Jan’s sermon Year c proper 27
November 19, 2013
“Now he is not the God of the dead, but of the living;
for to him all of them are alive.”
(Luke 20:38)
Year C Proper 27
Jan Robitscher
Job 19: 23-27a
Ps. 17 New
Bridges Presbyterian Church
Luke 20: 27-38
November
10, 2013
What keeps us from sleeping
is that
they have threatened us with resurrection.
Accompany us, then,
on this vigil,
and you will know
how marvelous it is
to live
threatened with resurrection.
(Julia Esquivel, A Sourcebook about Liturgy, p. 116)
In this month of November, as the leaves fall
and the days grow shorter and colder, we Episcopalians begin with the
celebration of All Saints and All Souls--a time when we remember those shining
examples of the Christian life who now are counted among the Communion of
Saints--and also those saints (the New Testament word means all who belong to
the household of God) who are nearer and dearer to us. Perhaps you do, too.
This is at once both joyful and painful, comforting and frightening. The end of
the Christian Year brings us face to face with mortality--in the world
around us and in ourselves. The Rule of St. Benedict bids us “keep death daily
before one’s eyes.”1 Not very easy for us in our death-denying
culture.
 | |
| Day of the Dead Altar at Church Divinity School of the Pacific |
But we cannot avoid it since we are faced with
death all the time. We see it on the news every day: the wars in Afghanistan
and elsewhere; mass shootings; the homeless who die violently-- or simply
of exposure --on our own streets. Or in quiet moments we remember those family
and friends whom we knew and loved so well. It doesn’t matter what side they
were on or what their politics were. They are all dead, gone, separated from
us--at least from our human perspective-- and nothing we can do can bring them
back to us again. Worse, perhaps we have thought it silly--or even scary--to
think of them in a continuing life with God, in heaven. Death and taxes
are certain--but resurrection? Perhaps the poet is right:
What keeps us from sleeping
is that
they have threatened us with resurrection...
+ + +
Job certainly knew what it was to live
threatened by death. Everything he held dear--family, lands, livestock, and
even his own health--had been taken away from him in a kind of cruel game
played by his “friends” (I use the word advisedly), and all this with God’s
apparent cooperation. And, at least at this point in the story, Job was
not afraid to pour out his grief before God in words which might not be read in
church if we really gave them their full vent:
“O that my words were written down! O that they were
inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead
they were engraved on a rock forever!”
But Job knew more. Somehow, in spite of
everything, Job also knew what it was to live “threatened with resurrection”,
to live knowing that death is not the end of this life, but the beginning of an
existence in another realm where he will be able to see God face to face and
live. And we must be careful, when we hear his words, not to hear too much of
the wonderfully sweet music of Handel’s Messiah in them, which is
appropriate at other times:
“For I know that my redeemer lives, and that at the last
he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been
destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God...”
Perhaps Job wanted to echo of the last verse of
Psalm 17:
For at my vindication I shall see you face,*
when I awake, I shall be satisfied, beholding your likeness.
And Jesus also had to contend with the question
of the Sadducees, “those who say there is no resurrection...” They really
were “threatened with resurrection”, and posed the question in the form
of a story that seems so ridiculous that it is a wonder that Jesus did not just
dismiss it for the silliness that it was and leave. But in a remarkable act of
patience, Jesus gently points out to them that, indeed, we will all
enter eternal life after death, and that our existence and relationships there
will be quite different from those we have known here. For, as one person has
put it, we will no longer be in the relationship of father, mother, child,
spouse, friend, or stranger. Instead, we will all belong to the “siblinghood of
Christ”.2 In any case, says Jesus,
“Now [God] is not God of the dead but of the living;
for to him they are all alive.”
 |
| Job with friends |
Here is the perspective we need! To “keep death
before [our] eyes” is not a morbid exercise, but a way of looking at the
Communion of Saints; those who inhabit the Church Calendars of Episcopalians or
Roman Catholics or those we hear about in the news, or our own beloved dead. To
see them through the eyes of God is to see them alive! Not alive as we
might like to have it, but alive with God in another place where there is (as
our funeral liturgy puts it) “no death, neither sorrow nor crying, but [the]
fullness of joy with all [the] saints”. Far from being the stuff of science
fiction or New Age fads, Jesus bids us enter into the simple construct of
children (Jesus says we will all be “children of God”) to lay hold of our
faith. Eternal life and resurrection are our belief and our hope. Job dared to
proclaim it. Jesus taught it to questioning Sadducees, and than walked his talk
all the way to death and resurrection, so that we could follow after
him. I offer again the poet’s invitation:
Accompany us, then,
on this vigil,
and you will know
how marvelous it is
to live
threatened with resurrection.
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