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Answering Phil

November 11, 2007
Luke 20:27-38

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 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.”

It was actually about 9 years ago, almost to the day, that I last shared a message on
this passage from the Bible, and after studying it again, I can now remember why I
intentionally avoided preaching it on again, avoiding it at least two other times when it
came up as a suggested text in the lectionary cycle. Its not that the obvious message
is difficult to preach, or the text itself is all that difficult to interpret, but that the question
being struggled within the text is not a question a lot of us ever really ask—most of us
wouldn’t think about getting married seven different times to seven of our brother-in-
laws just in order to have children. This is a question of Mosaic law that seems foreign
and arcane to most of us, though, of course, there is an important message here and it
mostly has to do with something one of my closest friends Phil talked to me about
many, many years ago. Phil was a friend of mine in Tuscaloosa, the town where I went
to college, though he lives now in Birmingham, and is one of those folks who you may
not to talk to for months, or sometimes even years, but when you do get together, it
feels as if you just saw each other days ago—it’s a friendship that is easy and graceful,
and so it’s also the kind of relationship where some big issues get discussed. In the
early nineties, in one of those easy and yet profound moments, Phil shared with me
what he thought religion was all about. He had come from Church of Christ
background—not a UNITED Church of Christ background, mind you—which is a
denomination that has close historical ties to Disciples of Christ, and, interestingly
enough, to one of the four streams that came together to make up the United Church of
Christ. Phil hadn’t been active in church in years, despite his parent’s continued
faithfulness to the Church of Christ. We were having one of those profound late night
conversations somewhere, probably over some adult beverages, when he made the
comment that he thought the only real question religion needed to answer was what
happened to us when we died. Now, I should have known that this question was the
one that Phil believed Christianity or any religion was meant to answer, because over
the years our discussion about faith always seemed to drift back to the afterlife.

Now, I have to admit that it was a little startling to me because I had always thought of
faith as being about the here and now, the world currently being gotten through, rather
than about the world to come. But for Phil, it really was about the next world, and what
happens to us when we stop breathing. Now, I don’t think you can’t attribute it to his
age, because he was just a few years older than I was, and when I first got to know him,
he was also a recent Auburn University graduate, which just shows you how
magnanimous and open minded I can really be, so it wasn’t that he was facing the end
anytime soon. I just think that somehow he had gotten the message through his years
in the Church of Christ that the question being answered in Christianity was the one
being posed by death, by the end of our physical presence here on earth.   But being a
southerner, and growing up in a culture that really emphasized that if you didn’t turn,
you were going to burn, it made sense that he had that idea, that it had seeped into his
understanding of faith, even if he hadn’t directly gotten it from the Church of Christ
church he grew up in, though I think he got some of it from his background, a
background that emphasized personal salvation which then guaranteed entrance into
heaven.

Now, to be fair, Phil wasn’t exactly unique in his particular understanding of the role of
religion, because it wasn’t as if the Sadducees in our story today didn’t think about
trying to answer those same kinds of questions—I mean, here they are, asking a
question about the afterlife. But what’s interesting about the Sadducees asking this
particular question is that they didn’t think much of the afterlife, and they didn’t agree
with Jesus, who believed, alongside the Pharisees, interestingly enough, in this idea of
the resurrection of the dead. Remember, Jews didn’t have a very elaborate or detailed
understanding of the afterlife, and they certainly didn’t have a doctrine about the
resurrection of the dead until about 100 years before the birth of Jesus, this idea that
God would raise our bodies from the ground on that last day, that our spirits and our
new bodies would be reunited at the very end of time. So, in many ways, this is a trick
question for Jesus, perhaps because they wanted to catch him siding with the
Pharisees in this doctrine that they considered false. But, of course, Jesus doesn’t fall
into the trap, it seems, though he freely admits his belief that our bodies are so
important that we will somehow, in someway, spend eternity in them—bodies that are
new, just as Jesus’ body was new when he himself was raised from the dead, and yet,
the same, because even Jesus had few scars from that nightmare on the cross when
he showed himself to those early disciples after he came out of his own grave, the
firstborn of the resurrection to come for many, many others. I think it’s a powerful
affirmation of the goodness of our bodies, of what it means to be flesh and blood in this
world, that Jesus says that our bodies in this world matter, fragile and scarred and
beautiful as they may be in this very moment.

I don’t the know the details, and Jesus didn’t share much with us, but the Sadducees
don’t care much for details either, because the whole question is set up in a way that is
meant to trick Jesus into eventually being labeled a heretic by the priestly professional
class that were the Sadducees, a group that was the complete opposite of the
Pharisees, which was a much more lay led Jewish reform movement.   Jesus simply
takes the bait, and even pushes their buttons by comparing humans to angels, which is
something else the Sadducees didn’t believe in—he’s pushing right back, right back in
their faces. The world to come is not like the world that is, we don’t get married, we don’
t do things like we’ve always done them, in this world to come. And then he turns the
argument to Moses and a moment in the book of Exodus where God names himself as
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and God speaks of these patriarchs as if they
were alive, as if in the moment God is speaking with Moses in that burning bush, that
these now dead great men of faith were in the room, so to speak, present before God
just as he was speaking to Moses. God just wasn’t once their God—God is still their
God! It’s this last piece that is intriguing to me, because I think it’s the heart of the
passage, and it moves the conversation from the kinda silly topic of whose going to be
whose husband in the afterlife to something more profound, and something that
matters to us in the here and now.

You know, I just think its ironic that you have Jesus responding to this conversation
about death by pointing to life, to pointing to something more than the details about the
world to come. Other religions have great incredibly detailed understandings of the
afterlife—the Buddhists have karma and the eternal wheel of reincarnation, the Muslims
have Muhammad giving elaborate pictures of Paradise in the Koran, but that’s not case
with either Judaism or Christianity—the world to come remains shrouded in mystery,
and sometimes even confusion, but what is promised is more life, more presence with
the Life-Giver. In the middle of a conversation about the world to come, Jesus points
them to life itself—life that begins in the here and now, and then stretches into eternity.
Jesus says Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are
alive.” That last line…for to him all of them are alive....that is a profoundly different way
of looking at the universe than the way we look at it. For us, the world seems to be
divided between the living and the dead, but for God it seems as if we are always alive,
never finished, never done with, never out of the care and embrace of God.    And I
wonder what it would mean to really embrace God’s view of the world, to try to see the
world as not divided between the living and the dead, though I know we often talk that
way about those who are now only in God’s sight. But beyond talking about it, what it
would mean to think of those we have lost to the next world as still truly, TRULY being
present in this world. On All Saints Day, the church often speaks as if the ones who
have gone on are still here, still in the room, still in the midst of worshipping God as we
are doing at this time. What would it mean to really think of this sanctuary as being
crowded with those thousands of people who have been a part of us, our friends, our
families, maybe even the Furman Sisters too, the place crowded to rafters with those
who loved God and loved each other in this place? If God sees them as being alive,
why shouldn’t try to see the world the way God sees it? Now, of course, we will mourn
the ones we can no longer love the way we used to love them, as flesh and blood, but
we all have to learn how to love differently at different points in our lives, and so maybe
God is continuing to invite us to learn to love as God loves this world, to see the world
as not one defined by life and death, but as a world a completely alive, always alive? I
don’t know about you, but I have to admit, that looking at this passage again, it helped
me to shift my gaze in this world to something different. I miss my father, who passed
almost a decade ago, but I think I miss him less, because his life is not really defined by
his beginning and ending, but by what God sees, and what God sees, it seems, is just
more life, more story, more wonder, more joy.

You know, over the years I’ve thought about how I would try to answer my friend Phil’s
particular understanding of what Christianity means—or any religion, for that matter.
And I think I would now try to answer him with something like this: You know, if you’re
looking for a religion that tries to answer in detail what happens to you when you die,
Christianity is not that religion. Christ did not focus on that issue because he knew that
living this life was going to pre-occupy us enough, and he wanted our attention here, in
this world, with all of its complexity and its challenges, and with all of its beauty and joy.
The next life we will have is a continuation of a story we are writing right now, right here
in this world, and that’s where Jesus wants us to focus our lives on. Not on the next
chapter, but on the story that’s being written now. We will go forward into life, but Christ
is not concerned so much with the afterlife as he is with this life. Following Christ is not
to be obsessed with the life to come, but with the life that is present. To follow this
Christ is to be rooted in life, because Christianity is a life-based faith—“God is not God
of the dead but of the living; in God’s sight all are alive.” Isn’t that what the resurrection
is all about, both Christ’s resurrection and our imminent resurrections?! “HE’S ALIVE!”
the women tell the disciples frantically at the tomb. And one day those words will ring in
our ears as well. We are writing the story of our lives into eternity, but the writing starts
now, at this moment, in this life. AMEN.