God Remembers

A sermon for All Saints Sunday

Lanny Peters

Pastor, Oakhurst Baptist Church, Decatur Georgia

November 7, 2004

Luke 20: 27-38

Matthew 23

Jesus sure got weary of arguing with religious conservatives and religious fundamentalists, who in his day were the Pharisees, scribes, and Sadducees. Usually he tried to be patient with them, as we see in today’s reading from the lectionary; but there were times he became so exasperated that he condemned them in no uncertain terms. The entire 23^rd chapter of Matthew, some 37 verses, is entirely an outburst of Jesus against these religious literalists. It begins with Jesus saying to the crowds and to his disciples that the scribes and Pharisees occupy the places of power “but they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others, but they are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.” (23:1-4)

After several more warnings about their hypocrisy, Jesus goes into a long tirade aimed directly at them, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven…. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” (23:13-15)

Now the disciples by this time were probably thinking, “Now whoa with those woes, Jesus! Calm down, now. These are, uh, uh, pretty powerful, and uh, dangerous people you are talking about here. There’s somebody with a note pad over there writing down what you’re saying.” Peter might even have stepped in and said, “Thank you Jesus, for those words, but these folks don’t want you mixing politics and religion, and folks, he didn’t get much sleep last night, so…”

To which Jesus probably said, “Sit down and shut up Peter, I ain’t through yet.” And he was not. His woes and warnings about the scribes and Pharisees go on and on, calling them hypocrites over and over and saying inflammatory things like, “You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell? Woe to you! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” (23: 27-28)

I only read about half of what Jesus had to say about them, so if you ever wonder why many powerful religious people became enemies of Jesus, go read Matthew 23. But why was Jesus so hard on them? They were some of the finest, upright citizens of his day. They were law-abiding folks. But Jesus recognized that they were obsessed with social morality and unconcerned about social justice.

Jesus said, “Woe to those who observe religious purity but “have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” (23: 23-24)

If the scribes and Pharisees could have voted in their day, they would have said that they based their choices on moral values, and yet that would have not included the weightier things like poverty, war, and the environment.

Well, that’s all I have to say about that. I just wanted to give you a little background on today’s text. If the Pharisees and the scribes were the religious conservatives of Jesus’ time the Sadducees were the fundamentalists. They counted as scripture only the first five books of the Law of Moses. That was their Bible and if it was not in the Bible, it was just not true.

There is nothing in the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures about the resurrection of the dead, so they did not believe in that. They believed that you lived on only in your children. “As long as there was someone there to remember them-as long as there were descendants to carry on the family name (and traditions) …then they still had life, even though they were long gone. By the same token, a man who died without an heir was finished.” (Barbra Brown Taylor, “God of the Living, in Home By Another Way, Cowley publications, 1999.)

Of course, what happened to women after they died was of little concern to the men who wrote the Mosaic Law or the Sadducees who interpreted it in Jesus’ day. And you could only live on through a male child. Have a bunch of girls and after you were dead, you were gone. It would have been too bad for the Rick Voyles and David Flukers and Gary Gundersons with nothing but daughters. But me, with my two sons, I would live on.

Without a son, everything a man “had been and done would vanish without a trace. This was not merely a personal loss, either. It was a loss of the whole people of Israel. So God gave Moses a law, by which a dead man’s brother should marry his brother’s widow, adding her to his own wives in hopes of producing an heir. If the couple had a son, then the boy was raised as his biological father’s nephew. Legally and socially, he was the son of his mother’s first husband, all set to inherit his property and keep his name alive.”  (Brown Taylor, p. 204)

This is what the Sadducees believed that the Hebrew Scriptures clearly taught. Hearing that Jesus had a belief in the unbiblical view of resurrection, they posed a riddle. They respectfully addressed him as teacher, and acted as if they wanted his opinion on the Mosaic Law. But really they wanted to catch him in something he might say, to trap him, or at the very least embarrass him. If they were lucky, they could find something to expose him as a blasphemer and a heretic, which would discredit him and lead him into conflict with the authorities. So they posed this riddle:

Now there were seven brothers: the first married and died childless so then the next brother married his wife according to the law, but then he died childless, and the third married her, and so on in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman died without ever having any children. So if there is a resurrection, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her. (Luke 20: 29-33)

Well, I must admit the Sadducees have a good point. If there is a heaven, whom is the woman going to spend eternity with? Will she rotate between them, a different husband for each day of the week? Or will they be one big happy celestial family. Or since she was treated like a piece of property passed around all her life, maybe heaven for her will be getting rid of the whole lot of them. Well, we might be interested in all those riddles, but Jesus is not. He does not answer any of the questions. Barbara Brown Taylor points out that the Bible itself does not answer any of our Sadducee like questions like, “If bodily resurrection is real, then what about those who are cremated?” The Bible “refuses to approach resurrection as a rational kind of thing at all. Instead, it talks about resurrection as a mystical kind of thing, which is based not on our belief in God but in God’s belief in us-and on God’s investment in the creation, the incarnation, the essential goodness of matter, bodies, flesh. It is based on our origin in God and our ongoing union with God, which means that anyone who was ever part of God’s life never stops being part of it.

Taylor concludes: “I do not think resurrection is really about us at all. I think it is about God, and to focus on our own faith or lack of faith in it may be to miss the point altogether. Resurrection is not about our own faithfulness. It is a radical claim about the faithfulness of God, who will not abandon the bodies of his beloved. That is what Jesus is getting at in his answer to the Sadducees. Never mind marriage, he says first of all…in the world to come that will not be necessary anymore. We will all be wed to God-the God who is able to make children out of dust, out of dry bones, out of the bits and pieces of genuine love we are able to scrape up over a lifetime of trying-‘for he is God not of the dead, but of the living, for to him, all are alive.’” (Brown Taylor Pp. 206-7)

I think that the problem, maybe even the sin of religious literalism, is a lack of imagination. Amazingly, today’s scripture passage is the sum total of what Jesus had to say about resurrection in all four gospels. The rest he left to our imagination.

Each year I find a book that turns out to prepare me for All Saints Day. This year that book was The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. (Back Bay Books, 2002) It is an amazing novel, not one that it seems could be redeeming. For you find out in the first line of the book that it is going to be narrated by a fourteen year old girl named Susie who was brutally murdered, as she looks from heaven back on her life as well as at the lives of those who go on living.

It touches on many things, like what it is like to lose a child. There is a line where Susie’s mother “braces under the weight of it, a weight that she naively hoped might lighten someday, not knowing that it would go on to hurt in new and varied ways for the rest of her life.” (P. 7)

That line reminded me of a poem by a woman named Jo McDougall about the loss of a child:

As I drive into town

the driver in front of me

runs a stop sign.

A pedestrian pulls down his cap.

A man comes out of his house

to sweep the steps.

Ordinariness

bright as raspberries.

I turn on the radio.

Somebody tells me

the day is sunny and warm.

A woman laughs

and my daughter steps out of the radio.

Grief spreads in my throat like strep.

I had forgotten, I was happy, I maybe

was humming “You Are My Lucky Star,”

a song I may have invented.

Sometimes a red geranium, a dog,

a stone

will carry me away.

But not for long.

Some memory or another of her

catches up with me and stands

like an old nun behind a desk,

ruler in hand.

The Lovely Bones is about the ongoing process of grieving and how misunderstood it often is. When Susie’s father returns to work, “his boss acted differently around him now, and so did his coworkers. They trod gently outside his office and would stop a few feet from his desk, as if, should they be too relaxed in his presence, what had happened to him could happen to them-as if having a dead child was contagious. No one knew how he continued to do what he did, while simultaneously they wanted him to shut all signs of his grief in a file somewhere, place it in a file somewhere and tuck it in a drawer so that no one would be asked to open it again.” (P. 159) It is a novel about the dead wanting to be remembered and the living wanting to remember the dead, as when Susie narrates: “A few teachers, like Mr. Botte, remembered me as a real girl. Sometimes on his lunch hour, he would go and sit in his red Fiat and think about the daughter he lost to leukemia…. Often, he would say a prayer for me.” (P. 224)

It is a novel about how “the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.” (P. 48) At one point, Susie says, “we’re here, you know. …All the time. You can talk to us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.” (P.. 309) “My parents kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life.” (Page 325)

This year, Alexis Hauk took a class at Emory on religion and suffering. She wrote a paper in which she talked about the dead. She remembered Sarah Woolf and said, “How would I know, as I wept for Sarah’s parents, mountains of strength, on an island foreign to me? When I attended Sarah’s funeral in March (of 2002), I could not know that I would soon lose my only brother five months later. Sarah’s parents, who I had watched with awe, would all too soon play a large part in my family’s recovery from our own tragedy. More than just a shining exemplum of distant courage, once we understood what it felt like to lose, these were our oxygen mask.”

Seebold’s novel contains an amazing parallel to Alexis. As Susie’s friend Ruth comes to believe,  “the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe.” (P. 325)

And that, my brothers and sisters, is what All Saints Day is all about. Modern day Pharisees and Sadducees will try to tell you that they have all the answers as to who will be in heaven (only them) and who will be “Left Behind” (everybody they don’t like, especially you gay people) but like their theological ancestors they just don’t get it.

Jack Smith was a gay man who loved this church as much as anyone ever has. He loved his son Mark, who was killed fifteen years ago at age 21 in an auto accident. Jack and Mark were working on a quilt together when Mark died. Jack finished it as part of his grief work. Jack died three years ago of AIDS. Jack and Mark’s quilt hangs in the back of the sanctuary, part of the oxygen we breathe, like other saints that bob and weave and laugh with us.

The day may come when we are all gone and no one will remember where this quilt came from. But even then, Jack and Mark, and Sarah and Thomas, and Judi and Alta Mae and Rufus and Dan and Robert and Betty and Gloria and each and every one of us, we will never be forgotten, for God never forgets a single one of us. God remembers. God remembers forever and ever and ever, amen.