How real is our faith? a sermon for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 20.27-38

²⁷ Some Sadducees, who deny that there’s a resurrection, came to Jesus and asked, ²⁸ “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies leaving a widow but no children, the brother must marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. ²⁹ Now there were seven brothers. The first man married a woman and then died childless. ³⁰ The second ³¹ and then the third brother married her. Eventually all seven married her, and they all died without leaving any children. ³² Finally, the woman died too. ³³ In the resurrection, whose wife will she be? All seven were married to her.”

³⁴ Jesus said to them, “People who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage. ³⁵  But those who are considered worthy to participate in that age, that is, in the age of the resurrection from the dead, won’t marry nor will they be given in marriage. ³⁶  They can no longer die, because they are like angels and are God’s children since they share in the resurrection. ³⁷  Even Moses demonstrated that the dead are raised—in the passage about the burning bush, when he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. ³⁸  He isn’t the God of the dead but of the living. To him they are all alive.”

Let the words of my mouth
    and the meditations of my heart
    be pleasing to you,
    Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Would you like to get inside the disciples’ lives sometimes? I mean, imagine what the conversations must’ve been like, what it must have been like to have been around Jesus, with all the weird stuff he did.

Yeah, the healing, the miracles. The radical whatever he said in all his teachings and parables that most people probably didn’t get at the time.

But imagine being around in moments like this one.

Those jerks of Sadducees, always trying to catch Jesus in some sort of trap, employ one that blew the disciples’ minds.

OK, Christ. What if a dude dies, leaves his wife as sole survivor, and she goes through all his brothers and still ends up a widow?

Now, the disciples probably thought the sneaky little Sadducees would stop there. What happens to her now? But no, they didn’t. They ask an all-new question.

After she dies, of those seven brothers, whose is she in the resurrection?

What? These jerks don’t even believe that’s a thing! 

That’s not even fair! They don’t care about the answer! They just want to sneak up and knock Jesus out from behind with that one!

But Jesus doesn’t deal with the woman-as-ownership problem with the Sadducees argument, which is, personally, what I would be wont to rail on about. He lets that one go. That’s the language and expectation of the time: women as property.

He doesn’t even attack the question headlong, which is typical Jesus style. How many questions can you think of Jesus addressing directly?

Not many, right?

No, he goes and undermines the whole argument.

He calls out the Sadducees first.

People who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage. 

Y’all are so caught up in the argument that you don’t get the eternal implications of what you’re doing. You’re so caught up in here and now that you have, in fact, no part of eternity. You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir.

Now, I don’t know how much Jesus shared with the disciples about the resurrection before he was assassinated, but it sure seems like he surprised them when he did the whole busting-out-of-death-and-hell thing. If they knew, they didn’t believe. They didn’t have faith.

For that matter, I wonder if we do. We collect stuff around us like it’s actually important, like what happens right now is what matters. Like the only time we get to have joy and life is during our nanosecond of a lifetime.

We confess that we know better. We profess that we have faith in something more real, more permanent, something eternal. But we live like the only thing that matters is what’s in front of our nose.

How real is our faith?

Do we really believe what we profess?

One God, three Persons? That’s a pretty difficult thing to wrap the head around. Heck, it’s an impossible thing. There’s no explanation in the world that makes sense enough to survive a good, solid argument.

What we believe, or at least what we profess are difficult, often impossible things. And what the institutional church does often betrays the lack of faith we have in our God and in each other, our lack of faith in our ability to be the miraculous, healing, resurrected Body of Christ today.

I know that.

And I know that in a lot of ways, I represent that institution. And so do you. And it’s when people look at us from outside the institution, a skeptical world seeing the deep faults and murderous tendencies of the church throughout history, that we look the very least like Jesus.

What are the fruits of our faith?

What are the fruits of our lives?

Is it life that we believe in? Is it a God who holds us in divine arms both in this fleshy, frail life and in a life of resurrection? Is that the God whom we trust?

Because we profess together:

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

The Holy catholic church,

The communion of saints,

The forgiveness of sins,

The resurrection of the dead,

And the life everlasting.

But we live like there’s no life in the Church. We do church like we’re just waiting to die. We make excuses: We’re too busy; we forgot; it’s not my style; blah, blah, blah.

If we believe in the Holy Spirit, let’s live like God is breathing in us!

If we believe in one holy, universal Church, let’s trust that God is going to do something through this body!

If we believe in the resurrection of the dead, let’s stop living like we’re already dead. Let’s trust God to bring us back to life!

Because friends, I don’t know about you, but I’m frankly disinterested in doing hospice ministry with Jesus’s churches. I don’t want to just hold the church’s hand while she dies.

Do you want to be a living church today, or do you want to be an overgrown toenail God just needs to clip off?

You may think that faith is just between you and God; that being a Christian is about your free pass to heaven; but friends, it’s a lot more than that. Following Christ is about being part of something bigger than yourself. It’s about being part of the Vine, the Family of God, the living, breathing, growing Body of Christ.

It’s about living today like you believe the promise of the God of the living and the dead, the God to whom Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive right now; the God to whom our sisters, our brothers, our grandparents, and our grandchildren’s grandchildren are alive and real and proclaiming Christ’s resurrection at this moment!

We are one Body, united in Christ, and we need to start acting like we believe that.

If you do, I want to invite you to join me today. Y’all, I ain’t got time for doing hospice with God’s church. God is calling us to be alive today.

Are you alive?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.