Sermon for Proper 27, Year C

OK, Church, I’ve got a bone to pick with you today. You all are throwing me off my game. See, I’m 45, so I know how work works, okay? I know that I’m supposed to have an annoying boss breathing down my neck, and I’m supposed to come home at the end of the day exhausted and drained, plop down in my recliner with a remote control, and say, “I don’t get paid enough for this.” That’s how I know I’ve been to work.

But I’ve been with you wonderful people for almost a year now, and I come home every day feeling more alive than I ever have. So let me ask you—how am I supposed to know when I am tired? I had a system before. I worked as hard as I could until I couldn’t take it anymore, and that’s when I knew it was time to take a day off. It was a good system. It worked for me.
But now it doesn’t work anymore—because of you amazing people. After the big funeral we had yesterday, both the junior and senior wardens came to me separately and said, “Hey, you’ve been working too hard. You need to take a day off. So pick one this week.” And my honest-to-goodness first thought was, But I don’t want to! And they both said, “Nope, you’ve got to take care of yourself. It’s important.” So I said, “Okay,” but I still didn’t like it.

The thing is, they’re right. I had a system that I relied on for my whole career up to this point, and it worked. But it doesn’t work with you because it feels like I’m cheating. I get to the end of the day and I feel energized, so my body doesn’t think I’ve been to work. I had a good system, but you all are so amazing you messed it up for me.

I’m wondering, half joking and half serious right now, because I’m still figuring out what to do with it. And that’s not much different from what’s happening in today’s gospel. You see, the Sadducees had a system too, and Jesus was messing with it—just like you.

The Sadducees were a class of elite aristocrats. They were the priests in the big temple in Jerusalem. They were on the payroll of the Roman Empire, which reserved the right to appoint their priests and expected them to maintain decency and order so that the Romans wouldn’t have to worry about what was going on. On the whole, it was a pretty good system—except that from time to time, the Jewish people would get riled up by some self-proclaimed Messiah who said that God had sent them to overthrow the Romans and restore the Jewish people to a time of holiness, prosperity, and peace.
The Sadducees’ whole job was to shut that down, and to do it, they used theology. Unlike the Pharisees, the Sadducees believed that there would be no resurrection of the dead. They considered questions about the afterlife to be irrelevant. What they cared about was the survival of their people and their way of life in this age.

And Jesus, from their perspective, was threatening that way of life. Just a few days before the passage we read in today’s gospel, Jesus had barged into their temple and driven out the merchants who were running a fairly profitable business there. He said, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”

This did not sit well with the Sadducees. Not only did it cut into their profit margins, but it also threatened the safety of their people.
Before we judge them too harshly as the bad guys of this story, let’s take a moment to imagine ourselves in their shoes. Imagine that today at coffee hour, some random guy comes stomping into our parish hall, starts flipping over the tables, and tells us that we’re all a bunch of heretics because we baptize infants.

As a priest, I can tell you that I would be very disturbed in that situation. I would probably do whatever I could to shut it down and restore order. If I had to argue theology until the cops came, so be it. My job as a priest would be to keep people safe in that situation.

I imagine that the Sadducees in today’s gospel probably felt the same way. So let’s remember that before we judge them too harshly.

They had a system. It wasn’t perfect, but it was working—until Jesus came along to mess it all up.

The Sadducees decided that they would restore order by debating Jesus on religious grounds. They knew that he believed in the resurrection of the dead while they didn’t, so they decided to pose a hypothetical question that would make Jesus look stupid in front of his followers so that they would stop following him and listen to the Sadducees instead.

They appealed to the law of levirate marriage from the Torah, which says that when a man dies childless, his brother should marry his widow so that she can bear children in her late husband’s name, thus preserving her security for generations to come. The Sadducees thought this was a perfect trap for Jesus because it would show the absurdity of his belief in resurrection and thus prove the Sadducees to be the more knowledgeable and competent leaders of the people of Israel.

But Jesus, as usual, manages to sidestep the trap that they set for him. What he said to them, in effect, was, “You’re asking the wrong question.”
Their question—about whose wife the woman would be in the resurrection—assumed that the same system of ownership and property management that exists in this age would continue in the age to come. But Jesus said, “It doesn’t work that way.” Life in God’s kingdom is not based on ownership but on fellowship.

A single woman in the kingdom of God will have no need of a man to speak up for her because she can speak for herself. In the kingdom of God, all people—men and women—are created equal, and God makes no distinction between them.

“You had a system for managing that,” Jesus says, “but in the world to come—the world as God intends it—that system won’t work anymore. The rules no longer apply.”

In order to underscore the point, Jesus quotes from the Torah—specifically, the pivotal scene where God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush. In that scene, God says to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”
Pay attention to the tense of that verb. God says I am, not I was. As Jesus says, “God is the God of the living and not of the dead, for all of them are alive to God.” Therefore, resurrection is real, and the sexist ownership rules of the Sadducees do not apply.

The mistake that the Sadducees made was in trying to protect whatever exists rather than participate in what is emerging. For them, survival of the status quo was the way of the future. But for Jesus, the way of the future was the way of resurrection—for God is the God of the living, not of the dead.

Survival means stopping things from changing, and it is a losing game because everyone and everything is mortal. If our only goal is survival, then we have already lost.

But resurrection, on the other hand, is not about what has been, but what is becoming. Every Sunday in this parish, we recite the Nicene Creed, and my favorite line is the part that comes right at the end, where we say, “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

And I really like that. I like that we look for the resurrection of the dead not just in some far-off future, but today—here and now. I like that resurrection for us is a matter of perspective—that the eyes of faith are looking for what God is doing today in our midst.
Even though it might make us uncomfortable, and even though it might challenge us to grow beyond our current categories of existence, we believe that life is claiming the territory that fear once held.

I am currently experiencing this claiming in my own life. Many years ago, when my wife and I first found out that we were going to have a baby, we were told that we were having a girl. So we picked a name, and we decorated the nursery, and we picked out all the toys that we thought would go along with that proclamation.

We made it our goal to raise a strong, independent, and intelligent young woman who would think critically and challenge us in all the ways that we needed to be challenged.

What we didn’t expect is that the child we raised would feel increasingly uncomfortable in the body that child was given. We watched the anxiety increase until the point where it became unbearable. And this child whom we loved asked us to hide all the pain pills in the house because the temptation to take them all at once and end the suffering was becoming too strong to resist.

So we then employed the assistance of therapists and doctors, who confirmed what our child had already been telling us: That our child was experiencing a mismatch of gender between body and mind, and the energy required to sustain that tension was quickly running out.
So my wife and I made a decision. We wanted our child to live—above all else—so we made the necessary adjustments to using new pronouns and a new name. Under professional medical supervision, we began a course of hormone replacement therapy so that our son Sage could finally feel at home in his own body.

In the year that followed, I witnessed a transformation of unprecedented proportions. The energy that he had previously expended just trying to exist was now freed up to give to other pursuits. He found that he had a talent and a passion for journalism and finally had the energy to give to it.
He thrived in this field at school, and in his first year broke the all-time record for the number of articles submitted to the school paper. He won multiple state awards through the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association, and just this past week, at the age of 16, was published in a Kalamazoo newspaper with an article about the public transportation system.
Kindred in Christ, this is one example of what resurrection life looks like. It does not conform to previously conceived patterns. It does not match our expectations. But it is life nonetheless, and it is no less—but rather more—than the life we envisioned for our child when my wife found out she was pregnant.

Life changes. Love does not. The love that is God and the God who is love was and is and is to come. That part is unchanging. Everything else is negotiable—but God is faithful.

Jesus believed this. Do we? Can we trust in Jesus when he leads us beyond the categories that were established for us when we were young?

Do we have faith in the Lord who ate with tax collectors and sinners? Do we dare trust in the Savior who met St. Paul on the road to Damascus and called him to become an apostle of the church he once persecuted?
Do we have that kind of faith in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior?

Based on what I’ve seen this past year, I think we do. And I trust that you, the amazing people of this church, are going to continue to disrupt the established patterns of the status quo because you, wonderful Christians, believe in the love that has the power to overcome every obstacle, every barrier, and every name that is named in heaven or on earth, in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Lord and Savior, forever and ever.

Amen.