God of the Living
Luke 20:27-38
November 7, 2010
Don’t you usually advise one to do only one thing at a time? Here we are trying to do two things - remembering and being saintly. For good measure, I want to add one more from the Gospel today - being resurrected. Doing these may seem to be pull us in different directions, but when you do one properly you do them all.
The Gospels have a number of references to resurrection, instances when Jesus roused Lazarus and young men and women from death and of course Easter morning. In other words, there is a lot of doing resurrection, but not much talking about it. Except right here where the Sadducees bring up the matter with a riddle in order to mock the whole idea of resurrection. It’s a word and mind game still going on in the Legislature as Lorne Calvert would attest. They wanted to make Jesus look stupid, but with good rabbinic verbal gymnastics he turned the table on them. And no one dared to ask him any more questions. Only then did they get smart; and after then they concentrated on getting even, or so they thought.
The first thing we should be doing is remembering - remembering all the saints who from their labours rest, remembering all those who have served and sacrificed their lives, both in war and in peace, and perhaps most importantly remembering that there are saints among us still, and that you and I still have an opportunity and an obligation to be saintly.
When you get down to it, remembering and resurrecting are pretty similar activities. If we only remember the past, the dates and personalities and things that happened and just admire them, we are worshiping idols, the dead. But if you take the members of something now past and attach them to some aspect of life very much alive right now, then you are re-membering the past. A seemingly paradoxical way to say it that has become popular is that you and I then are remembering the future - precisely what resurrection is all about. Taking something gone and dead, and putting it back together in a new way that is infinitely, even divinely better than the old.
Not too many people talk about resurrection because it doesn’t make scientific sense. The Sadducees didn’t buy resurrection at all, but apparently a lot of people, including Jesus, must have been talking it up or else they would not have bothered with this little parable or riddle about the woman who had seven brothers in succession as a husband. The Sadducees set up this trap in order to kill resurrection. They couldn’t.
OK, whose wife will she be in the resurrection? Talk amongst yourselves..... If I had to make a choice, I would go with the last guy. No convincing reason, however, perhaps because he had to wait the longest! Of course, Jesus’ point is that this is a senseless argument because these guys are trying to describe resurrection on their own terms. The principal idea one has to grasp is that resurrection is unlike anything else we know. There’s no marriage, no sexuality, no death now that they are sons and daughters of God. That changes everything and everything is changed.
It’s nearly impossible for us to understand what it means to be resurrected, to remember the future. A winning major league pitcher was asked what he thought his future prospects were going to be like. “The future,” he replied, “is like the present, only longer.”
Kyle Childress recalls when the brilliant but cantankerous Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney was speaking to some students at a Christian college. A student asked, “Dr. Marney, would you say a word or two about the resurrection of the dead?” Marney replied, “I will not discuss the resurrection with people like you: I don’t discuss such things with anyone under 30. Look at you all: in the prime of life. Never have you known honest-to-God failure, heartburn, impotency, solid defeat, brick walls or mortality. You’re extremely apt and handsome - white kids who have never in all of your lives been 30 miles from home, or 20 minutes into the New Testament, or more than a mile and a half from a Baptist or Methodist church, or within a thousand miles of any issue that mattered to a kingdom that matters. So what can you know of a world that makes sense only if Christ is raised?”
Later in some lectures, Marney confessed that there were days he didn’t know if he believed in the resurrection or not. Afterward, his friend Albert Outler stopped him in the hall and said, “Marney, whoever told you that you had to believe in the resurrection every day?” “Well, Albert,” Marney responded, “if you know so much, when do I have to believe in the resurrection?” Outler said, “On the day you die and the day you help someone else die; that’s when you believe in the resurrection.”
Not long before Marney died in 1978, he preached at a church about death, resurrection and the church. On the way back to the hotel, one of Marney’s friends said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you believe in the resurrection.” Marney quickly responded, “Well, I do ... when I’m around the right people.”
Fred Craddock told the story about when he was a little boy, he and his brothers and sisters would have to get dressed up in their best most uncomfortable clothes every Saturday night. A couple of the neighbors would come over and they’d all sit around the living room to read the Bible and then to sing songs out of an old spiral-bound Singspiration songbook: “Bringing in the Sheaves,” “Standing on the Promises.” He asked his mother once why they had to do this and she said, “Well, son, we don’t live close enough to a church actually to attend. But some day we might live close enough to a real church and so for now we’re practicing.”
One of the neighbors who came over every week was an African-American man named Will. One time young Craddock asked him, “Will, you ever been in a real church?” “Hundreds,” was Will’s reply. “Well, what’s it like?” “Well, I’ll tell you,” Will said. “First off, don’t go by appearances. Cuz’ sometimes you’ll see some little old white clapboard church up on cinderblocks out in the middle of nowhere and maybe the shutters are sagging a bit and all. But don’t go by that. Because sometimes God disguises his goodness - he hides his best stuff in little old no-account places like that. But you just go inside one of those and you’ll see.” “See what?” Fred asked eagerly. “Well, when you look up at the ceiling, you’ll see it’s a deep, deep blue. And the stars shine and the angels sing ... and well, you’ll just have to see for yourself some day, young man!” In time old Will died, and so young Fred and family attended the funeral in one of those little no-account churches God had disguised. But when Fred got inside, he was so disappointed. It was nothing like what Will had said. The paint was peeling. No stars shined. No angels on display.
But then the service started. The choir got to singing and to swaying. The congregation joined in and all of a sudden, somewhere in the midst of the singing and the swaying and the praising, Fred looked up. “And the ceiling was blue and the stars were shining. And ministries of angels sang Will to his rest.”
A world that makes sense only if Christ is raised - a world that only operates by resurrection. Believing in the resurrection when you are around the right people is the right time to remember the future. Are we just practicing or are we a real church? Saints do not practice.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan