God of the Living

Luke 20: 27-38

November 10, 2013

            “I’ll be waiting on the far side banks of Jordan.  I’ll be waiting drawing pictures in the sand.  And when I see you coming I will rise up with a shout, and come running through the shallow waters reaching for your hand.” 

This is one of my favorite gospel tunes!  If you want to hear a wonderful version of it, check out Allison Krauss and the Carter Family sing it on her album, I Know Who Holds Tomorrow. 

            It is a song of reassurance from an aging husband to his wife about dying, making that last journey from this life to the next.  He tells her that the lures of this world no longer make him want to stay, but his one regret will be leaving her behind.  So if he goes first, then he’ll be waiting for her on the far side banks of Jordan.  He’ll wait there until she makes that journey too. 

            The sentiments of this song are more than just comforting and reassuring.  I think they reflect what so many of us believe about dying.  When we die, we’ll be met by the people we’ve loved who have gone before.  We’ll be met by our saints, the saints we gave thanks for last Sunday.  They’ll be waiting for us on the far side banks of Jordan.

            In trying to think more intentionally about this idea, I took a poll on my Facebook page the other day.  Some of you may have seen it.  Some of you responded.  I wanted to hear people’s thoughts about the life after this one.  So I borrowed a question asked by James Lipton, the creator and host of Inside the Actor’s Studio.  Lipton would ask each renowned actor on his show the same question, “If heaven exists, what do you want to hear when you get there?” 

            I received a variety of responses from a diverse group of my friends and family.  A few people responded that they hoped to hear music.  One of my friends wrote about wanting to hear the word, “Rest.”  But the majority of the people who answered my question said they hoped to hear the voice of a loved one: the voice of their dad or their mother or their grandmother.  One of my friends, making the connection to Eric Clapton’s song, Tears in Heaven and the lyric, “would you know my name if I saw you in heaven,” said she hopes to hear her mother say her name. 

While my statistics professor from college would be aghast at the unscientific manner in which this poll was taken, I think that the answers I received reflect the hope of that gospel song.  Regardless of our religious beliefs or lack thereof, many of us hope that when we die we are reunited with the people we love. 

And that hope is why it’s easy to be unsettled by this passage from Luke.  It helps us then to try and understand what’s happening in this story.  For once it’s not the Pharisees that confront Jesus, it’s the Sadducees.  As the text tells us, they came to him already not believing in the resurrection of the dead and then questioned him about that very topic.  They wanted to put Jesus on the spot, find another reason for discounting him and his claims about God and the kingdom, and basically make him look foolish.

The Sadducees were one faction in Jewish society.  They were of the priestly class.  Many of them were aristocratic and wealthy.  They believed that the word of God stopped with the Pentateuch; the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  If the resurrection wasn’t found in those books, then it wasn’t going to be found.  It did not exist. 

The Pharisees, however, did believe in the resurrection of the dead.  Their understanding of God’s word didn’t stop at the end of Deuteronomy.  They also included the prophets and the writings that can be found in the rest of what we know as the Old Testament.

These two groups – the Pharisees and the Sadducees – had been arguing over the resurrection for a long time.  Asking Jesus about it was a perfect way for the Sadducees to stir up that divisive argument all over again.

So they try to bait Jesus by asking him a ridiculous question.  They really just wanted to make Jesus look bad. 

The question they ask is based on a rather obscure law found in Deuteronomy about the perpetuation of a family line.  If a man marries a woman, but dies, leaving her childless, then it is the responsibility of the man’s brother to marry her.  That way they can have children and the family name, which always came through the man, would continue.  The first husband will not be forgotten in Israel, because through his brother, he had children.  This probably sounds very odd to us, but that perpetuation of line, of name was essential when that law was given. 

So basing their question on that law, the Sadducees pose the question to Jesus about seven brothers marrying the same woman.  The brothers are fulfilling their responsibility to the law and to the first brother.  But all of them die, including the woman.  Here’s the sticking point, in the resurrection who will the woman be married to? 

This is not the first time that Jesus has been baited.  For Luke, this is the third and final question asked of Jesus that ultimately sets the powers that be against him.  But with each question Jesus modeled how to answer the true intent of the question without giving way to frustration over the questioner’s methods or reason for asking. 

This time is no exception.  Jesus knows they’re trying to set him up, but he doesn’t use that as an excuse to evade the question or dismiss it.  He says, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” 

Jesus tells them they’re comparing apples to oranges.  There is no comparison.  In this age, in this life, on this earth, marriage is a part of life.  At that time, it would have been an absolute necessity – again for continuing the family line and name.  But in the age to come, marriage won’t be a part of that life.  There won’t be an issue of which of the brothers is the true husband. 

The Sadducees imply with their question that the belief was that if resurrection was real, it was merely a continuation of life as usual.  As David Lose expressed in his weekly column, the resurrection is “an eternity of more of the same.”  But Jesus discounts that understanding.  This age will be nothing like that age.  There won’t be marriage.  More importantly, there won’t be death.  The people of that age will be like the angels.  They will be children of God.  Death will no longer be a consequence of living.  Death will no longer be a consequence of living. 

And furthermore, Jesus goes on, you can look to Moses to find proof of the resurrection.  You can look to the very Pentateuch that you hold onto so tightly.  Moses himself said that God was the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.  In our minds these patriarchs died long ago, but God is the God of the living.  These three must be alive for that reason, because God is the God of the living. 

So Jesus answered their question by pointing out their error of thought about the resurrection, and by appealing to the very scripture they thought proved resurrection wrong.  While all of this is great, it still leaves me wondering about my original question.  Will I be reunited with the people I love or not?  Will my friends hear the voices of their fathers and mothers and grandparents?  Will someone be waiting for me on the far side banks of Jordan?

It seems to me that Jesus wasn’t denying this.  He doesn’t really address it.  What I do think he says is that in the resurrected life will be fundamentally different from what we know now.  But does that mean that there won’t be relationship?  How can there not be relationship when what Jesus did for us in his resurrection was restore right relationship?  His life and his death and his resurrection restored right relationship for us with God and with one another. 

So I’m going to cling to my hope that in the resurrected life, I will not only be in wonderful right relationship with God, I will also be in relationship with the people I have loved and lost here in this life.  Isn’t that what our hope is all about?  That in the resurrected life, we will finally live in the way we couldn’t achieve in this life.  The resurrected life, although we have no way to describe it because we aren’t there yet, will not just be more of the same.  The resurrected life will bring us into full relationship with God and with all God’s children.  In this we have our hope.  In this we put our trust.  Because we believe that God is the God of the living.  Let all God’s children say, “Amen!”

Ghosts

 This piece was an assignment written for the inimitable Amy Weldon in her fiction writing workshop in September, 2010.  The challenge was to write about a place in stress. 

Her father shooed her toward the car like someone with a broom, trying to sweep the last bit of crumbs and debris into the dust bin.  She had forgotten nothing, but she couldn’t leave yet.    

“Hold on, Dad.  I have to go check on something.”  She ran back in the house before his weary sigh of impatience could stop her. 

She opened the front door and started up the steps.  Leaning forward, she climbed the stairs the same way she did when she was a little girl, using both her hands and feet to propel herself forward.  At the top of the stairs, she straightened and headed across the open sitting room to the door.  Its paint was scratched from signs that used to hang there; homemade proclamations to Keep Out, Girls Only and Amy’s Room. 

Pushing open the door, she took a few shy steps inside and stared.  There was nothing left.  No furniture.  No books or albums or dresser drawers filled with t-shirts and blue jeans.  Only dusty impressions of posters and pictures lined the flowered wallpaper.  The cork letters that spelled out her name were gone, and so was the framed picture of Scottish cows her friend Jennifer gave her in 10^th grade. 

Her desk with its notebooks of poetry and love letters and small metal buttons and ticket stubs from concerts had been packed away.  The closet, once so full it seemed close to exploding, stretched out endlessly.  Everything, every trace of her had all been wrapped, packed, boxed and carted down to the waiting U-Haul trailer.  A few cobwebs along the baseboards in the corners waved slightly when the door opened.  But there was nothing else left to catch even the gentlest breeze.

 Except for the ghosts.  She hadn’t found a packing box big enough to fit them.  Their shadowy figures choked the room.  One ghost sat on the floor, burning incense, thinking it covered the reek of cigarettes.  A younger shade rearranged furniture in her dollhouse.  One lay across the bed, lost in a book, unperturbed by the ghost who sat next to her crying over a boy who’d promised to love her forever.  Forever came quicker than expected.  She saw a ghost in braces, and one in hot rollers practicing painting her mouth in red lipstick.  The ghosts choked the room.  She saw them all.  For a moment they looked back at her.  Each one said, “Stay.  Wait.  A few more days.  A few more minutes.  Don’t go just yet.”

She tried to smile, tilting her head to the side.  Then with a small, sad shake, she said, “I have to.”  She turned and stiffened her neck so she wouldn’t look back.

Blessed Are ...

Luke 6:20-31

November 3, 2013/All Saint’s Day/Confirmation

            Greeks spit.

            Now that I have your attention, let me explain that statement before I completely offend my dear sister and all of my other loved ones in Greece.  Greeks spit ritualistically as a way to ward off evil, the evil eye or evil spirits, etc.  If you’ve ever seen the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding – and if you haven’t you really should – there are at least two occasions in that movie when the ritual of spitting occurs as a way to keep evil at bay. 

            Greeks aren’t the only people who spit in this particular way.  Eastern Europeans, more specifically Eastern European Jews, also spit ritualistically.  Again, think of the movie Fiddler on the Roof.  Golda, Tevya’s wife, does the ritualistic spitting three times to ward off evil or prevent more disaster. 

I know that these are examples from movies, but they are based on reality.  I’ve been greatly influenced by the Greek side of my family, so much so that I occasionally think about doing that ritualistic spitting; especially at happier moments cause that’s when it seems the evil eye is most likely to strike.  Everyone in the family is healthy, happy, things are okay; quick start spitting – you know just in case. 

But I have another image that comes to mind when it comes to spitting.  I think about some of the boys I went to high school with who chewed tobacco.  We weren’t allowed to have soda cans in class, so they would make spittoons out of paper and sit at the back of the class, hopefully outside of the teacher’s notice, and periodically spit.  Not the most pleasant of images, I know. 

            There’s a reason why I’m talking about this particular subject and it is based on a word used in our passage from Luke’s gospel.  The word is ptochoi; in English it is spelled P T O C H O I.  Richard Swanson, professor of Religion, Philosophy and Classics at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, did a profound word study on ptochoi in his commentary on this passage, and all the credit for what I learned about this word goes to him. 

            Jesus uses this word in the first of his beatitudes.  “Blessed are the poor.”  Ptochoi means “poor people.”  Unlike Matthew’s version, in Luke’s gospel Jesus wasn’t referring to the “poor in spirit.”  Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor people”  “Blessed are the ptochoi.” 

But as Swanson pointed out, every word comes with connotations.  So it’s helpful to think about other words that begin with that pt sound.  Swanson offered analogies to birds, such as ptarmigan and pterodactyl.  As odd as it seems to compare the poor to birds, ancient or otherwise, think about what it’s like to be swarmed by pigeons looking for crumbs.  How often have I been walking along in big cities and been swarmed, not just by hungry pigeons, but by homeless people asking for change.  Blessed are the poor who must swarm the well-off looking for food; whether it’s on a city street or standing in line at a food pantry, or queuing up downstairs waiting for the Community Meal to begin.  Blessed are the ptochoi. 

            While Swanson offered other interesting analogies between ptochoi to similar words that begin with the pt sound, the one that struck me was this – ptochoi is related to the Greek word ptuo.  In Greek it literally means “I am spitting.”  In fact our word ptooey comes directly from it.   Blessed are the poor people.  Blessed are the spat upon. 

            Blessed are the spat upon.  Think about the different examples of spitting that I started off with.  I would gladly accept the ritualistic spitting because, superstitious as it may be, it is a way of showing love and concern and asking for protection.  But there’s nothing in this world that would make me want chewing tobacco spat on me.  Nope.  No way.  No how.  But Jesus says that those who are spat upon are blessed.  Blessed are the ptochoi, the poor people, the spat upon. 

            As crazy as it may sound I agree with the commentators and Biblical scholars who say that this is an appropriate passage for All Saint’s Day.  It is appropriate and fitting because today is the day we lift up the saints of the church, the corporate saints and our own personal saints.  Being good reformed Protestants, we don’t venerate saints.  We don’t pray to them or consider them as intercessors between us and God.  But we do lift up their lives as examples, as role models of faith and faithfulness. 

            Father Clark Shackleford, the retired Episcopalian priest here in town, told a story at our Bible study the other day about a group of schoolchildren who were touring an Episcopalian church.  The church had many stained glass windows that featured biblical scenes and images of the saints.  When asked about which ones were the saints, one little girl said, “The saints are the ones that let the light shine through.”  I could not think of a more perfect example of a saint.  A saint is not someone who was saintly.  Someone we consider to be a saint is not necessarily someone who was perfect or lived a perfect life.  A saint is a person who through their living let the light of God shine through to others. 

            I’m going to take it one step further.   A saint is one who was willing to be spat upon.  A saint is one, who even if they weren’t born into the class of ptochoi, they willingly took on that mantle.  A saint is one who was willing to be spat upon for their faith, because of their faith. 

            I often use Archbishop Romero of El Salvador as an example of a saint.  He was not born as a ptochoi, and his views as a priest were traditional and aligned with the accepted teachings of the church.  When he was made Archbishop, the powers that be thought he would not cause trouble.  Other priests were upset by this appointment because they were afraid he would work against their cause of liberation theology.  But Romero saw a friend and fellow priest assassinated for his work to liberate the poor, and that changed him.  Romero was willing to be not just spat upon for his faith, but to give up his life for his faith.  Jesus said, “Blessed are the ptochoi,” and Archbishop Romero lived those words and died for them. 

            Romero is a well-known saint, but what about our own personal saints?  What about the people we’ve personally loved and lost?  I had a friend in seminary named Anne.  Anne had a brain tumor that affected her short-term memory, caused seizures and eventually took her sight and her speech and her life.  But Anne was the most determined person I have ever known.  We met in Hebrew school, which was like a boot camp for languages.  Learning Hebrew is tough to begin with, but having short-term memory issues makes it that much harder.  But Anne never quit.  When her health began to worsen, she was willing to take one class a semester, whatever it took to get through seminary. Before seminary, Anne worked with the poor, the ptochoi.  At one point I believe she was working in a shelter, and a resident there hit her, knocked her down.  Her husband and her father begged her to quit, but she just told them that they didn’t understand this person.  He had been knocked down by life over and over again; it’s no wonder he knocked her down.  He was one of the ones who was spat upon, and she was willing to be spat upon with him.  Blessed are those who are spat upon.

            Along with celebrating our saints today we also celebrate our confirmands: Ryan, Rebekah, Phoebe and Zach.  Too often the subtle message of confirmation is that it’s really graduation from church.  But that’s far from the truth. Today we confirm the vows that we made at their baptisms, even if we didn’t personally witness those baptisms.  But our responsibility to and for these young people is not over.  In fact, it’s just begun.  Because we are charged with being examples of faithfulness; being those who are willing to be spat upon in Jesus’ name.  We are charged with their continued discipling.  And we also must recognize that they are role models of faithfulness for us.  In so many ways, they have already shown that they are willing to be the spat upon.  We disciple them and they disciple us. 

            Although it may not seem like it at first, I think these words of Jesus, his sermon on the plain rather than on the mount, call on each of us to have courage.  Especially those of us, and I count myself a member of this group, who would not be considered one of the poor people.  We are called to have the courage to be spat upon, to be reviled, to be hated because of our faith, because of our trust in God through his son.  We are called to do this for all the saints, those who have preceded us and those who will follow.  Let all God’s children, let all God’s saints, let all those who are spat upon say, “Amen.”