22nd Sunday After Pentecost

Luke 20:27-38

We are almost done with the Gospel of Luke, just a couple more weeks until the end of the liturgical year, but Luke, he is not yet done with us. Luke is still trying to get us to think in new ways and reorient our worldview in order to focus on what God thinks is truly important.

And our gospel reading for today skips a little ways ahead from where we have been.  It comes from right near the end of Jesus’s ministry after he has entered Jerusalem for the final time.  All of Jesus’s counter cultural teaching, all of Jesus’s revolutionary ideas, all of Jesus’s pushing against the world order is finally beginning to come to a head.  Those with the most to lose are really starting to push back.  And so today’s lesson comes right in the middle of a string of encounters with people and groups questioning Jesus in the temple.  Now lets be clear, these are not his friends or disciples, but rather people who are trying to either discredit him or get him to incriminate himself in front of the authorities so they can arrest him.  But it’s not working.  Jesus bests them all every time.

So now today, the Sadducees come.  They are the wealthy elites of the area.  The people who are in charge of the temple and the ones that benefit most from the current religious and political system of their time.  And importantly for this story, unlike many Jewish people of this era, they don’t believe in the resurrection or that there is anything out there beyond what we see and experience in the here and now.   No Messiah, no judgement day, no heaven or hell, just this life and then it is over.  Now there are a variety of reasons for this, first because they only recognize the first 5 books of the bible which they claim don’t mention the resurrection.  But mostly because they really like the current system and strongly oppose any sort of change and so they are afraid of the revolutionary nature of teachers like Jesus and radical changes that the Messiah would bring.  They don’t want people envisioning a new and better world even if it’s in the afterlife.  It’s better for them that everything stays the exactly the way it is now.

And it is important to remember that they have already made up their mind on this issue long ago.  They are not asking Jesus these questions in order to learn anything or to have a meaningful discussion or to attempt to grow in faith.  They are there purely to attempt to embarrass and discredit Jesus.  Basically in modern parlance they are just trolling him.

So they ask him about the archaic practice of Levirate marriage, which is this weird thing described in the old testament where if one brother dies, another brother should marry his widow in order to preserve the family property and legacy.  It was an idea that may have made some sense in primitive agricultural communities, but there is no evidence that it was ever routinely practiced, especially not in Jesus’s time, where it would have been illegal under Roman law.  But it is in the bible, and nothing makes a religious troll happier than proof-texting obscure bible passages in order to try to embarrass forward thinking religious leaders.  Apparently, some things never change.

But when he hears their question, Jesus does something amazing.  He turns the argument on its head and does something beautiful instead.  Jesus tells them flat out that they are worried about completely the wrong things.  In this question and in life in general the Sadducees were known for being entirely focused on life only in here and now.  On wealth and status and power and accumulating and keeping it.  So of course, their biggest concern is in this question is about who gets to keep the property.  Sorry ladies, in this story the wife is property. 

But Jesus shuts them down, because they are looking in the wrong place.  Jesus doesn’t care about property or status or wealth and neither does God.  In the world that he envisions, these things don’t even exist.  Instead he asserts something truly radical that both men and women, those who marry and are given in marriage are worthy of salvation and called children of God, regardless of gender or marital status.   That “those considered worthy of a place in the resurrection will neither marry nor be given in marriage.”  That is not what we will be doing any more.  Instead we will be free to live in love.  Free from fear of death and loss and material constraints.  All those things that seemed so important in life, all those marks of wealth and success, none of it matters in the world to come.

And then Jesus goes and says something even more astonishing, he tells them that God is the God of the living and not the dead.  So, if the Lord is God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then they must be children of the resurrection, for to him all of them are alive.  Wow.  Think about wat that means.  That everything, everyone, every great thing in all of history, everyone you have ever loved or cared for, all of them are alive to God.  Now that is powerful good news.  That which seems dead or diminished here on Earth to us, is not diminished to God, is still just as alive and vibrant as ever. 

We live in a time when so much in our lives seems diminished.  Our church, our families, our communities, our institutions, our civil discourse and our ability to interact with each other, the health and sustainability of our natural world.  But perhaps like the Sadducees of the past what we really suffer from is a lack of perspective.  Because all these things remain alive and vibrant to God and eagerly await the time of resurrection.  Nothing is really ever lost that is loved by God.       

So the question then becomes what do we want our legacy to be?  Like Job, what do we want to be written down with the iron pen?  What do we want literally set in stone?  What do we want to have survive in God when all our material things are wiped away?  When our bodies are gone, when our buildings are gone, when our wealth is gone.  What will be left behind?

Our legacy of love. Of lives changed, of gracious caring, of fellowship with our neighbors, of friendships and families and relationships and kindness. Last week, we remembered the legacy of the saints of our lives, those who guided us and shaped our faith, who enriched our lives and brough us joy, and we lit candles to remember their light that still shines forth in the world.  That is what it means to be alive in God, a light that never diminishes, that passes from generation to generation, that never goes out, even long after our physical presence and our material things are gone.

Because that is what it means to live as a child of God.  To be focused on a legacy of love beyond material things.  Because whether our gatherings are large or small, whether we are rich or poor, young or old we can still have a great impact on the lives of those around us.  And this is the resurrected world Jesus invites us to where we can live fully in him.  Amen.