Resurrection Life
Pentecost + 25 - November 10, 2013
*To view the sermon on YouTube, go here.
I read recently of a new television show airing on Showtime, called “Time of Death”, which premiered last Friday. To call it a reality show doesn’t seem the right description; one reviewer called it a docu-series, an “unflinchingly honest” one “about what it’s like to die”. I haven’t seen the show yet, but basically, it follows the lives of various people - young, old, middle-aged – all of whom are suffering from a terminal illness in the final weeks and days before they die. Not your typical mindless-Friday-night, curl-up-on-the-couch-with-a-bowl-of-popcorn fare, to be sure.
It’s fascinating to me that someone out there was brave enough to tackle this topic, because as a culture, our usual approach to death and dying is one of denial. TV shows, movies, and books that center around death abound in our society – but they generally serve to help us keep our distance from death. Death becomes a kind of gruesome entertainment, and so we manage to push the reality of death away for a little while.
But despite this, we live with an un-spoken, subconscious fear of death and what lies beyond. And our culture capitalizes on this. It feeds on fear and anxiety, such that the overarching narrative of our lives together is one that highlights reasons to be afraid, and then tries to sell us solutions, ways to keep aging and sickness and death at bay, ways to numb our pain when the reality that none of us gets out of here alive gets too close.
Which is not to say that there are not plenty of reasons for us to legitimately worry. This week, we’ve all heard the story of the young girl who disappeared on her way to school, and our hearts broke for her and her family as we imagined or experienced for ourselves the anxiety and fear about where she could be and what may have happened, and hoped desperately that our own children and loved ones will be safe.
We have friends and family and neighbors, or perhaps ourselves, who have gotten a dreaded diagnosis of cancer or MS or some other life-changing disease and stand at the crossroads of treatment options, not knowing what may lie ahead and how it will all turn out.
We know the pain of wrestling with mental illness, the daily struggle against addictions to alcohol or drugs or pornography and the desire to break free from a power so strong that it enslaves us.
We stumble through the grief of losing a loved one – the child you longed to know and raise. A parent. The spouse you spent most of your adult life with.
These are real sorrows. They rightly weigh us down. They are ultimately unavoidable, even if we spend much of our lives trying to avoid them. And the culture around us, as much as it glorifies death, doesn’t offer much hope beyond it. For so many, there is the sense that death is final, that in the end, death wins.
That’s pretty much the attitude of the Sadducees in the story we hear from Luke this morning. The Sadducees are a group of religious leaders who, Luke reminds us, “say there is no resurrection.” They hold only to the truths they can find written in the books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, and from what they can see, this life is all there is. That’s okay with them though, because mostly, they had it pretty good here – power, prestige, money, the comfortable life. Why worry about the afterlife when the here and now seems so good? But to deny the resurrection is to deny the possibility that God will, in God’s time, set things right. It denies the hope that God’s power will be made known in the age to come. It denies the power of God over the power of death. For the Sadducees, ultimately, death wins.
And so they come to Jesus with this ridiculous, trumped-up question about the marriage of one woman to a line of 7 brothers. Their concern, of course, isn’t to find out what Jesus has to say about the power of life over death, but to trap him – they, along with the Pharisees and scribes and other religious leaders are seeking for a way and a reason to kill him by now. Read a few chapters ahead, and there we’ll find Jesus at the Last Supper, praying in the garden, handed over to the authorities, hanging on a cross, breathing his last breath. And Jesus knows all this is coming Way back in chapter nine, “he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (v. 51), and he’s predicted his own death three times on his way there. And knowing this, he speaks not to the surface question, but to the deeper longing of the others who would hear his response. He pulls an example from the books the Sadducees honor, about the leader they respect. Jesus speaks of Moses. Moses, a Hebrew raised in Pharaoh’s house, who sees the oppression of his people. Moses, who murders an Egyptian and then flees to a foreign land, trying to outrun his past and make a new life for himself. Moses who, while tending the sheep, comes across a bush that burns but is not consumed. Moses, who encounters God in that anxious, fretful, fearful place – a God who speaks to him, calling him out of that place of death and into a place of life, of mission and purpose, sending him back to Egypt to lead God’s people into freedom. And Jesus speaks these words, these powerful, hopeful words: “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living: for to him all of them are alive.”
Faced with threats and punishment and death himself, Jesus claims this central truth: that no matter what the world says and does, no matter how powerful death appears to be, God wills life! And not just life after death, though certainly as Christians we believe in and look for the life of the world to come, even if we can’t predict or know with any certainty what that will look like. But life, here and now is what God desires, life in the midst of all of the hurt and pain and little deaths that we die all the time. Jesus promises his listeners, then and now, that God is not a God of the dead, but of the living, and that means that God offers us life, new life, resurrection life, even now! God embraces us all, across time and space, bringing us daily to new life in Christ. We get glimpses of this promise throughout the Bible, both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, and see it clearly in the Easter story of Christ being raised from the dead when it seemed all hope was lost. We hear God speaking to us in our own fretful, fearful places, in the rush of the baptismal waters that drown and raise us up again in Jesus, that claim us as God’s own beloved children forever. We taste this promise in the bread and wine we share each week, this small morsel and sip that somehow is enough to strengthen and sustain us for the road ahead because we know Jesus is present in it and so in us. We experience it in this community of faith that walks with us, holding us up when we lack the strength to stand, believing for us when we cannot find the faith to believe on our own.
The world lies. The Sadducees were wrong. Death does come to everyone, eventually. But death does not have the final word. Death does not win. God is the God of the living. Wherever you find yourself this morning, whatever your burdens, your fears, whatever seems dead in your life, hold fast to this promise. God is with you. God is holding on to you. And God, the God of the living, speaks to us, calling life out of death, renewing us, sending us with mission and purpose and hope. This is Resurrection Life, life held by the living God who will not let us go. Thanks be to God.
Amen.
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