Spiritual Discipllines-Living

This sermon was delivered at the First Presbyterian Church in Berryville, Arkansas on Sunday November 11, 2007, the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time.

Haggai 2:1-2:9
Psalm 98
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38 (-40)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

There’s an old joke, a brain teaser if you will, you may have heard it before. It goes like this: “You have two coins, together they add up to thirty cents, and one of them is not a nickel. What are the coins?” Does anyone know the answer? Does anyone know what the two coins are? The coins are a quarter and a nickel. If you don’t know the joke you may be asking yourself, “I thought he said one of them wasn’t a nickel?” You’re right, I did, and that’s the joke. One of them is not a nickel. The other one is.

The purpose of this kind of joke for the tellers is to make them feel witty and superior at the expense of another. It’s not particularly funny; it’s a moment to show off for the one who tells it. (It’s nice when someone else knows the answer and spoils the joke. It takes the teller and pierces them right in their pomposity.)

Today’s reading from Luke takes that sort of tack as the Sadducees test Jesus on a point of levirate marriage. The Sadducees were the priestly, aristocratic party in Judaism, whose interests centered in the temple.[1] They probably descended from the sons of Zadok, who was one of the chief priests appointed by David.[2]

The views and practices of the Sadducees opposed those of the Pharisees. One of the differences between them is that the Sadducees represented the interests of the temple and its priesthood while the Pharisees represented the interests of the synagogue and its teachers.[3] The Sadducees and the Pharisees also disagreed on the matter of the resurrection. The Sadducees did not believe in the prospect of the resurrection where the Pharisees did.

Where the Sadducees and the Pharisees did agree was that Jesus was dangerous.

To help understand what was at stake with the question, it is important to know a little about levirate marriage. Quoting Deuteronomy, levirate marriage was a legal concept where “when brothers reside together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her, taking her in marriage, and performing the duty of a husband’s brother to her, and the firstborn whom she bears shall succeed to the name of the deceased brother, so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.”[4] The purpose of the law was to prevent marriage of the Israelite woman to an outsider maintaining national purity and to continue the name of the dead husband in Israel.[5]

So as our reading opens, the Lord is at the temple. The triumphant entry of Palm Sunday happened a couple of days earlier. Jesus has run the money changers out of the temple. He has taught in the temple and his authority was questioned—then made stronger by the words he spoke. And he has been tested by the Jewish authorities, foiling their efforts at every turn.

So our Savior receives a question that could only come off of the Sadducee Ordination Examination about levirate marriage. Of course for the Sadducees it was a trick question. After the resurrection, whose wife would this seven time married no child bearing woman be? She would be no one’s wife because there is no resurrection. Ha-ha! It’s the quarter and the nickel all over again. Jesus takes another tack to answer their question.

Jesus tells the Sadducees and all who will listen that there is life in the resurrection because “The Lord is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him [Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob] are alive.” And he makes this point using the Lord’s very own words from second Book of Moses. In Exodus, the Lord tells Moses at the bush which burns but is not consumed by the fire that the Lord is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.[6] Not the Lord was their God, but the Lord is their God. The Lord is still the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Lord continues to be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

In the Lord, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob live.

This truth so amazed the Scribes who were at the temple that they said, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” And depending on whom the “they” are in verse 40, because Jesus could leave the Sadducees speechless with such ease, composure, and style, either the Scribes or the Sadducees decided in that moment they wouldn’t ask Jesus another question.

There is life in the resurrection and the Sadducees couldn’t fathom it. The new life is nothing like they have ever seen, experienced, or conceived. It is new life and does not resemble the life they know in any way. It’s not like our life only better; it is something completely new and different. It is life transformed.

This is why Jesus makes the differentiation between the children of this age and the children of the age to come. The children of this age worry about questions of law and levirate marriage. Children of the coming age are concerned with praising and worshiping the Lord in the resurrected life, much like the angels live to praise and worship the Lord.

As this life changes people then, it continues to change us now.

As a spiritual discipline, we are called to live in the resurrection life revealed to Moses and explained to the Sadducees in the temple by Jesus.

We are to live in the resurrection life Jesus promises one and all. We are to live in the resurrection life Jesus gives so graciously. We are to live the resurrected life of worship and praise.

So how does it change us? The beginning of the answer to that question can be found in the question the Sadducees asked.

When I read this passage in the New Revised Standard Version, I get the impression of this being just another test from the Jewish officials. But when I was reading this passage translating it from the Greek, there was a tone that I found missing in the English reading. Imagine this reading: “There were seven brothers, and the first after taking a wife died childless, and the second and the third took her likewise and also they died and they left no children, then in the resurrection (which the Sadducees didn’t even believe existed anyway) the woman becomes a wife to which of them?

As I read this, I found a sort of “butter won’t melt in his mouth” quality in the Sadducee’s question. Also I found, what we would consider, an antiquated view of the woman taken, being the possession of the husband.

It’s as if the lawyer says to a man you get the car, the plasma TV, and the widow, in that order.

The purpose of levirate marriage underscores the value of marrying within the clan and the importance of sons. There is some truth that levirate marriage protects the woman who would have been without support after becoming a widow, but this is an added bonus for her and had little to do with the rationale for the law. The value of the national purity and the family name took precedence over the value of the woman in levirate marriage.

So considering the purposes of levirate marriage and the words and the tone of the Sadducee, the value of the woman in this passage is just the value of her womb and her death. With neither of these things, she would have been useless to this hypothetical situation. And considering she was barren, for the purposes of the test, as far as the Sadducees were concerned, the only thing she had of any value was her death.

Not her life, but her death.

The words and the tone of the Sadducee took a woman, a child of Abraham, a child of God, and made her into nothing. She was nothing more than ashes and dust—miraculously brought back to life in a resurrection the Sadducee questioner didn’t believe existed—waiting to see whose wife she would be again. The hypothetical woman’s only purpose was as a pawn in a story to try to trick Jesus.

If you find this interpretation of the story offensive, I find this offensive too. And based on his response, I believe Jesus found it offensive too. Jesus would have nothing to do with a story shrouded in death just to make a point.

Finding the Sadducees take on this woman offensive shows that we do not live in their world. We have taken at least one step past the legal restrictions of the Sadducees and moved toward the age to come and the grace of resurrected life.

The resurrection is not about death and return to the life we have lived on earth amplified. Life in the resurrection is a radical transformation. Resurrected life takes flawed sinful men like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and makes them patriarchs, fathers of the faith. Resurrected life takes humanity and places it in holy communion with Lord and with the angels in a life that will never perish. Resurrected life is like the bush which burned before Moses, it burns, it radiates with the light of the Lord God, but it is not consumed.

The Sadducees consumed the life of the hypothetical woman, in Christ she lives.

Resurrected life is unlike anything the Sadducees know, but it was available to them through life in the Lord. Most importantly, it is available to us now. Resurrected life in Jesus is not something that has to wait for our death to join; it is available to us now. Jesus made this clear when he declared that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob live—present tense-live—before his resurrection, indeed before his earthly birth.

Aye, when we share in the presence of the Lord we will share in the resurrection life in the presence of the Triune God, but the Lord our God does not want us to wait for our deaths to live the resurrection life. The Lord our God wants us to begin living that life today.

This is why as much as praying and giving, living is a spiritual discipline. We must seek to live in the Lord our God. We are called to live in the resurrection now, long before our own deaths.

I am happy that we live in a time and place that sees women as more than the sum of their lady parts. Yet this is not true in every place in this time. I would love to say that women and men are equal partners in this realm, but this is not true either. Yet, to quote Paul’s letter to the Galatians, “there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”[7] In the resurrection life, we are one.

We are called to live, live our lives in the resurrection now. But we don’t, not yet. But this is not something for us to beat ourselves up about, it is a simple fact of our earthly lives in a sin stained creation. Yet we are called to something far better, something we only glimpse from our earthly lives.

Life in the resurrection is glorious. Life in Christ is life eternal. Resurrection life transforms us into the people the Lord wants us to be, the people we were intended to be from the beginning.

Life is more than the day to day existence many face today. Real life is a spiritual discipline to be lived in the love, peace and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

[1] Sadducees entry. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, George Arthur Buttirck, Dictionary Editor. 1992 edition. Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN, 1962. Electronic Version, 2002.
[2] 1Kings 2:26
[3] Sadducees entry, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible.
[4] Deuteronomy 25:5-7
[5] Marriage, Levirate Marriage. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible.
[6] Exodus 3:6
[7] Galatians 3:28, NRSV