Advent Means to Come (and to Wait) (1 Advent, Year A)

     It’s a cliché to say that Christmas comes sooner and sooner every year, but it sure as all get-out seems that way to me . . . I was hearing Christmas music the day after Halloween this year, and I guess that it’s been that way for a while.  At least it’s not coming before Halloween yet . . . can you imagine hearing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” as you’re opening the doors on some little ghoul—all incisors and fake blood—begging candy off of you?  I can see it now: Zombie Santa and Rudolph the Dead-nosed Reindeer . . . I remember very clearly when I realized it was all over, when I realized that I was unprepared by the early onslaught of Christmas, when Pam and I walked into a mall in Eureka, California the weekend after All Saint’s Day, and there were big old gaudy Christmas packages and bored-looking store clerks dressed like oversized elves.  Ok, maybe the elves weren’t there, but I swear the Christmas packages were.

     Of course, it’s all being driven by the bottom line, and I guess I can’t really blame merchants for trying to bring a little extra cheer into the ol’ pocketbooks.  They do make the bulk of their money at this time of year . . . Black Friday—the day they supposedly break even—was only day before yesterday, so I guess it’s understandable that vendors would try to stretch it all out . . . and I wonder when it all tipped the scales, when a critical mass was reached.  Probably before most of us were born, even though a lot of us can remember a time when it didn’t seem to be this way . . . maybe it goes back to the very first store-bought gift and the first store-owner who realized that “Hmmm . . . there may be a profit to be made here.”  It was the first Norelco, and the Angels did say.

     And it’s even harder on us mainline Christians, who practice Advent . . . although I daresay some of us have succumbed to the secularity—is that even a word?—of the culture.  I know none of you all have, of course, but I, for one, have felt the siren song of Christmas glitter . . . Oh, yes, brothers and sisters, it’s true . . . On my way up Winton last night I was admiring the lights on Shroyer’s nursery . . . And then I caught myself humming—I’m so ashamed—I caught myself humming “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer . . . The extended cut . . . OK, so you can go overboard on the waiting, but I think it’s important to remember that it is Advent,  not Christmas, and that the season has it’s own pleasures and joys and lessons to teach.

     It seems to have been celebrated in some form or another since about four or five-hundred years after Jesus’ birth . . . for its earliest celebrants, it was a season of baptismal preparation.  In various places at various times it has lasted anywhere from two to six weeks, and even today in the Eastern Orthodox tradition it lasts 40 days, from November 15 until Christmas.  If that sounds suspicious, it is—one of Advent’s earliest meanings was a time of fasting and self-examination—a kind of lesser Lent—prior to the coming of the Messiah, and the Eastern Orthodox tradition, it’s still that way.

     The four-Sunday version we have in the Western Church seems to date to Pope Gregory VII in the waning years of the ninth century; Gregory’s the one who made the first Sunday in Advent the start of the Church year.  And it’s meaning has gradually shifted from fasting and penitence to a time of anticipation of and hope for the coming of Christ.  At Advent we long for Christ, we pine for him, we are ready after the long, hot summer, and the long, hot stretch of Ordinary Time, with its emphasis on discipleship and the Christian life, we are ready for a little magic, a little wonder, even a little mystery . . . and my favorite Advent hymns convey that mystery, they’re set in a minor key, O Come, O Come Emmanuel . . . they evoke a long, dark night, and we’re right at its end, in that cold, still time just before dawn, when the midnight spirits have silenced their rattling steps, before the roosters have shaken themselves awake, that’s where we are now, Advent, anticipation, hope and wonder . . .

     Even the word Advent evokes hope . . . it means coming, as in something’s coming, or someone’s coming . . . and Someone certainly is, and the mystery of Advent lies in part in its ambiguity, because the coming it celebrates is multi-valent, multi-faceted . . . Christ has come in the past, and we look back upon that time . . . The second week is traditionally about John the Baptist, the forerunner, the one who was not the Messiah but foretold the coming of Christ.  And we re-member that time, even though none of us were there, we remember it all the same, because to re-member something is to put the members back on it, members as in arms and legs and heads and hearts, to re-member something is to bring it back to life, if only in our minds . . .

     And so the second sense in which Advent means coming is in the present . . . we are expectant, just as our ancestors in the faith were, for the Christ who is coming as if for the first time, in 23 short days . . . Christ who is inaugurating the kingdom of God, who will come among us in a ratty old manger, a mangy little stall, who will come among us as the most fragile thing we can think of, a little, helpless baby . . .

     And it’s tempting to coo over that baby, to want to protect that child, to wrap him against the cold desert nights, to sing him to sleep at night and walk him around when he has the colic . . .  Do we have to nurture the Christ child that has come among us, who will come upon us on December 25?  Of course not . . . that’s God’s responsibility, God’s thing, not ours . . . and yet we constantly, idolatrously think that it’s all up to us, that God’s will won’t be done unless we do everything just right, but Christ is coming whether we do anything or not, whether we prepare or not, even whether we want him or not, Christ is coming in 28 days whether or no.

     And the past and the present collide at Advent, they come together for us every year at this precise point in time . . . and it’s even more poignant for us now, even more pressing that Christ comes, for he is our redemption, our new hope, in our personal lives but no less for our beloved Church.  Christ is our hope, our salvation, our transformation, and if we take our eyes off that fact for even a second, we risk losing our way.  Turn your eyes upon Jesus, the hymn says, fasten them upon him, glue them to his face, for he is coming.

     At Advent, Christ has come and is coming . . . and the third facet in our multivalent view, the third lens in our trifocled vision is that he will come again.  The past and present are fused together, and then joined by the future.  It’s Kai-ros time, God time, where chronological was, is, and will-be are collapsed into simply the now.  And it’s this future, second coming that’s reflected in the scriptures we read this morning . . . Jesus himself speaks of a time when two women will be grinding meal, and one will be taken and one left . . . when two men will be in the field, and one will be taken and one remain . . . keep awake, therefore, wait therefore, for you don’t know when it’s going to be.

     And the Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, speaks of that metaphorical moment of Advent, the time we are at right now . . . the night is far gone, the day is near . . . and though he expected Christ to return before he died, his words resound to us prophetically at this time of year . . . salvation is nearer to us than anytime before, and so we should live like it, live as if we are anticipating Christ’s return, as if we are anticipating the fulfilling of God’s Kingdom, not just one more shopping day until Christmas . . .

     And that brings us back around to the missing ingredient in it all, the thing that our secular friends don’t understand, that even a lot of Christians don’t get, is that if you anticipate, you by definition wait.  And if you celebrate his arrival before the event itself, if you rejoice before it happens, then there is no anticipation . . . you can’t anticipate what’s already happened in your minds.  And I think we’ve all been there, we’ve all sung Christmas carols till we’re blue in the face, stuffed that same face with Christmas candy, driven around in a frenzy looking for the best light shows, and then when Christmas actually arrives, it’s a let-down.  There’s nothing left to do, because in fact for us, Christ arrived weeks ago, and when he did, it was all over but the shouting.  In another passage from Romans, Paul put it this way:  “Hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?   But if we hope for what is not seen, we wait for it with patience.”  And before Paul, the Psalmist said “Be still before the LORD, and wait patiently  . . . indeed, those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.”

     Why is waiting on God so important?  Is it just a character-building exercise, like we say that suffering  builds strength, or humiliation builds character?  Or is it something more fundamental, more basic to our relationship with God?  Well . . . when we wait, we’re not doing anything, or at least anything pertaining to what we’re waiting for . . . waiting involves nothing but our minds.  When we wait on the Lord, we aren’t trying to do it ourselves.  It forces us to depend on God’s great providence, rather than ourselves, to let things happen in God’s good time, not our own.   It’s an attitude of expectancy, of hope, of prayer . . . waiting is surrender, it’s capitulation, it’s subsuming our will to the will of the one who created us, the one who wants only the best for us, who desires us to be at the top of our game as proclaimers of God’s coming kingdom.

     But what’s the difference, you might ask, between waiting and simply doing what we’ve always done, continuing life in the church?  We’re certainly not going to stop all the things that make us the church, we’re not going to quit worshiping on Sunday mornings the way we’ve always done, praying the way we’ve always prayed . . . we’re not going to quit S.O.U.L. Ministries or Christian Ed . . . We're not going to stop going to Matthew 25, are we?  Of course not, but waiting involves doing something fundamentally different from business as usual, it involves expectancy, it involves trust in God instead of ourselves, it involves an active openness, a vigorous receptivity, an energetic seeking of God’s will.

     And do you get the impression I’m not just talking Advent here?  That I’m talking about something in addition to the coming of Christ in a few short weeks?  Of course I am . . . Advent is a perfect metaphor for our transformation process . . . in a sense Advent is that process, that renewal that comes once a year, it’s revitalization in a nutshell . . . and here we are, at the end of the night, waiting for the dawning of a new day . . . and that new day is coming, we can sense it’s excitement, we can feel it, we can see it in the new outreaches we're going to try, we can hear it as the buzz starts to happen, but the renewal will only happen in God’s good time, we can't hurry it, even though the tendency is to quit all this waiting and jump right in, it feels urgent, after all, it feels like we’re on a precipice, after all, but we have to wait, we have to not sing of its arrival until it has come . . . but as we wait, we prepare, we anticipate, we create a space for God to work, we open ourselves up to the whisperings of God, to the moving of the Spirit.  As Isaiah says, those who wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.  Amen.

Cosmicity (Colossians 1:11 - 20; Consecration Sunday)

     The passage I just read may sound more familiar than most, and the reason is that I read the last six verses a month or so ago, when we spoke of the Jesuit priest, scientist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin; the passage was right up Teilhard’s alley.  After all, it was he who concluded that we are all connected, bound with golden threads, and Paul speaks of a Christ who holds all things together, is at the center of all of creation, and it's not hard to conclude that what he and Teilhard are speaking of is one and the same.  We are all linked in some mysterious way, and according to Paul, that way is Christ.  As St. Patrick said, in his achingly beautiful Breastplate,

Christ be with me, Christ within me,

Christ behind me, Christ before me,

Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

Christ to comfort and restore me.

Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,

Christ in hearts of all that love me,

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

The Celts, isolated away in their Irish fastness, preserved this ancient understanding of a Christ-soaked universe, a creation shot-through and permeated with Christ while elsewhere, the very Greco-Roman, neo-Platonic way of understanding the divine slowly took hold.  An understanding that placed God away way up in the sky, impossibly, ineffably separate and apart from us.  The state of this God could be summed up by the Omnis—omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.

I don't know if Teilhard knew the Breastplate—surely he did—but he would have immediately understood, because it treads the same ground as did his dazzling work.  But I enjoy imagining his response, his astonishment at this ancient pre-figuration, or maybe he would have simply nodded in quiet recognition, saying “Exactly!”

Others have intuited or postulated this connection . . . Carl Jung comes immediately to mind.  He believed that there is a “collective unconscious,” a notion to which his one-time mentor Sigmund Freud reacted with scorn.  For Jung, the collective unconscious explained the phenomenon he called synchronicity, which many of us have experienced at one time or another.  I myself am not all that sensitive to it, but I've had the common experience of knowing who it is on the phone before picking it up, especially when there's a deep connection between the two of us.   But others are more open to it, having the same dream on the same night as their loved ones, or dreaming about things before they happen . . . in linear time, at least.  And once again I imagine Teilhard reacting at this with delight: “Oh ho!  This Jung fellow, he is right!  This collective unconscious is transrational and atemporal, beyond measurement and time, and I wonder . . . Who do we know who fits that bill?”   And this decades before Sting decided to write a song about it.

 The most recent sign that Paul, Patrick, Jung and Teilhard weren't just whistling Dixie comes from Quantum Physics, of all places, and is a result that irritated Albert Einstein so much he called it “spooky action at a distance.”  Quantum theory says that if two particles are entangled, what you do to one has an instantaneous effect on the other, even if it's on a rocket ship at the other side of the universe.  This, of course, is what made Einsteins bust out in hives, because it seems to violate his theory of Special Relativity by exceeding the speed of light.  Just last year, however, physicists definitively proved it to be true, which no doubt has the old boy rolling in his grave.  But once again, I picture the ghost of Teilhard chortling in glee.  Because it looks like we’re all connected, it looks like he was right again . . .

But we don't have to look at spooky action at a distance to see the connections between us, or at least to sense them, to see their effects.  We are connected, we are linked by all sorts of things, all sorts of actions, all kinds of associations.  When we eat an ice cream cone we are being fed by a cow, nourished by the milk, just as if we were her calf.  But that’s not all . . . are we not also connected, are we not also dependent upon the dairy farmer who milked her?  And for that matter, are we not connected to the grass that fed her, and through that to the sunlight and water and nitrogen which made the grass grow?  And through the farmer, we are connected—dependent, really—on her parents, who gave her birth and nourished her?  Thinking about it, I am soon overwhelmed by trying to follow all the connections, and come to the realization that this web is spread over the entire earth and all that is in it.

But wait . . . That's not all!  There’s another kind of connection we can talk about . . . Whenever we help someone, whenever we do for someone, we are connected to them.  Call it a connection of care, an intentional connection of care.  And these connections have become deep in the 78 years of this congregation.  Everyone we've helped, every organization we've supported is connected in this way . . . And we can follow those connections, if we like . . .

It reminds me of that movie they trot out every Christmas . . . you know:  It's a Wonderful Life?  It’s the one where Jimmy Stewart’s character is given a chance to see what his hometown would be like if he’d never have been born . . . and the brother he rescued from drowning is long dead, and all the people on a ship he saves in the War die ‘cause he wasn't there to rescue them.  Uncle Billy is a hopeless drunk, estranged from the family because Stewart’s character isn't around to keep the Building and Loan going.  And because there is no Building and Loan, the entire town has become a hard place, no longer Bedford Falls but Potterville, named after the evil industrialist who controls it.

A lot of lives are influenced by Stewart’s character, in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways. And I wonder: what would Greenhills be of like if this church hadn't been around?  Where would Joanna Himes-Murphy be if S.O.U.L. Ministries wasn't there, if we hadn't been around to help get it going, or support it with our donations?  And what about all the folks we've given rides to the store from Winton House?  We're connected to them, and through them it radiates out to their loved ones and family.  And Matthew 25 and Habitat for Humanity, the list goes on.

All this is not so we can pat ourselves smugly on the back, saying look what good Christians we are, but it's simply to point out what a big hole would be left in this community, and in Cincinnati as a whole, if we hadn’t been here.  And our ministry rolls on, with new outreach planned for the coming year  And so in a few minutes, as we prayerfully pledge for the coming year, I invite you to think about the connections, both visible and invisible, that bind us to the community and the whole world, and think about the vital role this church plays.  Amen.

Jerusalem Blues (Luke 21:5 - 19)

     Tom Dorsey’s father was a minister and his mother a piano teacher.  He learned to play blues piano as a young man, and after studying music formally in Chicago, began to play rent parties under a variety of names.  Soon he was recording music, and in the mid-20s began to record gospel as well.  In 1928, the height of his secular career was the release of a raunchy blues song, the name of which is best left unmentioned here, which ended up selling seven million copies.  Not too long after that, he played at the National Baptist Convention and became the band-leader of two churches, effectively ending his secular career.

In the meantime, he had married a fine woman named Nettie, and she became pregnant with their first child.  In August of 1932, he left her at home in Chicago and traveled to be the featured soloist at a large revival in St. Louis.  After the first night, Dorsey received a telegram that said simply, “Your wife just died.” He raced home and learned that she had given birth to a son before dying in childbirth. The next day his son died as well, and he buried them in the same casket.

That kind of suffering is difficult to comprehend, unless you’ve been through it, and I suspect it was no different for Jesus’ disciples.  They'd come to the temple and were gawking at it and all—my, what big stones you have!—and Jesus laid a bombshell on them: “Uh . . . guys?  I hate to tell you this, but all these things you see?  There'll come a time when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”  And I can imagine the amazement, maybe even a little disbelief, because even though it wouldn't be complete for another thirty years, the Temple was one impressive structure.  The inner sanctum, the holiest of holies itself, was surrounded by successive courtyards, with all kinds of columns and such, and its outer wall soared over the Kidron valley, culminating in the pinnacle, where the devil took Jesus during his testing.

It was one imposing building, all right, so I don't blame the disciples if they were just a tad skeptical . . . “Teacher, when will this be?” they asked (maybe they wanted to make sure they were out of the way) “What will be the sign?” And we have to pause and make sure we understand exactly what Jesus is talking about.  When the disciples ask “when will this be,” the “this” they’re talking about is the destruction of the Temple, not the end times, at least in the passage we read.  He's talking about the destruction of the Temple, which we know occurred in 70 C.E., about forty years later.  It's understandable we might think it's about the end times, because in the other two versions of the story, in Mark and Matthew, it is, he's talking about the second coming, but not here.  Luke, writing about fifteen or twenty years after the destruction, perhaps heard the story differently or edited it differently, we don't know, but here he's predicting the Temple’s doom.

And they ask for a sign, and he warns them not to trust anyone who gives them one, who says they know when it's going down:  “Beware that you’re not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.”  Don’t listen to them, he says, don't expend your time and energy following them, because they will not know.  There are going to be wars and insurrections, but don't be scared when you hear of them, ‘cause the temple’s end isn't going to happen just then.  Nations will rise against nations, kingdoms against kingdoms, there’ll be famines and earthquakes, and dreadful portents in the skies.

And the thing is, all these events took place in the run up to the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple.  Recall that the reason for it all was a Jewish insurrection against their Roman overlords; by one count, there were fifteen would-be leaders, people who said “I am he,” who tried to gain a following in the decades before the destruction.  And four emperors succeeded one another during that period, accompanied by insurrection and violence  Over in Acts, Luke himself writes of famines and an earthquake, and the historian Josephus describes  signs in the heavens in the form of a sword-shaped star and a comet, both of which appeared during the burning of the temple.

But Jesus isn’t finished yet; he begins to get personal, saying that before all this happens, before the final invasion and burning, Jesus’ followers will undergo great persecution, great suffering:  you will be arrested, he says, handed over to synagogues and prisons, and brought before kings and governors because of my name.  You will be betrayed by family members, by parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, and some of you will be put to death.  And once again, Luke describes these things over in Acts, and this kind of thing can happen during  times of upheaval, times of rebellion.  Family members split by the conflict turn on one another—recall that it happened in the Civil War—and neighbors turn neighbors over to the police.  All of this can occur in the run-up to rebellion.

But right in the middle of his description, Jesus says something odd: if they are persecuted, if they are arrested, it will give them “an opportunity to testify.”  An opportunity to testify . . . What in the world could he mean by that?  Does he expect them to start preaching to their persecutors, to try to convert their captors in the midst of their extreme suffering?

In Thomas Dorsey’s grief, he withdrew into himself and refused to write or play music for a long time, so long that his friends and relatives despaired of him ever coming out.  Then one day, a feeling of peace washed over him, and a tune he swore he'd never heard before began to run through  his head.  He went to his piano and began to play, and before the night was out, he'd written lyrics and recorded what would become his best known hymn, beloved by millions.  “Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand; I am tired, I am weak, I am worn . . .”  The hymn was surely his testimony about a God who could be called on to stand by us in times of suffering and pain.

 Jesus is saying that suffering is an opportunity to testify, to witness to the Good News, by means of a steadfast reliance on the mercy of God.  Tom Dorsey was paralyzed with grief, he was suffering something fierce, but from it came a powerful witness to faith in God.  Jesus predicts extreme suffering for his disciples, yet in the midst of it all, they will have an opportunity to express—in words if necessary—their trust in God.

Does this mean God is the author of suffering?  Does God engineer suffering so that the Gospel might be spread?  Of course not, as Paul might say.  Jesus doesn’t even hint at that, despite the ancient belief that God causes everything, good and bad.  He just describes what's going to happen, and notes that it will be an opportunity for witness.  And don't worry about what you're going to say or do, don't study up in it, ‘cause whatever it is, it’ll come from the Spirit, that is, it'll come from the heart, which is where the Spirit resides.

And of course, that was what Tom Dorsey experienced, wasn't it?  A melody came to him, out of the blue, and though it had been written by George Allen nearly a century before, it seemed he'd never heard it before, and maybe he hadn’t, maybe it was brought to him by the Spirit, or perhaps it came from some deep, long-forgotten memory, but what did it matter?  I'd wager that either way, it was the work of the Spirit of God.

But testimony is not the only thing in play here.  Jesus tells them that some of them will be put to death, then turns around and says that not a hair of their heads will perish.   And of course he’s talking about the imperishable part, that part that is union with God: “By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

Richard Rohr defines suffering as whenever we’re not in control, whenever we are powerless, helpless before an overwhelming force.  And we can see that in the suffering Jesus’ predicts for his followers: they had no control over what would happen to them, they would be in the grip of irresistible power.  That was what it was like for Dorsey as well, he was powerless to save his wife, powerless to alter the outcome, he wasn't even there.  And of course, that is how it feels when a loved one dies, or when when we lose a job, or are persecuted for our race or sexual orientation or religious beliefs.  We get a churning in our guts, a  feeling that we cannot do anything about it, that's it is hopeless.

Rohr writes that times like these, times of intense suffering, can also be times of transformation, of spiritual advancement.  Suffering, he says,  is a primary spiritual teacher “more than any Bible, church, minister, sacrament, or theologian.”  When we are inside of suffering, we have a much stronger possibility of surrendering our ego and “opening up to the whole field of life.”  In other words, we are much more open to being led.

I think that's what Jesus means here by “gaining our souls.”  I don't think he's talking about the sweet bye-and-bye, about what happens to us after we die.  He's talking about the deepening of our spirituality, a coming closer to God in the here and now.  The mystics speak of the spiritual journey as going inward, drawing nearer to that still, small space within where dwells the spark of God.  Through suffering and pain, we can further this closeness, this awareness, this absolute union with God.  In their words, we can gain our souls.  Amen.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Luke 20:27 - 38)

     The first thing I want to do is apologize for the title . . . Seven Brides for Seven Brothers . . . I can remember seeing that movie musical as a kid, with Howard Keel dancing around with his six other great, big, strapping brothers in lumber-jack boots, and they send away for some mail-order brides to come way up into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth—I think it was Seattle – and they adjust to life in this wilderness and, of course, find true love . . . but I’m sorry for the title, I just couldn’t resist, even though it doesn’t really fit . . . there are seven brothers in our passage, all right, but only one bride, and that would seem really strange in the 19^th-Century wilderness, where you could order up a woman from a catalog, for Pete’s sake, but undoubtedly would be scandalized at the thought of a wife being passed down like an inherited tea set from one brother to the next . . . different strokes for different centuries, I guess.

The practice described in our passage, of brothers marrying their dead brother’s wife, is called “Levirate marriage,” and it was common in the ancient middle east.  It was described in Deuteronomy and Genesis– our Old Testament – and that’s what the Sadducees cite: “Teacher, Moses says 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.”  Sadducees were a faction within Judaism that, as Luke puts it, said “there is no resurrection.”  The reason they said this was that there is no mention of it in the Torah, the first five books of what Hebrew scriptures, and the Sadducees held that they were the only books that counted.  The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed that the writings in the Torah were subject to ongoing interpretation, particularly in light of writings like the Psalms and prophets.  In particular, they accepted the book of Daniel, which talks about the angels Gabriel and Michael, and has one of the earliest mentions of the resurrection of the dead.  So, as weird as it sounds, Jesus was aligned with the Pharisees on this point.

 The Sadducees’ question comes just after Jesus gives an unassailable answer to another question, the one about the paying taxes, and they try to spin it out to absurd lengths, the better to embarrass him.  “What if there were seven brothers” – and of course, seven is a special number, the perfect number, and their question is just that – perfectly ridiculous – “but just what if . . . the first brother married, and then something happened, he got killed in a tragic bagel factory explosion or something, and he died childless, then the second married her, and he fell in a wine vat and drowned—childless again—and the third brother married her, and guess what?  he died childless . . . and even after Ann Rule wrote a true crime novel about it (just kidding) it went on and on until all seven had married her and all seven had died childless, then in the resurrection” – and you can almost hear the sneer in their voices – “in this resurrection you talk about, whose wife will the woman be?”

And of course, they really don’t want to know the answer – like a lot of religious folks, they think they already do . . . I was reading a newsletter from John Spong—he’s an Episcopal Bishop who makes a tidy living writing inflammatory books from a relentlessly modernist – not post-modernist, as some claim – viewpoint, books with titles like “Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Virgin Birth . . .” and “Living in Sin?  A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality.”  And one of the latest is: “Resurrection: Myth or Reality?  A Bishop Rethinks the Origins of the Christian Faith,” and in this newsletter I read, he’s complaining about Tom Wright, an Anglican Bishop who’s a biblical scholar, and he’s running down Wright and getting pretty scornful about it, and I’m thinking 2000 years later and we’re still doing this?  It seems there will always be folks who’ve already made up their minds on this issue, thank you very much, and on a host of others besides . . .

But Jesus isn’t falling for it, he's not going to guess how many angels can dance on a pin, and responds to it by redefining it, by putting it into a completely different light . . . he says that only those who “belong to this age” marry and are given in marriage . . . marriage only matters now, in the present age, not in “that” age, by which he means the kingdom of God, where the dead have been resurrected . . . in that age, in the resurrection from the dead, they’ll neither marry or be given in marriage . . . and why not?  Because they cannot die anymore, they don’t need to have sexual relations anymore, they’re like angels, they’re children of God . . . and he doesn’t mean they have wings and haloes and flap around heaven all day and night.  What he means is that those who belong to that age are immortal, and therefore they don't need marriage anymore, they don't need to replenish their numbers by establishing stable family units organized around a sexual relationship.  The folks in that age live forever, they’re not decimated by famine or pestilence or war . . . marriage is therefore an anachronism.

Now.  This may or may not strike you as fortunate . . . we’ve all got pet theories about what it’s going to be like “after we die” . . . one song goes “I don’t know, but I’ve been told, streets of heaven are paved with solid gold” . . . some say that all the people we’ve ever loved will be there . . . others that whatever you need to be happy will be there, if you need your little dog fluffy, then there she’ll be . . . and I can imagine that to some folks, who’ve been in committed, loving, relationships for a long time, this may sound great.  They love their marriage, and wouldn’t want to it to be any other way, and the notion that theirs might not exist in that age might be troubling.

On the other hand, those trapped in loveless relationships might welcome being let off the hook . . . their idea of heaven might be that they finally get out from under their abusive, controlling spouses.  But the point of our story is not how it’s going to be different, but that it is . . . the new age, where the dead are risen from the dead, will not be the same old same old . . . Life after the resurrection – whatever it is, whenever it is, however it works – will not simply be a continuation of life before.

I think it’s a natural part of being human to want to know how things are gonna be . . . we don’t like uncertainty very much, so we pore over books and articles – and there are tons that have been written on the subject, from deep scholarly tomes to light fluff that’s nothing much more than wish fulfillment – but we pore over them nevertheless, and though there’s nothing much wrong with it, think what would happen if we took all the money we spent on it, all the time and energy worrying over it, and plowed it back into mission?  Into the service of our risen Lord?

All I know is that if anybody tries to tell you “this is the way it’s gonna be,” either at the second coming, or in the age to come, you’d better check your wallets . . . And in truth, I think it best to live with and recognize the mystery of the unknown, the mysterion as it’s called in Greek . . . Paul likens life in this age to a childhood, where we see in a mirror, dimly . . . but, he says, in the resurrection “we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part,” he says, “then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

In our story, Jesus gives us just a little taste of that mystery . . . he affirms that those who live in that age cannot die anymore, that they are immortal. Like angels they are children of God.  And he’s shown that the Sadducees’ argument is based on a false notion – that the coming age is a continuation of the present age – he proceeds to give a biblical argument for the resurrection, using arguments from their own Hebrew bible: Didn’t God say to Moses “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?”  And we all know that God is the God of the living, right?  I mean, the dead can’t have a God, can they?  Because they’re dead . . . thus, there must be a resurrection, there must be immortality of some kind.  Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, though they have died, must be somehow alive, or about to be alive . . . And Jesus hoists the religious authorities on their own petard.  He gives the Sadducees, who only believed in the first five books of Moses, an argument from their own scripture.

And in so doing, he bests the cream of the religious crop on their own turf . . . they’d come to him with an absurd argument, designed to show him up as a piker, a hick from Galilee who lacked any authority in scriptural matters.  But in the end, the joke’s on them . . . because at the end of the day, the only authority left standing is Jesus himself.  Some scribes standing nearby – onlookers to the Sadducees’ humiliation – say it outright, like a Greek chorus commenting on what just happened: “Teacher,” they say, “you have spoken well.”  And nobody dares ask him any more embarrassing questions, for he’s bested them all.

Like all these stories about Jesus answering trick questions – and this was the third one in a row that Luke describes – like all the stories, it shows Jesus as a master of debate, of the scholarly riposté, a kind of super-rabbi who takes no prisoners.  But it also tells us something about his opponents as well . . . the Sadducees are so wrapped up in their argument, so tied up in the ins and outs of levirate marriage, that they can’t see the new age when it’s standing right there in front of their nose . . . for that’s where it was, of course, personified as Jesus of Nazareth.  They can’t see that God’s doing a new and transformative thing, that there is a fundamental discontinuity between this age and the next.

That’s why all our views on the resurrection are – in the end – inadequate.  We can’t just take all the good things we know, raise them to the n^th degree, and expect that to be what the Kingdom of God is like . . . we can’t take something we love here in this age – like cars or movies – and say that in the coming age we’ll have thousands of cars or all the films ever made . . . it just isn’t that way.  In the age to come, in the resurrection of the dead, all bets are off, God will do a new thing, and there’s no getting around it.

      But if this story is about discontinuity, if it’s about the impossibility – and undesirability – of projecting all our cares and worries and expectations upon the next age, one thing is certain.  God’s love will not be frustrated, not even by death.  It will not be denied, even though all the forces of evil seem lined up against it, though all the wars and rumors of wars, all the starvation, all the terrorist attacks eat at our very souls, God will triumph.  Even though we have no idea – really – of what the Kingdom of God is now and will become, even though all we know is that it will be different, one thing will never change: the eternal love of God.  So be not afraid.  Amen.