St Luke’s, Havelock North – Ordinary Sunday 32 / Remembrance Sunday – Sermon

Reading: Luke 20: 27-38

“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living.”

Jesus’ words in our gospel reading this morning may seem like an odd choice of reading for the 11^th day of the 11^th month. On this day when we remember those who died at places like Passchendaele and Flanders to read that God is God of the living, not the dead, seems a bit out of place, but I want to suggest that’s only the case if we don’t pay attention to what we’re hearing.

Key to understanding this passage is knowing something about the characters involved. We who hear or read the Bible regularly are quite used to the terms ‘Sadducees’ and ‘Pharisees’ but I’m not sure how much we really know about them. Between them they represented the two major factions within Judaism in Jesus’ time and they had major differences, most of which we won’t get into this morning. The difference that’s key here though is their stance on the idea of resurrection.

Fr Brian McGowan tells the story of teaching a group of nine year olds that the Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection and one boy putting his hand up and saying, ‘So sir that’s why they were Sadd-u-cee.” There may be some truth in that, but certainly the fact is the Sadducees believed this life was it, game over.

The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed in a real, physical resurrection. For them that was a key part of their theological stance which said the hardships and suffering of this life would be rewarded in the next, so if there was no next, everything fell apart. For the Pharisees resurrection was a way of putting flesh on the hope that there was a better world to come.

So at the start of today’s reading Jesus is teaching in the Temple when a group of Sadducees come up and ask him a question. It wasn’t an original question; in fact it was a perennial favourite among those who liked a good argument. Under the rules laid down by Moses if a man died his brother had to marry his widow so as to ensure the family bloodline continued. So what if seven brothers all ended up marrying the same women? If you believed in resurrection which brother would she be married to in the next life?

Someone once said that there are questions which should never be asked except by those who are famished for an answer. What we can see immediately in today’s reading is that these Sadducees aren’t even hungry. They haven’t come to Jesus looking for an answer, but for an argument. This is about scoring points in a game of theological ping pong using a question for which there can never be a right answer because the question itself is all wrong, which is perhaps why Jesus’ answer isn’t all that satisfying.

Karl Barth once said that “The Bible gives to every person and to every era such answers to their questions as they deserve.” Ask a bad question and don’t be surprised if the answer isn’t great.

We could spend time today carefully analysing what Jesus says and drawing from his words some thoughts about resurrection and the life to come, but to do so would be to miss the point. Jesus takes the Sadducee’s question and deals with it in the same vein in which it was asked – coldly, analytically, deliberately picking it apart and ultimately turning the whole thing around so that he ends up criticising the Sadducees cultural understanding of the meaning of marriage as just some sort of baby producing arrangement. And after all that is there a clear answer to the question asked? No there’s not, because the point here isn’t that God is interested only in the living and not the dead, but that God isn’t interested in purely academic questions asked not from a sense of real need but out of nuisance or malice.

We could get tied up in the issue of whether or not there’s a physical resurrection waiting for us after we die. We could spend countless hours and lots of energy arguing about what this verse or that is really trying to say. We could tear ourselves apart debating rules and regulations that have little or no relevance to our everyday lives or those of anyone else, but the question we need to ask ourselves, the question that Jesus leaves hanging with the Sadducees in today’s reading remains, where’s the life in that?

Where’s the life in trying to reduce our faith to a series of questions and answers? Where’s the life in putting more emphasis on the rules and the words than on the real people they impact upon? Where’s the life in placing conformity of belief above a theology of hope?

Today we’re invited, with people throughout the world, inside and out of churches, to take a moment to remember. To remember those who died for a cause that for them was all too real and to remember the decisions and the actions that led to their deaths. And today is also a day when we’re invited to ask some questions.

Why do such things happen? How do tragedies like Passchendaele and Flanders and Gallipoli come to be? And why are the same things happening still? Why do young men and women still die in wars? Why is violence still seen as a valid answer?

We’re invited to ask those questions today, not just out of a sense of academic interest or to be theologically clever, but from a real hunger for the answers. Today of all days we’re invited to cry out to God, why? And to expect some sort of response.

And today of all days we who would follow Christ, we who would be his Church and his Body, today we need to live out his answer to such questions. “I am the resurrection,” Jesus says to the grieving Martha standing outside her brother’s tomb. If you’re looking for new life, look here.

Let’s be blunt for a moment. To many people today the Church seems like little more than a bunch of conservative older people and fundamentalist youngsters who are against everything and that’s that. Ask about religion and people will talk about rules and attitudes and bigotries and behaviours with very little by way of redeeming value. We on the inside are seen by many out there as judgemental, hypocritical and unhappy, and far from being life-affirming and positive we want to suck the life and fun out of everything. I hope we don’t see ourselves that same way.

Our stewardship theme for this week invites us to consider what we’re doing to care for ourselves. How are we looking after the members of this parish family? What are we all doing to support and encourage one another? Today’s other themes add to those questions, while they all point us to that major message and challenge – while there are many questions we can ask and many answers we should seek, and the Church undoubtedly has roles as prophet and pastor, above all and beyond all we are called to embrace the God who brings life in all its fullness, so that we might in turn share that life with others.

May the God of yesterday, today and always, the God who answers the call of the hungry and gives light to those in darkness, bring true life to our lives that we might really live. Amen.