People of the Future
Luke 20:27-38[1]
We are creatures whose lives are defined to a significant extent
by time. That is a fact of life. We all have a past, and we have to find a way
to be able to accept the past we have, not the past we’d like to have. We also
have to find a way to live in the present, because we really don’t have any
other time in which to truly live. At the same time, we need some sense of hope
for the future. Having hope gives us direction in life. All three—past,
present, and future, define our lives, and we have to find a healthy way of
relating to them.
These days, it would seem that many people try to ignore the past
and the future. There is such a strong emphasis on staying in the present
moment, it would seem that we want to act as if the past and the future don’t
really matter. While I agree that staying in the present moment is a good way
to live, that doesn’t somehow magically make our past disappear. Nor does it
erase the fact that we need a positive sense of the future in order to be able
to live fully in the present. Without hope for the future, perhaps the skeptics
are right: in the words of Lord Macbeth, life is “a tale told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”[2] If
this is true, death is the true reality of life, and there is no hope for any
of us!
In our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus was responding to this kind
of pessimism about life. In the context, he had been answering questions from
various groups of Jewish leaders, each one intent on embarrassing him in front
of the people. The particular question posed in this setting came from the
Sadducees. They the priests and high priests. Their base of power was the
Temple. They were also the ones who primarily represented the Roman empire. And
they were not above bribing the Roman governor for the privilege of serving as
the High Priest, the chief religious leader of the Jewish people.
As Luke tells us, the Sadducees did not believe in “resurrection.”
They believed that this life was all there is. They believed only what the past
had to teach them through the books of Moses. And they used the books of Moses
as rules that strictly defined what they would and would not believe in. In a
very real sense, they were people without any sense of a future. They operated
within a closed system, in which life was of necessity defined by the past.
They were the guardians of the past, and they used their power to maintain
their view as the final word on life in the present.
And so they came to Jesus and posed a question to him that they
believed would embarrass him. It is a question about the practice of a man
marrying his brother’s widow. The idea was that the first child would be the
descendant of the dead brother, and that would ensure that he would continue to
live on through his offspring. This was the Sadducee’s view of the future: they
continued to live on through their children. But they posed a question to
Jesus: suppose seven brothers in turn married the same woman. “In the
resurrection … whose wife will the woman be?” (Lk. 20:33). I don’t think they
were really looking for an answer. They simply posed the question in order to
make the idea of a “resurrection” look ridiculous. And Jesus with it.
But Jesus “corrected” them, and he did so by quoting Moses right
back at them. He recalled the instance where Moses met God at the burning bush.
There, God spoke of himself as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the
God of Jacob” (Exod. 3:6). When Moses had this encounter, the patriarchs had
been dead for centuries. Jesus drew the inference that this proves that the
dead are raised, for he said that God is “God not of the dead, but of the
living” (Lk. 20:38). In light of that fundamental truth about God, Jesus went
on to explain that in the next life there would be no need for practices
designed to ensure descendants for a dead man, because they would all be
“children of the resurrection,” no longer subject to death (Lk. 20:35-36). In other words, their question was irrelevant.
I think one of the most important points Jesus was trying to make
here is that you cannot limit God’s work to the past. If God is the God of
life, he is also the God of the living. And that means that our future is not
one that is defined by death, but rather by life. God does not operate within a
closed system, but rather he is at work creating his Kingdom, which is
“everlasting kingdom” that “endures throughout all generations” (Ps. 145:13).
This kingdom where life and peace and justice and freedom reign is the future
toward which God is working, and it is already here pointing us to our true future.
When we align our lives with God’s truth, we become people of the future.
I think that how we choose to look at all this can makes a
profound difference in our attitude toward stewardship. If we think that our
best is back there somewhere in the past, I doubt that we’re going to be
interesting in risking anything for God’s Kingdom. But if we can live our lives
on the basis of the faith that the “God of the living” is continually at work
around us and among us to make everything new, then maybe we can have the
courage to stake our lives on God’s future. From that perspective, we have no
idea what God can do in and through our lives, in and through this
congregation, and in and through this community. When we embrace God’s future
as our own, we can not only live more fully in the present moment, but we can
also invest ourselves in what God will accomplish through us. Then we truly
become people of the future.
[1]
©2019 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 11/10/2019 at
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2]
William Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” Act 5, Scene 5.
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