|
Sermon preached by the Reverend Patrick T. Gray at
The Church of the Advent One of the things I was told when we had our first child was that I as a parent would get to be a kid again, meaning that if I liked playing when I was young, which I did, I would now be given an excuse, a chance, to do it all over again. And although it took awhile, and certainly this second child that we recently had could care less about playing (the only thing Eleanor wants to do right now is eat and sleep, which she’s doing pretty well), but now, with Ezra older, I get excited when I know it’s time for our monthly shop, because we’ll inevitably go to someplace like Target, which means we (meaning Ezra and I) will make a bee-line for the toy section. But whether we get a toy or not, the thing Ezra always says, day after day, is, “Let’s play, Daddy!” So play we do. Matchbox cars are big right now with my boy, all things John Deere is huge, especially given the fact that Grandma and Grandpa Nyquist are farmers in Minnesota, and recently Fr. Warren gave him a Brüder fire truck that he plays with incessantly. But we haven’t quite made it to the board game stage yet, or at least not in the traditional sense. We have bought a couple of board games. It seemed a requirement as American parents to have a copy of Chutes and Ladders in the house, so we bought that a while ago. And we play with it quite a bit. But the rules, we don’t quite play by the rules. And as a child, I was quite the rule-keeper. Nothing was more frustrating to me than someone who didn’t play by the rules. But I’m not really frustrated when I play board games with my son, who, when I try to show him how we first spin and move our little figure the number of spaces that the needle lands upon, and that if we land on a ladder, we can climb up it, and if we land on a chute, a slide, we go down it. When I show this to Ezra, he just looks at me, and says, “That’s OK, Daddy,” and proceeds to show me how the game is really played, by moving your figure over the board anywhere you want to move it, and if you want to go down a ladder, you can do that, and sometimes you might want to climb up a chute, and every now and then you spin the dial, but it doesn’t really matter what number it lands on. It’s just fun to spend the dial. And who wins? We both do, according to Ezra. “It’s OK, Dad.” But is it OK? Am I setting my son up for some severe disappointment when he gets older, when he’s able to read, when he sees that there are instructions, rules printed on the inside of the box that inform him that by landing on a chute, you go down, and only down, and by landing on a ladder, you go up, and only up. Am I creating a future anarchist who will have no respect for the rules, for the way things are, for the way things should stay? So if you’re with me on this, if you’re slightly sympathetic to my plight, you may also be sympathetic, as I am, to the Sadducees. Because the Sadducees wanted everyone to play by the rules. Now we all know about the Pharisees, the Gospels take a lot of time putting them in their place. Those insiders who were so good at keeping the law, “straining a gnat,” as Jesus called it, but forgetting about those weightier things, those things that were really important, primarily God and God’s mission to the world, to those God cares so much about. And so when we as insiders are being honest, we can see how quickly we ourselves can identify, become, actually are, the Pharisees. Scripture speaks to us when it talks about Pharisees, Jesus looks at our hearts full of hypocrisy when he talks to the Pharisees. But there was certainly one aspect of the Pharisees that we can wholeheartedly endorse, that Jesus himself agreed with. And that is their belief in the resurrection of the dead. Now for the Pharisees, the resurrection wasn’t some life after death in a non-bodily state where people simply went on existing. The resurrection for the Pharisees had to do with the whole story of Israel, from Adam and Abraham all the way to their own time, and then on into the future when God would raise all Israel, perhaps even all humans, from the dead, and create a new world for them to live in. The resurrection was a future event that had not yet happened, but when it did, the dead would be alive again in a new way, existing in God’s new world, where all the wrongs of the world would be put to rights. (1) And this is what the Sadducees denied. The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. So the Pharisees could be considered, more or less, like us. Misguided at times, more smug than we should be, but hoping for the resurrection of the dead. But the Sadducees, what about them? Should we identify with them? Although our modern period has done its best to demythologize the resurrection, make it inconsequential to the life of faith, doing its best to make it palatable for the modern mind (as if the pre-modern mind didn’t understand that when you die you don’t get up again), the church itself has worked so hard to take the sting out of the resurrection, to the point where it doesn’t matter much at all, although all this has occurred, I think it’s pretty clear that the resurrection matters, a robust belief in the resurrection matters. So maybe there’s not much to identify with at all when comes to the Sadducees. St. Luke in our Gospel lesson this morning certainly sets them up as bad guys; that they’ve come to ask a question of Jesus, to trick him. And that might very well be the case. At this point in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has entered Jerusalem in quite a dramatic fashion, with great crowds of people celebrating and praising God as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, as the people welcomed their king. And one of the first acts that this so-called king did was cleanse the Temple, the center of all Jewish life, this upstart had all the makings of a revolutionary. And not surprisingly, this did not sit well with the ruling class. Now the ruling class wasn’t just Sadducees, but a large chunk of them were. The Sadducees were the aristocrats, the establishment, the ones who were quite invested in the idea that “come weal or woe, the status is quo.” Any upset in the way things are would invariably mean a loss of power, a loss of their power, and that was unacceptable. Everyone should play by the rules because the rules benefit the Sadducees, and Jesus wasn’t playing by the rules, and it looked like he was encouraging people to be rule-breakers, as well. But the Sadducees weren’t just power-brokers, power-mongers. They were as deeply concerned as the Pharisees were with the story of Israel, with the mission of Israel, the mission of God’s chosen people. And the resurrection didn’t fit that mission. Now the Pharisees argued the resurrection from the Scriptures, particularly from books like Daniel, where it was easier to prove it. But these were comparatively recent books, and the older books, particularly the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers & Deuteronomy), this was much harder to do. So the Sadducees viewed the Pharisaical belief in the resurrection as a modern heresy. And the reason heresy matters is not because it’s important to have all of your ducks, all the right ducks, in a row. No, heresy matters because heresy impairs your vision of mission, of who you are, of why you are, and what you’re supposed to do about it in the world. But what was the mission of God’s chosen people, according to the Sadducees, particularly if the resurrection stood in the way of it? Well, it has a lot to do with the question the Sadducees present to Jesus. In fact, through it, the Sadducees lay out their own vision of what God is up to in the world. The question is based on the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 25, verses 6-10, where Levitical marriage is prescribed when a man dies childless. And a man, when his brother dies, is told to take his brother’s widow in marriage and to have a child with her. And the reason for this, mentioned over and over again in this passage from Deuteronomy, is to “perpetuate the dead brother’s name in Israel.” This is God’s mission, God’s way to thwart death, to keep death from winning. The command of the law has as its purpose the continuation of the brother’s life among the people of God by the continuation of his name.(2) And in our Gospel passage, the Sadducees confront Jesus with not just a trick, but a challenge. The deaths of these brothers show the unrelenting battle with death, and death is winning. One brother after another falls. One brother after another is unable to perpetuate his name in Israel.(3) And this is exactly what Moses’ command found in Deuteronomy seeks to rectify, to make right. But this remedy given by Moses is absurd if there is a resurrection. So, the Sadducees wonder (perhaps quite legitimately) why God would command such a thing, if in fact the resurrection was the point all along. Now Jesus does not dismiss the Sadducees, refusing to answer their question because he smells a rat. Rather, he takes the question quite seriously, because he knew the Sadducees were arguing from the law, and he did not wish to make light of the law, to make light of Moses, because they were indeed the legitimate conveyors of God’s word. So in answering their question, as to who will be married to whom in the resurrection, Jesus makes two basic points. The first is, Jesus makes a distinction between “this age” and “the age to come.” Although the resurrection will be a bodily resurrection, the resurrection life will not be exactly the same as the present life. In the resurrection, death will have been abolished, and so sexual relations, and especially the need to continue a particular family line, will be irrelevant.(4) In other words, our resurrection bodies will fit the characteristics of God’s new world in which death will be no more. And that’s pretty reasonable. If what we are is partly constituted by the fact of death, by the built-in ability to struggle with death, that which struggles with death is no longer needed when death has been completely overthrown. But Jesus knew he also had to address Moses, and the way the Sadducees read the law. And he doesn’t necessarily tell them their reading of the law, of Moses, is wrong. But he does tell them in his second point, to look again, look again at the law, look again at the inside cover of the box. Look again at the story of Moses himself, the story that we find in the book of Exodus, in the story of the burning bush, where God identifies himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now of course, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were dead when the story of the burning bush took place. At least dead by earthly standards. But Jesus reminds the Sadducees that the God of the Bible, the God of the Patriarchs, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is not satisfied with earthly standards. That God’s mission does not end in death, and the Sadducees at least got that right, God cares about death, cares enough about it to do something about it. But if this God is the God of life, then those whose God this is, continue to live with God, to be alive with God, for God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. So those who had died by earthly standards were still alive in God’s presence, awaiting the final resurrection. And Jesus argued for the resurrection from the very same Scriptures that, for the Sadducees, gave them pause about the resurrection. Jesus argued that the message of Scripture, the message that God wished to convey through his chosen people, was that the point of life was not death, the point of life was resurrection. So in this scene, Jesus showed the Sadducees what the game was really all about. He took the ones who thought they knew the rules of the game, who thought they had read the inside of the box very carefully, and he showed them something that they hadn’t seen, that was contained in the rules themselves, that showed not only what God desired, but what God began, and ultimately fulfilled in Jesus. Because of course our Gospel lesson this morning foreshadows what happened to Jesus himself, that the resurrection life is no longer a distant hope, but a very present hope, because we believe that God has acted powerfully by raising Jesus from the dead. And Jesus is now the first fruits of our own redemption, the promise that we who are found in Christ will also share in his resurrection life, that death will not have the final answer, but love will, God’s love manifested as our resurrection. So what did the Sadducees do? Our lectionary left off that bit. Some were impressed. They commented, “That was well said, teacher,” and St. Luke tells us they no longer dared ask Jesus anything else. Some of them were no doubt more enraged than before by this exchange, giving them even more reason to do away with this Jesus. But maybe some did go back and take another look at the inside of the box. Maybe some of them said, “Well, what do you know, maybe the Pharisees were right about this after all.” But as those Sadducees would have recognized, it’s not simply a matter of saying I’ve changed my beliefs, but that I’ve changed my life. I’ve changed my life because I worship the God who gives life. So it’s not merely belief that matters, but life, giving life matters. And that’s our challenge today, my brothers and sisters. How do we give life? How do we give life to those around us, to the world, to our colleagues, to our family, to our friends, to our enemies? We have all read the inside of the box over and over again, and most of the time, the rules seem to point us in the direction of selfishness, of self-righteousness, of isolation, and ultimately, it points us to death. Life seems to take us to death. The only other for sure thing besides taxes. But if we believe in the resurrection, if we believe that Jesus is in fact risen from the dead, it doesn’t have to be that way. Death does not have to dictate everything. And that’s the challenge – to take Christ’s victory and place it over our lives, so that we can be given God’s life, and give it to others. Take up that challenge with me this morning, my brothers and sisters. For in a few minutes we will be given God’s life in the form of bread and wine, food to strengthen us, to fortify us, to give us life, to give us God’s life for the life of the world. So let us eat, drink, and be faithful, thankful to the one who died for us and has risen from the dead, and enflamed to go and bring this Good News to others, both in our life-giving words and in our life-giving deeds. Amen. (1) Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone ( London: SPCK, 2001), 245. (2) Sarah Henrich, The Lectionary Commmentary: Theological Exegesis for Sunday’s Texts: The Gospels ( Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 444-5. |