Proper 27 C

Have any of you had the experience of talking to a friend or a neighbor or a colleague who quoted something from scripture and was absolutely sure that he or she had a rational explanation why that particular scripture supported the point that he or she was trying to make? In the Gospel passage today Jesus implies that that is not how we are to use scripture. Rather scripture is designed to take us beyond ourselves, to transform us, to help us be fully alive.

Proper 27 C

Luke 20:27-38

Transcribed from a sermon given on

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

On November 7, 2010

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

(laughter) Anybody every had that experience? I don’t know? Maybe once or twice?

We all know that people use scripture to support what they already believe. We have all had that experience. Maybe you’ve done it once or twice. We certainly find that it happens in the current world. In the big controversies that are going on, whether it be about ordination of gays and lesbians, or about the ordination of women. You might go back a little further and you saw the Bible being used this way during the civil rights movement. You certainly saw the Bible being used this way during the time of Civil War where people on both sides of the issue of slavery could take passages from the Bible and say, “Clearly the Bible supports slavery,” while others could say, “Clearly the Bible supports the abolition of slavery.” The Bible has been used to support the Divine Right of Kings. It was used by all kinds of religious people many years ago to send soldiers off to the Middle East during the Crusades to kill thousands of people to get back Jerusalem. It was used in the early Christian Church for all the theological debates about the nature of Christ. It is nothing new to take snippets from the Bible and then use them to support your point of view. We know it is nothing new because that is what happened in today’s Gospel reading.

There was a division within Judaism in the time of Jesus about whether there was life after death, about whether there was some form of resurrection. Some believed that our death was the end of our unique experience. Others believed that there was some kind of life after death. Jewish people today also fall into those two camps. It is part the Jewish tradition. Some believe in a resurrection some believe that there is none. The Sadducees were a group that did not believe in resurrection. Now Jesus at this point in scripture has been talking a lot about resurrection. So a Sadducee thinks he has it all figure out. He’s got a great argument that he is going to take to this rabbi.

He takes a bit of the law from Moses which says that if there are brothers and one of the brothers dies and the wife has had no children then the other brother should marry that wife. The reason for this is you wanted to continue the lineage. You wanted to continue the name of each male. So if the brother has died it is the other brother’s duty to marry the wife and have children who will carry the brother’s name and carry on that tradition. So this Sadducee takes that law, that is not a very significant law, and then he manipulates it. Now suppose that there were seven brother and they all ended up marrying the same woman as each one died off. It is one of those thought experiments. I’m sure you have encountered people who use those kinds of hypothetical situations in order to support their perspective. So he asked, “Whose wife is she in the resurrection?”

Jesus’ response is that you don’t understand. In the resurrection people don’t get married. We are not concerned in the resurrection with the same kind of issues that we are concerned with when we are living on earth. Marriage isn’t relevant. If you are going to live forever you aren’t concerned about having children. It is not an issue.

It is interesting that in looking at the other books of the Bible, the other synoptic Gospels, both Matthew and Mark have this same story. It is almost identical except they have an additional sentence in which Jesus’ first response to the Sadducee is, “You do not understand scripture nor the power of God.” I don’t know why Luke didn’t include that, but I love that way of describing someone who takes a piece of scripture to support their own viewpoint. Scripture is not supposed to be used that way.

Then Jesus goes on to take another little piece of scripture that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with resurrection and uses it by saying that Moses said that God was the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and if he is God of them, God is the god of the living not of the dead which means there must be resurrection. I always remember when I read that thinking, “That’s really not a very good argument for resurrection.” There had to be better scriptural arguments for it.

But when I though about what I was going to say today, and I contemplated this whole passage, I realized that this whole passage is not about the resurrection, it is about the use of scripture. It is about how are we to be with scripture. So Jesus kind of turns it around on the Sadducee by basically saying, I think you are totally wrong and that is not the way to do scripture. You really don’t understand, but if I were going to use that kind of reasoning I can find some passage in scripture that with the same kind or reasoning would support my point of view. But that is not what scripture is for.

When I was in seminary there was a student who told a story of a professor who said to the class, “Now if you were stuck on a deserted island, what one book would you want to have with you?” And since this was at a seminary, everybody raised their hands and said, “Of course you would want the Bible.” And the professor said, “No, what you would want is a book on boat building.” Because the point is to get off the island. And then the professor reached down and picked up a Bible and he said, “This is a book on boat building and we have turned it into a manual for island life.” A book on boat building we’ve turned into a manual for island life.

Scripture is designed to take us beyond ourselves. Scripture is there to transform us. The word in the New Testament that is usually translated as repentance is metanoia, to know again, to turn around, to be transformed. The purpose of scripture is not to support what we already believe but to encourage us to see the world in a new way. To challenge us.

My new testament professor said that when you are reading scripture as you are reading along if you are going, “Oh, yeah, I like that.” Just keep reading don’t stop. That is not real relevant, but when you reach that passage where you go, “Huh? Jesus couldn’t possibly have said that. No this couldn’t possibly be right,” that’s when you stop and you take time and you pray and you meditate and you study to try and understand that passage, because that is where the spiritual growth is. We don’t grow just reading things we agree with. We grow when we struggle on the edges and we try to understand things in a new way.

Maybe there was a reason that Jesus used that passage about God being the God of the living, because what he offered is not just resurrection after our death, but he also was offering fullness of life right now. Remember the time when he says, “Let the dead bury the dead.” There are a lot of people who are walking around on earth but are not fully alive. God and the resurrection are for those who are fully alive, who are constantly growing, who are constantly reaching out to know God in a new way. And that is what scripture invites us to.

One of the gifts and challenges of being a preacher in a liturgical church that uses a lectionary is that I don’t get to pick what the readings are on Sunday morning. I get up on Monday and look to see what I have this coming Sunday. Sometimes I go “Oh, great, I’d love to preach on that.” And other times I go, “Oh, what am I going to do with that?” And it forces me to wrestle with pieces of scripture that I might just read over in a hurry. And it forces me to look at them in a new way. And then try and figure out what am I going to say to the congregation that might open people there to see things in a new way. Because that is what, I believe, scripture is all about. It is about inviting us through the action of the Holy Spirit to be transformed and to live a life where we are fully alive.