“Hearts to God: Commitment Here and Hereafter”
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
23rd Sunday after Pentecost – November 7, 2004
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17/Luke 20:27-38]

            I came across a story that I can’t resist telling you. It seems that a Roman Catholic Bishop came to administer confirmation at one of his parishes. According to custom he began to quiz the class to determine their readiness to be confirmed. He asked one young lady, “What is matrimony?” She responded enthusiastically with this definition. “Matrimony is a state of terrible torment which those who enter it are compelled to undergo to prepare them for a better and brighter world.” The bishop was amused, but before he could say anything the young priest who had prepared the class blurted out, “Oh, no, no, NO! That is purgatory, not matrimony. You KNOW that!” The bishop interrupted him, “Father, let the child alone. What do you or I know about it?”

            I think what we have here with the Sadducees is a little bit of the student’s understanding of matrimony (or purgatory) and the bishop’s point, too. It’s an issue of understanding and of knowledge. The Sadducees were a very conservative group. They wanted to confine their field of belief only to that which was written in the five books of Moses, the Torah. God’s revelation is thus a closed thing, captured in a book and there can be no new self-disclosure by God. Anything that developed out of Israel’s ongoing experience of God, what we find in the prophets and the wisdom literature, simply wasn’t valid. So they didn’t hold to a life after death or to the existence of angels, both of which were later developments in the Hebrew tradition.

            The Sadducees’ understanding of the kingdom of God was politically structured. For them to have allegiance to God meant that there must be an allegiance to a Jewish king, or the least one must be willing to enter into rebellion against the hated Roman occupation force – no matter how symbolic. What this view does is to reduce all life before God to a this-worldly scenario. For the righteous to experience blessedness meant that it had to happen in the here and now and would come in the form of prosperity, long life, and children to carry on the family name. The Messiah, in this view, is reduced to nothing more than a physical descendent of the king who ruled in Israel’s ‘golden age.’ And the Messiah’s mission is nothing more than to restore this ‘golden age’ with safe borders and a prosperous economy.

            So we come, now, to the point of dispute. What’s being raised here is the issue of ‘Levirate’ marriage. That is, the teaching requiring a brother to “raise up seed” for a deceased brother by marrying the deceased’s wife and having a child by her. If eternal life is only accomplished by keeping the name going, it certainly makes sense to do that. Though for someone like me, an only child with no offspring bearing my family name, it doesn’t hold out much hope. What’s happening here is that the Sadducees want to show Jesus that the notion of a resurrection is absurd, so they turn to this example. A woman marries a brother who dies, and then another, and then another, until she’s married seven of them. None of whom produce a child. So, whose wife is she in the next life? Is the commitment only for here, or does it involve the hereafter as well? Interestingly enough, there is a similar question found in the Babylonian Talmud where a rabbi is asked if corpses in the next life will need to be ritually sprinkled. The rabbi’s response? This question is “sheer nonsense.”

            It seems that the Sadducees must have had the same sort of vision that Woody Allen claimed to have. He said his vision of eternal life revealed that it was “just like this life, only longer.” What the Sadducees are trying to pull is an argumentative trick called a reductio ad absurdum – a reduction to the absurd. While arguments and theological speculation are not bad in themselves, we have to know when an argument has ground and when it doesn’t.

Such arguments can lead to greater faith or knowledge, but they can also lead to disillusionment or to missing the real point. Jesus saw what was coming a mile away and turned the argument on its head. His point is crystal clear, God’s logic isn’t ours. God is transcendent and infinite – we are neither. We are limited in our understanding and in our experience, where God is not. Thus, “God is the God of the living and not the dead.” What may appear dead to us can be alive to God. I find the comments of Luke Timothy Johnson on this passage quite inspiring:

God is, furthermore, infinitely rich in life, alive himself and giving life to all. God’s revelation does not stop with Moses but continues in the experience of humans. God raises the dead to life as easily as God gives life in the first place. And this resurrection life is radically different from the present one. The “children of the resurrection” are “children of God” and share God’s own life. Not only lack of faith in God but an impoverished imagination insists on portraying such a hope in terms of earthly preoccupation about descent and property! [Luke in Sacra Pagina vol. 3, p. 318]

            This understanding of eternal life that Jesus presents simply doesn’t match the view of the Sadducees, or Woody Allen for that matter.  We tend to project only based on what we know and have experienced. Thus, our vision is necessarily limited. It seems very much like the debate that went on for years in Physics concerning the nature of matter. What we’ve discovered is that what we thought for years was solid, isn’t. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen the little particles that make up matter, but I ‘know’ they’re there. I know it because those who have worked with instruments and materials I don’t have access to have told me so and I hold them trustworthy. Perhaps that’s the manner in which we should approach this issue? That’s why Paul tells the Christians caught up in various controversies – especially over the Lord’s second coming – that they should “stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us.”  It’s important for us to realize that we are not the first to believe and that we stand, as one author has said, “on the shoulders of giants.” What we have been taught over and over is the wonder of God’s love and God’s will to constantly renew and support the life of God’s created world. Our faith, our teaching, should be consistent with what has been handed down to us.

            Ultimately our faith is about how we respond to God’s promise: I will be with you. That is the stuff of what it means to lift our hearts to God and understand that God’s commitment to be present is one for both here and hereafter. The God of the living is alive and well and living in us. This God enters our experience through a variety of means. We come to know God through the Bible, the Word, which is the inspired record of the encounter with God over centuries. We know, too, that God’s self-disclosure, God’s revelation, is not limited to the pages of the Bible.

            Our Puritan forebears loved to talk about how one should seek to “read the book of nature” to discover God’s presence there. God also shows God’s self to us through the sacraments, through prayer, and through our life together – yes, as difficult as it is to believe it, God is made manifest to you and me through each other. One of the hallmarks of our Congregational Way is that it seeks, and teaches, “More light and truth.” Look deep inside and see that God’s self-revelation is ongoing. God is showing us more and more and our response must be to enter into dialogue and come to it with a renewed attitude toward God and life itself.

            When we give our hearts to God we are making a commitment that involves both the here-now and the here-after. To commit is to put in charge or in trust. God has committed to us through creation, through the promise of presence, which God makes personal in Jesus the Christ. If God is willing to commit to us there must be a response on our parts – and not just the phrase, “I believe.” Believing only counts if one’s life and conduct matches what we say we believe. To commit in this way is to make a difference in our world. Author Wendell Berry has put it this way:

. . .every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. . .
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. . .
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
Though you have considered all the facts. . .
Practice resurrection.

[Excerpt from Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”]

Jesus’ offering of life didn’t compute with that of the Sadducees. So often we limit ourselves and limit God because “it doesn’t add up.”

            The wonder of the resurrection simply doesn’t fit our logic. And, what is more, we don’t have to wait until we’re dead to find out if it’s true or not. The living God practices resurrection and it begins with each one of us when we open ourselves to the presence of God within us. We practice resurrection each time we pour water three times in Baptism and an individual symbolically goes into the tomb with Christ and rises a new person. We practice it, too, when we refuse to be limited by what we see, or by narrow preconceptions, but open our minds and hearts to “more light and truth.”  We practice resurrection when we affirm and celebrate life all around us and within us. We practice resurrection when we raise our hearts to God and entrust our lives, our hopes, our futures to God. What we do when we give to the support of the church and its work is simply a sign of what our whole lives should be.

            Christians in the Orthodox East normally greet each other with the words, “Christ is among us!” The response is, “He is and ever shall be!” Even in that small way they’re affirming and practicing resurrection and they’re testifying to the truth that God is alive and well and living in us. In that simple greeting there is the reality of God’s commitment to us here and hereafter. “Christ is among us!” Now we go to live what we believe, what we know, that God has committed to us here and hereafter, and we commit ourselves anew to God. “Christ is among us!”