Sermon - 22nd Sunday After Pentecost (11/10/2019)
Job 19:23-27a; Ps. 17:1-9; 2 Thess. 2:1-5, 13-17; Lk. 20:27-38
Almost fifteen years ago, on the day after Christmas 2004, an earthquake under the ocean off the coast of Indonesia caused an enormous tsunami that devastated the coasts of a dozen nations. Between 200,000 and 250,000 people lost their lives. It is estimated that about one-third of them were chidren. And one might reasonably ask: How can God allow such suffering to happen? We might just as well ask that question about the suffering of just one person – why? What purpose of God can justify the death of even one innocent human being? But when death and loss on an unimaginable scale happens in the blink of an eye, one has to wonder. Where is God?
The Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart wrote a small book called The Doors of the Sea, reflecting on the tsunami of 2004 and its aftermath. In the book, he goes through most of the traditional philosophical answers to the question of how a good and all-powerful God can allow suffering. And then he relates that, on the morning of the last day he had set aside to write an essay on this subject, there was an report in the New York Times from Sri Lanka. The article told “the story of a a large man of enormous physical strength who was unable to prevent four of his five children from perishing in the tsuanmi, and who – as he recited the names of his lost childen to the reporter, in descending order of age, ending with the name of his four-year-old son – was utterly overwhelmed by his own weeping.”
Dr. Hart then asked the question: Face to face with this man, would any of us be so heartless as to try to explain to him why it’s OK that God allowed this to happen? Could any of us actually say to him, “This is the will of God and you just have to accept it.”? Would we actually dare to say, “Don’t worry, God must have had a reason for doing this to you.”? I think we all know, instinctively, that in the moment none of these things would be any comfort at all to this grieving father. The human thing to do, if we were sitting beside this father as he weeps, is to keep our mouths shut and weep with him. To rage with him against the unfairness of it all. And perhaps that is God’s reaction as well.
For the Scripture teaches that death is not, and never has been, part of God’s plan. Death does not come from God; death is God’s enemy that God has come to defeat. There is nothing more full of life and light than God; these is nothing that pleases God about death. God never wants tombs to be filled; faith in the God of the Bible begins at a tomb that is empty.
Consider the gospel reading today. Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem for Holy Week, where he knows his own death is imminent. He is confronted by the Sadducees – these are the aristocratic families of Jerusalem who run the temple. They are so old-fashioned that they only accept the first five books of the Old Testament, only the part of the story that goes up to Moses. Nothing more modern than that is of interest to them.
And it may be surprising to us, but the law of Moses in fact has nothing to do with life after death. The blessings of following the law, and the punishments for failing to follow it, all come in this world, not the next. You may remember memorizing the Ten Commandments as a child. Remember when it says, “Honor your father and your mother so that . . . “ Do you remember what comes next? “So that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Ex. 20:12; cf. Deut. 5:16). Not “so that your reward in heaven will be great.” The Law of Moses was about living well in this world, not the next.
But the later books of the Old Testament tell how, after the Jewish people lost their land and went into exile, as the Promised Land came under the rule of one pagan empire after another, the people of God came to understand that God’s call to them was not simply that one people would live well in one land, but that all creation would one day be set free from its bondage to sin and death. And that all of God’s faithful people of every time and every place will share in God’s victory over death.
So by later Old Testament times, and certainly by the time of Jesus, most Jews had come to believe – not so much that our souls will go to heaven when we die, that’s more of a pagan Greek way of thinking than a Jewish one. But that on the day of the Lord, the dead will be resurrected and will share fully in the redeemed and restored creation when God brings heaven to earth.
The Sadducees were the conservative holdout against this widespread belief in the future resurrection of the dead. When the Sadducees met Jesus in the temple on Tuesday of Holy Week, they tried to embarrass Jesus for believing in the resurrection. Their question is based on part of the law of Moses: If a man married but died without a child to carry on the family, the man’s brother was required to marry the widow, both so that she would have a family to take care of her, but more importantly, so she could have children to carry on the dead brother’s family.
So the Sadducees pose a hypothetical to Jesus: There are seven brothers. The oldest marries and dies without a child, so in accordance with the law his brother marries the widow, but he dies childless as well. And so this poor woman is passed down through the family like a used car until all the brothers have married her and died, and the woman herself has died. Now, the Sadducees ask, how can a resurrection of the dead make any sense? Whose wife is she going to be?
Jesus responds, That’s not how the resurrection of the dead works. When God raises the dead and brings them into the kingdom, in the new Jerusalem, death will be no more. People will not have to get married just to have descendents to keep their memory alive. In the kingdom of God this woman will not be Mrs. Brother Number One, or Mrs. Brother Number Two, or Mrs. Brother Number Seven. God will raise her from the dead as herself. That’s what the resurrection of the dead is about.
And Jesus goes further: If you think that resurrection is some new liberal idea that Moses didn’t know anything about, think again. Remember that Moses first met God when he saw a bush that was burning, but somehow was not consumed. Moses experienced the God who is always living and present in this dying world, a fire that burns within it, often hidden but sometimes allow itself to be seen, but a fire that does not destroy or kill. And Moses heard this God say: I AM the God of your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Not I was the God of your long-dead ancestors, but I AM. For in this world we live for a time and then we die, but God knows nothing of death, only life, and in God’s eyes all are alive.
And after Jesus spoke these words on Tuesday of Holy Week, on the very next Sunday morning, the resurrection of the dead began. At the cross the eternal living God brings death into God’s own being, in order to destroy death forever. And even as we continue to live on this side of the veil, where we live for a few short years and then we die, in faith we know that resurrection has already begun and has been promised to each of us in our baptisms.
And the day of resurrection, I do not believe God will finally give us the explanation for why it was necessary for children to die. No, I believe that on that day God will raise the children swept away by the tsunami along with their parents, and God will “wipe away all tears from all their eyes, and there will be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and the One seated on the throne will say, Behold, I have made all things new” (Hart, quoting Rev. 21:4-5).
And even now, those who have gone ahead of us and who to us are as dead as the long-dead ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were to Moses enslaved in Egypt – we believe that our beloved dead are alive for God, who is the God of the living and not of the dead. And for those with eyes of faith, like Moses we see the presence of the living God here among us in ordinary things, in flame and bush, in bread and wine, in nature and neighbor. The living God who comes to free us from the fear of death and sorrow, the living God who comes to destroy death and bring life abundant. The God who in your baptism has begun the work of your resurrection from the dead, and who promises to complete that work for you and for all creation.
Our faith is not a rational explanation for why the world is the way it is. Nor is it a promise that we will one day escape this world and go to heaven. Rather, the gospel tells us that God is fixing this world, rescuing Israel from enslavement in Egypt, raising from the dead first Jesus the Messiah and then all who hope in his name. And so death is never the end of God’s story, and neither shall it be the end of ours.