Some day, I
think I’ll write a book called Famous
Scenes Left Out of the Bible. One of
those scenes actually belongs in the twentieth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel in
the middle of our story this morning.
The included scene would have the text read like this: “There were seven brothers; the first
married, and died childless; then the second and the third married the widow,
and so in the same way all seven married her and died childless. Finally, finally the woman died. And Jesus looked at the Sadducees for a
moment in total disbelief. Then he
snickered. The snicker became a laugh,
then a guffaw. And Jesus, turning to his
disciples saw that they were trying to hold in their laughter. And the Sadducees grew very angry. But Jesus, totally losing it, fell down upon
the ground, rolling in the dirt, laughing uncontrollably. “This,” he said, finally composing himself,
“is the darnedest story anybody ever cooked up.” But clearing his throat and wiping away tears
from his dusty face, Jesus proceeded to teach the Sadducees a lesson. They were chagrined to hear him say that
Moses himself testified to the resurrection when he spoke of the God of
Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. So therefore, said Jesus, “God is not God of
the dead but of the living.”
Worse
things have been done to the Bible. In
fact, one has to wonder why all three of the Synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark,
and Luke—report this incident. In all
honesty, I imagine that they found it far less funny than I do. I think it might be that they were all
writing to audiences who, far enough removed from the Easter event, had some
trouble with the notion of resurrection.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think
that the Early Church was necessarily plagued with exactly the same issues that
bedevil the post-modern world. But we
know, for example, from another source, namely St. Paul, that there were
significant numbers of people in the ancient Church who had a hard time with
the notion of resurrection. Paul writes
in 1 Corinthians 15, “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how
can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then
Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our
proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” A little later he goes on to say, “But
someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised?
With what kind of body do they come?’”
So well before any of the first three gospels took shape, Paul was
acknowledging that there were folks around who had trouble with the notion of
resurrection, let alone the fact that on resurrection hangs the truth of the
Christian faith. If you have trouble
believing in the resurrection, don’t feel so alone.
Perhaps you
are beginning to wonder if I am in as great a fog as any Sadducee. Don’t I know that we are half a year away
from Easter? Am I not aware that St.
Thomas’ Church has been building towards this day now for well over a month as the
culmination of your stewardship season?
What has all this marrying that the poor woman did with so many feeble
and worn out husbands—all with the added problem (from somebody, somewhere) of
monumental infertility—what has all this to do with what we are here for on
this special Sunday?
This story
is the quintessential example of a crowd of people, very sure of themselves and
their point of view, who ask the wrong question. They miss the point
entirely. A generation ago, The
Episcopal Church had a great Presiding Bishop by the name of John Elbridge
Hines. Bishop Hines used to begin his
sermons with a prayer that included the phrase, “When we would make much of
what cannot matter much to thee, recall us to the heart of our confession,
Jesus Christ, Lord.” In the light of that,
most of us are Sadducees at least some of the time. We make much of what cannot matter much to
God. We ask stupid questions, which, by
the way, is not at all the same as expressing honest doubts. We fritter away our time on things that are
forgotten in a day or less. The
religious as well as the non-religious are not exempt from the danger of missing
the point by making much of what cannot matter much to God or anyone else.
So what is
the point?
Everything
in the gospel hinges on Resurrection. Is
the whole message one of love? Then love
and resurrection are inseparable. Is the
thrust of the New Testament about serving others to relieve suffering and to
make a better world? Then service and
relieving suffering are inextricably tied to resurrection. Is the theme of the gospel salvation, or
transformation, or eternal life, or morality, or outreach, or justice, or right
relationships, or honoring the Truth, or claiming one’s most profound Selfhood? Yes and yes and yes to all of that. And every one of those things, properly
understood, is an expression of resurrection.
For God is God of the living, and if you are either alive or want to be,
God is all about raising you from the dead.
That is what our baptism means.
It is our initiation into a community of resurrected persons sharing the
life of the resurrected Jesus. And it is
more—our baptism is. It is living out
that life, practicing the precepts of Jesus, cultivating the Mind of Jesus,
acquiring the habits of Jesus, doing the works of Jesus. It is from beginning to end about being
raised little by little, day by day, action by action from death to life. You want to know what dead is? It isn’t so much what you’ll be when you are
a corpse. It is lifeless, tasteless,
meaningless, pointless stuff—relationships that are poisonous, attitudes that
suck, inflated egos that try to mask insecurity with bravado, self-medication
through one thing or another that never quite eases deep pain nor bleeds away
old anger. It is what the New Testament
writers refer to as “the world” or “the flesh,”—not to be confused with the
marvelous body you have. Spirit and life
and resurrection are all rolled up in the same ball, and that ball is the life
of God, the power of God: the power that
raised Jesus from the dead and raises you from the dead.
That is the
point.
But we are
left with a question, aren’t we? What must we do, what can we do, to live the
resurrection life more fully? Or, if we haven’t yet begun to live it, how do we
start? It is a fair question, and it
deserves an answer.
Practice
being grateful. If you hang around the
Christian community very long, you are bound to hear a bunch of one-syllable
words, an important one of which is grace.
Essentially, grace refers to the giving action of God. The one thing we can safely say about God is
that God is always giving. Every once in
awhile, something hugely significant breaks into our awareness. In 1999, on a sun-drenched autumn morning I
started the drive from Santa Fe up towards Taos through what is properly called
the Land of Enchantment. I looked
westward at mountains rising out of the desert, an overwhelming sight. Full of joy, I exclaimed out loud with no one
to hear me in the secrecy of my truck, “O God, thank you! It is unimaginably beautiful. Thank you for whatever you did to cause such
beauty!” I sighed and drove on. In a second or two, I heard the words—not a
human voice or a disembodied spirit, but words that formed so large in my mind
that they might well have existed outside of me: “Frank, I made it just for you.” Tears sprang.
Alice Walker, my favorite theologian, says in The Color Purple that God is always flirting with us, trying to get
our notice. Her character Shug says that
God is pissed every time we pass the color purple and don’t notice. “The world is charged with the grandeur of
God,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins.[1] And that is just the start of it. God made it
all just for you, as if you were the only being on the entire planet. God gives
it all just for you. Free of
charge. Millions upon millions of years,
billions even, went into the making of you.
Flaming stars turned dark and died, flinging their dust across distances
you cannot fathom, and their glory is right now in the stuff sitting here in
the form of you. Pinch yourself. Feel what once shone as light, which you now
feel as flesh.
Live with
that awareness, breathe deeply that joy, and you cannot be depressed forever or
down for long. You’ll want a thousand
tongues to sing your dear Redeemer’s praise.
And if you catch the spirit that made you, you will find yourself,
sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, wanting to mirror that life that gave
you your life and keeps on giving it to you no matter how you beat it up. When you were conceived and later born, you embodied
the DNA of your parents and took on their characteristics. We are born again in baptism so that we can
take on the characteristics of our Maker and Redeemer. And before long, we find ourselves finding
ourselves oddly when we start losing ourselves.
We begin practicing, awkwardly at first and then with increasing
confidence, giving ourselves away.
That is
what God does, and when you do it, God is palpably alive in you. Grace and gratitude are inseparable, two
parts of a continuous cycle. Charis, or
grace, is at the heart of the Great Thanksgiving, which we call eucharist.
And that brings us up to this very moment. We have gathered today to make
eucharist. A part of our eucharistia is
making an act of thanksgiving the way we most frequently do, and that by giving
a gracious gift. Call it a pledge, call
it commitment, or call it your estimate of giving. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you make the connection
between what you give through St. Thomas’ and your life in Christ. Don’t pay the Church for goods and
services. Give to the Body of Christ
because you are the Body of Christ and you want to be as giving as the Body of
Christ in the manger, as giving as the Body of Christ when he fed five
thousand, as giving as the Body of Christ on the cross. And don’t stop with the card you fill out
today. Find some way to turn your
thanksgiving into a gift every day. Pay
compliments. Tip generously. Laugh
hilariously. Love profligately, especially those who are hard to love and who
therefore need it the most.
And should
you ever come to the moment when you puzzle over who will be whose lover or
wife or husband in the resurrection, may God recall you to the heart of your
faith: that you are alive in God and God
is alive in you, for which grace you will never cease giving thanks.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013
[1]
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in
Chief Modern Poets of England and America, 4th Edition (New
York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 60-I.
