Luke 20.27-38

+ As most of you know, I have beenon a reading binge for over a year now.

I am averaging about five books amonth.

Reading has been my lifeline—or maybeI should say my escape—from some of the realities of our world.

If it’s been my escape though Ihave to say: it’s been failing me.

The realities are still creeping inand I’m still having to face them and speak out against them and fight therealities of them.  

Still, my reading adventure hasbeen interesting.

And lately I have been findingmyself reading some of the theologians who have influenced me over the years.

I re-read my Paul Tillich.

I’ve re-read Dietrich Bonhoeffer(who continues to speak quite effectively to us right here and right now in ourcurrent situation)

I have re-read Thomas Merton andDorothee Solle (who I truly love) and the liberation theologians.

I have re-read the desert mothersand fathers.

And some new thinkers too.

I recently recommended to StephanieGarcia (who jokes with me about my lack of belief in an eternal hell) a book Iread called The Gospel of Inclusion by Bishop Carlton Pearson.

There’s even a Netflix film about thisbook called, Come Sunday.

It’s about his realization that hecannot believe in Hell any longer and how his church reacted to thisrealization.

It’s an alright film, but I thinkmore important than anything, it does open up a conversation about why people really,really WANT to believe in hell, even when they are presented with the optionthat it might not exist—certainly in the way we have popularly believed.

Another one of the theologians Ihave been re-reading is none other than the late great, John Shelby Spong, theformer Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey.

One of the first books of his Iread in my twenties was a book called Resurrection: Myth or Reality?

 I don’t think I’m giving the end away bysaying that Bishop Spong’s answer to that question was: Myth.

Bishop Spong believed that therewas no resurrection—rather that whatever resurrection one believed in waspurely metaphorical.

Yes, Jesus died on the cross.

Yes, he lives on among those of whobelieve in him.

But there was no bodilyresurrection, according to Spong.

In fact, in this book, Spongasserts his belief that Jesus’ body was probably taken down from the cross andgiven to the dogs to feed on.

The tomb is empty, Spong said.

But not because of any supernaturalevents.

The tomb is empty and Jesus is nothere because he was never there in the first place.

It’s an interesting read.

And I find that I still don’t agreewith Spong on many points, including the fact that I don’t believe Jesus’ bodywas thrown to dogs after he died.

And Bishop Spong would’ve been allright with that disagreement (which is why I like Bishop Spong).

But the issue of resurrection isstill an interesting one, and one we usually don’t give a lot of thought tooutside of the Easter season.

Certainly the Sadducees in ourGospel reading today viewed the Resurrection of the body in a different way ofunderstanding the resurrection.  

Now, to give them credit, the Sadduceeswere smooth and they were smart.

They knew how to present a slyargument without being blatant.

You can hear the condescension andsarcasm in their question.

And they did believe that bybringing up the resurrection, they would show Jesus to be the fool and thecharlatan.

For the Sadducees, the resurrection of the body was a fairy tale.

It was something gullible peoplehoped in.

It was absurd and ridiculous.

And so they present this questionto Jesus, which is actually a very good question.

It is a question many of us ask aswell, especially any of us who have been affected by divorce or death of aspouse and remarriage.

In the resurrection, whose spouse willwe be?

My mother, who had a very messyfirst marriage before she married my father, would often ponder this.

In fact, she would be blunt andsay, “When I see Roger [he first husband] in heaven, I hope he stays far awayfrom me!”

I always gave her credit that shebelieved Roger would actually be IN heaven, to which she would just roll hereyes and say, “it not up to me.”

Jesus, in response to this, in thatway Jesus does, flips their argument back around on them.

Jesus lays out a heaven in whichthere is no longer a need for things like marriage.

In heaven we will all be likeangels.

He then lays out this amazing statement,

God, he says, is not the God of thedead, but a God of the living.

Jesus' God is the God of Abraham and Isaacand Jacob, who, he implies, are not dead at all, but alive.

Present tense.

This particular scripture has been meaningfulto me after reading Eric Metaxas biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

For all my issues with Metaxas himselfwhich I’m not going to get into this morning, there is a passage in that bookthat references this scripture that just blew me away when I read it.

In a paragraph referencing the assassinationof Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious SS monster who essentially orchestrated thefinal solution on the Jews, we hear this,

“At the end of May [1942], the albinostoat [I love that word “stoat”] had been ambushed by Czech resistance fighterswhile he was riding in his open-topped Mercedes [in Prague]. Eight days later,the architect of the Final Solution fell into the hands of the God of Abraham,Issac and Jacob.”

Our God is a living God.

And, according to Jesus, somehow,in some way, we go on.

For him, that is what resurrection is.

Christians—in our typical way—have overthe centuries went to extremes to explain and define what resurrection is.

And they have made it one of the definingbeliefs we must have to be saved.

Essentially, to be resurrected wemust first believe in resurrection.

Hmmm. I don’t hear Jesus telling usthat anywhere here…

But, us Christians love to justsqueeze the nuances out of everything!

I once had a former parishioner—a cradleEpiscopalian—who later joined the Eastern Orthodox Church over his belief thatthe Episcopal Church had lost its way regarding belief in the Resurrection.

He refused to receive Communionfrom priests whom he knew did not believe in an orthodox understanding of theResurrection of Jesus.

In fact, one of the first questionshe would ask a new priest when he would meet them is: So what do you believeregarding the Resurrection?

I luckily passed that test, but notwithout a good deal of spiritual searching and struggling and some verbalnuances of my own.

But, the fact this morning is this:what do we believe about the resurrection?

Certainly we profess our collectivefaith in the Resurrection every Sunday in the Creed.

But have we really thought aboutit?

Well, of course,  one of the best places to look when we areour examining our faith is, of course, our trust Catechism, found in the backof the Book of Common Prayer.

So, let’s take a looksee at whatthe Prayer Book says about the resurrection.

If you will take your trusty old prayerbooks and turn to page 862.

There we find that question,

“What do we mean by the resurrection of the body?”

The answer is: We mean that God will raise us from death in the fullness of our being, that we may live with Christ in the communion of the saints.

I love that definition ofresurrection.

God will raise us up in thefullness of our being.

Wow!

That is beautiful!

And that is something I can agreewith and believe wholeheartedly in.

Now, what that means specificallyis not easy.

And, you know?

I don’t want it to be.

I don’t want to examine that answertoo closely.

I just want to kind of bask in theglow of the beauty of those words

God will raise us up to thefullness of our being.

Isn’t that our goal after all?

To live into the fullness of ourbeing?

Isn’t that what trans people, and lesbianand gay and asexual and bisexual and straight people have been striving to do allalong?

Live into the fullness of theirbeing?

Isn’t that what all of us as living,breathing, searching, questioning, doubting human beings are striving for?

To live into the fullness of ourbeing?

We don’t need to squeeze themeaning out of those words, as we are apt to do.

Because if we do, we will lose the purityand beauty of that statement.

 When we start becoming too specific, we startlosing something of the beauty of our faith.

We lose the purity and the poetryof our faith.

When we start trying to examine tooclosely how the resurrection will happen and when it will happen and how a pileof bones or cremated remains or a body destroyed in the sea can be resurrectedinto another body, bit by bit, we find ourselves derailed.

What we do know, however is that what the resurrection promises is being raisingup in the fullness of our being by our living God.  

The whole basis of what Jesus isgetting at in today’s Gospel, in this discourse on marriage, is that theresurrection is not, as the great Anglican theologian Reginald Fuller, said, “aprolongation of our present life, but a new mode of existence.”

It’s not an extension of thisworld.

It’s something…different.

We will still be us, it seems from what Jesus is saying, but we will be living intothat fullness of our being—with a different understanding of what it means tobe alive.

Issues like marriage and divorceand remarriage will no longer be an issue.

Now some of us might despair atthat fact.

We want to know that when we awakeinto the fullness of our being, into that resurrected life, we will have ourfamilies there, our spouses and our loved ones.

I have no doubt that our loved oneswill be there, but it seems that it will be different than here.

We will have a truly fulfilled andcomplete relationship with all of our loved ones, and also with those who wemay not have loved.

What this leads us to is, at thesame time, a glimpse of the freedom that we will gain at the resurrection.

Just as some things such as marriage will no longer be an issue, all thoseother issues we are dealing with now in our lives and in the church will alsono longer be with us.

The issues that divide us as a country,as a church, as a community, will all be done away with at the resurrection.

And these bodies too will be done away with as well.

These bodies that will fail us andbetray us—these bodies that will die on us and be buried or be burned will nolonger be a part of who we are anymore.

We will, at the resurrection, bemade whole and complete and perfect by our living God, the God of ourforebearers.

The reason we know this is because the God we serve—the God we have gatheredtogether to worship this morning, is not a God of the dying bodies we have withus now.

The God we serve and worship is aGod of the living.

When Jesus identifies God as theGod of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, he is saying thatAbraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive and that their God is the God of the living.

So, Resurrection is important tous.

It is VITAL to us.

It is important to us because whenwe long for and strive to live into the fullness of our being, we are living theresurrected life.

Resurrection is essential to ourfaith, because in it we have met and faced death.

Death no longer has control over us.

It longer has any power in ourlives.

The power and strength of death hasbeen defeated in the resurrection.

In the resurrection, we have thealmost audacious ability to say, at the grave, that power-packed word of life:Alleluia.

Praise God!

Praise the living God of the Living!

For our God is not a God of thedead, but of the living.

So, let us live into the fullnessof our being.

Let us live into the resurrectedlife that is our inheritance and our legacy.

And only in life—in this precious,beautiful and wonderful life, given to us by our God—can we fully and trulyserve our living God.