The God of Life
Luke 20:27-38[1]
Life has a funny way
of teaching us the lessons we need to learn. As much as we may try to deny it,
one of life’s basic lessons is that, as William Faulkner is famously quoted, “The
past is never dead. It’s not even past.” All of us live our whole lives under
the influence of our experiences. We can either make peace with our past,
accept it for what it was, and move forward with our lives. Or we can try to
ignore our past, making an effort to forget the memories that can come back to
haunt us. But whatever we try to suppress festers to the point that it exerts
even more power over us. And when it does come out, it’s usually quite ugly.
While it’s true that
we can never escape our past experiences, I don’t believe for a second that we
are trapped by them. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be much point in living.
Then Benjamin Franklin was right when he said, “in this world, nothing is
certain except death and taxes.” That kind of outlook is common, but it’s a
prescription for a pretty hopeless view of life. From this perspective, death
has the final word on everything. And that means that the human family is
hopelessly trapped in the vicious circles of selfishness, hatred, poverty,
violence, injustice, and despair. All that’s left is just to resign ourselves
that “Life is useless, all useless,” as the “preacher” of Ecclesiastes says
(Eccl 1:2, TEV). There’s not much room in that outlook for faith or hope
or love.
In our Gospel lesson
for today, Jesus was responding in part to this kind of pessimism about life. He
had been answering questions from various groups of Jewish leaders, each one
intent on embarrassing him in front of the people. One question posed came from
the Sadducees. They were the ruling priests who controlled the Temple. They
were also the ones who cooperated with the Roman empire. And they were not
above bribing the Roman governor for the privilege of serving as the chief
religious leaders of the Jewish people.
As Luke tells us, the
Sadducees didn’t believe in “resurrection.” They lived in a closed system, and
they weren’t open to the idea that there could be anything more to life than
what they already knew. The Sadducees came to Jesus and asked him about the
practice of a man marrying his brother’s widow. Moses had told them to do this
so that the first child would be the descendant of the dead brother, to ensure
that his name would continue to live on through his offspring. This was the
Sadducee’s view of “resurrection”: people “live on” through their children. Their
question to Jesus was about seven brothers who in turn married the same woman.
They asked him, “In the resurrection … whose wife will the woman be?” (Lk.
20:33). I don’t think they were really looking for an answer. They were just
trying to make the idea of a “resurrection” look ridiculous. And Jesus with it.
But Jesus “corrected”
them by recalling the time when 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). Jesus went on to explain that in the next life there would be no need
for ways to ensure that a dead man had descendants, 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’s defined by death, but
rather by life. God’s work in the world is based on promises that point toward
a future with hope and life. Promises like “I will wipe away every tear,” and
“they will beat their swords into ploughshares,” and “I am making everything
new.” The Christian faith is at heart the hope that God has begun to do just
that through Jesus Christ. Our faith insists that from God’s perspective, the final
word that defines us all is not death, but life.
I think that how we
choose to look at all of this makes a great difference in our attitude toward
stewardship. As I mentioned last week, in the Reformed tradition we believe
that stewardship is not just about money, but it’s about seeing our lives as a
gift from God to be invested for the sake of the Kingdom. If we choose to live
within a closed system and assume that there’s only so much to go around, we’re
probably not going to be willing to take much risk when it comes to our money
or our lives. But if we can look at things from the perspective of God’s open
future, a future in which life is the final word rather than death, then
perhaps maybe we can step out in faith. If we can see the future as one in
which our “labor in the Lord” is “not in vain” but rather makes an important
contribution to advancing God’s purposes in our community and our world, it
puts our stewardship in a whole different perspective.
We all have the
choice: we can live as if the past overrules any hope for the future, and death
ultimately makes life “useless.” If we choose to assume that our best is back
there in the past—which means it’s gone—I doubt that we’re going to be interested
in going out of our way to invest anything for God’s Kingdom. But if we choose
to live based on the faith that the “God of life” is at work around and among
us to make everything new, then maybe we can have the courage to stake our
lives on God’s promises. When we embrace God’s vision for the future, perhaps we’ll
begin to realize that we have no idea what God can or cannot do in our lives,
in this congregation, and in this community!
The next step is to
put our faith into practice every day through prayer, giving back what we’ve
been given, helping those in need, inviting others to join us, promoting community, studying the Bible
together, and joining together for worship on the Lord’s Day. When we invest
our lives for the sake of the kingdom of God, it’s a big vision we’re taking on.
None of us can do it alone. It will take all of us doing all we can together in
a spirit of humble prayer, asking the “God of life” who is the source for
everything we have to send us what we need. More than that, it will take God
himself working in and through us, whose last word is not death but life!
[1] ©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 11/6/2022 for Hickman
Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/JSjQzIxI7HE
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