7th November, 2010 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time. C
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The readings this weekend are timely for the month of November, which is traditionally the time of prayer for the Souls of those who have gone before us into eternal life… Also, as the year starts winding down, and the church year is coming to an end at the end of this month, the readings start looking at the end times and the promise of what is to come after that…. We are constantly brought back to the fact that God is faithful. God keeps his promises to us. God has promised that each one of us is precious to him and that God does not ever cease to care for us. We trust and believe in Our Lord’s promise that our life has abiding value, even beyond our earthly existence…. Our life continues on into the eternal life of God’s Heavenly Kingdom..……
The tensions and tragedies and mysteries of this life, all give way to the hope in God’s faithfulness to his beloved children……in this life and the next….
You can see on the sanctuary a special symbol of a tree…. It started off as bare… with empty branches…. A symbol of death….. but the leaves… with the names of departed loved ones, friends and parishioners… fills the tree… and reminds us of the eternal life we believe in….. our prayers are with the those who have gone before us… we believe we will all be reunited in God’s Heavenly Kingdom of life, peace and joy….
Our Christian faith does not gloss over death and its enormous impact….. in fact,… the very central symbol of our faith.. is the Cross…. It is so powerful, so unavoidable… so unable to be watered down……. But we also believe that it’s a sign of God’s absolute commitment to us humans…. God… revealed in Jesus, who stayed in there with us, through the best and the absolute worst that life throws at us…. And even underwent death… and not just any death, but the worst kind… and went through that and rose up to defeat the power of it .. and promise us that God will never give up on us…. Never abandon us…. Even if it feels like it….at times…
In the face of death … we search and listen.. and we hear silence…. As all people do…. (believers and non-believers…… but the quality of that silence is very, very different………… And, I truly believe… it’s not an empty silence…. It’s.. a like the silence just before someone is about to reply…. Just before someone is about to answer…….. (but extended, without a defined timelimit….)……… like the words of a poem I am about to read…….. it’s a silence filled with the power of God’s promise… it’s a silence bursting with God’s eternal ‘yes’ to life and to us…. (it’s a pregnant pause….)…..
This is the poem.. it says something that mere explanations can’t ever….
“From the voiceless lips
of the unreplying dead
there comes no word.
But in the night of Death,
Hope sees a star,
and listening Love can hear
the rustle of a wing.”
(ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL)
To me… that poem sums up the hope we have in our God….. when we run to God with all the fears and disasters that befall us… including when we are bereaved by loss… we ask God for answers…. And although we don’t hear a voice replying to us… in the silence… I truly believe… is a resounding promise…. I will raise you up… I will bring life out of death…. And that is not just in the next life… but also, God is constantly at work, striving to …. Bring resurrection and new life to all of this life’s endings and failures…. For, our Lord promises us, he is the God of the living… for all are alive to God….
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REFERENCES:
· FR. PAUL W. KELLY
· MISSION 2000 – PRAYING SCRIPTURE IN A CONTEMPORARY WAY. YEAR B. BY MARK LINK S.J.
· 2010 – A BOOK OF GRACE-FILLED DAYS. BY ALICE CAMILLE.
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Fr Jim has kindly sent a copy of the sermon he was planning to preach at our church for 8am, Sunday. Sadly, his replacement priest became ill and Fr Jim could not attend. Thanks Fr Jim for this wonderful homily, though. (Please note that the Anglican Lectionary has a different first reading to ours, but the other texts are the same).
The Anglican Parish of Maryborough
Sermon preached by Fr Jim
7 November 2010
Haggai 1.15b-2.9; Luke 20.27-40
We have come to the stage in reading Luke’s gospel Sunday by
Sunday, where Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem. He began this journey
knowing its heavy significance: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that
kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often
have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her
brood under her wings – and you were not willing!” (13.34).
Now he’s actually there. He entered the city in the shambolic
“procession” we recall dramatically on Palm Sunday (19.29-40);
then weeps over Jerusalem: “If you had only recognised on this day
the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your
eyes” (19.41-42). Then he foretold the city’s destruction.
How poignant is that!
We’ve entered a phase of intense conflict between Jesus and the
religious authorities. This morning we have the Sadducees, an ultraconservative
religious party who maintained there was “no
resurrection”; by which they meant there was no life after death.
The idea of some sort of life after death had been growing in
Israel’s religious life for a couple of centuries and had gathered
some popular support. You find reference to it in Daniel (12.2-3):
those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake to a judgment
of everlasting life or – note the powerful expression! - “to shame
and everlasting contempt”.
But the Sadducees would have none of this; and they did not regard
the book of Daniel (as we know it) as “Scripture” or having any
spiritual authority. Death therefore was death: total, final, hopeless.
(Many people, even Christians, effectively think that way.)
Their question to Jesus was meant to prove their point.
The only “Scripture” they recognised - that is, the only religious
writing with binding authority – was “the law of Moses” (the first
five books of our Bibles). Their “question” – challenge, really - was
to show that if there was any resurrection at all, it would be
impossible to apply the God-given law of Moses. So this absurd
new-fangled notion of “resurrection” has to be wiped away because
it cannot fit in with God’s law. Full stop.[i]
Jesus may have won this battle, but as we know he lost the war. At
least in this sense: he failed with most of the religious authorities of
the day, especially in the capital. But Luke’s gospel – in this passage
- is preparing the readers and the hearers for the account of Jesus’
extraordinary, unprecedented and trail-blazing resurrection.
*****
Now let’s go back to the first reading. Common usage today uses
“resurrection” to describe a dramatic comeback against impossible
odds; we have had this most recently in the title of John Howard’s
autobiography, Lazarus Rising; it is also a journalistic commonplace
to describe comeback for sporting stars and rock stars.
So in one sense it would not be too far-fetched to describe the
rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, after the Jews’ return from
the desolation of their exile in Babylon, as a “resurrection”. But as
it happened, it was the same old problem – God’s law sidelined,
worship corrupted, and faith became a matter of national pride
rather than life-giving commitment. And history repeated itself –
invading armies marched in, and the Romans merely took over
from the Greeks … and God’s people lived in pathetic servitude in
the Promised Land. Not realising they had brought it on
themselves.
In other words, this version of “resurrection” failed – in spite of
God’s hope in giving the nation another chance.
*****
Last Sunday, All Saints’. Remember the stunning readings: God will
swallow up death forever (Isaiah 26.5-9); “Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more; for the first things
have passed away” (Revelation 21.1-6).
So we are not dealing with a mere “comeback” here, but with a
total remake, a thorough transformation. Try and imagine it:
existing without death or sin or disease or anything else, so familiar
to us, that takes the edge off life’s beauty and joy. Try to imagine
living outside of space and time, even.
What is left? According to Jesus, not even your marriage bond …
Only: your identity. You will still be who are you – although
perfectly now, as God always intended you to be, after your
remake in the image of the resurrected Jesus.
Can you grasp that? Can you grasp that?
*****
So often, at funerals, I hear people talk about Grandpa (say)
watching his favourite footy team (beer in one hand, cigarette in the
other); or Grandma, cooking up her favourite dish for a great time
with her friends … Such images might help some people cope with
the reality of their own bereavement and grieving. But I think here
Jesus’ answer rules out such images for Christians.
I don’t want “more of the same”! I want the total remake into the
image of the resurrected Jesus; after that, what else really counts?
What is your idea of resurrection? What will it be like for you?
And what do you really want?
© the Revd James M McPherson
Maryborough Qld 4650
www.anglicanmaryborough.org.au
[i] 1 The concept of Sheol occurs several times in the “Law of Moses”, so the
Sadducees would have accepted that as their definitive belief about “life” after
death. It predates the concept of resurrection.
In Judaism She'ol is the earliest conception of the afterlife in the Jewish
Scriptures. It is a place of darkness to which all dead go regardless of
lifestyle and where they are "removed from the light of God" (see the
Book of Job). She'ol is a concept that predates the Christian and Muslim
ideas of judgment after death and also predates, and is different from,
Heaven and Hell. It is unclear whether She’ol was to be considered a real
place or a way of describing the unknown status of a person's conscious
being.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheol, visited 6 November 2010.]
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