God of the Living

Scripture text Luke 20;27-40

It’s a quirky time of the year. Creation itself seems to be preparing for the death that winter weather brings. For myself, I lost some people who were important in my life at this time of year: my favorite aunt, my mother-in-law and my dad. I find myself every year before celebrating Thanksgiving with an ever-changing table thinking of life anew under the cross and outside the empty tomb of Jesus.

This is always a contemplative time for me, a thin place in the turning of the year where a door opens between worlds that often seem terribly far apart. In these late fall days, I am grateful to remember that in the body of Christ, death does not release us from being in relationship with one another.

So I begin today with a poem of Blessing called “God of the Living” by Jan Richardson:

When the wall between the worlds

Is too firm

Too close

When it seems

All solidity

And sharp edges

When every morning you awake

As though flattened against it

Its forbidding presence

Fairly pressing the breath

From you

All over again

Then may you be given a glimpse

Of how weak the wall

And how strong what stirs

On the other side

Breathing with you

And blessing you still

Forever bound to you

But freeing you

Into this living

Into this world

So much wider

Than you have ever known

Before the death of my husband, one activity we enjoyed together was being hospice volunteers. We felt privileged to be with people at a very precious and sacred time in their lives. There was a holiness about those encounters that is difficult to put into words. We met a lot of people with a multitude of physical ailments. Rich and poor, churched and unchurched, eager to talk about an afterlife and not. Some of these people were alone, some were in lovingly long marriages, some were with a special someone they had met later in life following a death of a spouse or a divorce. We have all known people who are enjoying a second chance at happiness with someone they were meant to be with. In hospice, in these second loves, I often saw a special faithfulness as they endured a terminal illness together.

I wonder if the questions they had at death might echo what we hear in scripture today. Being the second spouse, what does it mean about me? Who will I belong to? Will he/she be waiting for me?

What would we answer in that situation? What could we say to fill the void left by the spouse’s death while remaining faithful to the God who has faith in us?

Jesus was asked this question in our gospel text today. This scripture we read in Luke comes late in Jesus’ ministry. He has already traveled all over Galilee and proclaimed the Good News. He has healed the sick, fed the hungry, and cared for people wherever he went.

These Sadducees are continuing to want to trap Jesus, to embarrass him. The Sadducees tend to be wealthy and well-connected. They accept only the Torah as authoritative scripture. They reject the idea of resurrection because it is not found in the Torah.

And so they invite Jesus into this no-win territory between the no resurrection Sadducees and the Pharisees who do believe in resurrection. It’s a place where Jesus is bound to alienate half the crowd. And they feel that if he says that all seven brothers will be the woman’s husbands, he will probably alienate everyone. People can imagine a man having seven wives but not a woman having seven husbands.

Jesus begins his response to this loaded question in a direct way.

People who belong to THIS age: there is a difference between this age and the age that is to come.

In this age, marriage and the perpetuation of life is essential because of the reality of death. However, in the age that is to come, in resurrection, death will be no more, death will die. So marriage is no longer needed. God’s purpose for life after life after death will be so glorious and remarkable that marriage will be no more.

What Christ is conveying to these listeners and to us is that there is a beauty in the resurrection that we discover when we find ourselves caught up in the mission of God and there is an indescribable fulfillment in the resurrection that is to come when God makes all things new.

God will wrap us up in such a way that marriage will no longer be necessary to convey the deep sense of love and commitment that it does in this realm. Our spouse will not be married to anyone, but we will all belong to each other. I remember discussing this scripture when I was going through grief support after my husband had died. I did not like hearing these words at the time and yet I have come to believe that there is something beautiful about the fact that when we do go to greater glory we will all be equal with one another.

The way Jesus confronted the question of the Sadducees is so relevant to us today as people of grace who contemplate both life and death. Many of the questions that we probably ponder are difficult because we desperately cling to this material world that we know… the here and now. In our families, our marriages, and our relationships we find our fulfillment and our purpose. When we lose someone we love, someone in whom we root our identity, we do wonder what will happen in the world to come. There is a lot we do not know But here is what we know for sure:

God will take care of us. God will lead us through the loss of our loved ones and hold them in His loving embrace until the time when all the saints will be reunited. Not as brothers, sisters, husbands and wives But reunited as children of God.

Jesus’ response to the Sadducees is the way that God responds to many of our questions — not always with answers that flatter us or make life here on earth simpler — but with His life given for us so that we might more fully give our lives to him.

What we need to remember as we immerse ourselves in these scriptures today is that all these texts transport us to God’s eternal heaven and the coming of Christ with life and death pulling on our ears and on our hearts.

We are dead with Christ in our baptismal waters — yet we are alive with Christ in his resurrection. God’s eternal order does not equate to how we relate to one another here on earth.

And we always need to remember that God is with us in the mundane and the radiant.

God is with us in life and in death, in marriage and divorce and in new relationships. He is with us in our joys and in our fears.

God is with us here, now and forever more. He is not a God of the dead but a God of the living.

All are included, loved, favored now and in God’s new order.

Have a blessed Thanksgiving.