Thanksgiving, gratitude and resurrection living...

NOTE: Here are my worship notes for this coming Sunday,

November 10th.  I found great wisdom - and help - in David Lose's reflections in Working Preacher and have used many of his insights. I am grateful. (I have NO idea why I am having trouble with the font size today... but it is late and I am calling it quits for today.) 

Introduction

We are 25 days out to Thanksgiving and just six plus weeks until Christmas.  We are in the middle of our Stewardship Campaign for 2014 with just two weeks to go before Pledge Sunday.  And, if you are following the liturgical calendar of Western Christianity, we are three weeks away from Christ the King Sunday – the close of the Christian year – and the final feast day before the start of Advent.

·   I tell you this today because time is a funny thing – we always want more – and we are often stressed-out about all the pressures and demands that time places on us.

·   But here’s the thing: we already possess all the time that there is, right?  None of our fretting, worrying, obsessing or all the rest makes time move any slower or faster.  It doesn’t buy us one extra minute of life nor does it alter the laws of creation.

And while many of us FEEL like Dr. Seuss when he said, “How did it get so late so soon…” the key to living a life of gratitude and real thankfulness has to do with staying grounded in the present moment. Mother Teresa had a helpful way of paraphrasing both Moses and Jesus when she said:  “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today, so let us begin.”

·   Let us begin to love one another in an unhurried way – let us begin to carry one another’s burdens without complaint – let us begin to unplug ourselves from the rat race that makes so many of us so frenzied and crazy – and let us begin to live like we authentically follow Jesus rather than just tip our hat at him as we check our email on the way to yet another appointment.

·   This morning’s gospel provides a good starting point when Jesus says: 

Given the big picture, although marriage – and business and politics and our children’s sports schedules and the latest electronic gadgets – have become major preoccupations here, they are not all the important in the life to come. Those who are included in the resurrection of the dead will no longer be concerned with marriage – or business or politics or a lot of the other things that ensnare us now – 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. Remember even Moses exclaimed about resurrection at the burning bush, saying, ‘Lord you are the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob!’ So listen: God isn’t the God of dead men, but of the living”

This morning I want to put our lessons from Scripture into a context of real time – as well as the real pressures of 21^st century living – but I want to try to do this from a sacred rather than a harried perspective.  Every week – and this is not one of my Celtic exaggerations but a real fact of life – every week somebody says to me something like this: “I am just so busy these days – it is making me crazy…” Then they go on to tell me all the things they CAN’T do because of all the stuff they HAVE to do.

·    And I’m going to take the risk of sounding like a total old grouch in telling you this, ok?  I used to feel sorry for people who were frenzied and frazzled and running themselves ragged.  Their anxieties evoked empathy – their worries broke my heart – and I used to try to come up with strategies to help out.  I mean, that’s what all young pastors do – we want to be useful and helpful – so I used to offer ideas and suggestions and strategies to help anxious and stressed-out people try to manage things better.

·   But I don’t do that too much anymore – yes, yes a little bit when I’m really co-dependent – but not so much anymore because most people don’t really want to change. You see, no matter what they say, in contemporary culture busyness makes us feel important or valuable. So some people get affirmation by burning the candle at both ends and no matter what I say they aren't going to stop.

·   Also, as hard as this is to say, some people need to hit bottom, really crash and burn before they are ever going to be ready, willing and able to slow down and start living at a pace that is holy and human.  And while I hate this fact, I know that I don’t have all that much time left to waste offering insights and strategies to people who don’t really want to change.

Does that make me cranky?  Does that mean my heart is too tough and I’m not as loving a pastor as I could be?  Somebody will surely say yes but one of my mentors as a maturing pastor has been Fr. Martin – a recovering alcoholic Roman Catholic priest – who used to work with other addicts – and busyness is as much an addiction, beloved, as booze or dope. And what Fr. Martin taught me was that some people are not ready to make deep and life-giving changes.  And while that doesn’t mean that they are bad people or any more of a sinner than the rest of us, it mean they are caught in a rut.

Fr. Martin used to say to all those who came to him for counseling something like:  Look, I love you – and I will pray for you every day – I want to assure you that God loves you and aches for your healing.  But if you aren’t going to seriously try to implement my hard won advice for your life, you are wasting both of our time.  So, unless you are going to DO what I ask, let’s bring things to a close right now because there are OTHERS who are really ready to make a change.  And that has become one of my pastoral mantras most of the time, too.

You see, it is all about honoring God as fully as possible within the constraints of the time we have.  It is all about living truly grateful lives.  So if it is true that we already have all the time that there is, then it is up to us to use it well.  I like this old saying:  Time is too slow for those who can’t wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve and too short for those who rejoice. But for those committed to God’s love, time is eternity.

As our calendars push us towards Christ the King Sunday and Thanksgiving and even Christmas, let’s look at an alternative to the stress and anxieties offered in today’s texts.  Specifically, let’s be clear about two insights:

·   First the context of Christ’s lesson in his time – what he was trying to communicate to whom – and why it offered healing and hope in his day.

·    And second what these ancient words might mean for you and me in the 21^st century, ok?

Insights

The gospel lesson today involves a fight between Jesus and the Sadducees. So if we are going to have any clue about why these words and ideas matter, we have to first grasp who the Sadducees were and second how the wisdom of Jesus was different from their perspective, ok?  The biblical scholar and preacher, David Lose, makes these points about the Sadducees.

·   The Sadducees were sometimes rivals to the Pharisees but were also united with them in their opposition to Jesus. The Sadducees had primary authority over the Temple in Jerusalem. They recognized only the original five "books of Moses" as fully authoritative, and for this reason did not believe in the resurrection of the dead (as that is not referenced in the Pentateuch). (Working Preacher)

·   The law they were arguing about with Jesus is called levirate marriage from the Latin levir("brother in law") and is found in Deuteronomy 25:5-10. The goal of this law was to insure the preservation of one's family name by stipulating that a man should marry the childless widow of his brother. Are you with me?  Do you see how such a thing might be valuable in the realm of ancient Israel?

The question the Sadducees were addressing was meant to make Christ’s words about the resurrection seem foolish. So, while Jesus chose to engage them in this battle, he also chose not to waste his own time.  And there were three things they did not understand about the true meaning of resurrection.

·   First, he said that life after this life is NOT a continuation of what we already know – everything is totally different in the resurrection – not a continuation of the present.  It is a time of ecstasy with God that will last forever. The Sadducees believed that once this life was over, that is all she wrote; Jesus said that God is not that stingy - there is more to come.

·   Second, because resurrection life is so different – and we can’t even imagine what it means to be with God perpetually in ecstasy – we ought not get caught up in fights about things that waste our time in the present.  Like Moses learned at the burning bush, God yearns for us to be fully present and alive right now for the Lord is the God of the living not the dead. Mostly Jesus was about loving and healing people in the present and helping us stop wasting our time.

·   And third, if it is best not to waste our time fretting and worrying about what life after life will be in ecstasy with the Lord forever, it follows that we not waste our time doing stupid or cruel things in the days that remain right now, right?  Why not learn to live in the wisdom of the Lord NOW – honoring love, nourishing hope, practicing patience, prayer and beauty – instead of running around like a chicken with our head cut off and complaining about our busyness without making any changes?

That’s the first challenge and first part of my message:  so let me as if that was clear?  Do you have any questions about what Jesus was arguing about in his context?  

The second part of my message builds on the first:  if resurrection living is going to be beyond our comprehension – filled with ecstasy and intimacy with God forever – “if time itself and death will have disappeared forever” so that whatever we experience beyond this world comes through God rather than our limited senses, somebody is probably wondering: why bother talking about it at all?  Let’s face it, none of us have been there yet, right? So why waste our time talking about heaven and resurrection and all the rest when there are so many other pressing matters demanding our attention?

·    Here’s my hunch:  learning to trust Jesus about the life to come is another way of encountering his peace and living in the present with gratitude.  Different ages have different themes – there was the ice age – there was the age of fear – the age of disease and the age of famine – ours has been labeled the age of anxiety.  So do you know the difference between fear and anxiety?  Fear has a focus – it has a name – while anxiety is a free-floating sense of dread. It isn’t grounded in anything specific, so it can’t be addressed or healed.

So what Christian resurrection thinking points to is the assurance that not only will our loved ones be embraced by God’s grace and ecstasy, but that we, too will be reunited with them in ways that are greater and more holy than anything we might imagine in this life.  Today's gospel passage tells us something essential, I think:

·    +  Jesus doesn’t say that we won’t know our spouses, friends and family members in our resurrection life. “He only says that resurrection life will not be marked by the same features as this one. Indeed, given his next statement about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it seems that the relationships defining our current life may persist” but they will be saturated and defined by God’s grace. (Working Preacher)

·    +  Are you still with me here? I often turn to Revelation 21 for a hint at what all of this means as we look through a glass darkly…

Jesus also goes on to make it clear that there is a distinction between immortality and resurrection.  And while that may seem like an arcane difference – and many, many people affirm the immortality of the soul as a source of comfort – the truth of Jesus is even sweeter.  You see, rather than say some indistinct part of my loved one lives on into eternity beyond the physical body, Christians confess that while all of us really die – it is not an illusion – the promise of the resurrection is that the whole person “will in some way be united with God." (Working Preacher) St Paul put it like this in I Corinthians 15: 

Some skeptic is sure to ask, “Show me how resurrection works. Give me a diagram; draw me a picture. What does this ‘resurrection body’ look like?” If you look at this question closely, you realize how absurd it is. There are no diagrams for this kind of thing. We do have a parallel experience in gardening. You plant a “dead” seed; soon there is a flourishing plant. There is no visual likeness between seed and plant. You could never guess what a tomato would look like by looking at a tomato seed. What we plant in the soil and what grows out of it don’t look anything alike. The dead body that we bury in the ground and the resurrection body that comes from it will be dramatically different. You will notice that the variety of bodies is stunning. Just as there are different kinds of seeds, there are different kinds of bodies—humans, animals, birds, fish—each unprecedented in its form. You get a hint at the diversity of resurrection glory by looking at the diversity of bodies not only on earth but in the skies—sun, moon, stars—all these varieties of beauty and brightness. And we’re only looking at pre-resurrection “seeds”—who can imagine what the resurrection “plants” will be like!

Our hope is not fragmented, you see, but full bodied. Again, David Lose’s words are helpful based upon a conversation he had with a grieving widow:

After teaching an adult forum on resurrection… a parishioner came to me afterward very upset. Her husband had died the previous year and her belief in the immortality of the soul had brought her comfort. As gently as I could, I said that I didn’t want to take that comfort away, but rather to make it stronger, more complete. “What I want and hope for you,” I said, “is more than the wispy essence of your husband. I want the whole person for you, the whole person created, loved, and now redeemed by God in and through Christ.” Over time, it seemed like that affirmation helped her reckon with her grief, not by denying it but by promising that there would be an end to it – and, indeed, an end to all of our grief, tears and suffering -- when God creates a new heaven and new earth and invites us all to live there together with God and in the fellowship of the saints. (Working Preacher)

Conclusion

The promise of the resurrection is the assurance of the end of our grief and suffering forever.  It challenges the anxieties of this age with hope and grace and offers us an alternative that doesn’t waste our time (or our energy or our love.) Want to live a life of gratitude and thanksgiving:  get grounded NOW, Jesus tells us, in the love of God.  Pay attention NOW to what is most important.  And leave the rest – especially the anxieties, fretting and busyness – to the Lord. God is in control whether we trust that or not – and our worrying doesn’t help the cause of Christ one iota!  At this point in my journey, that's the good news for today for those who have ears to hear.