Sermon: Seeing Something New

Luke 20:27-38

Seeing Something New

James Sledge                                                                           November 10, 2013

This may seem a stupid question, but why do people ask questions? Quite naturally people ask question when they are seeking information they do not have. If I’m lost and ask someone, “Can you tell me how to get to Rustico in Arlington?” I’m hoping that person knows something that I don’t. But very often, questions are not that simple.

Some questions are really looking for confirmation or validation, not information. Questions about whether or not a dress looks flattering or a completed project is well done may or may not be genuine. And then there are religious questions.

If someone comes up to me on the street and asks, “Is Jesus Christ your Lord and savior?” it’s certain that no simple exchange of information is about to take place. If I answer “No,” the questioner will not respond with a “Thank you,” and then walk off.

Some of the worst religious questions are those from people who disagree with you. Christians who fancy themselves smart and sophisticated will sometimes ask more fundamentalist friends questions designed to point out what uneducated dolts these friends actually are. Atheists will sometimes ask Christian friends questions about some facet of faith that seems particularly ridiculous to them. “Do you really believe Jesus did miracles like casting out evil spirits?” At least that question lets you know ahead of time that to answer “Yes” means you will get laughed at.

The Sadducees in our gospel ask just such a question to Jesus, a complex, trick question meant to make Jesus look foolish. Then they can laugh at this country rube of a rabbi.

It may help to know that the Sadducees were well-to-do elites with quite a bit of power and influence. Religiously they were rather conservative. Unlike the Pharisees, they held that only the books of Moses, the first five books in our Old Testament, were authoritative. And since there was no mention of resurrection in those books, they dismissed belief in resurrection the way some of us might laugh at the Rapture.

Their question is rooted in an old practice called levirate marriage. For ancient Hebrews, this was a kind of social safety net for widows. In a time when women were not full citizens, a widow without male children was terribly vulnerable. Requiring her brother-in-law to marry her not only provided a measure of protection for a widow, it also was a way of keeping the deceased brother’s lineage going.

And so this question about a widow with seven husbands. The actual scenario is perhaps implausible yet still possible. I wonder if the Sadducees could refrain from snickering as they sprung their little trap. Wouldn’t it be fun watching Jesus tie himself up in knots with this.

Interestingly the Sadducees, who do not believe in resurrection, seem to have a remarkably conventional notion of it. Resurrection is a lot like things are now, it’s just somewhere else and sometime else. It’s a view a lot of modern day Christians share: resurrection as an upgrade of sorts. There’s the Family Circus version of this with Grandpa in his white robe, looking down to check on Billy and his siblings. And there’s the Greek philosophical version of an immortal soul whose essence somehow persists.

But Jesus has no trouble navigating the Sadducees’ trap, in large part, because he does not have a conventional understanding of resurrection. It is part of something new, so new that it is almost unimaginable. It will not really fit into conventional notions of how things are.

Jesus’ comment about being “like angels” in the resurrection has nothing to do with people becoming angels when they die. In the Bible, angels are not former humans. They are an entirely different sort of creature, not at all like us. And that is precisely Jesus’ point. The hope of a new day that Jesus proclaims is not at all about an upgrade or progress or advancement. It is about something so new only eyes of faith can even begin to glimpse it.

I suspect there is scarcely a man, woman, or child much beyond kindergarten who is not at least familiar with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Note that title. More to the point, note what the title isn’t. It’s not, “I have a plan,” or “ I have some issues that need to be addressed.” Dr. King  had a dream, by definition something beyond reality. And indeed this dream was audacious to the point of being ridiculous, even impossible.

“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification - one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Not many could imagine such a possibility in 1963.

Even more audacious, Dr. King told African Americans who were suffering under racist oppression not to resort to violence, calling them “veterans of creative suffering.”  He urged them to persist in non-violent struggle “with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.”

All these years later, when black and white children joining hands in Alabama is not so farfetched, it is easy to forget that Dr. King’s dream required eyes of faith to see. Many who revere Dr. King seem not to know or remember this. But his dream, like Jesus’ view of resurrection, emerged from a faith that saw the future, not as a slight upgrade to the present, not as progress, but as something almost inconceivably new.

And so as his speech built to its triumphant conclusion, Dr. King returned to scripture, to the faith from which his dream was born. “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

Dr. King could dream such a dream because, like Jesus, he could see what is visible only by faith. He could persist in the face of hatred and violence and the knowledge that he would most certainly lose his life because, by faith, he could see that God has hopes and dreams for us beyond anything we can imagine on our own. He knew that God’s purposes will be fulfilled, and so he knew that the arc of history does bend toward justice.

Can you see God’s dream? Can you glimpse what the world cannot? Can you sense what is beyond conventional imagining. Jesus came to earth, not to start a new religion, not to teach a few new doctrines, but to open us to the newness of God that is beyond human  imagining. He offers us the gift of the Spirit so that God’s newness might invade our being and transform our very existence. As God says through the prophet Isaiah, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.  I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

Can you see it?