2 Thessalonians 2.1-5, 13-17, Luke 20:27-38
The Third Sunday before Advent, 6 November 2022
Eldroth, Clapham
This is a time of year for remembering. A time which raises for us all, questions of life and death. Questions like: what do we really believe happens after death?
Some would say that those who have died, have completely, absolutely, irreversibly forever gone. Others may say that the dead are at peace - but what does that really mean? You may believe that those who have died are now in an afterlife, in a new home, where one day we might rejoin them.
Our understanding of death reflects the way we think about God, and ourselves. And so it affects the way we behave in life.
In our gospel today Jesus had a debate with his fellow-seekers the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection. They believed that, if there really were a resurrection, then God would have told Moses about it, and Moses would have put it into the books of the law. But Moses didn't put it into the books of the law, so they reckoned that God mustn’t have told him anything about this matter, and this means that there is no resurrection.
As evidence that there was no resurrection they cited a law in Deuteronomy which set out that, if a married man died without children, then it fell to his brother to take that man's widow as his wife so as to beget a child for his late brother, to keep the dead man's name going in the family line.
This law existed exactly because these people didn’t believe in a life-after-death; so, being full of anxiety about finding some way of overcoming death they decided that the only way to do that was by having children. To secure their blessing in the land of the living they had to make sure they had descendants. This is why the man who died without children needed his brother to get for him the share in posterity that he couldn't get for himself.
The Sadducees liked to prove their point by telling that ingenious little story of seven brothers who died before having children, each passing the wife on to the next like a used car.
But Jesus is not impressed by their clever argument. He surprises them by saying that those who rise from the dead do not get married - because they are like angels. They are the children of God; they are the children of the resurrection.
He is teaching that marrying and giving in marriage are normal things which happen in a world which is full of anxiety about overcoming death. But for those for whom death is not a reality, there is no anxiety about overcoming death; and for those people the reason for marriage, or for having children, is not about overcoming death. It is about celebrating life.
Now you might understandably be thinking, what do I mean by ‘those for whom death is not a reality’. Surely death is a reality for everybody? The words of committal in the old Prayer Book Funeral Service seem to sum up well our usual state of being: ‘In the midst of life we are in death’, it says, and it seems we are, each of us people who are keenly affected by loss, continually bereaved.
Jesus quotes the book of Exodus where God tells Moses ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ - three people who Moses understood to be dead at the time. Jesus is trying to help us to begin to understand that the power of God involves being completely and entirely alive, living without any reference to death. There is no death in God. God has nothing to do with death, and for that reason facts which are obvious to us, like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob having been long dead, simply do not exist for God. As Jesus says in Luke, ‘To God, all are alive’. To God, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive.
Let's put this another way: we tend to think that ‘being alive’ means ‘not being dead’. We know we¹re alive because we¹re not dead. For God this is simply not the case. For God being alive has nothing to do with death. Jesus saw God as being radically alive, not mortal, not immortal, but a-mortal, in no way shaded by death. Those who started the dispute with him just couldn’t see God in this way, their whole way of seeing is distorted because it is stuck in a vision which flows from death to death, blind to God - who is the entirely death-less One.
Now, what would happen to us if only we really believed only in life! How would we then see ourselves and live towards others - all humans and non-humans with whom we share this earth? If we believed the good news that for God, death is something that is not, that ‘To God, all are alive’? If we lost our focus on death and became increasingly tuned-in to only believing only in life?
To overcome their anxiety about death, the Sadducees created marriage laws which protected their family line through generations. In our world those laws still exist, because those anxieties still exist, and have great influence on us, and can make us liable to get into relationships which might be harmful, for fear of being alone - forgetting that we are never alone with God; if we believed only in life then think how our relationships could be different.
And in our world anxiety about death makes some people frightened of not being remembered, which drives them to do extreme and terrible things; the leaders of the nations are prone to fall into this trap, but so can we be in our own ways. If we believed only in life then think how our politics, and our behaviour towards others, the poor, outsiders and opponents, would be different.
To reach this point of understanding, God’s perspective, can come with patient reflection and prayer. Whilst failing health and the ruptures of the world cause us to sleep restlessly believing that ’In the midst of life we are in death’, Jesus invites us to open our hearts to another movement active on this earth: to the equal and beautiful truth that also, ‘In the midst of death we are in life’.
‘In the midst of death we are in life’. Though we may feel ourselves to be surrounded by darkness Jesus wants us to lift up our eyes to the hills where the breaking light of the rising morning sun emerges as surely as at the dawn of creation, as surely as it will again tomorrow. In the midst of death’s darkness, the light of life moves towards us, seeking to embrace us; life in the form of the God who is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all are alive.
We are like angels, Jesus tells us, because we are children of God. And so, as the Persian poet Rumi once asked, “You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”
So even on All Souls where our bereavements are real and raw; even today, there is a good news which can free us from our anxieties about death and draw us into a full, creative, liberated life. The good news that if we throw ourselves into the embrace of God who is only and all about life, then we will find our focus beginning to shift away from death’s anxieties and sorrows, towards life and the glorious art of living.
Notes
This sermon is a rewrite of If only we believed only in life! To God all are alive, preached in Somerset, 2016, and To God all are alive, Croxteth, 2004. It borrows heavily from James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, Chapter Two, as referenced in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary: All Saints Day C.
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