Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
November 11, 2007
Sermon by Pastor John Marboe
The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 20: 27-38)
Some Sadducees, those who say there is no
resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, “Teacher, Moses wrote for
us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall
marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first
married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her; and so
in the same way all seven died childless.
Finally the woman also died. In
the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”
Jesus
said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage;
but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the
resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they
are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses
himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the
God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the
living; for to him all of them are alive.”
The Gospel of the Lord.
Do you believe in the
resurrection of the body? Do you
believe in the resurrection of the body?
I like to think of Immanuel as a grace-filled
space. That’s my constant hope for this
congregation, that we together here are able to do what is very, very difficult
for people to do, that is, to freely discuss matters of religious and spiritual
concern honestly and without fear.
Religious issues, by definition, involve us deeply and emotionally. Today, we focus on just such an issue: the
resurrection from the dead.
I want to share with you a story to get us all
thinking together about this. One of our
confirmation students, one of our very bright confirmation students—and, of
course, they’re all bright—a few years ago asked me this question in all
seriousness, he said: “If we are going to die and go to heaven, and there we’re
going to live forever, how old are we?”
Now, think about that. How old
are we? Do we have an age? Are we ageless? And if we are ageless, are we then
body-less? Or do we get to be our
favorite age: 4, 24, 54?
What he was asking was very similar to what the
Sadducees were asking Jesus. The
Sadducees came to Jesus with a question.
And we are told that the Sadducees were people of a religious and
political party in
Well, how can it be?
In the world of Jesus, the Jews were sharply divided on this issue of an
afterlife. There were those, many,
perhaps most, who believed that when you’re dead you’re dead. Remember that Billy Crystal line from “A
Princess Bride”: “Not just a little bit dead; she’s dead-dead.” So when you’re dead you’re dead. Or like our daughter, who when she was three
our second cat died and was buried in the back yard, and I asked her where the
cat went. And she looked at me and said,
“Well, into the world.” When you die, do
we just go into the world? Well, many in
Jesus’ day believed exactly that.
Well, then there were the Pharisees, those often
opponents of Jesus, but with whom on this particular issue he sides, he agrees
with them. And they believe and teach
that there is a resurrection from the dead.
But it’s just not a spiritual resurrection, it’s a bodily resurrection;
that somehow the bodies of all the dead will be gathered up and then revived,
transformed, given new life, in the age of the Messiah.
And then, of course, there were the Greeks and the
Romans who were also around at that time, and they believed something really
quite different. They believed that at
death the soul separates from the body and then migrates over into the realm of
the dead, which they called Hades. So
the Greeks and the Romans had a rather different way of viewing it. They believed neither in the resurrection nor
in “when you’re dead you’re dead.”
A fundamental difference between the
Greek world and the Hebraic world was this: that to the Greeks and the Romans
every person has an immortal soul that outlasts the body. But to the Jews, there was no such
thing. Soul and body are knit
inseparably together, so that when the body dies, the soul dies, too. So if there is going to be life after death
for the individual, the body needs to come along.
When Jesus was questioned by the
Sadducees, he took the side of the Pharisees, indicating that he believed in a
bodily resurrection, where the body is transformed to a heavenly or angelic
body. The Apostle Paul, who we know also
was a Pharisee, took that view as well.
Now, I’m setting us all up—and I
hope you’ve been able to follow this rather complicated scenario—because I want
to ask you again: Do you believe in the resurrection of the body? Most of you, like most Christians, don’t; at
least not in the way that the New Testament proclaims it. Somewhere along the way, in our 2,000 years
of church history, the biblical belief in the resurrection of the body has
given way to the Greek notion of the resurrection of the soul.
Every week in our liturgy we recite
the Apostles’ Creed, and in it we say, “I believe in the resurrection of the
body.” Now, many have noticed this
and have asked me about it along the way.
And to one parishioner I was speaking with, he just said, “Well, I don’t
believe that.” He was bold and honest
enough to say, “I don’t believe that. I
believe the soul endures, but the body is gone forever.” Likewise, in our pastors’ text study this
week, as we were discussing this passage, one of our colleagues said the same
thing: “I don’t believe that. I believe
the soul endures, but the body is gone forever.”
So this raises an even more
important question for us. How important
is it that we believe the right things?
How important is it in God’s eyes that we think the right way? How important is it if some of the things we
believe are a bit different from the Bible’s view? This is not a hypothetical question. In this case, it’s simply where many, if not
most of us, are.
There are certain ways of believing
that were quite natural for ancient people, ancient people who wrote the Bible
or who are portrayed in our Bible—certain ways of believing that for them were
quite natural but have become impossible for us—such as: that humans have been
on the planet for only 6,000 years.
That’s the Bible’s view. Or that
the earth is a stationary center in the universe and that the sun, the moon,
and the stars move across our sky.
That’s the Bible’s view. Or that
it is proper and right for women to be the property of men. That’s the Bible’s view. Or that God might command the slaughter of an
enemy population. Well, at least in one
place that’s the Bible’s view. And
perhaps, at least for some, a bodily resurrection is no longer possible to
believe. Someone once calculated that
Jesus, when he ascended from the earth into heaven, if Jesus was moving at the
speed of light, he would only just now be reaching the edge of the Milky
Way.
The point is that ancient people
could well believe in a heaven, a dwelling place of God, the right hand of God,
as being just up there beyond the sky.
But we no longer can have that point of view. We cannot anymore imagine that heaven is a
physical space. What if the New
Testament is mistaken about the resurrection of the body? What if we are?
Here is something I’m hoping that we
can get today, and if any of us find this a disturbing line of thought, I’m
sorry, but it’s not without a purpose.
One of Martin Luther’s greatest insights was when he
began to realize that faith is trust in a gracious God and not adherence
to a certain set of beliefs. But in the
Protestant world—and I think is this unfortunate—beliefs have become the new Works
Righteousness: God loves you and accepts you if you believe the right things in
the right way, as though what we think makes us acceptable to God.
In another place in the Gospels, Jesus calls on the
analogy of parenting to describe how God is disposed toward people, and he says
this: “Who among you, when your child asks for a fish, will give them a stone? Or if they ask for bread, you will give them a
scorpion? If you then, who are evil,
know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly
father give good things to those who ask?”
Well, look, which of you parents would refuse to love your child because
they thought the wrong way? If you then
know how to love your child in that case, how much more will the heavenly
father love those in the same condition?
It’s unfortunate that so many of us
in the church have been raised under the threat of damnation for thinking the
wrong way. Every now and then I’ll get
this question: “Pastor, what do we
believe about . . . [X]?”
But I always ask, “Well, what do you believe?” God is not the thought police; God is not the
thought police. God is love; God
is love.
When we say, for example, the
Apostles’ Creed together, we say that we are confessing our faith. We are confessing it, which means quite
literally that we are saying it together.
To confess just means we say it together, that’s all. It doesn’t mean we all agree exactly on its
exact meaning.
When we get to the part about the
resurrection of the body, I personally take it as at least a beautiful symbol
of how God loves our frail and imperfect bodies. And couldn’t we all stand to love our bodies
more; to stop being so negative, so critical, so denigrating about our
bodies? Here we confess God’s love for
us; it’s not just about our spirit and our minds but about our bodies.
What exactly happens upon death is really a great
mystery. In Jesus’ day, they couldn’t
agree on what happened; and neither, no doubt, do we today. And that’s okay, because we’re all going to
find out.
But, in the meantime, let us trust in a gracious
God. And let this church be a safe place
because of that grace, a place where people can be honest about who they are,
what they believe, and how they feel, and not feel oppressed by how they think
they should believe, or should think, or should feel.
May God’s grace create here a space
for people to be—in freedom and in trust.
Amen.