Certain Sadducees

Certain Sadducees

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

November 10, 2013; 21 Pentecost, Proper 27, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Luke 20:17-38)  Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."

Jesus said to them, "Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."

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he Sadducees are having a little bit of fun at Jesus’ expense.  They don’t believe in resurrection, so they ridicule Jesus and make sport of him.  Jesus simply points past their skepticism and invites them into a vast possibility, a territory, a new age, full of mystery and hope in the God of the living.

Here’s something that bothers me about the Sadducees.  They are too certain.  And they are far too certain about things that are essentially unverifiable.  The problem of their certainty is then exacerbated by the aggressive, toxic way they assert their certainty. 

I like to say that certainty is the belief that we are smarter today than we will be tomorrow.  Certainty can lead to arrogance.  The kind of arrogance we see in the Sadducees and their sarcastic question about the woman who married seven times. 

Every historic heresy in the Christian tradition is a form of the truth, a certainty that is blind to something more.  A heresy is a partial truth that insists on beating to death the rest of the truth.  Most of the truest truths, the deepest truths, are mysteries, often paradoxes. 

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he earliest Christians experienced Jesus as a human being.  A living, breathing human being, with human needs and limitations just like everyone else.  When nails went into his body, he bled. 

They also experienced him as the fullness of God, the divine presence wholly manifest in a human life.  When they were with him, they knew themselves to be with God.  Not just another intermediary – like an angel – but with God.  In Jesus there was no veil of separation between the divine and the human.  He was God, they said, poured out into a human life. 

But that’s impossible, the theologians said.  One party of theologians was certain – Yes, Jesus is a human being, but a human can’t be God.  Only God is infinite and uncreated, therefore if Jesus is human, he must be a creature.  The highest of the created order, but still only a creature, they said. 

Another party of theologians was also certain – Yes, Jesus is God, Jesus is divine.  But God can’t be a mere human.  God is infinite and immortal.  Humans suffer and die.  So they said Jesus was God appearing in a human guise; the divine only looked like a human being in Jesus.  But when the human Jesus suffered and died, the divine spirit escaped into the eternal heavens, untouched by suffering and death. 

Those two parties created two of our earliest heresies, Arianism and Docetism.

But wait, insisted those who experienced Jesus.  It’s not either/or; it’s both/and.  Yes, it sounds impossible, they said, but when we were with Jesus, we were with someone who was fully human, and at the same time he was the unveiled, full presence of God-with-us.  Theologians go figure it out.  It took a few centuries.  It’s still a paradox and a mystery. 

Not unlike light.  The mystery of physical light:  which is both particle and wave.  Impossible; but true.  Go figure it out scientists. 

We’ve got scientist Dr. Lothar Schafer with us for three weeks exploring the realities of the quantum universe with us.  Expect to see some similar mysteries at work in the so-called physical universe as the mysteries that we explore from a spiritual perspective.

If we are all humble and open in these explorations, we usually find that as we answer questions at deeper levels, each new level reveals new questions to be explored.  The joy is in the journey.  God is the journey and the journey’s end.  Faith is trusting the journey, which is to trust God.

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ut some people believe they need more control than that.  Some people seem to need certainties in order to feel secure.  Sometimes in our insecurity we shrink the vastness of Truth (with a capital “T”) into smaller truths that we can comfortably comprehend, and then we assert this partial truth as absolute.  We shrink Mystery into something we can manage. 

Conrad Hyers tells of a backstage interview with the great dancer Anna Pavlova.  Following a singular performance an interviewer asked her what was the meaning of the dance.  “If I could say it, do you think I should have danced it?” she declared. 

Hyers speaks of the sour fruits of the temptations toward literalism:  “Poetry is turned into prose, truth into statistics, understanding into facts, education into note-taking, art into criticism, symbols into signs, faith into beliefs.”[i]

Thomas Keating is fond of saying that “Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation.” 

We do experience God.  We encounter Mystery.  And we dance and sing and write and pray.  We do theology as best we can.  And that’s not so bad, until we become over-attached to our theories and ideas and theologies, over-attached so far as to try to cast everyone else into the shadow of what light we think we have perceived. 

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e can hold humbly and gently to the truth that we have encountered.

I find I’m easily charmed by odd beliefs whenever people hold them with a gentle spirit.  You know, people can believe remarkable things.  The law of benevolence invites all of us to be generous toward those of other faiths and opinions, especially when they show any of the fruits of the spirit – “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and temperance.”  As St. Paul says, “Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23)

But that’s not what we experience from the Sadducees in today’s gospel.  Their intent is to ridicule and demean. 

Whenever people assert their certainties with aggression, they tend to add to the division and toxicity of the world.  The problem is even more troubling when people declare aggressive certainties about things that are essentially unknowable – such as what happens to us after we die.  When like-minded people flock together with like-minded people, they sometimes create a mob mentality.  Parties of like-minded people, certain of their certainties and aggressive in their tactics create so many of the world’s avoidable conflicts.  Whenever they add violence to their certainty, we inevitably get tragedy and injustice.

Jesus answers the Sadducees attack with an invitation to open their imagination to mysteries beyond our skepticisms and certainties.  Jesus points to something ineffable, based on hope in God as God is experienced in real life.  For God is God of the living.  Our life comes from God and goes to God.  In the infinite life of God, our ancestors live.  And we can imagine and experience ourselves as children of God, and maybe even like angels. 

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his is heart language, the language of poetry and symbol and metaphor and faith.  It is a language that draws us toward the deepest truths.  The deepest truths seem to meet in a territory familiar to all of the enduring religions.  This territory embraces qualities of love and compassion.  It stretches toward the union and reunion of all things.  It opens into the vast mystery of a silence that vibrates with presence.  It is the territory of poets and mystics and saints, entered humbly with openness to awe.  This is the territory that offers us the peace that passes understanding, a peace that can pacify the hard heart, the arrogant mind, the proud activity – the Sadducee in all of us. 

Those who belong to this other territory, this other age, “are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”  For they have died to the arrogant certainties of the Sadducees and been born again into the new life of grace.

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[i] Conrad Hyers, Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance, from the Christian Century, Aug. 4-11, 1982, p. 823; reprinted at religion-online.org.  Thanks to Chuck Walling for sharing it with me.