story, song, and Sacrament. One of the primary errors we make about worship is that we think it is something we are doing for God, but that’s not at all the case. God was doing just fine before humanity came along. God does not need our worship, but we need to worship God.
We humans are worshiping creatures. We cannot not worship. Worship is as natural and essential as breathing. Some worship money, some worship power, some worship beauty, some worship themselves, some worship celebrities, but everybody worships. What the Church helps us to do is to align our worship with the living God who enables us to participate in the only thing that matters and the only thing that shall endure: the love of Jesus Christ. Everything else is an idol and an empty promise. But as innate as worship is to being human, so is being distracted and forgetful.
Worship grounds us in the promises of God. This is what the prophet Haggai’s concern is. Haggai is a prophet and book of the Bible that is not ignored so much as it is forgotten. But there’s so much truth and life in what we heard this morning. Haggai, whose name manes “my festivals,” writes during the when the people were returning from their forced exile in Babylon. The Temple had been destroyed and was in the process of being rebuilt.
Haggai’s prophecy is about returning to the rhythms of worship, of reclaiming their identity and God’s promises in the gift of community, gratitude, and praise. But there are naysayers. Some remember what the previous Temple was like and they complained that this Temple wasn’t as good as the first one. I know none of us have ever used the phrase “That’s how we’ve always done it” or “That’s not how it used to be,” so you’ll just have to trust me that, sometimes, people actually are blinded by their expectations and make unhelpful comparisons to the past. Like the Sadducees, some of the people were stuck in the realm of the dead, of what used to be, and they were in jeopardy of missing out on what God doing in their midst.
What we worship isn’t the past; rather we worship a God who is alive, doing new and amazing things. This is why Haggai prophesies, “I will fill this house with splendor… the latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former.” In other words, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” The promise of God is that our best days are not behind us, that God is doing infinitely more than we can ask for or even imagine. And so, we need worship to focus our attention on the God who is in a perpetual advent, coming to us afresh every morning, blessing us at every moment of our lives.
Again, Haggai is a book of the Bible that is rarely referenced or remembered, but then Haggai says something that is a part of our identity and calling as a parish. Through Haggai, God says, “In this place I will give peace.” I know our translation said “prosperity,” but that’s wrong. It’s the Hebrew word shalom that we all know means “peace.” It’s right there, engraved in our reredos. Those words are a big part of the reason why I’m here. Earlier this year when I was invited to consider the parish profile, one of the ways that God caught my attention was with those words: In this place I will give peace. That’s something I felt called and excited to be a part of.
It’s something that is desperately needed, both in our lives and world – peace. The sort of peace that world cannot give and cannot take away. It’s the peace that comes from knowing that we are loved, that death does not have the final say, that we are not defined by our mistakes, that we belong, that our lives are a part of something greater, that all shall be well. We receive peace as we are fed with the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation in this place, and as our Lord taught, that it is more blessed to give than to receive, it is our mission to bring our weary world into the peace of Christ.
The world and our fears have a way of narrowing our vision and limiting our imaginations, and sometimes we end up asking bad questions and find ourselves living with bad answers. But, friends, there is a better way. God has promised us the gift of abundant life and that gift is coming on earth as it is in heaven. Worship steeps us in the sure and certain promises of God, worship opens our imaginations to perceive abundance instead of scarcity, worship binds us to the peace that passes all understanding. Therefore, let us keep the feast.
