Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Sermon for November 10, 2013: 25th Sunday after Pentecost



Sermon for November 10, 2013
PREACHER: Pastor Carrie Smith

Luke 20:27-38

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

 Last week, our community gathered to celebrate All Saints Day, lighting candles in remembrance of our loved ones who have died, and rejoicing in the promise of the resurrection. Here at Bethany, this day is always a beautiful celebration: we haul out the bell choir, our best singers, special brass musicians, and our lovely liturgical dancers, all to help us give thanks to God who is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end; and to Jesus, the risen Lord, who promises to be with us always, even to the end of the age. It was a glorious worship service, thanks to all those who offered their artistic talents to the glory of God! 

On All Saints Sunday, the promise of the resurrection is what makes the day more than just a memorial for the dead. The promise that one day we will all be raised and reunited with our loved ones is why Christians do not mourn as those with no hope, but instead gather and celebrate as we did in spectacular fashion last week.


But let’s be honest: on All Saints Day, we don’t dwell on the specifics. The preacher doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about the nature of the resurrected life, providing proof of the bodily resurrection of the dead, or painting Thomas Kinkade-style pictures of heaven. Why? Because everyone has a different understanding of what the resurrection of the dead means or looks like. And Scripture, while it gives us hope, doesn’t give us many details to go on!



Take the text for this week, for example.

Here we encounter a fringe group, the Sadducees, publicly testing Jesus on the issue of the resurrection. First of all, we don’t know much about the Sadducees and who they were. These guys seem to be ones whose entire identity is made up of what they are against. Can you picture people like this from your own life? Folks who seem to draw energy from being negative? You might remember the Sadducees from Sunday School, where I, at least, was taught to remember that the Sadducees were against the resurrection, so they were sad, you see...

So the Sadducees had issues with the resurrection, and they especially had issues with Jesus teaching in the synagogue about the resurrection. So they concocted a scenario, a perfect storm, a trap of a riddle, meant to twist Jesus up in his argument and prove the resurrection to be impossible.

“So…there is this woman whose husband dies, leaving her childless. So she marries his brother, and he dies. She eventually marries all 7 brothers, and they all die, and she never has any children—so after she dies, whose wife will she be?”

The point of throwing this riddle at Jesus is to try and make Jesus say something, in the synagogue, that goes against the teachings of Moses. The Sadducees want to discredit him, and therefore his ideas. But Jesus comes back with an answer that stops them in their tracks: he says: “Listen, these marriage laws are about the here and now. The resurrected life is completely different! Your complicated rules will not be an issue! And furthermore, even Moses talks about the resurrection. So the most important thing to know is this: Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. This may not seem like a definitive answer, but for the Sadducees, it was enough to shut them up. The very next verses, which didn’t make it into our lectionary reading for today, say this:

9Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.”40For they no longer dared to ask him another question.

I wish I could say something so definitive about the resurrection—something that would stop doubters in their tracks. Or, even better—I wish I had the right words to clear up my own doubting and confused thoughts on this issue! But to be honest, I had preached about the resurrection at a number of funerals before I had thought too much about what I really believed about it.

And then, I had no choice but to think about it. This happened at my first call, down the road at a country parish, and I had a dear parishioner there who was sick from the very first time I met her. At first, Paula was just short of breath. She wheezed a little as she walked up and down the steps into the church. She always attended the Wednesday evening service with her husband, because for many years she had worked the night shift as a nurse and found Sunday mornings too difficult. Wednesday nights typically had about 15 people in attendance, an intimate group, so we got to know each other quickly, and the Wednesday group often prayed for Paula and her breathing issues.
In the weeks and months after I arrived, as I got to know her, Paula’s health got worse and worse. Doctors were baffled. They could find no reason for her to have difficulty breathing. It wasn’t cancer. It wasn’t asthma. It wasn’t allergies or a mold problem in her house. Finally, they diagnosed her with “idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.” In other words, scarring of the lung tissue with no discernible cause. And no treatment.

She was 59 years old.

Unfortunately, the disease progressed rapidly, and less than a year after I met her, Paula was in the hospital unable to take any meaningful breaths. One incredibly hot August day, I stopped in to see her there after spending far too much time at the county fair (another important part of a rural pastor’s job!) I rushed in, hot and sweaty, for a quick hello, and saw that Paula was really struggling. So I sat at the edge of her bed and asked what I could do. Paula shared that she was frustrated and angry, and incredibly sad to be leaving her husband, kids, and grandchildren. She knew she was dying, and it sucked. But at that moment, in her hospital bed, she wanted to talk about the resurrection.

What was it like? Did I believe in it? How could we know it to be true? Dying was the easy part, she said. Trusting that this wasn’t really the end was the hard part. Please help, she said.

I have to say, as a brand-new pastor, I felt completely unprepared for that conversation. I knew how to write a good funeral sermon. I knew how to baptize babies and chant the liturgy and prepare children for confirmation. I knew how to attend the county fair and bless the cows and pigs and sheep my parishioners were showing. But looking a dying woman in the face and answering her questions about the resurrection seemed something best left to a pastor who knew more than I did, had seen more than I did, or understood Scripture more than I did.

But here was no one else in the room that day but me. So here’s what we did: Paula and I held hands. We decided there was so much we didn’t know (what the resurrection would look like, who would be there, what our bodies would be like, what our relationships to our loved ones will be like, for example) so instead we talked about what we did know: What God is like. How we’ve felt God’s love for us and presence with us. And, especially, where we have experienced resurrection already, in this life.
Paula talked about the joy of holding her grandchildren as babies and seeing the future in their eyes.

I talked about watching my brother journey from the depths of a powerful addiction to a new, clean life, full of promise and hope.

Paula shared about her love of angels (she had a truly massive angel figurine collection at home!) and some of the times when she felt the presence of angels (or God, or the Holy Spirit, or whatever you wanted to call it) giving her comfort and hope.
I shared about the darkness of my own grief after losing several pregnancies, and the new, resurrected life I found when I was able to share my story with others going through the same thing.

Paula talked about feeling Jesus’ presence with her at church, and while reading Scripture, and especially while singing her favorite hymns. She also gave thanks for the life-giving 40 year marriage she had enjoyed with her husband.

After a while, we were silent. There were still many questions left unanswered. The future was still unclear. But together, we had found firm ground in speaking about the God we knew intimately—the God who had been present with us at our baptisms, in our sharing of communion, in the beauty of nature, at the birth of our children, in the love of our church community, and in times of difficulty and grief. The God we both knew is the God of the living, not the dead. Our God is a God of life, life, and more life—which we saw most perfectly when Jesus was raised from the dead and walked again among the faithful. As scary as it was to be facing death, Paula came to a resting place, trusting that the God of this life she loved so much would continue to be the God of the next life; that the God she loved and served would not abandon her when she needed God most.

Soon, I went back to the county fair, because Paula needed her rest. She died just a few days later.

At this point in my ministry, I’m not sure I have any better answers about the resurrection. I wish I could direct you all to heaven’s website, where you could see previews of the rooms available and even check out the menu for that heavenly banquet! I wish I had the perfect snappy comeback for those who doubt, just like Jesus did with the Sadducees. But instead, in times of doubt—mine or others’—I find myself going back to that hospital room with Paula, where together we found hope in the promise of the resurrection, and where we knew the awesome presence of the living God in the sharing of our stories. 



Let us pray, sisters and brothers, with St. Augustine, who wrote:

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” Amen. 

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