God of the Living a sermon for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Pentecost, YEAR C Scripture: Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9; II Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. I enjoy riddles and jokes, as many of you probably already know. It’s fun for me when they come together, as they do in this story. “You’re driving past a cemetery when you ask your friend if they know how many dead people are buried in that cemetery. Your friend will have no idea and will naturally be amazed that you could possibly know the number of dead people buried in some random cemetery so they respond, ‘No, I do not have the foggiest idea of how many dead people are buried in that random cemetery that we drove by but I’ll take a guess and say..... 55.’ Now you come back with a clever response, ‘Nope! It’s all of them. They’re ALL dead! Get it? Every person buried in that cemetery is a dead person!’” So now that I’ve told you the joke I have to tell you that the punch line is really not right. According to the hope and the promise we hold on to through our faith in Jesus Christ, we really should change our answer from “All of them” to “None of them are dead. That answer, while theologically true, kind of “kills” the joke. It’s not nearly as funny this way, but it is a lot more thought-provoking. In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus gets an interesting question from the Sadducees; the Sadducees were a Jewish religious sect at the time of Jesus. They had the majority of the seats on the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council. They were more secular in their thinking and how they lived their faith and they were more willing to cooperating with the enemy, the Romans. But what is most important to this story is that they denied that the Bible taught the bodily resurrection from the dead and the existence of angels or demons. They believed that only the first five books of the Old Testament, what the Jewish people call the Torah or the Pentateuch, were applicable to a person’s life. They believed that the resurrection was a myth and irrelevant to a person’s life. They only wanted to know about what was important for this life. They didn’t really care what happened after death. This sure sounds a lot like our culture. There are plenty of people who say, “Who cares what happens after I die? I got a lot of partying to do before that happens!” “Hey, my life is busy. I got a lot going on. I don’t have time for that God stuff right now. I’ll get right with God down the road.” “There’s nothing after death, dead is dead. Life is the only thing that matters.” We know that that kind of thinking is wrong because we already have the experience in our lives that we DO need to think ahead. First none of us just woke up in church this morning, did we? For those of you that are retired, did you just wake up one morning and all of a sudden all the money that you needed for the rest of your life was sitting in an account waiting on you? That would be nice, if it were true! How did you get your job? Did you just walk into work one day and they hired you on the spot, right? Those are ridiculous questions; we know that in order to accomplish each of those things, it takes dedication and preparation. It’s the same for eternal life. I think that we often forget that, because it seems as if we live as though it weren’t true for us. We can say things like: “I know my neighbor doesn’t go to church, it sounds like she doesn’t believe in Jesus but someone else will tell her about him” Or “I know that the person next door is in need, but somebody else will help him.” The Sadducees come to Jesus in order to try to trick him. They had a stupid question to ask him in order to demonstrate just how ludicrous the idea of the resurrection really is in their minds. So they went after him on a point of the Law, the fulfillment of the Levirate law in Deuteronomy 25:5 that commanded the brother of a deceased man to marry the widow, his sister-in-law, and have a child with her so that his dead brother’s name would not die. To make their point, they suggest this crazy, one-in-a-lifetime situation where seven brothers all marry the same woman and none of them have any children with her. You see, if any one of them had children with her then, in their minds, she would have been his rightful wife. She dies childless so not one of them is bound to her through having children. So then, which one is her husband? It is intended to be a puzzle to make Jesus look foolish, no matter how he answered. However, instead of the stupid answer which such a stupid question deserves, Jesus answers well and speaks God’s truth in love. He explains that no one will be married to her or anybody else in the life to come. We will be like angels, Jesus says, the biological realities and limitations of the world will no longer apply to us but we will still be our own selves in heaven. On the Mount of Transfiguration the disciples were able to recognize Moses and Elijah. We also know that the disciples knew who Jesus was after he rose from the dead. Jesus teaches in the last portion of our text the reality of the resurrection of the dead. He reminds them using the scriptures that people are raised to life eternal. He talks about how God met Moses at the burning bush at Mt. Horeb, God introduced himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God cannot be God of dead people but only of living people. For God there is no such thing as a dead Christian. Our God is the God of the living, and that is us! We don’t know exactly what happens when our physical body dies, but what we do know is this awesome promise that we are the children of the living God, alive eternally. Jesus must have answered that question well because he didn’t get any more questions. The last verse of our text says, “Some of the teachers of the law responded, ‘well said, teacher!’ And no one dared to ask him any more questions.” Even some of Jesus’ other enemies praised Him for His wise answer. Here is a lesson for us; to always be ready to speak to the eternal hope we have been given. Someday a person may ask you some questions that may seem like traps, but be prepared to give wise answers so that God might use your testimony to bring others into His family. Be careful how you answer the questions of others, it may be a “stupid” question but it may have eternal consequences. Always be ready to proclaim that God is the God of the living, we are not dead, we are alive in Christ. Thanks be to God, Amen.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 21:29:23 +0000
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