SERMON FOR NOVEMBER 10, 2019 TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST TEXT: LUKE 20:27-38

One of my favorite theologians is a German gentleman with the delightfully teutonic name of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. He lived from 1768-1834. He served as a pastor in Berlin and was an immensely popular preacher. Early in his career a friend of his died, leaving behind a wife and several daughters. The distraught widow wrote Schleiermacher, seeking comfort. She was considerably shorter than her deceased spouse and wanted this pastor’s assurance that when it came her time to follow her husband to heaven, he would be able to spot her among the ever-growing ranks of taller angels and saints. Schleiermacher was an educated and thoughtful man. Tempting though it is to speculate about the afterlife, indeed to spin a detailed vision of our future heavenly home, Schleiermacher was a committed minimalist on the subject. He was unwilling to say more than the Scriptures warranted, and in his judgment, the Scriptures give us very little to go on. He pointed to two passages: the familiar one from chapter 14 of the Gospel John in which Jesus assures his disciples that there are many dwelling places in his Father’s house and that he is going to prepare a place for them, and the brief passage from the first Epistle of John: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (3:2). Schleiermacher scrupulously respected that boundary —“what we will be has not yet been revealed” — and he was comfortable with it. Scripture had little to say about the life to come, but these two passages said enough to sustain his hope about the future beyond the grave. It was safely in Christ’s hands; that was all he could know and all he needed to know. His friend’s widow was not so readily satisfied. It seems to me that Schleiermacher might have appealed to today’s Gospel as a third text offering us a glimpse of what is to come. However, in this particular instance it would only have complicated the widow’s concern about a heavenly reunion with her husband, because eventually she and Schleiermacher married. Together they raised her daughters and had a son of their own. “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?”

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 . . . .” Whoa, wait a minute, Jesus, now that you bring up the question of marriage and the afterlife, and the issue of remarriage, even multiple times to boot, would you care to elaborate? Because this issue hits home for many of us. Members of monastic orders took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, so that they might anticipate that angelic resurrection existence while on earth. They renounced these defining parts of the life we experience in this world: poverty instead of the pursuit of property and wealth, which give one independence and security; obedience to one’s superior in the order rather than the freedom of self-determination and the power to shape one’s destiny; celibacy instead of the intimacy and companionship of marriage. No family to give purpose to one’s striving; no children to carry on one’s legacy. These were great sacrifices to make in pursuit of a state of blessedness only hinted at in Scripture. Even when monastic practice was flourishing and celebrated by the church as a higher spiritual estate, it was the calling of a minority. Most Christians followed their Lord while rooted deep in the secular world of work, family and community, which was decidedly not angelic. Most Christians still do. Our relationships, our accomplishments, our losses and unrealized hopes — these make us who we are. So what endures into the age to come, when we become like angels? That same passage from 1 John cited above begins, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are” (3:1). Will we be the same children of God when we become children of the resurrection? If only Jesus had unpacked this for at least a few more verses.

But Jesus’ purpose is not to offer his hearers an introduction to the afterlife. At this point in Luke’s Gospel the Lord has made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. After disrupting the temple trade and driving out the moneylenders, he has begun teaching there daily. He has a series of run-ins with the religious authorities, and with each one the hostility grows. In today’s Gospel it is the Sadducees who try to bait Jesus. This group within the Jewish community was distinguished by the fact that they recognized only the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) or Torah as scripture, while the Pharisees and others included the Prophets and Psalms as well. It was in those books that the Pharisees found justification for belief in a general resurrection of the dead. The Sadducees, however, rejected the idea. So they come to Jesus with this extreme hypothetical situation based on the Jewish law in order to make the doctrine of the resurrection sound ridiculous and to discredit him for teaching it. Jesus abruptly turns the tables on them, making them look foolish for their assumption that the afterlife will simply continue the earthly order in a heavenly venue. The issue raised about the wife who is widowed repeatedly and marries the seven brothers in turn will be a moot point in the age to come. Then the husbands cannot die anymore; there will be no need to birth children to perpetuate their name. The widow will be off the hook.

Jesus knows the Sadducees questioning him are not acting in good faith. Once he has put them in their place with this tantalizing peek into the social arrangements of the world to come, he moves on to make the case for belief in 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 a God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” It is a shrewd argument on Jesus’ part. He draws on the Pentateuch, the scriptures recognized by the Sadducees as authoritative, by citing Exodus 3. This is the story of Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush and the revelation of God’s holy name. The passage, Jesus points out, declares that God is — the present tense — the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not that God was their God. So he concludes that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must in some sense still be alive; hence, the necessity of resurrection. The confrontation ends there, because, as Luke tells us, “. . . they no longer dared to ask him another question” (Luke 20:40).

But we would certainly like to. Like the diminutive widow destined to become Frau Schleiermacher, many of us long for more details about our heavenly reunions, more specific assurances, than the Scriptures provide. Speculation is hard to resist. I try to limit mine to this. After my father’s death, my mother said she could not remember a time when he was not in her life. So her resurrected life cannot be one without him in it either, whatever the status of marriage in the age to come. And as for me, my life can never be whole until I am relieved of the terror and sorrow that still linger after all these years in the wake of my failed marriage. I envision that in the age to come Lucy’s father and I will see one another again and be at peace. And move on once and for all eternity. But in the end I must heed Schleiermacher’s faithful restraint: “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” It is enough to know that because we are alive to God, we will be alive to one another. Amen.