Luke 20:27-38
No marriage in the world to come. No sex
in heaven. That prospect does not actually sound very . . . heavenly. There are
a variety of ways for human beings to be intimate with each other, of course,
but certainly vast numbers of people enjoy and depend on the sexual intimacy of
marriage. Which is why so many people have found the words of Jesus today so
disturbing. There will be no marriage in the resurrected life. But we know God
is love, so we can be sure that whatever we will experience in that life, it will
involve more loving, not less. So if these verses bother us, I am guessing the
problem is not with God’s plan but with our imagination, or lack thereof. C. S.
Lewis writes insightfully about this in his book, Miracles:
I
think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told
that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure should immediately ask
whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer “No,” he
might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In
vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures
don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think
of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not
know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know
the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in
Heaven, will leave no room for it. Hence where fullness awaits us we anticipate
fasting.
We anticipate fasting. We talk a good
game. We proclaim that God is awesome, we profess that God’s love is all
powerful, but then we limit what God can do to what our human brains can
envision. So 0ften what we call a failure of faith is really a failure of
imagination. The Sadducees in this Gospel are trapped in the smallness of their
own minds. If a woman is married to seven different men in this life, then
whose wife will she be in the next life? The Sadducees cannot imagine how to
resolve that — “Look at this big problem! How can you fix it? You can’t fix
it!” — so they conclude that there is no life after death. And Jesus responds
by saying that God is so much bigger than that and has something so much
greater than that in store for us.
This is a common theme in our history:
God is always inviting us to envision things that seem beyond our imagining. We
see in that reading from the prophet Haggai today. The people of Israel are
finally going home after their long exile in Babylon, and what they find is
Jerusalem in ruins and the temple destroyed. But while they may feel hopeless,
the LORD says through Haggai that the
latter splendor of this house will be greater than the former. Just because
you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean God can’t do it.
In fact, Scripture shows that being
filled with the Holy Spirit means opening our minds and expanding our
imaginations so that we can share in the dream God has for creation. The
prophet Joel says that when the Spirit is poured out, your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream
dreams and your young men shall see visions (Joel 2:28). One of the reasons we are here today, we who are Gentile
Christians, is that Peter had a dream from G0d that blew him away, a dream of a
vast sheet covered with animals being lowered from heaven, and all of them —
all of them — being declared clean by God. A first century Jew could not
imagine enjoying table fellowship with unclean Gentiles, but God imagined it
and brought it to pass.
And this is not just true in the Bible.
During our lifetime, many people could not imagine a woman standing at the
altar, celebrating the Holy Eucharist. During our lifetime, many people could
not imagine embracing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people as they
are and blessing same-sex marriages. But God could, and the Spirit, moving
through faithful people open enough to get a glimpse of what God is doing,
brought it to pass. And the movement of the Spirit is not limited to the
church. Not that long ago, it was impossible to imagine that Jim Crow laws
would be overturned and that black children would attend school with white
children. We have a long way to go to achieve full racial justice, but what
progress we have made is due to open-hearted, open-minded people sharing in
God’s seemingly impossible vision for humanity. What was Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s most famous speech? “I have a dream.”
What is God’s dream for us? That is not a
sentimental question: it has a direct bearing on how we live our lives. The
Sadducees live sadly diminished lives. They can’t see past their own myopic
vision: death conquers everything, and all we do in this life just ends in
oblivion. Jesus teaches us that God’s love is so much greater than that, a
truth made fully manifest in his resurrection. He doesn’t want us to live
constrained lives, always fearing the finality of death, but to live lives
filled with hope and expectation. God always has greater things in store for
us. Everything this parish does, from building the Mission to feeding 44
children every weekend to giving out Play-Doh on Pride Day, it does because
people among us dare to dream with God and do things that we might once have
thought impossible.
And the same holds true for our
individual lives. We can get hit hard: a loved one dies, we receive a bad
diagnosis, things fall apart. We might not be able to see anything but darkness
ahead, but God’s vision is never obscured by darkness. God is never finished
with us; even at the moment of death, God is not finished with us. The Gospel
today and the Good News of Jesus Christ in general set us free from the worst
sin of all. And despite conventional wisdom, that sin is not pride, and it’s
not even the inveterate human tendency to worship idols. The ultimate sin is
despair — and Jesus will not let us go there. Nothing defeats God’s love.
Nothing. As that old Raymond Rossiter poem puts it, “Life is eternal; and love
is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the
limit of our sight.”
And from God’s perspective, the view is
limitless.
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