Text: Luke 20:27-38
At the center of Christianity is renewal. Jesus brings renewal to the world and to each of us. Things that are bad will become good. What is broken will be fixed. Jesus teaches about living a good life, about being a good person. But those teachings guide us to change ourselves and thus the world for the better. Through Jesus, things will be different. That difference is a cause of and also a result of our trust in God and in Jesus. Jesus saves the world and saves us by changing us.
When people talk about the effect of being Christian, their sentences are full of words that mean renewal: return, reborn, refresh, repair, restore. And resurrection. These words are so full of life and joy and hope that they seem about to pop. All those “re-“ words inspire us for two reasons.
First, they make us realize that we are made for better things. We are not created broken and needing to be whipped into goodness (as if that were possible). We were created good and became broken. Inside the potential of the world and inside the potential of our souls is God’s goodness. But it has somehow been corrupted, become cloudy, distorted. So the evil in the world is a mistake, not fundamental. Or if you were to speak like Martin Luther, done to us by Satan, the Evil One, the Lord of Darkness. Or like the apostle Paul—who taught much to Luther—by the power of Sin. Paul and Luther are trying to describe the same thing: innate goodness perverted. We are not designed to suffer, but to live contentedly and joyfully. That is what God intended and does intend.
And second, these words give us hope that what we were designed to be can in fact someday be. We can be renewed—made as intended again. We can be restored—made whole again. We can be refreshed—made vital again. We can reborn—start again.
Things sometimes do not go so well for us. Circumstances, chemistry, poor choices, natural events, forces in and out of our control—for whatever reason, our lives are sometimes not so great. Something happens that shouldn’t; something does not happen that should. We feel beaten down for a moment, or for much longer, and cannot escape. Sometimes things look bleak. In these moments, it is easy to think that the way we are now will be the way we are going to be forever. That the future will be today all over again. In those times, renewal seems to be a bad joke. Rebirth, longed for, seems unattainable. No joy. We imagine God to be powerless to restore us, or maybe just uninterested.
In today’s Gospel story, the Sadducees try to make a fool of Jesus. They do not believe in the resurrection of the dead (unlike the Pharisees, as I said earlier, who do). They want to trip Jesus up, so they invent this far-fetched story of a woman marrying seven brothers in a row. If they are all resurrected when they die, then to whom will she be married, they ask Jesus. This is a joke. You can imagine them congratulating themselves on their sneaky, clever example. High fives all around. That’s a good one, they all say. They are laughing at Jesus.
But Jesus takes them seriously. Their question is a variant on a more modern version: What will I look like in heaven? Heaven being, in this view (as in the Sadducees’), like earth only better. Which of the many ways I’ve been and seen in my life will I be in heaven? Will I be old and creaky? Young and foolish? Will the extravagant part of me, that I like, be diminished? Will my rough edges, only some of which I don’t like, be ground away? What clothes will I wear, if any?
What Jesus says to the Sadducees—and what we hear for ourselves in this story—is that they are thinking that resurrection is just like here and now, only longer. That the eternal future is just like today—more or less—over and over again. But Jesus says it is not. It is different. The Sadducees think of God in a tiny, constricted sort of way. They see God’s options as limited. They lack imagination.
The strange thinking of the Sadducees is not that different from ours when we feel stuck in the present, when we are out of hope, and see the future as an extension of the present. It represents a kind of cosmic discouragement. The Sadducees’ absurd story of the brothers and the widow is designed to shut out the future. They are doing what we do when we tell ourselves that forces in the world or in ourselves make a different future unlikely, impossible.
Jesus teachings, and especially in the Gospel of Luke, counter that discouragement. Jesus teaches that the last shall be first, that the lowly shall stand, that the hungry will be filled, that the poor will be satisfied. These are stories of new futures. Captivity will be freedom, enemies will be as family, greed will be generosity. Sadness will be happiness.
Jesus encourages us—as he did the Sadducees—to expect more, to expect much, from God. Christianity teaches hope for a transformed world. A world not in which the poor get riches, but one in which there are no poor and rich. Not one in which the wounds of war are healed, but one in which there is no war. Not one in which the hungry are given food, but in which no one goes hungry. The goal of the ministry of Jesus is to transform the world. The effect of the ministry of Jesus is to transform each of us, and thereby transform the world.
It does not require magical thinking to trust we can be renewed, restored, refreshed, reborn. Resurrected. On the contrary, to think that anything is static goes against our knowledge of the way things work in the universe and of our own experience. A member of Faith once said that you never know what this church will be like six months from now. The spirit moves this place. And moves in our lives. Even death does not change that. The world is dynamic. We know that the stars in the heaven are not fixed, that all things are in motion, that movement in time is the rule of creation. And we know that is true in our lives.
We do not need to be like the Sadducees. We do not need to let our inability to see how the future will unfold hem in our hopes for new life.
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