Alive (Sermon for All Saints / Totenfest)

Scriptures:     Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2;1-4,

Wisdom 3:1-10 

2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12,  Luke 20:27-38

Today we celebrate All Saints – in German, Totenfest.   Today we call to remembrance those loved ones – family members, friends, church members - who live on in our memories – and, much more importantly, who live on in God’s presence.  In a broader sense, beyond the specific names we remember from year to year, we are reminded of a central teaching and hope of our Christian faith, that death is not an endpoint of our lives, but is instead a transformation point beyond which we go to be with God.  Our second hymn this morning spoke of the bulb being transformed into a flower and the caterpillar encased in the cocoon being transformed into a butterfly that flies free.  In the same way, we believe that our current life is a bare seed – a bare beginning – of the resurrected lives that our loved ones have attained, and that await us as well.

Our Gospel reading this morning is actually the lectionary Gospel reading for next Sunday.  I swapped the Gospel readings for this Sunday and next, because I felt next Sunday’s lectionary reading fits the theme of Totenfest, and so next Sunday we will read about Zacchaeus, the tax collector who had a life-changing encounter witih Jesus.   In today’s gospel reading Jesus is in a debate with the Sadducees. Now, who are the Sadducees?.....in the Gospels, we read much more about the Pharisees, while the Sadducees are less visible.  The Sadducees were a conservative movement within the Judaism of Jesus’ day, devoted to the rituals of the Temple and aligned with the priestly elites of society.   They took their name from and traced their spiritual origins to Zadok, the high priest during the reigns of David and Solomon – even though there was no direct lineal, DNA connection. In addition to being priestly elites, they also tended to collaborate with the Roman occupation.  As you may imagine, given their elitism and collaboration with foreign oppressors, they held little sway with the common people. The Sadducees focused on the written law of Moses; that is to say, the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). They rejected the oral traditions of Scriptural interpretation propounded by the Pharisees. As a result of their reading of Scripture, the Sadducees rejected the possibility of resurrection – and it is this rejection that drives the story.  (When I was younger, I was told that one way to remember that because the Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection they were “sad, you see”.  Of course, that’s just a memory device, and probably not especially helpful in understanding them.)  Since the Temple and its rituals were their main object of devotion, the movement largely faded away after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. By contrast, the Pharisaic movement survived the destruction of the Temple, and modern-day Judaism traces its roots largely to the Pharisees of Jesus’ day.  To take just a slight digression, I think there’s a lesson for us in these differing outcomes.  The Sadducees tied their devotion to geography, to a building, essentially to a shrine – which is fine as long as the shrine existed, but not so fine when it was destroyed.  Destroy the shrine, and you destroy the system of religion that is dependent on that shrine.  By contrast, the Pharisees tied their devotion to religious ideas and ideals – and ideas are portable, following us wherever we go.  Ideas don’t depend on geography or civil engineering, don’t depend on land or buildings.  The religious beliefs of the Pharisees, based on ideas, were strong enough yet flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances, while those of the Sadducees, based on material circumstances, were crushed by changes in those circumstances.
Anyway…..the Sadducees approached Jesus with a question which was asked not in sincerity, but rather with the intent to make the idea of resurrection look ridiculous.  Their question turns on the institution of levirate marriage, which provided that if a husband died without an heir, the widow was to marry the husband’s brother to produce an heir in the name of the deceased brother, to keep alive the deceased brother’s family line – this is provided in Deuteronomy 25:6.   And so the Sadducees constructed a scenario in which one widow marries seven brothers, one at a time as each one dies in succession, all without producing a child, and asking in the afterlife, whose husband she would be.  Again, this question was not asked in sincerity, but to trip Jesus up and make him look ridiculous.  Today, in social media terms, we would say they were trolling Jesus. Jesus used their attempt at trolling to create a teaching moment, using the texts the Sadducees most valued to expand the question beyond the narrow framing and assumptions of the Sadducees.  Because, of course, the Sadducees’ question depends on the unstated assumption that the resurrected life is just like our current life, except with better lighting.  But Jesus blows up that notion, saying that living arrangements are different in the life to come – to use a phrase from Bill Maher, “New Rules!”
Jesus then goes beyond their question to prove the resurrection from their own preferred Scriptures, the five books of Moses.  And this was important – had Jesus used some other Old Testament or Apocryphal text, the Sadducees would have rejected his argument.  Jesus refers to the story of God speaking to Moses from the burning bush – this is in Exodus 3:6, in which God says, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”  Jesus in essence makes an argument from grammar,  saying in effect that if Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were no longer living, God would have said something like, “I was the God of your father, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”  But since in speaking to Moses, God referenced them using the present tense – and since, as Jesus says,  our God is God of the living -  that means they were – and are – still alive.  Jesus told the Sadducees, “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”  We experience time in a  linear sequence – past, present, and future.  But before God, past, present, and future are all one, in one great eternal “Now”.
Jesus told the Sadducees, “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”  That is to say, before God, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive – as are those whose names we read this morning, and all of our departed loved ones.  And, I have to say it, also perhaps some departed that we don’t love so much, because it is God who sets the invitation list for God’s kingdom, not us.  As I’ve preached here more than once, God loves us – and God loves our neighbor, especially the neighbor who makes our skin crawl and whose voice is to us like fingernails on a chalkboard.  Next week, as I said, we’ll be reading about Zacchaeus, the dishonest tax collector who after meeting Jesus repents and promises restoration to those he victimized.  Remember that when Jesus invited himself to dinner at Zacchaeus’ home, the crowds following Jesus didn’t say, “Awww….isn’t that sweet.”  Rather, they grumbled that Jesus would give the time of day to such a scummy character.  And yet, Zacchaeus is before God along with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in glory.  As I considered this text, I remembered the closing scene of Robert Benton’s 1984 movie Places in the Heart, which starred Sally Fields…and it’s hard for me to believe 35 years have passed since that film was made.  The film, set in Texas during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, opens with a falling-down drunken young African-American man playing with a gun and accidentally shooting Fields’ husband, the local sheriff who had been called to bring the young man under control.  The locals in turn lynch the young African-American man.  Most of the movie portrays Fields’ valiant struggles to keep her family together and the family farm from going under in the face of  numerous obstacles and without her husband’s guidance. The film closes with a scene, set in the local little country church, of communion.  The organ is playing the hymn “In the Garden”, and as the plate of bread and the tray of wine is passed down the aisle from row to row, we see the various characters whom we’d encountered throughout the movie, some of whom had been in conflicted relationships, sharing communion.  In the last few seconds, we see Sally Fields pass the tray of communion cups to her deceased husband, the sheriff, who in turn passes the tray to the young African-American man who had shot him.  It’s a vision of the reign of God, and of the forgiveness that prevails there.  Early on in my time here, I was asked questions about what heaven was like.  And I’ve always struggled with such questions – after all, almost by definition, heaven is beyond description, and the traditional images of harps and halos are only metaphors, not to be taken literally.  What I can say is that in heaven, God is there, and for me, that’s enough.  God’s presence is enough.  And further, heaven begins here, as we walk in faith with God in this life; as St Catherine of Sienna said, “All the way to heaven is heaven, for Jesus said, “I am the way.”  Heaven begins here.  The reign of God begins here, in this life.  Our every word, our every action, fit us or unfit us for heaven, lead us closer or further away from union with God.
Jesus told the Sadducees, “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”   As we are grateful for the memories of our loved ones and for all they have been to us, may we also give thanks to God before whom they still live and still love.  May we give thanks to God for what the writer of the letter to the Hebrews calls the “great cloud of witnesses” of all the departed faithful.  In the words of our opening hymn, “we feebly struggle; they in glory shine.”  They have run their earthly race, and now they are in the bleachers with God, cheering on those of us who follow – and, in turn, we will some day join them in glory.   May the memories of our loved ones be for a blessing, and in turn may we so live that others are blessed by their memories of us.  And may God, who is present with our departed loved ones and with us, guide us all the days of our lives.  Amen.