GOD OF THE LIVING

(Preached on Sunday, November 11, 2007)

Now he is God not of the dead but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.                                                                                         -Luke 20:38

 

Gilda Radner, the comedienne of Saturday Night Live fame, died of cancer and wrote a book before she died about her experience of fighting cancer.  Near the end of that book there is a passage about a time when she was having a recurrence of the cancer, which very aptly describes her feelings.  AI=d have days when I was depressed and couldn=t get out of bed or I wouldn=t feel good... It=s a pain in the neck to have somebody who=s worried about dying around -- the whole house gets gloomy.  In the weeks after my recurrence, ... we would try to go out to dinner with people, but I couldn=t eat because of the lump of fear in my throat.  I would just stare off and the other people would be eating.  Because my delight was gone, I kept thinking, >Why are they talking, how can they be enjoying themselves and drinking and ordering this food?= I was in the black, deep, dark hole, really depressed.  But it wasn=t even depression, it was just tremendous fear and anger.@

Her honesty is amazing today in a society where the denial of death has become a fine art.  Today, about 800,000 spouses and about 400,000 children under 25 years of age, die every year, leaving behind nearly 8 million immediate family members to mourn the loss.  The numbers of extended family members affected by these deaths is, of course, many times greater. 

 

Yet, as a society, we work diligently to hide death.  Medical technology has removed death from the everyday reality of the home and relegated is to the hospital.  In the process, we find ourselves confronted with unprecedented decisions about whether to prolong or to end life.  Even with the strides in the past 20 years in providing Hospice care to assist people to die with dignity in their own homes surrounded by family, in contrast to traditional cultures, our society lacks cultural supports to assist families in coping with death.  In our society, the funeral industry now largely dictates the rituals for mourning.

 

Gilda was bluntly honest about her emotions as she confronted the reality of her own possible death.  There are always a host of emotions that swarm around such an encounter.  Emotions such as numbness, emptiness and loneliness, fear and anxiety, guilt and shame, anger, sadness and despair.  Most of these are what we consider to be Anegative@ emotions, Abad@ emotions, the kind we don=t like to feel.  True, they are not the best guests to invite to a party, but they are real and perfectly o.k.  In truth, there are no good and bad emotions.  Emotions don=t have an intrinsic value, they just are.  Nor do we create emotion or control our emotions, contrary to popular opinion.  We just have emotions, they just happen to us, they just are.  Part of our reason for denial of death as a society is that we do not like the feelings that come with facing death, the emotions that happen.  We don=t like pain. So we deny the pain, deny the emotions, deny death, hoping that the emotions and the pain will go away, and life can be fun again.  But that just ain=t the way it works.  That just ain=t what happens.

 

But there is another way.  The Bible doesn=t deny the reality of death.  The bible confronts death head-on.  It recognizes the reality and finality of death.  It understands death is a way of talking about the fact that life is broken into pieces.  Life represents our existence with God and death represents our separation from all that is good, including God. 

 

At least that is the Hebrew scripture view of death.  That is the view the Sadduccees still held at the time of Jesus.  While the Pharisee party in Judaism had developed an understanding and acceptance of belief in a resurrection, the Sadduccees did not see such a concept expressed in the first five books of the Bible, the Books of Moses, and so they did not accept such a view.  That is how they were trying to trip up Jesus with their trick question.

 

Be assured that this passage had nothing to say about marriage; the topic could as easily have been kumquats.  Nor, indeed, is it very informative about resurrection. 

Though factually uninformative, the passage is richly evocative.  Jesus speaks with the esoteric contradictions of an oriental sage.  Existence in the realm of God is utterly unlike the world we know and live in C their relations are not like ours at the most familiar levels (Aneither marrying nor being give in marriage@), and its inhabitants are Alike angels@ (whatever that may mean). 

 

Jesus doesn=t try to explain the resurrection.  He doesn=t try to describe the details of the resurrection, so we still have a lot of questions that are left unanswered about the resurrection, just as the Sadduccees did.  Such as: If our bodies will be raised from the dead, what about cremation?  What if somebody gets eaten by a shark?  What about those people who have lost arms or legs?  What about my old Dalmatian, Prince, will he be included in the resurrection, or is it for people only?  Will we know each other?  Will we be resurrected right after we die, or will we lie in wait until Jesus comes again and be resurrected then?

 

Can you see why the Sadduccees had a hard time believing in the resurrection?  There are a lot of unanswered questions.  I imagine all of us have had a hard time at one point or another.  That=s because normally when things in this world die, they stay dead.  And, the only person who has ever been bodily resurrected didn=t tell us a whole lot about the experience.  We just don=t know that much about it.  Nobody has ever been able to explain the resurrection.

 

What we do know is this: God has acted in history.  When God raised Jesus from the dead, it was just the beginning.  The same God who created this world and saw that it was good, will not leave this world to rot and perish in its own sin and destructiveness.  God loves the creation too much for that.  The resurrection is God=s way of creating a new heaven and a new earth without doing away with the old heaven and the old earth.  It is God=s way to redeem and reclaim this world, to take what we have messed up and make it right again.  The resurrection is God=s unwillingness to let us go, because God loves us that much.  So, when Jesus was raised from the dead, it is just the first wave of God=s activity of resurrecting the whole world.

 

Resurrection is not some natural ability that we have.  Resurrection is not native to us.  It is a remarkable gift from the grace of God.  Absolutely free!  Always in the gospel we get back to grace.  Some ancient Greek philosophers believed that we are, by nature, immortal spirits; the human body and life on earth was a crude prison.  We are like caged eagles.  For them immortality was our right, which at death could be restored as we escape to our true element.  Others, like the Oriental pessimists and cynics went the other way.  These said we die like any animal and that is it.  But the teachings that flowed from Jesus said two things C To the

pessimists: ANo!  You are wrong.  We are not like a dead dog or lion.  There is a gift of life after death.  God offers it through faith in the resurrected Christ.@  To the immortals: ANo you are wrong.  The body is not a cage; it is a good gift for now.  Death is for real; we really die, not escape through a loophole.  But God gives us a new gift of life: Resurrection life: Gift!  Bonus!  Grace!@

 

I=m sorry, but that=s about the best I can do in explaining the resurrection.  I don=t feel too bad, though, because Jesus didn=t really explain the resurrection either.  But then again, he lived it. 

 

Also, the more I thought about it, just like the Sadduccees, we want an explanation of the resurrection.  We have lots of questions about the whole idea of resurrection.  But, usually our questions about the resurrection have to do with us.  What=s going to happen to us?  How long is it going to take for it to happen?   Will we be like we are now?  Will our present relationships continue?  Will we know each other?  Will I still have to wear glasses?  Will I still be bowlegged?  Me, me, me.  Us, us, us.