Sermon: Marriage and the Resurrection

Date Preached: Sunday November 11th 2007

Bible Reference: Luke Chapter 20, Verses 27-38

There’s an old Italian legend about a master and servant. 

It seems the servant wasn’t very smart and the master used to get very exasperated with him.  Finally, one day, in a fit of temper, the master said: "You really are the stupidest man I know.  Here, I want you to carry this staff wherever you go. And if you ever meet a person stupider than yourself, give them this staff." 

So time went by, and often in the marketplace the servant would encounter some pretty dumb people, but he never found someone appropriate for the staff.  Years later, he returned to his master's home.  He was shown into his master's bedroom, for the man was quite sick and in bed.  In the course of their conversation the master said: "I'm going on a journey soon."   

"When will you return?", asked the servant.

"This is a journey from which I will not return." the master replied,

The servant asked: "Have you made all the necessary  arrangements?"  "No, I suppose I haven’t."  "Well, could you have made all the arrangements?" "Well yes I suppose I could. I've had time.  I've had all my life.  But I've been busy with other things."  The servant said: "Now let me be sure I have this straight.  You're going on a journey, from which you will never return, and you've had all your life to make the arrangements, but you haven't." The master said: "Yes, I guess that's right."  The servant replied: "Master, take this staff.  For at last I have truly found a man stupider than myself." 

Just a story.  But perhaps it’s more than that.  Perhaps it describes the way in which we live, many of us, refusing to look on the one journey that faces us all.   

A famous theologian, confronted by an eager young theological student to say a few words about the resurrection of the dead, refused.  "I can't talk about the resurrection with anyone under the age of 30.  Before 30 what do you know of honest-to-God failure, real heartbreak, mortality, solid defeat?  What can you know of a dark world which only makes sense if Jesus Christ is raised?"   

Well although I wonder how sensible it is to set an arbitrary age. – and think about all  the young soldiers we remember today, the larger point remains: unless we have experienced something of the world's darkness, then the light which shines in the darkness is never going to make much sense.   

I suppose it wasn’t until I’d been a patient with a mysterious liver disease a number of years ago in my early 30s – having lost 2 and a half stone in 10 days – just newly married to Sue and yet seriously having to contemplate not making it through – the best of medical specialists scratching their heads and at last being honest and saying we haven’t a clue what’s going on – it was only then that I understood what that fear and uncertainty and awful waiting is all about." Sure puts things into perspective. 

And maybe some questions shouldn't be asked unless we're really starving for an answer. The Sadducees who approach Jesus don't really want an answer, do they? - they want to play theological tennis with their questioning.

Now don’t get me wrong I love academic debate, but it's not the best route for people hungry for real answers.  This isn’t just a text about marriage; it's a question about the resurrection - and Jesus' answer seems a bit flat, like he's having an off day. 

Because if you think back, other people got better answers to this resurrection question – but then they were asking from a very different place in their life. 

Like Martha, weeping for her brother Lazarus, what did Jesus say? "I am the resurrection and the life". 

To Mary, weeping outside the tomb on Easter Sunday, the answer came in the form of her name spoken from the other side of death. 

So:

Ask the question with tears in your eyes,

ask it in a hospital room or a nursing home,

ask it in those long hours of the night - and we may actually hear our own name in the answer as well.. 

But the Sadducees come to Jesus with their convictions – and there’s nothing wrong with having convictions.  But they can cause blindness – and they can prevent us from seeing what others are able to see.

The Sadducees were very conservative theologically.  They only accepted the first five books of the bible - the ones everyone thought Moses wrote.  For them that was the extent of the bible.  And since nowhere in those five books is resurrection mentioned – (at least they didn’t think so) they believed that the resurrection couldn't be  real.  That's conviction number one.   

Conviction number two that they came to Jesus with was that, if there is a heaven, an eternity, a resurrection, then it has to be just like this life.  What you see is what you get - for eternity.   

And so they put together this peculiar, marginally plausible, story about a woman and seven brothers. Because tucked away in the corner of Moses' law, in Deuteronomy 25:5-6, is the idea that if a man died childless it was up to his brothers to create children with his widow.  All the evidence suggests that this law wasn't even practised in Jesus' day. But here's a nice little theological conundrum the Sadducees can pose, to try and trick Jesus.  Maybe they even think it's funny.  It's a bit of a ludicrous situation - designed to show everyone who was listening that a halfway intelligent God couldn't possibly dream up something like eternal life if it could result in a mess like this.

But it didn't strike Jesus as funny. Death doesn’t. And his response is to turn the issue around – like we’ve been seeing him doing with so many situations. He tells them that all those social and legal and relational arrangements which can be so good and necessary and wonderful in this life, will (thank God) remain here.  The structures of "this age" will be superfluous in "the age to come. 

 In preparing for this Remembrance Day sermon I thought about all the funerals I’ve conducted in just 3 or so years of ministry – about 180 so far I think. The people have ranged from barely a few months old to almost a hundred: men, women and children.  Most died from so-called "natural causes" but I’ve had my share of horrific accidents, a murder, suicides and so on.  Some funerals were attended by hundreds, one just by myself and the undertaker in a raging blizzard at a graveside. One even had poorly disguised plain clothes police dotted around in the congregation.   

The point, of course, is that death is no respecter of age or status. You know that and I know that, but we often live as if we were blissfully ignorant of it. 

I'm sure that the Sadducees were convinced that they had hard-headed common-sense on their side when they rejected the “pie in the sky when we die” notion of eternal life.  Better to stand tough and face the harsh truth that this is all there is.  But that’s a position of faith and belief just as surely as the alternative one Jesus advances. 

Because opposite to this very prevalent view “that this is all there is” - that history is nothing but a row of tombstones - Jesus places another wonderful vision.  He says we'll be transfigured. That everything - our life, our relationships, even the very world itself - will be changed. 

How will all things be changed? And into what?  Well neither Jesus, nor Paul says exactly. But Jesus does says that the transfigured life will be like that of angels - but to then to say it’s like something implies that even this isn’t the whole story.   

In the end Jesus settles for saying that we will be the children of God – and that's based on a few clear ideas.

First, history is going some place.  Not just round and round. There is a beginning and an ending.  And while the words of the bible are more theological and religious, than historical and scientific (in 21^st Century terms), the message is plain: there is a beginning, a present, and a consummation – an end. 

And God is revealed as way, way more loving and involved than just some Great Engineer who set it all in motion and then walked away. The clear reason that we were made - was to be friends with God.  There's lots that gets in the way of that, but that's our purpose, to be in a loving relationship with God

     - now in this world

     - and forever in the world of the resurrection, in a world, a state, a condition, which includes those most have viewed as long dead

     - Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Sarah, Leah, Rachael, Rebecca my friend Caroline – my dad. 

As Jesus said - God is not God of the dead, but of the living - to him all of them are alive.

And here’s the challenge. Are you willing to be the friend of God - to go where God wants you to go? Are you willing to begin the process of being changed - of being transformed – starting here and now?

Are you willing to let go of the brief and transitory things of this world for the sake of drawing closer to God? Am I? 

The Sadducees showed in their question to Jesus that they wanted an eternity as close to earthly life as possible - and of course it’s ridiculous; as ridiculous and unappealing as sitting around on a cloud strumming a harp for all eternity. 

And as they used to tell us in Sunday School, that’s why they were SAD – U – CEE!!

Anyway Jesus tries to blow the doors off that notion that it’s just more of the same. What’s Paradise about that?

So whatever the resurrection is, it is utterly other than anything we’ve known. But, at its centre is the One we have always known, however dimly.  

When John Owen, the great Puritan pastor and teacher lay dying, he was dictating some last letters to friends.  He said to his secretary:

"Write, I am still in the land of the living."  Then he stopped  and said: "No, change that to read - I am still in the land of those who die, but I hope soon to be in the land of the living."   

That is where what is real, what is love, will be lifted into the light and all relationships and all faces will be transfigured for the children of God.   

And to be ready for the journey, for that reality - that fullness of life - Jesus tells us that all we need to do is place our trust in him – and live by his infilling power – and by values, as we’ve been discovering are the opposite of our world’s 

You gotta read this stuff – the Narnia books from C.S Lewis if you never have before. This is what Mr Tumnus ends up saying in The Last Battle“What's more, the adventure and security never stop growing. "The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets,"

May the God of the living - the God of Christ Jesus - be praised now and evermore.  Amen.