Sermon Archive
Readings for 11 November 2007
Proper 27
Year C
Job said,
"O that my words were written down!
O that they were inscribed in a book!
O that with an iron pen and with lead
they were engraved on a rock forever!
For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;
and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another."
2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5
We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth. For this purpose he called you through our proclamation of the good news, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.
Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.
Finally, brothers and sisters, pray for us, so that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly and be glorified everywhere, just as it is among you, and that we may be rescued from wicked and evil people; for not all have faith. But the Lord is faithful; he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one. And we have confidence in the Lord concerning you, that you are doing and will go on doing the things that we command. May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.
Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus [and asked him a question, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us 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. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."]
Jesus said to them, "Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.
Sermon
The Rev. Jack Zamboni
There came to Jesus some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection.
In the Judaism of Jesus’ day, one of the hot theological debates was not sexuality, but about whether on not resurrection happened. The Hebrew Scriptures had almost nothing to say on the matter at all, so the issue was up for grabs. The Pharisees believed that God would resurrect the dead. The Sadducees – another religious party of the day – said no: this life was all there was. Jesus agreed with the Pharisees, not the Sadducees –hence their attempt to catch him in a trick argument in today’s Gospel
The argument over resurrection between Jesus and the Sadducees was not just an abstract theological disagreement about whether there is a life beyond death; it was a disagreement about the kind of world we live in now. There being no resurrection or there being resurrection makes a difference not just in what happens after we die; it makes a difference in how we live in the present. And how big a difference it makes will come clear when we look at a world in which there is no resurrection.
Imagining a world without resurrection isn’t easy. We’ve lived all our lives as heirs to a culture which for 2,000 years has assumed that there is resurrection. Its not, of course, that we don’t fear death and don’t sometimes take extraordinary measures to postpone it; nor that there aren’t people in our world who believe that when you die, that’s it. But for all the varied outlooks in today’s culture, the normal assumption still is that there is a future and better life beyond the grave.
Now try to imagine with me, if you can, what it would feel like to live in a world where that assumption didn’t exist, a world in which there is no resurrection. Try to imagine how you would come at your daily life if you didn’t carry around in you somewhere the belief that your three score years and ten -- or more -- weren’t going to be the sum total of your existence in the universe. What it would it feel like if what happened here and now was all there is; that in some finite amount of time, everything you had done, been, wished, hoped, made or desired would be cut off and gone forever.
When I imagine such a world, the picture that comes to my mind is of a closed-in box -- and a gray one at that. The gray is sign that such a world would be rather depressing. But it is the closed-in box that really captures my attention. This world with no resurrection, this closed-in box, is a world of very limited possibilities; a world with very limited hope. If your death and the death of everyone and everything you love were the complete and final boundary of existence you would be in a world without a future; a world that ends; a world where all you can look forward to is, quite literally, nothing.
Living in such a world, the overwhelming tendency would be to play it safe in everything from crossing the street to getting on a plane, to marriage and partnership. You’d hold on as best you could to whatever good things happened to come your way; you’d latch on to whatever felt like it might give you some security. There would be very good reason not to take risks -- what if you took a big risk with your only shot at this limited life -- and got it wrong? What if you screwed up your one chance at a very limited future? Like the Sadducees, you might be concerned to pass on what you could, materially and otherwise, to your children, since they would be the only connection to the future that existed at all. But for yourself, this closed-in, gray world would be a hopeless, futureless dead-end. St. Paul summed up it perfectly when he wrote to some Corinthian Christians who were flirting with the idea of there being no resurrection: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” A world with no resurrection is a world without a future, and without a future, you cannot take risks and you cannot hope.
By contrast, a world where there is resurrection is world with a future, a world with countless possibilities and unlimited hope. Whatever happens, whatever any of us does, good or bad, is not the final word. No matter what risks we take, what tragedies occur, what mistakes we make, what sins we commit, there is the hope that a new future can still be made beyond the worst that we do in life or that life does to us, beyond, even, the seemingly final boundary of death.
There is enormous freedom in that hope -- the freedom to live life fully, to take risks, seek out new possibilities, to live towards the future, because there actually is a future to live toward. Paul makes this point when writing about Abraham’s hope in God’s promise that in his old age he would have a son. Abraham’ body was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), and his wife Sarah was barren, Paul says, but Abraham hoped against hope, for he trusted in the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” (See Romans 4:16-25) Abraham’s hope comes from living in a world of resurrection, a world of faith in a God who gives life to the dead and brings into existence the things that do not exist -- a world in which hope abounds, because God is always bringing new life and new futures into existence. That faith and hope allowed Abraham to take the risk of leaving his homeland for a far away promised land, and the greater risk of trusting his future to the promise of a son in his old age.
That is what life is like in a world where there is resurrection -- a life of hope, possibility, and risk-taking. When we have faith, however inarticulate, in resurrection; trust, however faint, that we don’t live in a closed-box world, but in a world with a future, we can take risks because in the world of resurrection taking risks for God actually makes sense. That is why it matters so much to how we live now that the Sadducees were wrong and Jesus right, that, as his own rising from the grave demonstrated, there is resurrection. For it is resurrection that makes it possible ability to take risks, to live towards the future in faith and hope. If resurrection is our future, we can live faithfully and hopefully in the present.
Now, I had a problem when I began to prepare to preach this week. Because next week is our Commitment Sunday, I wanted to preach about Stewardship today and it wasn’t clear to me at first what this Gospel might have to say about that. But maybe you’ve begun to see for yourself what I began to see once I realized how resurrection, hope, faith, the future, and risk-taking were all connected. Resurrection and stewardship are connected because stewardship is, among other things, about risk-taking. Of course, stewardship is about providing resources of time, talent, and treasure to carry out God’s work of ministry in the church and in the world. It is, as preachers often say, about gratitude to God for all the good gifts of our lives, and the recognition that all we “own” really belongs to God. It is about our need to give, to be generous as God is generous with us, and it is about recognizing that we live in abundance, not scarcity. Stewardship is all these things and more -- someone has defined stewardship as All we do with All we have All the time. All of that is true.
But stewardship is also about risk-taking and that is where a lot of us get stuck in our stewardship: it feels too risky. Our Stewardship Committee has been asking us to make a Leap of Faith in our pledging this year -- and that strikes me as just the right words. Specifically, they’ve asked us to increase what we commit to give in 2008 and to develop a plan to continue increasing our giving in years to come. Now, the truth is that the increases many of us might consider making – an additional $5, $10 or $20 per week depending on our income – are not all that risky. Its what we spend for a meal at McDonald’s, a car wash or movie ticket plus popcorn. Even the tithe, 10 % of income, which is the Episcopal Church’s standard of giving, isn’t really that risky. I’ve been tithing for about 30 years and have always had enough to live on.
Yet giving away money feels risky. The economy is uncertain; the world is uncertain. The natural reaction is to hold on to what we have, to what we imagine will guarantee a future in this uncertain world. That feels much safer, more secure, less risky than giving more of our money away -- because money, we think, is the real source of a secure future in our lives. Stewardship is about more than money, of course, but the money part of it is often the hardest to talk about for just this reason. In being asked to give our money, it feels like we are being asked to take a big risk, to give away our security, because we think money gives safety for the future.
Well you know what, friends? If we lived in a world without resurrection, that kind of thinking would make sense. If we lived in a world of limited possibility and circumscribed hope, a world in which taking risks would seem like a dumb and crazy thing to do, then giving away your money would be a foolish risk.
But that’s not the world we Christians live in. We live in a world of resurrection, a world made by the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist; a world in which it is possible to take risks, including giving away money, because our hope for the future doesn’t lie in money, but in resurrection. Our God is not the God of the dead who are trapped in a closed-box world where holding on to all you can makes sense. Our God is the God of the living, the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, the God who took the greatest and most life-giving risk in creating the universe in the first place and invites us to do the same.
For us, as for Abraham, taking risks is the path to new life, the path of hope, the path of faith, the path of openness to God’s future, the path of resurrection. Stewardship is not chiefly about dollars; it is not about funding the church’s budget or even about supporting the church’s ministry, though of course it will help do those things. Stewardship is, as the Stewardship Committee has told us, is about taking a leap of faith; it is about putting our money where our mouths are; it is about living the faith we celebrate at Easter and every Sunday, the hope that is ours as followers of the risen Christ; it is about celebrating the gift that we live in a world in which risk is not only possible but rewarding, Giving only makes sense in a world of resurrection -- but in a world of resurrection, giving makes all the sense in the world.
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