A Whole New World

FUMC Fort Dodge

November 11, 2007

Mark Haverland

Luke 20 27 There came to him some Sadducees, those who say that there is no resurrection, 28 and they asked him a question, saying, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the wife and raise up children for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and died without children; 30 and the second 31 and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. 32 Afterward the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife." 34 And Jesus said to them, "The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage; 35 but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, 36 for they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. 37 But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. 38 Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to him."

Marcus Borg is famous for being a leader in what is called the Jesus Seminar. This is a group of scholars trying to get behind the text of the New Testament to find the real, historical Jesus. They believe that the Jesus we encounter in the NT is not the real Jesus. The Jesus of the NT is the Jesus of one or two generations after the real Jesus. In their view, the real Jesus is filtered through the lens of early believers whose Jesus reflects the concerns of their particular times and circumstances. In other words, each generation, including our own, asks Jesus to speak directly to its concerns, which, by the way is, I believe, what God wants us to do. The Bible reflects what Jesus meant to people who lived about 50 years after he died. Our task is to discern what Jesus means to us today. Were the Bible to be written in our times, Jesus would be addressing the concerns of people embarking on the 21^st century. Jesus would speak to the concerns of today in the language of today with images and metaphors which speak to the people of today. This way of looking at the Bible is a powerful way of letting Jesus speak anew to each generation of Christians. God is not done speaking. The real Jesus is more than the Jesus of the Bible. Even the writers of the NT did not capture the entire essence of Jesus. Jesus is alive after all, isn’t he? The task of believers today is to find the real Jesus obscured, but not completely hidden, in the writings of the first century authors of the NT and ask him to speak to us today. This, I take it, is what we try to do each Sunday when we come to worship.

I’d like to lead a Lenten Book study on a book by Marcus Borg entitled The Heart of Christianity; Rediscovering a Life of Faith. This book is a wonderful discussion of what Jesus can mean to those of us in the church today. Marcus Borg takes the Bible seriously, but not literally. In fact that is the name of another of his books. The Bible is true, he says, and some of it even happened. The Bible doesn’t tell us how God sees things. It tells us how certain people saw God. Borg quoted an American Indian story teller, who always began his stories like this: “Now, I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know it’s true.” Mark Twain once said that he used to be able to remember everything, whether it happened or not. Now, he lamented, he can only remember those events which didn’t happen. But his stories, like mine by the way, might not have happened, but they are always true. Likewise, the Bible is true whether it happened or not.

None of this disturbs me in the least. But it does distress lots of people. I remember in my last campaign for the legislature walking up to a man near the Bible College in Ankeny. I tried to make pleasant conversation with him, but as soon as he figured out who I was, he spat out his contempt: “Oh, you’re the one who thinks the Bible is just stories.” Well, I do believe the Bible is made up of stories, but not “just” stories. The stories of the Bible have the power to reveal God speaking to us today – no mean feat. I actually prefer to refer to the Bible as poetry rather than stories. The Bible is poetry plus. The Bible is made up of deeply spiritual poetry, which opens up a whole new way of looking at the world.

It matters a lot how you look at the Bible. Is it poetry or science, myth or facts, metaphor or history? Is the glass half full or half empty? The answer to this old chestnut, by the way, depends on whether you are drinking from it or filling it. Those who think the Bible has to be literally true will find the Bible always half empty. Those who relish the richness of the stories, find the Bible always half full.

The battle between Biblical literalists who drain the Bible of its poetry and those who see the Bible as a never empty, bottomless pitcher full of spiritual wisdom is as old as the hills. Jesus fought this same fight with the Sadducees. The debate between Jesus and the Sadducees is a battle between the old fashioned, conservative views of the Sadducees and the new-fangled ideas of the upstart Pharisees. Jesus takes the side of the Pharisees that there is a resurrection of the dead and a life everlasting, something the Sadducees denied. He seems to anticipate the comments of Woody Allen who said, “I don’t want to live forever through my works. I want to live forever by not dying.” Jesus says to the Sadducees that after the resurrection we will indeed live for ever by not dying.

The Sadducees believed only in the first five books of the Bible which they took seriously and literally. As it turns out, these first five books have not a word about resurrection of the dead nor about the immortal life of the soul. These ideas develop later in the history of Israel. The resurrection and life in heaven saved some people's faith in God by explaining that good people would get their rewards, maybe not in this life, but in the life to come. I guess they had to explain why so many bad things were happening to good people. This kind of thinking was not present in the first five books of the Bible. Moses seemed to be saying that people got pretty much what they deserved in this life and the hereafter was not needed to right present day wrongs. The Sadducees, following Moses, rejected the notion of a resurrection of the dead. They thought our immortality is in the DNA we pass on to our children. The great blessing to Abraham is that his descendants would number as the stars – not that he would live forever on a cloud in the heavens.

Today many of us have great hopes for heaven, don’t we? I know of a woman who had three babies die in infancy. She was sustained in her life and faith only by the hope that one day she would meet her babies again in heaven. All of us take comfort in the thought that death separates us only for a while. Most of us are comforted by the thought of joining those we love in a heaven which awaits us. We expect heaven will be like earth only better. We will be reunited with those we loved on earth and we will all be thin and beautiful, bright and happy, healthy and vigorous. My mother was always on a diet. She struggled with her weight for all the years I knew her. Once I sent her a cartoon from the paper which had a woman newly arrived in heaven with her robe and wings, standing on a cloud, looking at her plump body and exclaiming, "You mean I'm still not thin?!" To expect to be thin in heaven is to join the Sadducees in assuming that life in God’s Kingdom is just like life everywhere else, only better.

In the movie of years ago, Midnight Cowboy, Ratso, the character played by Dustin Hoffman, is a crippled wino who suffers greatly from his handicap and his lack of social skills. He dreams of leaving New York for Florida where, his club foot miraculous healed, he will run effortlessly on the sunny beaches. He dies on the bus to Florida where heaven awaits and where all his troubles will soon be over. He wanted so much to be like everyone else but could only achieve this dream in Florida, which for him was heaven. For many of us, heaven is a necessary dream that keeps us going, gives us hope that one day everything will be as we want it. Without this hope, faith dries up and withers in even the strongest of hearts.

When the Sadducees ask Jesus what heaven will be like, their question assumes, as we ourselves sometimes assume, that heaven will be like earth: People will live on with much the same set of circumstances that they experience during life. We’ll be married to the same person, have the same children, and have the same parents – all of whom will be restored to us. Heaven will resolve what for us this side of the grave seems big problems: how to take care of widows, for instance, in a land with no social security system. Today we are more interested in how to meet up with our lost soul mates again, how to walk with no limp, how to find friends and keep them forever, or how to stay married. But Jesus says life in the resurrection will be very different from anything you can possibly imagine.

The Sadducees ask a multiple choice question about a wife who lives through eight funerals on the way to the Resurrection. Whose wife will she be? Who will take care of her in heaven? Since this is a problem for us on earth, they reason, it must be a problem which God will solve once we all get to heaven. This is a curiously relevant question. My father was married to two different women before he died. His first wife was a Methodist. His second wife was a Catholic. When he died he was in love with a Jewish woman from Iraq. If he had lived another ten years, I’m sure he would have taken up with a Muslim woman. For him, women were a wonderful way to learn about religion. Which of these women is my father cavorting with in heaven, do you suppose? Many people have more than one marriage nowadays and so the question of the Sadducees is curiously contemporary. We want to be re-united with our families when we die because they are such an important part of our lives before we die, but which families will that be? It’s like the story of the man who was married to two women over the course of his life. They both predeceased him. He buried his wives in a grave with just enough room to place his own casket exactly between them. “I loved them both equally,” he said, “so I want to be placed equal-distant from each of them for all eternity.” After a long pause he continued, “Actually, I wouldn’t mind if you tilted me just a little toward Millie.”

Jesus tells the Sadducees that they have asked the wrong question. The coming age is radically new, not more of the same. We won’t be re-united with our families at the resurrection because we won’t need families at all any more. We will finally be part of God’s family. God is about to create a new heaven and a new earth, death will be no more, tears will be no more, not because we get what we want, but because God finally gets what he wants.

Jesus assures us that heaven will be like nothing we can even imagine. All that we care about, concern ourselves with, worry about, manage carefully, will NOT MATTER. Our relationship with God will eclipse all other relationships, interests, values, loyalties, joys. The Sadducees asked, "What about the bride to seven brothers? Whose is she?" Jesus responded, in effect, "She’s mine." She's a child of God. She no longer needs to be married to anyone. “’Til death do us part” is more than an empty phrase. It accurately describes the passing of one age to the next. To paraphrase a popular German polka, “In heaven there is no marriage; that’s why we do it here!”

I don't think we need get too concerned about the issues of immortality and resurrection in a literal sense. How will this happen? Will we have the same bodies? If we do, by the way, I want my 25 year old body - not my 61 year old body. Or will our souls float around on clouds somewhere? Jesus doesn't respond specifically to these issues, either. He seems unconcerned with the silliness of the argument about the seven husbands. This is often the way Jesus responds to literalists who get tied in knots over details. The Sadducees were so concerned about who is married to whom, and whether or not they had children and whose children these were, they assumed that God shared these concerns. What they missed was that God was about to do a new thing. The age to come will be a place and a time when all things that currently distress and concern us will pass away. We will finally achieve a unity with each other and with God that now eludes us.

Charles de Gaulle was the father of a daughter with Down's Syndrome. He and his wife often grieved that she couldn't be like the other children in their family. When the child died at an early age, Charles approached his wife who lingered at the grave-side and said, "Come, Evonne. Did you not hear the blessing of the priest? She is now like the others."

This, said Jesus, is how it shall . We will all be one with each other and one with God.

O God, we know that when we bring you our prayers, it is an act of faith in the power of your life within us and around us in our day.

We believe that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

As we look at the world and our own community, we pray that life will overcome the depths of injustice, of lack of compassion, and the sufferings of the people.

We believe that nothing is impossible with God and that we can be part of the renewing of life. In this spirit of hope and faith, we bring you our prayers:

The people pray

Join us with your life, Jesus Christ, as it surrounds this fragile planet and all who live here with the warm light of your Holy Spirit.

As we see the sun rise each day, remind us that your life never dies. As we see the moon each night, remind us of the gentle comfort of your kindness.

Stir up a different energy in your church, O God. May we live with startling courage, so that people may see and believe in your resurrection.

Guide us and encourage us in each moment, we pray. Amen.

Offertory Sentence

Sometimes our gifts can bring a rising of life in those who can see nothing but death ahead of them. Let us give as though that is so. Our offering will now be received.

Offertory Prayer

O God, we know that many people wait for life to be renewed in many different ways.

Bless these gifts and help us to use them for the sustaining of true life. Amen.