Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, RCL
November 10, 2019
North Fork Ministries
Gospel:
Luke 20:27-38
Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."
Jesus said to them, "Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.
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In a scene from Stephen Spielberg’s remarkable film, Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis, playing the role of President Lincoln, is pondering the question of whether to allow the unbearable misery of the civil war to finally come to an end, or whether to hold off the war’s end for a few day’s longer, until Congress had sufficient time to decide the fate of the proposed 13th Amendment to the Constitution, an amendment that would ensure that, finally, even after the war, slavery would be permanently abolished. It was a frightful decision for Lincoln, who knew that every moment the war continued meant that untold numbers of both Confederate and Union soldiers would continue die. Yet he also knew that although the Emancipation Proclamation had freed the slaves during the war, the ultimate fate of the institution of slavery remained undecided.
In a pre-dawn scene, in the telegraph room of the War Department, President Lincoln is wrapped in a shawl. He stares down at his hat, held between his knees. Two young telegraph operators observe him, awaiting his decision concerning an order to bring a Confederate peace delegation upriver from Richmond directly to Washington to receive a proposal for surrender.
Lincoln says, ““Have Captain Saunders convey the
Commissioners to me here in Washington.”
Then there is a pause, and Lincoln places his hat on the floor. “Shall I transmit, sir?” the telegraph operator asks.
There’s another long silence and then Lincoln asks, “You think we choose to be born?” And then, “Are we fitted to the times we’re born into?”
Lincoln’s dialog with the technically trained young men, eventually leads him to cite the ancient Greek mathematician, Euclid. Lincoln says, “Euclid’s first common notion is this: “Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” And then, “We begin with equality. That’s the origin, isn’t it? That balance, that’s justice.”
And so for the sake of equality, Lincoln kept the peace delegation away from Washington, allowed the war to go on a little longer. In arriving at his decision, Lincoln elevated the argument. He took a practical question, albeit one of great importance, and raised it above the level of common discourse. He lifted the conversation to the plane of the transcendent.
The question that the Sadducees brought Jesus in today’s gospel reading was an absurd one. According to Moses’ law, they said, “If a man’s brother dies, leaving behind a childless widow, the man shall marry the widow and raise up their children. They asked Jesus what happens if that brother also dies, and the next brother marries the woman, and then the next brother in line also dies, and so on through seven unfortunate brothers and a very bereaved widow. (It’s an odd twist on the classic musical film, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. In this it’s case, “One Bride for Seven Brothers”).
The Sadducees’ question for Jesus was this, “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?” It was a meaningless question because the Sadducees, unlike the Pharisee’s, didn’t believe in resurrection or in angels. They strictly observed the original Torah, the Law of Moses, and Moses had made no mention of the resurrection of the dead. For them, the question was meant to draw Jesus into their personal theological and political argument.
But Jesus would have none of it. Instead Jesus ratchets up the conversation. He avoids their petty questions and gets to the heart of the matter. Like Lincoln, Jesus appeals to the transcendent - proclaiming that, “The God of Abraham, of Isaac, and Jacob is a God of the living, not of the dead; for to him, all of them are alive.”
If you have attended one of our Inquirer’s classes the past couple of years, you probably recall part of a sermon preached by a United Church of Christ pastor, Yvette Flunder. She says that she was raised a Pentecostal Fundamentalist and was taught that there was one answer to every question. And if they didn’t know the answer to the question they could get it on the radio from the “Bible Answer Man.” And the Bible Answer Man would tell them what the Bible said. And so she learned that there was, “one answer to every question … and if you didn’t agree with it, you were going to hell.”
She was taught that, “the essence of religion was to find the right way.” Along the way she learned that if you possess the right way, that means that everyone else is wrong. As she says, “I managed to have genuine sympathy for you in your wrongness. But make no mistake about it, baby, you were wrong.”
“Now here’s my struggle,” she goes on to say. “I’m amazed at how I have evolved theologically. I’m amazed that as I grow and evolve theologically, the more I grow, the less I seem to be certain about. So people ask me in my congregation, ‘What about this or that?’ And I say, ‘Honey, I don’t know.’ They say, “You don’t know? But you’re the pastor!’ ‘Yea, but I still don’t know. I don’t know!’ And the kids ask hard questions: ‘Who got to the tomb first? Was it Mary? Was it Peter? We can’t get it hooked up.’ I told them, “I don’t know.’ …‘And if God created a lion to lie down with a lamb, where is the dinosaur?’ ‘Honey, I don’t know. I don’t know!’ And it seems the further along I get, the less I know. And I’ve been in church all my life.”
Occasionally I will train acolytes. I think that it is good for our acolytes and our ministers of communion and our lay readers to be trained well enough to know what they are doing and to serve with confidence and grace. It adds dignity and beauty to the worship experience when our worship leaders are knowledgeable and comfortable with their duties.
Acolyte trainings are often occupied with legitimate questions like, “Should I hang the lavabo towel over my right arm or my left arm?” or “Should the lighting of the candles behind the altar begin from the right or from the left?” or “When should I bow and when should I kneel?”
But I usually want to answer, “I don’t know. Honey, I don’t know.” The older I get, the more I grow in the faith, the less I seem know. I find myself far more interested in asking the right questions than in finding the right answers.
And so our acolytes spend the first part of our training session learning how to meditate. And then we practiced a Zen Walk – walking slowly, mindfully around and through the aisles, practicing consciousness, cultivating an awareness of God’s presence, and seeking simply to discover through graceful movement that God is alive within us.
As Jesus told the Sadducees, our God, “is a God, not of the dead, but of the living.” May all our questions lead us to an awareness of a God who lives within us.