Sermon for the 6th of November, 2022, 3 before Advent
As always, Jesus doesn’t exactly answer the question that he is asked, or, if he
does, it is an answer that surprises and sometimes confuses his hearers.
This time the Sadducees, a sect of the Jews of Jesus’s day who wanted nothing
to do with any theory of resurrection, ask the question about the woman of
seven husbands and her status in heaven. They have carefully constructed this
question to see if he will answer “yes” for the Pharisees’ view of resurrection or
“yes” for the Sadducees’ view of no resurrection. But Jesus gives them a
different kind of answer. He tells them that if they are abiding by the Mosaic
law in regard to the marriage of a brother’s wife they should also abide by the
teaching of Moses as to resurrection, as in the Burning Bush episode. He quotes
Moses there as saying that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Implied is that to God, these great ancestors are all alive: God is the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
So Jesus, therefore, concludes by saying, God is not a God of the dead, but of
the living, for to him they are all alive.
So if those who share in the resurrection after death become like angels, being
children of God, as Jesus said, the question for these questioners then becomes
not which husband out of seven do you claim once you are all in heaven
together, but what bearing does this question have on how you live now?
What does it mean to live a Resurrection life?
Jesus himself said that after we die, we are children of the resurrection. But if,
because of His resurrection, we are believers in resurrection, we are children of
the resurrection now. In this life. Living in faith, hope, and love, which is all we
can really do until that moment comes when we trust that God will gather us all
in, whatever shape our lives have come to have.
What does it mean to live a Resurrection life?
I have three thoughts in answer to this question, from three preachers.
Sam Wells had this moving paragraph in his book, Be Not Afraid: Facing Fear
with Faith:
He writes his own obituary once a year. It is an exercise that forces him to think
about how he would like for others to remember him. He says,
Yes, an obituary is full of events, achievements, births, marriages, and deaths.
But if you’re anything like me, you skip ahead past the ponderous narrative to
the final paragraph, which says something like, “above all, she will be
remembered for her...”—-and then it describes what she was really like. And
that’s not about skill, intelligence, longevity, or wealth; it’s about character. And
when I read an obituary that says, “Above all, she will be remembered for being
a channel of well-being, peace, and joy” or “God was so transparently at work
in his life that you felt, if you stayed close to him, you’d keep close to God,” I
think, “I’ll have one of those, please. I’d like an obituary like that, thank you
very much.”
Would your last paragraph say that about you? Would it say, “She was a
channel of well-being, peace, and joy”? Would it say, “God was so
transparently at work in his life that you felt, if you stayed close to him, you’d
keep close to God”? If not, why not? And with the time God has left for you,
what are you going to do about it? In the end, all the earned or honorary
degrees you receive, the money you make or give away, the property you own or
bequeath, and even the marriages you enter and the children you have aren’t
going to matter—-at least not in the way that this matters. Others will know if
you’ve received a blessing if they can look back and say that you’ve been a
channel of well-being, peace, and joy to them—-that in you, they have found a
blessing; that, that close to you, they have felt themselves close to God. That’s a
call to every person.......(p. 20)
What does it mean to live a Resurrection life?
Another favorite preacher, Frederich Buechner, said this in his autobiography,
The Sacred Journey, a similar exercise in looking back and reflecting on what
matters. He includes an additional dimension:
There was the day I signed the contract for that first novel that I had started in
college....It was a major event for me, needless to say—-the fulfilment of my
wildest dreams of literary glory. But of the actual signing itself in the offices of
Alfred Knopf—-who was there and what was said and how I felt—I remember
nothing. What I remember instead is leaving the publisher’s office afterwards
and running into somebody in the building whom I had known slightly at
college. He was working as a messenger boy, he told me. I was, as I thought, on
the brink of fame and fortune. But instead of feeling any pride or sense of
superior accomplishment by the comparison, I remember a great and
unheralded rush of something like sadness, almost like shame. I had been very
lucky, and he had not been very lucky, and the pleasure that I might have taken
in what had happened to me was all but lost in the realisation that nothing
comparable, as far as I could see, had happened to him. I wanted to say
something or do something to make it up to him, but I had no idea how or what
and ended up saying nothing of any consequence at all, least of all anything
about the contract that I had just signed. We simply said good-bye in the lobby,
he going his way and I mine, and that was that. All I can say now is that
something small but unforgettable happened inside me as the result of that
chance meeting—-some small flickering out of the truth that, in the long run,
there can be no real joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all—-and I
can take no credit for it. It was nothing I piously thought my way to. It was no
conscious attempt to work out my own salvation. What I felt was something
better and truer than I was, or than I am, and it happened, as perhaps all such
things do, as a gift. (pp. 96-97)
The kingdom of God has still not come—that is clear! There is so much
inequality and injustice—-the damage so great that human beings inflict upon
one another in our very human world—-our light is desperately needed in this
dark time. As Buechner says in his simple eloquence: there can be no joy for
anybody until there is joy finally for us all—-we wait, together, for that time.
As for me, I just returned from chaperoning a group of ten young persons in our
diocese to the ecumenical monastic community of Taizé, in France. I am not a
natural youth leader—never have been—but to sit in the undistinguished barn-
like modern church there in the company of two thousand young persons, in
services of worship led by the monks of the community, was a profoundly
moving experience. Worship there, three times a day, consists of scripture,
silence, and singing. That’s it. It goes very deep. It left its impression.
We can live—we are called to live—-flooded through with the radiance of
Christ and the glory of God, so that what we have accepted as the best that life
has to offer, what we hold up and admire as of shining worth—-we see how all
this pales in comparison, fades away and becomes unreal—-in the light of what
Resurrection means. If we can live this kind of brightness as we wake up to the
possibilities of each day, brave its challenges, showing forth the love and light
of Christ—-if we can embody this kind of radiance, we are living a
Resurrection life, now.
Faith, hope and love—the great trinity of the Christian faith—justice, peace,
and joy—-they are the same—-if we can hold on to these, we will be okay. We
will not be overcome by the catalogue of disasters that our world seems more
than ever to be downward-spiralling-into—we will be empowered by the joy of
the Holy Spirit to show forth the brightness of God in the life we live.
May we take heart in the fact of the Resurrection in which we believe, and the
freedom from fear that gives us.
As I reflect on what it means to live a Resurrection life, I have had one of the
songs we sang at Taizé in my head—it keeps appearing. I sing it to myself,
because it uplifts me, it gives me joy to sing it.
I’d like for us to sing it now, together, as a conclusion, a benediction, a sending-
out. Three times, so that you can get a sense of the rhythm and its simplicity.
The choir will sing it once alone to help us begin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL1_IhVTJmk