22 Pentecost

 November 9, 2025

Luke 20.27-38

+ As most of you know, I have been on a reading binge for over a year now.

I am averaging about five books a month.

Reading has been my lifeline—or maybe I should say my escape—from some of the realities of our world.

If it’s been my escape though I have to say: it’s been failing me.

The realities are still creeping in and I’m still having to face them and speak out against them and fight the realities of them.  

Still, my reading adventure has been interesting.

And lately I have been finding myself reading some of the theologians who have influenced me over the years.

I re-read my Paul Tillich.

I’ve re-read Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who continues to speak quite effectively to us right here and right now in our current situation)

I have re-read Thomas Merton and Dorothee Solle (who I truly love) and the liberation theologians.

I have re-read the desert mothers and fathers.

And some new thinkers too.

I recently recommended to Stephanie Garcia (who jokes with me about my lack of belief in an eternal hell) a book I read called The Gospel of Inclusion by Bishop Carlton Pearson.

There’s even a Netflix film about this book called, Come Sunday.

It’s about his realization that he cannot believe in Hell any longer and how his church reacted to this realization.

It’s an alright film, but I think more important than anything, it does open up a conversation about why people really, really WANT to believe in hell, even when they are presented with the option that it might not exist—certainly in the way we have popularly believed.

Another one of the theologians I have been re-reading is none other than the late great, John Shelby Spong, the former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey.

One of the first books of his I read in my twenties was a book called Resurrection: Myth or Reality?

 I don’t think I’m giving the end away by saying that Bishop Spong’s answer to that question was: Myth.

Bishop Spong believed that there was no resurrection—rather that whatever resurrection one believed in was purely metaphorical.

Yes, Jesus died on the cross.

Yes, he lives on among those of who believe in him.

But there was no bodily resurrection, according to Spong.

In fact, in this book, Spong asserts his belief that Jesus’ body was probably taken down from the cross and given to the dogs to feed on.

The tomb is empty, Spong said.

But not because of any supernatural events.

The tomb is empty and Jesus is not here because he was never there in the first place.

It’s an interesting read.

And I find that I still don’t agree with Spong on many points, including the fact that I don’t believe Jesus’ body was thrown to dogs after he died.

And Bishop Spong would’ve been all right with that disagreement (which is why I like Bishop Spong).

But the issue of resurrection is still an interesting one, and one we usually don’t give a lot of thought to outside of the Easter season.

Certainly the Sadducees in our Gospel reading today viewed the Resurrection of the body in a different way of understanding the resurrection.  

Now, to give them credit, the Sadducees were smooth and they were smart.

They knew how to present a sly argument without being blatant.

You can hear the condescension and sarcasm in their question.

And they did believe that by bringing up the resurrection, they would show Jesus to be the fool and the charlatan.

For the Sadducees, the resurrection of the body was a fairy tale.

It was something gullible people hoped in.

It was absurd and ridiculous.

And so they present this question to Jesus, which is actually a very good question.

It is a question many of us ask as well, especially any of us who have been affected by divorce or death of a spouse and remarriage.

In the resurrection, whose spouse will we be?

My mother, who had a very messy first marriage before she married my father, would often ponder this.

In fact, she would be blunt and say, “When I see Roger [he first husband] in heaven, I hope he stays far away from me!”

I always gave her credit that she believed Roger would actually be IN heaven, to which she would just roll her eyes and say, “it not up to me.”

Jesus, in response to this, in that way Jesus does, flips their argument back around on them.

Jesus lays out a heaven in which there is no longer a need for things like marriage.

In heaven we will all be like angels.

He then lays out this amazing statement,

God, he says, is not the God of the dead, but a God of the living.

Jesus' God is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, who, he implies, are not dead at all, but alive.

Present tense.

This particular scripture has been meaningful to me after reading Eric Metaxas biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

For all my issues with Metaxas himself which I’m not going to get into this morning, there is a passage in that book that references this scripture that just blew me away when I read it.

In a paragraph referencing the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious SS monster who essentially orchestrated the final solution on the Jews, we hear this,

“At the end of May [1942], the albino stoat [I love that word “stoat”] had been ambushed by Czech resistance fighters while he was riding in his open-topped Mercedes [in Prague]. Eight days later, the architect of the Final Solution fell into the hands of the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob.”

Our God is a living God.

And, according to Jesus, somehow, in some way, we go on.

For him, that is what resurrection is.

Christians—in our typical way—have over the centuries went to extremes to explain and define what resurrection is.

And they have made it one of the defining beliefs we must have to be saved.

Essentially, to be resurrected we must first believe in resurrection.

Hmmm. I don’t hear Jesus telling us that anywhere here…

But, us Christians love to just squeeze the nuances out of everything!

I once had a former parishioner—a cradle Episcopalian—who later joined the Eastern Orthodox Church over his belief that the Episcopal Church had lost its way regarding belief in the Resurrection.

He refused to receive Communion from priests whom he knew did not believe in an orthodox understanding of the Resurrection of Jesus.

In fact, one of the first questions he would ask a new priest when he would meet them is: So what do you believe regarding the Resurrection?

I luckily passed that test, but not without a good deal of spiritual searching and struggling and some verbal nuances of my own.

But, the fact this morning is this: what do we believe about the resurrection?

Certainly we profess our collective faith in the Resurrection every Sunday in the Creed.

But have we really thought about it?

Well, of course,  one of the best places to look when we are our examining our faith is, of course, our trust Catechism, found in the back of the Book of Common Prayer.

So, let’s take a looksee at what the Prayer Book says about the resurrection.

If you will take your trusty old prayer books and turn to page 862.

There we find that question,

“What do we mean by the resurrection of the body?”   The answer is: We mean that God will raise us from death in the fullness of our being, that we may live with Christ in the communion of the saints.

I love that definition of resurrection.

God will raise us up in the fullness of our being.

Wow!

That is beautiful!

And that is something I can agree with and believe wholeheartedly in.

Now, what that means specifically is not easy.

And, you know?

I don’t want it to be.

I don’t want to examine that answer too closely.

I just want to kind of bask in the glow of the beauty of those words

God will raise us up to the fullness of our being.

Isn’t that our goal after all?

To live into the fullness of our being?

Isn’t that what trans people, and lesbian and gay and asexual and bisexual and straight people have been striving to do all along?

Live into the fullness of their being?

Isn’t that what all of us as living, breathing, searching, questioning, doubting human beings are striving for?

To live into the fullness of our being?

We don’t need to squeeze the meaning out of those words, as we are apt to do.

Because if we do, we will lose the purity and beauty of that statement.

 When we start becoming too specific, we start losing something of the beauty of our faith.

We lose the purity and the poetry of our faith.

When we start trying to examine too closely how the resurrection will happen and when it will happen and how a pile of bones or cremated remains or a body destroyed in the sea can be resurrected into another body, bit by bit, we find ourselves derailed.

What we do know, however is that what the resurrection promises is being raising up in the fullness of our being by our living God.  

The whole basis of what Jesus is getting at in today’s Gospel, in this discourse on marriage, is that the resurrection is not, as the great Anglican theologian Reginald Fuller, said, “a prolongation of our present life, but a new mode of existence.”

It’s not an extension of this world.

It’s something…different.

We will still be us, it seems from what Jesus is saying, but we will be living into that fullness of our being—with a different understanding of what it means to be alive.

Issues like marriage and divorce and remarriage will no longer be an issue.

Now some of us might despair at that fact.

We want to know that when we awake into the fullness of our being, into that resurrected life, we will have our families there, our spouses and our loved ones.

I have no doubt that our loved ones will be there, but it seems that it will be different than here.

We will have a truly fulfilled and complete relationship with all of our loved ones, and also with those who we may not have loved.

What this leads us to is, at the same time, a glimpse of the freedom that we will gain at the resurrection.

Just as some things such as marriage will no longer be an issue, all those other issues we are dealing with now in our lives and in the church will also no longer be with us.

The issues that divide us as a country, as a church, as a community, will all be done away with at the resurrection.

And these bodies too will be done away with as well.

These bodies that will fail us and betray us—these bodies that will die on us and be buried or be burned will no longer be a part of who we are anymore.

We will, at the resurrection, be made whole and complete and perfect by our living God, the God of our forebearers.

The reason we know this is because the God we serve—the God we have gathered together to worship this morning, is not a God of the dying bodies we have with us now.

The God we serve and worship is a God of the living.

When Jesus identifies God as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, he is saying that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive and that their God is the God of the living.

So, Resurrection is important to us.

It is VITAL to us.

It is important to us because when we long for and strive to live into the fullness of our being, we are living the resurrected life.

Resurrection is essential to our faith, because in it we have met and faced death.

Death no longer has control over us.

It longer has any power in our lives.

The power and strength of death has been defeated in the resurrection.

In the resurrection, we have the almost audacious ability to say, at the grave, that power-packed word of life: Alleluia.

Praise God!

Praise the living God of the Living!

For our God is not a God of the dead, but of the living.

So, let us live into the fullness of our being.

Let us live into the resurrected life that is our inheritance and our legacy.

And only in life—in this precious, beautiful and wonderful life, given to us by our God—can we fully and truly serve our living God.