Alive

Scriptures:     Haggai 1:15-2:9, Psalm 145 

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17,  Luke 20:27-38

Today on All Saints, or in the German tradition Totenfest, we remember our loved ones who have passed from this life to be with God, those who have left the membership rolls of Emanuel Church to join the membership rolls of the Church Triumphant.  Here at Emanuel Church, with our cemetery and many of our departed family members right outside our windows, our family members always seem close, and never more so than on Totenfest, when we read their names and remember their lives, and the ways in which their lives connected with our lives.

Our Gospel reading also has to do with connections.  In our reading, Jesus is in Jerusalem, and many of the religious authorities in Jerusalem see Jesus as a threat – and so he has questions coming at him from different directions.  In today’s Gospel reading, we meet the Sadducees, who, Luke tells us, do not believe in the resurrection.  In Sunday school we were told that the Pharisees believed in the resurrection while the Sadducees did not, and the way to remember which was which was to remember that the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, and so they were “sad, you see”.  Of course, we don’t actually know that they were sad, that’s just a silly memory aid.  What we do know is that they were the aristocratic, landowning elite who mostly controlled the ceremonies at the Temple in Jerusalem.  They accepted only the five books of Moses – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Number, and Deuteronomy – as Scripture – for them, the Bible had only 5 books - and rejected the oral traditions passed down by the Pharisees.  And, as Luke notes, they did not believe in the resurrection.  After the Temple was destroyed in AD 70, the Sadducees passed from the scene – their power base was the Temple, and when there was no longer a Temple, they lost their places of privilege, while the Pharisees continued, and there’s a direct line from the Pharisees of Jesus’ time to rabbinic Judaism in our time.

Anyway…..in our Gospel reading, some Sadducees approached Jesus.  They reminded Jesus of the tradition of Levirite marriage, stated in Deuteronomy 25:5-10, in which if a man and woman marry and the man dies childless, the man’s brother is supposed to marry the wife and raise up children in the dead brother’s name.  And then they lay out a ridiculous scenario:  a man and woman marry, and the man dies childless.  The woman marries the man’s brother, and he dies childless.  And then she marries the next brother and so on, through seven brothers – and all the brothers die, and then the woman dies.  In the resurrection, who will be her husband?

Clearly, this was a set-up question.  These folks weren’t on a sincere quest for truth, but on a mission to embarrass Jesus.  But as Jesus had done in the past with other trick questions, Jesus gave an answer that pointed out the flaws in his questioners’ assumptions, while at the same time communicating deep truth about the nature of God. 

The tradition the Sadducees referenced had an important purpose, to continue the survival of the family name – and, by extension, the survival of the community, of the nation.  Life was hard, battles with surrounding tribes were frequent, disease was rampant and medical care was, by our standards, virtually non-existent.  Death stalked the community. Life was short.  And so it was important to assure that the community would not die out.  Having children was the way in which to defeat death.  And in the story the Sadducees told, at least as they understood it, death had defeated the family despite the family’s best efforts; with the death of the last brother and the woman, the family name would have died. Even though the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, they made the assumption for argument’s sake that if there was such a thing, that life after death would be like life before death – in the words of Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and short. 

But Jesus pushed them past their assumptions.  In the world to come, people cannot die – so there is no need for marriage, no need for children to carry on the family name.  Instead, all live in God’s presence, as children of God.   Jesus used the Sadducees’ story, a story they told to prove their belief that death was the end, as an opportunity to affirm that God is the God of life and living.  He also reminded the Sadducees of one of their foundational stories from Exodus, one of the five books they recognized as Scripture, in which God told Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” (Exodus 3:6) “I am”, not “I was” – because God is God of the living, and to God, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were as alive as Moses was.   We worship a God who loves us so much that God won’t let go of us even after we die.

Now, Jesus’ words about children of the resurrection not marrying or being given in marriage may be  unsettling to those who have lost a spouse.  In the world to come, will my wife or husband recognize me?  Jesus seems pretty clear in this passage that the arrangements made in this life aren’t legally binding in the next.  But I would imagine, that in the world to come, we will relate to God and one another in ways that we can’t even imagine in this life – that is to say, the relationships will be stronger, not weaker, more intense, not less so.  I think of it in this way:  when we were children, we had friendships with the neighborhood kids, and we thought we’d always be friends.  And then life went on – maybe our friend’s family moved to another town - and we grew apart.  In high school, we may have had friends in our graduating class that we thought would always be our friends, and those friendships may have been much more intense and lasting than our friendships as children.  I remember my friends in high school writing in one another’s yearbooks, “remember me always” and “always remember me”.  And for many of these friends, “always” lasted maybe a few months after graduation, and then we went on to jobs or college, and many of those friendships faded – I only have one high school friend that I’m still in touch with on a regular basis; some have died, and the rest I just see at reunions, and get their names mixed up.  And then we got married, many of us, a relationship much deeper and more lasting than anything we could possibly have imagined in high school – and if we’ve been fortunate, those marriages have sustained us over the years.  At every stage, as we’ve matured, we are able to sustain more lasting relationships than when we were younger – our adult marriages are longer lasting than our high school friendships, just as our high school friendships were longer lasting than our childhood play dates.  I know that in years past, Emanuel Church had “Tom Thumb” weddings for the kids, but of course a “Tom Thumb” wedding is nothing compared to an adult marriage.  In the world to come, I believe we’ll relate to God and one another with a quality of love that will make even the best marriage look like a Tom Thumb wedding by comparison.   So yes, you will recognize husband, wife, brothers, sisters, children, parents, friends, and see and understand them and love them beyond anything possible in this life – because in this life even the best relationships come with misunderstandings and limitations - but even beyond those we knew in this life, our primary relationship will be with God, because it is the love of God that makes all other loving relationships possible.

Why do I believe this?  Because God is love.  Indeed, our God is all about relationships of love.    As Christians we believe that our one God exists as three persons – Father, Son, Holy Spirit – who are in a constant dance of self-giving love with one another – a dance into which we are also invited.  In this life, God is constantly calling us to love generously and expansively, to love not only our friends but our enemies, to love not only those we already know but the stranger by the side of the road in need of help.  Indeed, at the very beginning of the Bible, in the creation stories in Genesis, as God was creating and saying of each thing created “it is good”, the first time God said the words “not good” was when God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” (Genesis 2:18)  We were created for community, not isolation.   And the world to come, where we will live eternally in God’s presence, will be the ultimate community, where we will have nothing to hide, where we will be fully known to God and one another.  Or as St. Paul put it, “Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

So on this All Saints Day, we give thanks for our saints, those who have helped sustain this church, those who have helped make us the persons we are.  We remember them, and we give thanks, knowing that in God’s presence they are still alive, and that we will see them again.  May we, the living saints of Emanuel Church, speak and live in such ways that our example will live on in those who come after us, so that when we have gone on to our reward, those who come after us may remember us in love.  Amen.