The Vicar Tries to Steal Another Sermon

Last Monday the kids from the Ark Daycare Center came up into church to hear a story. The story happened to be about Moses and the 10 commandments, so if you had been here you would have seen me playing with the 50 pounds of sand in the desert box that lives in the back of the church, and you could have watched me open a bright red box shaped like a heart, a box that holds ten tablets. Each tablet has one commandment on it. The storyteller takes the tablets, one after the other, and places them in the sand to form steppingstones across the desert. If you think you'd like to see this story in action, you can come here next Friday night at 7:00 for our family storytelling program, and see how it works.

But the reason I'm telling you about the ten tablets with the ten commandments on them is not ONLY because I wanted to do a commercial for the new storytelling program. Another reason is to tell an old, familiar story on myself, the story where I pick up the tablet that says "don't steal" and promptly find a truly excellent sermon that someone else has written…a sermon that I'd love to share with you and take all the credit for. But I can’t do that, so you need to know that much of what you're about to hear comes to you courtesy of The Rev. James Liggett, who wrote a very fine sermon about our Resurrection life with Jesus.

He started his sermon by asking the question that the Sadducees ask in today's gospel -- if a woman has been married -- married legally, married in accordance with God's law -- if a woman has been married legally and in accordance with God's law many, many times during her earthly life, to whom will she be married after the Resurrection? The Sadducees were asking this question because they didn't believe in the Resurrection at all, at all, and wanted to ask a perfectly ridiculous question to point out how perfectly ridiculous they thought the idea of the Resurrection was. If you can't figure out something as simple as who is going to be married to whom after the Resurrection, said the Sadducees, then you can't understand the Resurrection well enough to believe in it. You might as well pack away the whole idea and forget about it. So the Sadducees asked Jesus a question about the Resurrection. And then the Rev. James Liggett came along and asked another question. His question is ABOUT the question the Sadducees asked. He asked, DIDN'T THE SADDUCEES ASK A GREAT QUESTION??

Now I don't know about you, but my first thought was no, not really. To me, those Sadducees sound like the kid in elementary school who really, really likes grammar, and likes to ask questions about it, and can spend 25 minutes arguing with the teacher about whether or not to use a comma somewhere while the rest of us sit with our eyes glazing over and thinking about recess. Fine, let them ask the question, let them bother Jesus with it all they want, and please just let the rest of us go home, OK?

But then the Rev. Mr. Liggett pointed out that the rest of us ask questions like that all the time. He says that we wonder whether babies who died as babies will still be babies in heaven…and if not, how old they will be…and for that matter, how old any of us will be. (By the way, St. Augustine thought about this question and came up with the answer 33, just in case you're interested). We wonder whether we'll recognize each other, and how much time we'll have to spend with people we didn't much like when they were here on earth. We wonder whether we'll still be able to watch spectacular sunsets, or drink good red wine. We wonder whether our pets will be there, too, and some of us -- that would be me -- are not at all sure we even want to go to heaven if there are no cats there.

We'd really like to know the answers to these questions. Some people will try almost anything in order to get answers -- seances, psychic channeling, books about near-death experiences, crystal balls, and so forth -- because it would really feel good to have our questions answered, our doubts removed, and our uncertainties settled. And it would feel best of all if we could get our answers straight from Jesus, who is likely to have more reliable answers that your nearest television psychic, after all. But when Jesus answers the Sadducees, he doesn't tell them anything much at all. He gives them a fascinating answer. What Jesus says is basically this -- things will be very different, people will be very different, God will take care of things very efficiently, and we really don't have to worry about the details. We can just trust God to take care of all that for us.

This may be a fascinating answer, says the Rev. Mr. Liggett, but it really isn't all that satisfying. We want to know more. We want all the details. But Jesus isn't telling us all the details, and he seems to be suggesting that we shouldn't spend a lot of time asking about them, either. We really don't have to know how old we will be, or whether we'll be able to chat with our friends and hold our loved ones in our arms or sit with our favorite cat on our lap after we are resurrected from the dead. We can let go of all these questions.

We can do this letting go because -- and this is the really important part here -- we can let go of our questions BECAUSE our hope about the resurrection-- the hope we have for ourselves and for those we love -- doesn't come from knowing answers to questions about what the resurrection life will be like. Our hope doesn't come from knowing who will be married to whom or whether well see a white light, or whether we should be taking harp lessons. Our hope comes from knowing Jesus, who is himself our resurrection and our life. Because we know Jesus, and because we know Jesus loves us, it is safe for us to let go of our doubts and our worries and our anxieties, and safe for us to let God do God's job. Because we know Jesus, and because we know Jesus loves us now and will love us to the end and beyond, we can surrender everything we are and everything we have and everyone we love to Him, in absolute confidence that his love and his care for them and for us will be greater than anything we can ask or imagine,

Now and forever, and into our resurrection life and beyond, Amen.