Angelic Equality
Luke 20:27-38

November 7, 2004

Vocabulary can do you in. I can tell you that Canadians have a bunch of words that are not American English. Toque sounds like a foul oath, garage sounds like you can’t speak a simple French word, and a loonie ... well, is anyone surprised it refers to our money?

The English are masters at weird vocabulary - and they think they invented the language! Where else can you go next door to “knock up your neighbour”? Academic English has its words - battels are your financial accounts, your bill, at the college; gobbits are short paragraphs that you are supposed to write long essays and commentaries upon; a don is a professor, even if his name is Bill.

One day I was standing around at one of their infamous “drinks parties” trying to sneak a few extra crisps, when one of those Dons or Bills or Joes sauntered up and asked me what I was going to do in the After Life. I had seldom been asked so intimate a religious question, but then I realized he was not talking about my occupation in the next world, but my vocation after I leave the university. “Same thing as before,” I mumbled through the crisps, “back to the church.”

Trying to do too many things at once can get you into trouble. Talking on your cellphone while driving, trying to listen in on two conversations going on in the same room, talking on the phone while someone else is talking to you in the room - actually that’s not your fault! Combining two holidays is an accident of the calendar, but in today’s instance it works. All Saints Day and Remembrance Day derive from differing agendas, one ecclesiastical, one secular, but the one feeds the other.

Both days celebrate and sanctify memories about people and events, some saintly, some even more saintly. Saints are good people to remember, and even more to emulate. Saints were never meant to be perfect, but people possessed by God in quiet and sometimes public ways.

Remembrance Day does not pretend to commemorate perfect people either, but calls attention to the diligence, risk and sacrifice called forth from many people in time of war. Remembrance Day is only legitimate when it remembers that there is no good time of war. There is a difference between the two days then - All Saints urges more people to be counted in that number, while Remembrance Day should be working to end the need for its existence. Maybe then we will have more time to remember more saints.

This legal theological confrontation between Jesus and the Sadducees, the only time the Sadducees appear in Luke, is in its own way both about a saint and about remembering. The Sadducees were an elite, privileged, and conservative group of priests who believed only in the literal words of the Torah. They did not buy a lot of the ideas the Pharisees were thinking about, such as angels and the resurrection. They too, however, saw Jesus as a dangerous person to their way of life, so they attempted to entrap him in his own words. Lawyers, get ready, they had a case study for him, a clever, though dishonest one.

Everybody knows Deuteronomy 25: 5-10, don’t they? The Sadducees figured everybody did. It’s the Israelite version of what the anthropologists call the levirate. A man dies, leaving behind a wife and no children. If he has a brother, the brother should then marry the widow and hopefully have children. The first born son would be considered the child of the original husband. If the brother refuses, then the elders get involved to convince him to do his duty. If he persists in refusing, then the wife confronts him in public audience, rips off one of his sandals and spits in his face, saying not very nice things about him. This negligent brother’s family will be forever known in Israel as “the house of him whose sandal was pulled off.”

So, now that we are up to speed with the Sadducees, they gave their situation. A man dies and leaves a wife, the brother does his job, but he too dies before a son is born. The original brother had a big family and eventually seven brothers marry this woman, each producing no child, and finally the woman dies. Too many weddings, too many funerals, I guess.

When the resurrection happens they ask Jesus, whose husband shall she be? Lawyers, get ready for a quiz. Would it be her last husband, the first one, or perhaps her favourite one? This woman had to be a saint, putting up with all those guys. Or else she was a black widow of sorts with a marvelously effective kiss of death. And do you think she remembered each one of them? Did they all remember her, or did they intentionally want to forget her? The Sadducees were very serious people (Ôsad, you see’), but they had to be repressing big laughs, because they had Jesus cornered. This was a ridiculous situation that had no happy solution, so the whole idea of resurrection had to be ridiculous.

For theological thinkers, however, the Sadducees had disappointingly one-track minds, bound tightly to the earth. Jesus answered them, “You’re trying hard to make sure that heaven operates according to the way you want earth to operate. It’s out of your control. This is God’s realm and things are different.”

There’s no worrying about whether you are going to look old or young in heaven, whether you remember your parents, whether your parents remember you, or particularly whether you retain your earthly power in the heavenly situation. There’s no need for all those earthly alliances and relationships because you are like the angels, equal to the angels, sons and daughters of the resurrection, and that is, as we so often pray, children of God.

Now we have to stop here right now. Is this all a bunch of mythology? Are there such beings as angels, is there really a resurrection? Frankly, the recent craze about angels with all the memorabilia and movies is sheer sentimentality in my opinion. Yet, the early Christian Church called its saints angels, people who had transcended the way we self-centeredly organize and manipulate our relationships down here. Angels are literally “messengers” - they are people who help us remember in the future sense that God’s reality is not ruled by our laws, by our relationships we cannot live without, by our grudges we cannot let go or forget, and by our injustices that oppress our societies.

Angels have always been here to live out a different kind of existence, to give us a different message that the way this world seems to operate is not the only way it is supposed to be. The people you see who think, act, live differently are probably angels, without the winged accessories.

We need All Saints Day to help us remember that a human being does not have to be trapped in legal bureaucracies, in patterns of self-serving and self-obligating oppression of other people. Some of the saints you might read about seem weird, idiosyncratic in their behaviour. But who is weird? If a saint has become the critical mass of the presence of the living God, then you and I are weird if we do not share in that presence.

Our God, Jesus reminds the Sadducees, is not the God of the dead, not the God of the past only, but the God of the living, of the present and of the future. On Remembrance Day, that has to be our first thought; otherwise, there is no After Life.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan