"God of the Living"

Luke 20: 27-38
November 7, 2010
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time / All Saints
First United Church – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

This past Monday I drove to Jasper, Indiana to support a clergy-friend whose mother had just passed away. I met up with another clergy-friend there and we went to the visitation together. My friend, Jennifer, told me that Leah’s mother, Marilyn, had recently been commissioned in the UCC as a Liturgical Artist. Indeed, there were examples of her art all around the room. Beautiful stoles, banners, wall hangings of handmade paper, and photographs of previous installations floated around the room. Although I had never had a chance to meet Marilyn, I couldn’t help but feel her spirit’s presence in the room, speaking to us all through her artwork.

My friend, Jennifer, and I made our way through the line, waiting to greet Leah, we examined the artwork and also the posterboards decorated with family photographs. As we rounded the corner towards Marily’s casket, we both caught our breaths. Marilyn’s casket was open and – hanging gently from the open lid of the casket was one of her pieces of art. There were five letters made out of handmade pastel-colored paper and trimmed in gold foil. There on her casket was one word: RISEN.

Risen. What does that mean exactly? Does it mean that Leah’s mom was floating somewhere above the room, watching us look at her art? Does it mean that her spirit was somehow far up in the clouds? Does it mean that Marilyn carries on through our memories of her?

I can’t honestly say that I have the answer. I don’t know what it means to Leah and her family and I certainly don’t have a definitive answer to that age-old question, “what happens after we die?”

What I do know is this – regardless of HOW Marilyn Robbrts is risen, she is, without a doubt, risen. I felt it in my bones when I saw it written on her casket and knew it to be true.

Today’s passage from Luke calls us to ponder what it means to be risen. I don’t know about you, but I find it to be a little hard to catch on the first or second time through, so I hope you’ll come with me as I move through it a bit.

As Jesus moves steadily towards crucifixion, he is challenged by scribes, Pharisees, and a host of others. In this story, the Sadducees are the ones looking for a fight. The Sadducees aren’t mentioned elsewhere in Luke’s gospel and would have been unfamiliar to his original hearers. This is why he clarifies for us that the Sadducees were a group that didn’t believe in the Resurrection.

Resurrection, in the context of Jesus’s time, is likely something different than what pops into your head when you think of the concept. Resurrection in a first-century Jewish context has to be understood in light of apocalyptic hopes. There were those in Judaism who anxiously awaited the Day of the Lord – that apocalyptic hope that God would come to deliver all the faithful from the trials and tribulations of their day-to-day lives. Some of those who hoped for the Day of the Lord also believed that those who had already died would be resurrected – that is, they would get up in physical bodies and live again. This was not something that happened to individuals; rather, it was a belief in a communal Resurrection – something that would happen to everyone after God’s final victory.

It’s not surprising that the Sadducees didn’t believe in this kind of resurrection. As members of an elite, ruling class, these priests probably weren’t fans of apocalyptic hopes. After all, apocalyptic fervor has never gone over well with those who already have a pretty great life on earth.

The Sadducees seem to assume that Jesus, like the Pharisees, does believe in the Resurrection, though, so they come after him with this little story in an attempt to make him look foolish. They don’t really care about the answer to their question – their intent it to show the silliness of believing in Resurrection by trapping Jesus with a riddle of a story about a woman who had seven husbands. “So, Jesus,” they say, “We’ve got a question for you. Say there’s this lady whose husband dies. Moses said that the dead man’s brother has the responsibility to marry her, so he does. Only this second guy dies, too. Luckily, he’s got another brother, so he marries her, but then he dies. And on and on until she’s been married to all seven brothers. You tell us, when they are all resurrected, who does she belong to?”

And Jesus, in his typical disarming way, never answers the question directly. Instead, he responds to the question they didn’t ask out loud but wanted the answer to, which is this: “Really, what happens after we die?”

And his answer is a bit surprising to me because it’s not exactly what I would expect from a first-century Jew. Does he believe in resurrection? Well, yes, because he says the dead are like angels – children of the resurrection. But his evidence for this is what really surprises me. He says that we know people are resurrected because when God spoke to Moses in the burning bush, God self-identified as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Present tense. Meaning that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were and are, somehow, someway, still alive. Risen. Resurrected.

This makes sense to us because many of us typically think of people as being resurrected to new life right after they die. But a much more common belief in Jesus’s time would have been to think that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were somehow on pause somewhere, waiting for the trumpets to sound on the Day of the Lord. Then, and only then, they would be resurrected.

But Jesus seems to think this isn’t quite the case. Instead, God has already resurrected some of the dead. And this is because God is not God of the dead, but of the living. To God, Jesus says, all are alive.

God of the living.

Jesus’s answer to the question is basically this: it’s the wrong question. It doesn’t really matter how folks are resurrected. But make no doubt about it, they are. To recognize the God of Abraham as your God is to mean that you recognize you are a part of the Holy. To be a part of the Holy is to step outside of a reality that is limited by time and space. The Holy One of Israel is everywhere and everytime. And because we are children of God, we, too are everywhere and everytime.

I still don’t know exactly how it works. And does that bother me? Yes, sometimes it does. But when I hear these words of Jesus – that our God is the God of the living, I know them to be true. When I saw that word – RISEN – on Marilyn’s casket, I knew it to be true. And when I see these candles in our sanctuary – each one boldly shining in memory of a life that refuses to end, I know that Jesus’s words are true. Our God truly is the God of the living.