Questions

Questions

Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

November 10, 2019

Text:

Luke 20:27-38

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.”

Sermon:

I quite unexpectedly landed at Oxford University to study theology back in 1993. I had started out in a seminary in California but there I met an Englishman who would in a few months be my husband and so I followed him back to England and continued my studies there.  When I arrived at Oxford I was overwhelmed and daunted by the student culture.  When there were lectures students would ask questions that completely intimidated me.  They’d say things like “You said that Kant’s moral imperative is the basis for all blah blah, but isn’t it Nietzsche who said blah blah blah blah…”  I don’t even know.  So, after being intimidated for a few weeks I went to see a good friend of mine who is a professor. I had met her in California the year before and coincidentally she had moved to Oxford at the same time I did.  And I told her that I felt inadequate in the midst of all these really intelligent and well-educated students and she said to me, “Listen carefully to their questions. It’s their tone that is intimidating, their content is pretty lacking.  They are trained to talk like that at their schools and then they bring it here to try to prove they are so smart.” And so I went back to the lectures and I listened and she was right.  It was total style over content, which is why professors were so unfazed by their questions.

And why I share this with you is that this is in a sense what the Sadducees are up to.  Here is a little context to help make sense of this Gospel lesson. The Sadducees were generally an upper-class group of people who based their beliefs in the Torah and the Torah only. Because it does not say anything in the Torah about the resurrection, they do not believe in it.  Amy-Jill Levine, Biblical Scholar and Professor at Vanderbilt makes a pneumonic riddle about this.  “Which group of Jews did not believe in the resurrection? The Sadducees, which is why they were “sad, you see?”

Jesus on the other hand, like the group called the Pharisees, interpreted belief in the whole corpus of the Hebrew scriptures and thought  – the Torah, the prophets, the wisdom literature, and they and Jesus had come to the conclusion there is a resurrection at the end of our earthly lives – this interpretation is largely based on the Book of Daniel.

So back to our main story – the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection to eternal life, so they are asking Jesus these questions, challenging him by setting up a ridiculous situation of a woman with seven husbands, to make a fool out of them.

Which is an interesting cautionary tale – when someone asks you a question it is helpful to understand the intent of the question.  Is it truly to ask for information, or is to challenge authority, is it to shame an opponent, is it to show off, or to win a debate or argument, or is it just rhetorical?  Case in point: My mother always used to ask me almost every night “would you like to make the salad?”  Then one day I just said to her “I am never going to like making the salad so you can just tell me to make it.” Clearly, it was a rhetorical question.

So, the Sadducees make this ridiculous question up about the resurrection.  They think they are challenging some hick rabbi from Timbuktu, Palestine.  And Jesus, who is on to them, throws the whole argument out and says to them eternal life is so different from our lives here on earth you cannot compare.  And he offers an alternative lesson – that we can trust God and in God all our questions come to rest (Feasting on the Word, p, 287, Patrick J. Wilson, Year C, volume 4).  One commentator writes that Jesus points to a “God, whose faithfulness is to those whom God has called, is immeasurable and inexhaustible, and in that faithfulness, we find enough to endure all that life and death will ask of us.” (ibid., p. 289)

But I want to turn us back to this theme of questioning.  Last week I was at a meeting at Wellesley College. A woman named Erin Konkle, who is the director of Civic Engagement told us about the many community service programs that Wellesley students are involved in.  She mentioned that one of the most challenging things for students when they get involved in their placements is the experience of showing up to their volunteer sites and feeling uninformed.  No matter how much training the students receive, they are still going to be a little out of their depth – there are going to be uncomfortable because they don’t know what is going.  And Erin said that it is an important lesson in and of itself.  It’s okay not to know the answers, it is okay to not be the expert. There are times that you just won’t know everything.  She gave a humorous example of students coming back to her after a day in the kitchens at Middlesex Women’s Prison and they said to her, “No one told us that we couldn’t bring knives into the kitchen.”  Erin sort of shrugged and said that she did not know that they needed to be told no sharp objects are allowed in the prison and that why in the kitchens you can only use plastic knives.  We won’t know everything. We can’t know everything.

Our faith is a little bit like that. Sometimes we will want to know the mechanisms of faith – how does wine and bread turn into Jesus. How does the resurrection work, how true is this part of the bible, etc. etc., There are some things about our faith we will never know for sure.  And that is okay.  As Anne Lamott wrote, “the opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.”

And so, the good news is that we don’t have to have it all figured out. In fact, the more we grow in our faith the less we know for sure.  So, if you find yourself questioned about your faith – you don’t have to offer bible quotes and pat answers.  You only need to say that your faith makes a difference in your life – it makes my life go more smoothly – it helps me in the face of challenges – it gives me purpose and meaning – it helps me make priorities in my life.

We are lucky that within the Episcopal tradition we are allowed to ask any question we want.  No question is heretical. No question is outside the bounds of what God allows.  But the other good news is that we do not have to have all answers.  We do not need to defend our beliefs as if we are in a court of law or defending at PhD thesis.  We can just be – we can wonder, we can rest, we can question, and we can trust – that the God who made us and loves us, will be with us, and beside us, in this life, and the life hereafter.

Amen