Sam Bush, “God is Real.”
Have you ever liked the idea of something but not the reality? For me, a good example is camping. I love the idea of being out in nature, away from screens and being with my family. But when it’s time to set up the tent or light the fire or sleep on the ground, the romance dwindles quickly. So many things fit this category: making spaghetti from scratch, buying books that you think you should read, quitting your desk job to work on a farm. These are all nice ideas that are difficult in real life. The German writer Goethe once said this on the topic of marriage: “Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing. A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” I just hope Goethe had a good marriage counselor!
In today’s gospel reading, a religious group called the Sadducees approaches Jesus about the idea of the resurrection. The Sadducees were a powerful aristocratic group in Israel. They held the majority of the seats in the ruling council of the temple. They held offices like High Priest. And they were generally more concerned with politics than religious affairs, perhaps because they did not believe in the afterlife. They were concerned with what was happening on the ground level, not the heavenly realm.
They approach Jesus to challenge him on the idea of heaven. Their argument is based on an Old Testament law that says if a man dies leaving no children, his brother is to marry his widow and take care of her. They present a scenario in which a woman marries through a line of seven brothers. When one of them dies, she marries the next brother and then the next brother until everyone, including the woman, has died. “So,” they say, “in the resurrection, whose wife will the woman be?" It is a trap. If Jesus says she will be the wife of all seven men, it would imply everlasting adultery. This was the ace up the Sadducees’ sleeve to refute the idea of resurrection. You can imagine them wearing wry smiles as they wait for his reply.
And how does Jesus respond? He’s very matter of fact. He says, “Those who belong to this age marry; but not in the resurrection. Marriage is a major preoccupation down here, but it’s a whole new ballgame in heaven.” The theologian Eugene Peterson paraphrases Jesus’ reply this way: “Those who are included in the resurrection of the dead will no longer be concerned with marriage nor, of course, with death. They will have better things to think about, if you can believe it. All ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God.” Jesus is not talking about heaven as an idea, but as a reality that makes our world look like the shadowlands. Apparently, the things we consider to be fundamental to our lives - marriage, children, career, legacy, successes and failures - will be but a shadow of the things to come.
You see, Jesus is not interested in the hypothetical. He knocks down the Sadducees’ story for the straw man that it is. Think about it: this poor woman gets passed down the family line with all of these brothers dropping like flies? Don’t you think you’d be a little nervous if you were the seventh brother? Like, shouldn’t we look into these mysterious deaths? The truth is that this woman is not real. They don’t care about her. She is a fictional prop for the sake of an intellectual argument. We do this all of the time. We speak about people in abstractions. Every time we talk about “the poor” or “the rich” or “the elderly” or “today’s youth” we risk losing touch with real, actual people. Where does the “idea” of you fall short, where who you want to be does not line up with who you actually are?
Into this hypothetical realm, Jesus says, “Can we stop playing pretend?” In Matthew’s account he tells them, “You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” In other words, “You have no idea what you’re talking about! You can’t compare this age with the age to come.” He’s speaking with authority. He’s talking about heaven like he’s actually been there and experienced its reality in full which is impossible for us to comprehend. And yet, its existence does not hinge on our understanding. Based on Jesus’ word, it is real whether we believe in it or not.
The clergyman Henry Van Dyke wrote a poem where he describes a ship setting sail and heading out to sea. He stands to watch it on the horizon until the massive ship is just a speck. “Then,” he writes, “someone at my side says, ‘There, she is gone.’” But then he writes, “Gone where? Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast, hull and spar as she was when she left my side. Her diminished size is in me – not in her. And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,” there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, ‘Here she comes!’” The Bible tells us that, because of Jesus’ resurrection, life is changed, not ended. This is not an idea, but a reality. Jesus says that God is the God of the living, not the dead. He mentions Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - men who had been dead for 2,000 years by that time - as if they are alive and well.
It can be easy for modern Christians to feel a little embarrassed by the idea of heaven as wishful thinking or some kind of escapism. There’s a notion that if you’re putting all your money on the afterlife, you won’t invest in your current life on the ground level. But believing that this world is not all there is, that something is eternal, that there is more to the story, can help you be more rooted to reality. As C.S. Lewis said, “Aim for heaven and get earth thrown in; aim for earth and get neither.” A hope in heaven can allow you to be less afraid, it can free you to be more generous, to treat your life as a temporary gift, to see other people through a more eternal lens.
John Newton, the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” once wrote a letter to a friend who was in a heated exchange with a rival opponent. He urges his friend to see his rival as he will see him in heaven. Newton writes, “In a little while you will meet in heaven; he will then be dearer to you than the nearest friend you have upon earth is to you now.” The things we think matter so much will not be nearly as real as the reality of heaven when God’s light will cast out all darkness and where perfect love will drive out fear and sin.
And yet, I believe we need something more than the hope of heaven. Believing that we will one day reach that far celestial shore can bring a real sense of comfort, but we need something on this side of the pond. In addition to the hope of heaven we believe that heaven came to us. As Christians, we do not worship an abstraction, but the living God. A God who did not stay remote, but took on flesh, entered our reality on the ground level, died on an actual Cross for our actual sins, so that we might actually live. Our idea of God was a distant deity who demands justice, but, for once, the reality is so much better than the idea. The living God is a friend of sinners who raises the dead.
As our baptism liturgy says, “In the waters of baptism we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.” As baptized believers, we have been reborn.
How does this speak into your actual reality? How is this not simply a game of pretend? Well, in light of today’s reading, I’ll give you a real example, not of a hypothetical marriage, but a real marriage.
A minister I know named Charleston Wilson who pastors a church in Florida tells a story of providing marriage counseling for a husband and wife who had been married for many decades and, to put it simply, the thrill was gone. He says after about 45 minutes of the couple fighting while he tried every textbook technique he could think of to fix their marriage, an idea hit him like a ton of bricks:
I was really overcome by it. I leaned over calmly, looking them directly in the eyes and, being as articulate as I could, I said, “I’ve got good news for you today. Your marriage is over … You heard me right, your marriage is dead. And the best thing we can do today is bury it right here in this office so that God can give you a new one.” They agreed … and it worked! On the spot! It works 97% of the time! They left holding hands.
This is the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection that enfolds in our day-to-day lives. Whether it’s your marriage or your sense of yourself or your very life, to live is Christ and to die is gain. And it might not always work for you - you may be in that 3% sometimes - but Jesus’ death on the Cross and his resurrection DID work on your behalf. The grace of God does not hinge upon your understanding. What we experience now in part, we will one day experience in full. The resurrection of the dead is not about making all things better. It’s about making all things new. If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come.
Amen.
