A Sermon from First Church….
A sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship of the First Congregational Church of Scarborough, Maine on Sunday, November 11, 2007. The principal reading was Luke 20:27-38.
“Tricky Questions, Insightful Answers”
“He (God) is not the God of the dead, but of the living,
for to him (God) all are alive” (20:38)
The Sadducees were mostly priests who “counterbalanced” the Pharisees and their oral tradition of the Law. The Sadducees were a conservative, mostly wealthy group, well connected to the Temple, who saw only the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative. They were devoted to the status quo and secular interests of Judaism as a nation, albeit occupied by the Romans. They rejected all thought and talk of life after death.
The story can be told of a Duke University campus visit made by Carlyle Marney, a Baptist preacher, teacher and theologian from North Carolina. A student asked, “Dr. Marney, would you say a word or two about the resurrection of the dead?” Marney firmly replied, “I will not discuss that with people like you.” “Why not?” asked the student. “I don’t discuss such matters with anyone under 30,” Marney said. “Look at you, in the prime of life, potent – never have you known honest-to-God failure, heartburn, impotency, solid defeat, brick walls, or mortality. So what can you possibly know of a dark world that only makes sense if Christ is raised?”
Marney may have been a bit harsh with the student, but there is a point to be made. Before you ask a question, know why you want an answer. Some questions ought not to be asked except by those who are starving for an answer. The Sadducees are not hungry for an answer. They come to Jesus for a little theological football.
Like so many political speeches that muse about “the poor,” “the oppressed,” and “the abused,” the Sadducees are making use of someone with whom they would never be in actual relationship. Jesus tells the Sadducees what elsewhere he tells other men who make use of a woman to justify themselves. He says, “Leave her alone” (cf. Mark 14:6; John 12:7).
He tells them that the cultural and relational structures of “this age” are superfluous in the age to come. Their accepted notion of marriage pertains to procreating offspring to perpetuate a man’s name, securing the survival of the family and the nation, if not of the species. It is a bit like trying to discuss apples when you eating oranges.
Other seekers get a different answer to the resurrection question. To Martha, groping her way to a brave, new faith after her brother Lazarus’ deathh, Jesus said, “I am the resurrection.” To Mary Magdalene, blinded with tears in the Garden, Jesus gave the supreme answer of her own name spoken by Him, from the other side of death.
Pose the resurrection question in the cool light of a temple courtyard where you are the management, as did the Sadducees, and what you hear may send you away scratching your head.
The resurrection has always been an intriguing problem for the still Living. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas wrote a “Summa Theologica,” a summary of theology that is still the basis for much Christian doctrine. Someplace in its many pages, between creation and the second coming, Aquinas applied his considerable genius to our question.
I do not recall all of his reasoning, but I do recall that he figured the perfect human being after the resurrection would be a male, 40 years old, 6 feet high, and 180 pounds in weight. I do not know where that leaves some of you but it leaves me 1 inch too tall, 50 pounds too heavy, and 20 years too late to get into heaven and to enjoy paradise.
We are prone to make problems more difficult than they are, to get involved with trivia, to play with human beings instead of probing eternal mysteries, to do just about anything except ask the hard questions straight out.
The resurrection question has nothing to do with seven husbands or one wife or the imaginary, perfect person offered to us by Aquinas. The question has to do with us. When we die is that all there is, or is there something more? Are we as dead as we seem, or are we somehow still alive? We are not thinking and not talking about someone else, we are thinking and talking about ourselves.
When we get downright serious, Jesus does have an answer. Jesus said, “He (God) is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him (God) all are alive” (20:38). And that is about all we know on the subject, because that is about all Jesus ever said on the subject.
So, let us take a few minutes to appreciate what Jesus did say.
In this matter, do we have options? If so, what are they? We either rise from the dead or we do not. If we do not, then we should get all the pleasure we can here and now, since that is all there is; or we can just not bother at all, since it all ends in a whimper.
BUT….
If we do rise, there is still the temptation to remove ourselves from life prematurely, since the next one is so far superior. This may sound like an academic exercise or a non-problem to us, but it was a very serious one for the first generation of Christians. They were so eager for Christ’s coming that they just stopped work, sat down and waited. I have yet to figure out whether they had more sense or more faith than we do.
We have our own, more subtle ways of escaping this world, do we not? We often ignore our responsibilities to others in the areas of justice, politics, culture, economics; we neglect our responsibilities to future generations by despoiling our natural wonders and man-made resources and by not handing on our values and our faith.
I am convinced that one reason why our youth seem not to listen to us is because most of us have so little to say. Whether the topic is war or peace or sex or lying or drugs, our own values are so like a tossed salad, so confused, that we often end by letting the youth stumble through by themselves. Fortunately, many, if not all, make it through without us.
It is their right to reject our values and beliefs, and some will vocally, but it remains our responsibility to give them something to chew on, to work with, and, just perhaps, spit out. They are interested in life; and if after 2,000 years of Christianity, we still do not know how to live, what can we really expect of or for them.
We are further from the morning’s topic of the resurrection than I mean to be, but not so far as it may seem to you. If we know so little about what happens after death, at least resurrection sets the tone for this side of the grave. Resurrection is a call to life – not just after death but here and now.
Once we are firmly planted, with both feet on the good earth, it is necessary to live in the present to the fullest. True, we might have done something different in the past, and we could still do it very differently in the future, but these are only possibilities. The only reality, the only moment we are now living and can try to control, is here and now. We can get our whole being into operation in only this precise time and place. We must not ignore the present, or we do so at our own peril.
Now is High Noon! We should make everything on heaven and earth focus on the present moment. Otherwise, life is a passing thing, prayers become wishes, worship is in vain, and our very existence is superficial, perhaps superfluous.
Our God is the God of the living, and Jesus Christ came to bring us life – abundant, overflowing, and everlasting. Our task is to live it to the full. Then everything else, we are told, will be given to us besides. To tell the truth, after we figure the odds, we rather like ourselves and our things and our ways pretty much the way they are. But that is nothing new. And that is the abiding problem, that only God can change, or so it seems.
In such a climate of living, faith can still prosper in the face of dying. For it God be for us, who can be against any prospect, the higher side of any promise? As the Swiss sage Karl Barth said of the Scriptures, “The Bible gives to every person and to every era such answers to their questions as they deserve. We shall find in it as much as we seek and no more.”
