Luke 20:27-38
Impossibly Alive
James Sledge August
9, 2015
I
belong to a Facebook group called “Happy to be a Presbyterian.” It has a lot of
pastors and others interested in the church who post sometimes interesting
articles and discussion topics. The other day someone shared a blog post
entitled, “Death Is Not the End Because Jesus Offers Us Eternal Life and
Happiness.” The post itself contained nothing particularly memorable. I likely
never would have even looked at it except for th3 note that accompanied it. It
read, “I really deliberated on whether or not I should post this week’s article
here because I know that many of you do not believe in resurrection or the
afterlife. However, I decided to post it anyway since the PCUSA embraces a wide
range of views—including those of members who do believe in the resurrection.”
By
the time I first saw the post, there were already close to a hundred comments,
and there was a pretty intense debate underway as to what exactly someone must
believe in order to be Christian. The discussion never got out of hand, but it
did get a bit testy at times. Considering how central the resurrection of Jesus
is to Christian faith, some might find it surprising this was a big point of
contention. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that the person who
originally posted the article assumed his belief in eternal life to be a
minority one among Presbyterians.
But
perhaps no one should be surprised that people of faith struggle with their
understanding of resurrection. It is a topic that is barely explained in the
Bible. Our gospel reading today is the only place where Jesus tackles to
subject directly. In fact, a great many notions about resurrection and eternal
life come, not from the Bible, but from such disparate places as Greek
philosophy or fanciful speculation by Christians unsatisfied with Scripture’s unwillingness
– or perhaps inability – to explain things. A lot of people want details and
mechanics.
The
Sadducees in our reading today are focused on details and mechanics, but not
for the same reasons many Christians are. They employ mechanics to emphasize
the absurdity of believing in resurrection. I wonder if the often absurd
mechanics of resurrection and eternal life imagined by some Christians aren’t a
big reason that educated or progressive sorts of Christians sometimes struggle
with this subject.
Barbara
Brown Taylor, in a sermon on our gospel passage, shares a pair of stories highlighting
problems of mechanics. She tells of a bridegroom who wanted to edit the wedding
liturgy and remove the line about “till death do us part.” Both he and his
bride believed in eternal life so why should their marriage end with death? An reasonable
question perhaps?
But
she then tells of a woman dying of cancer whose husband unexpectedly and suddenly
died of a heart attack. At the funeral people attempted to comfort her, telling
her that she would soon be reunited with him. Later she told Taylor, tears
streaming down her face, “I am never going to get away from him, am I?”[1]
Thankfully,
Jesus seems little concerned with mechanics and he doesn’t take the Sadducees’
bait when they attempt to trick him. What he does say is remarkably short on
details. “They are like angels and are children of God, being children of the
resurrection.” Whatever that means.
Jesus then engages in what was
apparently a fairly typical bit of rabbinic interpretation, using God’s
self-identification as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as evidence for
resurrection. I’m not sure such methods are very convincing for modern folks.
Regardless, the heart of the matter lies not with mechanics but with who God is.
“Now
he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are
alive.” But dare we actually trust such a thing?
____________________________________________________________________________
There
is a scene in the first book of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where Aslan the lion allows
himself to be killed in exchange for Edmund being released from the clutches of
the witch. After Edmund is reunited with his siblings, Aslan is brought back to
life. The children are upset with Aslan when they realize that there are
prophecies predicting this very event. They want to know why they were allowed
to be so traumatized by Aslan’s slaughter if he knew the prophecies said it
would be undone. Aslan’s reply, “It has never been put to the test.”
Jesus either wouldn’t or couldn’t
explain resurrection in any sort of logical, literal way, but he did put his
insistence that God is a God of the living to the test. He remained faithful despite
the cross and death, trusting that for God, even death is not insurmountable.
_____________________________________________________________________________
From
the beginning, Christian faith has been rooted in what Jesus shows us about the
love and power of God, how God can bring life out of death, how God’s love for
us is stronger than death. Yet the faithful have found enumerable ways of
getting off track over the centuries. At times faith got reduced to a method or
formula, the mechanics for gaining entry into heaven. Check the appropriate
boxes and get your ticket to eternal bliss. Other times Jesus became the
supreme, ethical teacher who shows us how to create a kind of heaven on earth,
if only we will embrace his radical ideas. Still other times Jesus becomes a
therapist and mystical guru who provides individual fulfillment or
enlightenment.
Perhaps
there are elements of truth in all these, but none fully capture the strange
teachings and call of this rabbi named Jesus. Jesus called people to follow him
in a counter cultural, counter intuitive way of life that embraces service and
sacrifice, even suffering and death, a way that lets go of worries and concerns
about self because it is connected to a cosmic mystery bigger even than death.
Jesus knew himself to be joined to, part of, what Martin Luther King called
“the moral arc of the universe,” a trajectory safely in God’s hands. And so he
could trust himself, trust his very life to the God of the living for whom
death is no final ending.
Neither
Jesus nor the Bible lay out the mechanics of this or give us a blueprint.
Presumably the mystery of what is to come is beyond our comprehension, and so
those images of heaven and the hereafter are, at best, crude and speculative
stand-ins. But what Jesus does give us is the Spirit, his living, indwelling
presence that lets us know and commune with this one who has died and yet
lives.
I
know that a lot of people find immense comfort in visualizing the particulars
of heaven or thinking of a loved one looking down on them from there. I can
appreciate that, but there is something I find much more comforting. In those
times when I actually feel the Spirit, experience the presence of the risen
Christ, it is possible to see beyond sight, to know beyond knowledge, to
imagine the impossible.
In
that sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor I mentioned earlier, she refers to Jesus’s
words from our gospel reading and says,
This
is absolutely all Jesus had to say on the subject of resurrection. You can
search all four of the gospels and you will find no more teaching on it. What
you will find is that in short order
he went on to test to waters for himself. He surrendered life as we know it,
and when those who loved him came to perfume his body, they could not find him
anywhere. When he showed up later, he showed up with a body. He ate fish, broke
bread, cooked breakfast. He also walked through locked doors and vanished while
people were looking right at him. He was the same but he was different, and
because he was both, our futures may
turn out to be as astounding as his.[2]
We
Make the Road by Walking. The
practice begun in Advent continues through summer of 2015. Scripture and
sermons connect to chapters in Brian McLaren’s book. This week’s chapter is 50,
“Spirit of Life.”
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