I didn't actually preach this sermon. I was so unhappy with it that I went off manuscript and preached what was in my heart. Which followed a *similar* slant to what is printed below, but on the whole was very different.
Pentecost
25
November
10, 2013
Luke
20:27-38
Sixty
years ago today, my dad’s parents were married.
In their wedding ceremony, they exchanged vows and in those vows was a
promise to be faithful until death parts them.
Yesterday, we gathered in Kalamazoo to celebrate their faithfulness to
each other and God’s faithfulness to them over the past sixty years. Notice, that wedding vows are not for
eternity, but only until death parts the two making the vows. It is beyond our knowing what relationships
will look like in the age to come, if they will be the same or if they will
look different. As those who preside
over weddings, we can only speak of what we know and all we know is of for sure
is of this world and this life. We can
only imagine what it to come in the next life. And this makes our gospel text
for this morning a little tricky.
Part
of the difficulty with this text is that there are some things that you need to
know when diving in. These are mostly
cultural aspects that make things a lot clearer, and less weird, than they are
if you take them in our current cultural context.
The
first has to do with the Sadducees. The Sadducees are a group of religious
leaders that we don’t hear very much about in the Gospels. They were at odds with the Pharisees because
of two distinct differences in beliefs.
The first is that the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection. For
them, this life is all there is. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were
believers in the afterlife and the resurrection of the dead at the coming of
the Messiah. The other distinct
difference between the two groups was that the Sadducees believed that the sole
source of divine authority came from the Torah, the first five books of Hebrew
Scriptures, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Pharisees believed that divine authority
could also be found in the other parts of Hebrew Scripture. It is this second difference of opinion that
caused the first difference in opinion.
So
there is one area of information that helps us read this text.
The
other piece of information that is helpful in reading this text is in knowing
what Levirate Marriage was. If we were
to read this text in our own cultural context, one might think that the
Sadducees were referring to a very mixed up family…but the reality of Jesus’ time,
and the time before Jesus, is that inheritance laws were so important that if a
married man died childless, it was his younger brothers duty to marry the widow
and raise up children with her for his brother so that land could continue to
pass down through the first man’s line.
This was one of the laws of Moses.
This
law was created with the original intention to do two things. One, to protect the inheritance rights of the
family, and two, to protect the widow from being looked down upon for being childless
at the death of her husband. To be a
childless woman in that time was considered to be cursed according to the
cultural standards. However, this law from Moses, as well intentioned as it may
have been at the time, reveals to a modern day reader the belief held during
that time that women were property, first of their fathers, and then of their
husbands.
So,
to recap…Sadducees and Pharisees didn’t get along and it was not unusual for a
woman to be married off to her husband’s younger brother if her husband died
childless, per the laws of Moses.
This
brings us back to our gospel text for this morning.
When
the Sadducees approach Jesus, then, they are bringing to him a very extreme
case of this levirate marriage. They
were coming to Jesus not because they cared about the wording of the marriage
vows, but because they were part of the group of folks that were seeking out a
reason to get rid of Jesus. So they try
to trick him with this story - A woman was married to a man and, at the time of
the man’s death, the couple had no children, so she was married to the oldest
of the man’s six younger brothers. The
woman wound up being married off to all seven brothers after each of brother
died childless. The woman then
dies…which begs the question…Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? Which is really to ask whose property will
she be?
When
the Sadducees bring this question to Jesus they, who do not believe in the
resurrection, are assuming that Jesus and the Pharisees believe that life in
the resurrection will be just a continuation of life here and now. They are also assuming that this barren
woman’s place in the resurrection is dependent on one of the brothers…they’re
just not sure which one because at one time she was the property of each of
them.
But
instead of playing into their hands, Jesus turns the story on its head and
reveals to them that the resurrection life if not like life as we know it
now. It’s better. In this life woman are married off and
treated as property. In the resurrection,
the institution of marriage where in a woman is treated as property is not
necessary…in fact the ownership of any human being as property is unnecessary
because the age of the resurrection is not just a rehashing of the past but a
new and different…and better age.
There
is no death in the age of the resurrection.
There is restoration to wholeness and the original intention of God’s
good creation, one in which sin does not exist.
One in which everyone is on an equal footing as children of God and there
are no victims because God’s ultimate justice is done. In the story Luke tells,
this means that in the resurrection, the barren woman has just as much value as
the seven brothers she was married off to, even though in this life she was
considered to be worthless because of her incapacity to have children. And while we live in an age where, for the
most part, women are not seen as property of their husbands, the ownership of
women and men in other forms of property holding still hold people
captive. In the age of the resurrection,
God’s justice will be done for them, though in this age we are called to strive
for the day when no one will be considered a commodity to be traded, bought or
sold.
God
made a promise to be our God for all eternity and our God is a God who keeps
his promises. When Jesus responded to the inquiry of the Sadducees, he revealed
a God of the living, not a God of the dead.
So if God makes good on God’s promises, God will make good on God’s promise
to be our God in this life and in the life to come.
The
Sadducees did not get the answer they were looking for. But they didn’t bother Jesus again. Soon they would see the manifestation of what
Jesus spoke about. Soon he would be put
to death by the Romans, only to rise from the dead three days later. Death would not win this battle, and a
resurrected Christ would be revealed for them to see and touch. For
Luke and his audience…the forces of Rome which put Jesus to death and later
viciously persecuted the early Christians and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem
did not have the last word, Luke was confident that God and God’s good creation
does. And we who sit here this morning, we who are children of God, joined to
Christ’s death in our baptism, hear the same promise…that our God, a God of the
living, will be our God in both this life and in the next. And though we do not know exactly what the
age of the resurrection will look like, but we do know this…it is not merely a
continuation of this life, but something better…an age where death will cease
to exist, an age where all people are free and loved equally, an age where there
are no victims, an age where we are all united under God’s totally and
unfailing love.
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