The God of the Living

Luke 20: 27-40, page 745
Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children.
Finally the woman died too.
Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. But in the account of the bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ Our God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to God all are alive.”
Some of the teachers of the law responded, “Well said, teacher!” And no one dared to ask him any more questions.
Sermon
Our house is on the market now, so keeping things clean for prospective buyers has taken on particular importance. Our dogs, we have three dogs and if you take no other moral lesson from this sermon than a warning that three dogs is too many dogs I will have done my job well enough, our dogs have gotten into the habit of kidnapping Lily’s stuffed animals and tearing them apart in the back yard. Sara sent me into the backyard the other day to pick up the remnants of one of my poor daughter’s less fortunate stuffed animals.
It’s strange what happens sometimes in the midst of such a project. As I was picking up stuffed animal stuffing from the backyard I started noticing other projects that needed doing – that there were also bibs in the backyard that the dogs had taken outside, leaves on the patio chairs, pine straw that needed raking, and the gutters were clogged. Then I noticed parts of the house that could use a fresh coat of paint, fence rails that could stand to be replaced, and on and on and on until the whole house suddenly seemed to be in such disrepair that I came to the hopeless conclusion that no one would ever want to buy it.
It all started with my focus, and while most people don’t go from picking up stuffed animal stuffing to thinking that their perfectly fine house is a junk heap, what we focus on has a big impact on how we understand ourselves and the world – an eye for stuffed animal stuffing can snowball – we go from seeing a paint chip on the car and a perfectly fine automobile starts to look like a jalopy – the sight of a pimple turns the prom queen’s self image from beauty to the beast.
What we focus on matters, so while we don’t learn much about the Sadducees just by reading our scripture lesson for the day, we do learn their focus. Our lesson begins: “Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question.”
Luke doesn’t tell us much here, but I’m willing to bet that the author of Luke is telling us all he thinks we need to know, that the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question.
I’m sure that there was much more to the Sadducees than just that, but by Luke they are defined according to what they focused on, where they stood on the great debate of the day, whether or not there was a resurrection of the dead.
Luke doesn’t tell us more any more than that, but the Sadducees’ belief spanned many more issues than this one – they focused on the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. In so many ways they were like the Pharisees, except the Pharisees broadened their focus beyond the first five books of the Bible into nearly the whole of what we now have as the Old Testament, and based on these additional books the Pharisees came to believe that there was scriptural evidence for life after death.
These two groups, similar in so many ways, defined themselves according to this small difference. For the Sadducees, in order to know who they were they had to know who they weren’t, and so they defined themselves according to how they were different from the Pharisees on the great divisive topic of the day.
Jesus steps into the room, and like so many of us who are on one side of a debate or another, the Sadducees wanted to know if Jesus was with us or them.
This is what we all do to some degree or another – we want to know, are you with us or are you with them. When I went up to Tennessee last week folks wanted to know whether I was a UT fan or a Vanderbilt fan.
My response was, “Vanderbilt has a football team?”
More important than which college football team I cheer for is where Jesus stands on the great issues of the day – so the Sadducees want to know what Jesus thinks, and like so many groups who have spent too much time focusing on one particular issue, the Sadducees have reached the point of asking hypothetical questions so ridiculous that they make people feel like they either have to be with them or must be an idiot.
Seven men married to one woman – whose wife will she be?
If there is a resurrection from the dead – how can this poor woman be married to seven men? See – there can’t be a resurrection from the dead. Think about how ridiculous that would be.
But it’s not so different from the ways certain groups portray each other today. Wouldn’t you stop a woman from murdering her child? Then how can you let her murder her fetus?
Don’t you believe that women have a right to decide for themselves what they do with their bodies, or would you have them wear burkas and get their husbands permission before they do anything?
We would like to know what Jesus would do, where he would stand regarding the great debates of our day – but in a way it’s like asking what James Madison would say about video games if you’ve been following the Supreme Court hearings this week – he’s a man of another time who responded to his generation’s hot topics and not ours.
But in another way, asking Jesus to side with you or with them is even more impossible because Jesus isn’t ever on one side or the other.
Yes, Jesus takes a stand, he isn’t wishy-washy or appealing to both groups at the same time, but what’s different about Jesus is that he takes a stand by bridging differences rather than deepening the divide between the two groups.
To the Sadducees who focused solely on the books of Moses Jesus says, “Even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ Our God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to God all are alive.”
Not only is this appeal to Moses important for the sake of Jesus beating the Sadducees at their own game claiming that even Moses believed in a resurrection of the dead, but this last phrase, for to God all are alive, speaks of unity in the midst of division. For to God, all are alive.
Jesus doesn’t stand in one camp and not the other – Pharisee or Sadducee, for to God, all are alive – not just opposite camps whose focus on difference convinces them that they are more different than they are alike, but the whole of creation, and even beyond it – from the living to the dead – all are alive to God.
Unlike us, Jesus’ focus is not on what divides, knowing that if our focus is on what makes us different we will forever be divided. Jesus focus is on what makes us one - and in the eyes of God, we are all alive.
Ours is a time of intense division. Battle lines are drawn and heightened attention has been drawn to them in these midterm elections, but if our focus as a nation is on how we are different, who is right and who is wrong, who is for freedom and who is not, then the terrorists have won – you haven’t heard it lately but it’s still true: united we stand or divided we fall.
The same is true for our church – if our focus is on what divides us, then we are just where Satan wants us to be: weak, fragmented, going nowhere because we can’t agree on where to go.
So we’ve got to remember Jesus words: For to God, all are alive – and in the eyes of God there is so much that makes us one.
Unfortunately, the Sadducees did eventually come together with the Pharisees. Unified they cried out to crucify the one who called them together.
May we not be so blind.
Open your eyes to the truth. Open your eyes to the reality, that you are surrounded by your brothers and sisters.
Thanks be to God, the God who makes us one.
Amen.