God of our days and our nights, of our coming and our going, bless we pray thee, the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts and by them and the power of your Holy Spirit, make us more fitting servants of your most Holy Will. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.
There is An Italian legend about a master and servant.
It seems the servant was not very smart and the master used to get very exasperated with him. Finally, one day, in a fit of temper, the master said: "You really are the stupidest man I know. Here, I want you to carry this staff wherever you go. And if you ever meet a person stupider than yourself, give them this staff."
So time went by, and often in the marketplace the servant would encounter some pretty stupid people, but he never found someone appropriate for the staff. Years later, he returned to his master's home. He was shown into his master's bedroom, for the man was quite sick and in bed. In the course of their conversation the master said: "I'm going on a journey soon."
"When will you return?", asked the servant.
"This is a journey from which I will not return." the master replied.
The servant asked: "Have you made all the necessary arrangements?"
"No, I guess I have not."
"Well, could you have made all the arrangements?"
"Oh yes, I guess I've had time. I've had all my life. But I have been busy with other things."
The servant said: "Let me be sure about this. You're going on a journey, from which you will never return, and you've had all your life to make the arrangements, but you haven't."
The master said: "Yes, I guess that's right."
The servant replied: "Master, take this staff. For at last I have truly found a man stupider than myself."
Just a story - perhaps. Or perhaps it is more. Perhaps it describes the way in which we live, many of us, refusing to look on the one journey that faces us all. There may be good reason for that.
A famous theologian, confronted by an eager young seminary student to say a few words about the resurrection of the dead, refused.
"I can't talk about the resurrection with anyone under the age of 30. Before 30 what do you know of honest-to-God failure, real heartbreak, mortality, solid defeat? So what can you know of a dark world which only makes sense if Jesus Christ is raised?"
Sure, we could argue about the accuracy of choosing age 30, but the larger point remains. Unless we have experienced something of the world's darkness, then the light which shines in the darkness is never going to make any sense.
As a friend of mine said recently: "It was not until I had been a patient in a hospital for a month while the best of medical science played Sherlock Holmes over my body that I understood - down here where life gets real - what that fear and uncertainty and awful waiting is all about."
Maybe some questions shouldn't be asked unless we're starving for an answer.
The Sadducees who approach Jesus don't want an answer - they want to play theological tennis with the question, to throw a question up and bat it around a bit.
I love academic debate. But it's not the route of people starving for an answer. This is not a text about marriage; it's a question about the resurrection and Jesus' answer seems particularly flat. Like he's having an off day.
Other people got better answers to this resurrection question - but then they were asking from a very different place in life.
To Martha, weeping for her brother, Jesus said "I am the resurrection and the life".
To Mary, weeping outside the tomb on Easter Sunday, the answer came in the form of her name spoken from the other side of death.
Ask the question with tears in our eyes, ask it in a hospital room or a nursing home, ask it in those long hours of the night after a difficult verdict has been given and we may hear our own name in answer as well.
But if we ask it, as the Sadducees do, in a comfortable, secure, brightly lit religious building where we imagine everything is under control, we get something that sends us away scratching our heads.
The Sadducees come to Jesus with their convictions. There's nothing wrong with convictions. But they can cause blindness - they can prevent us from seeing what others see.
The Sadducees were very conservative theologically. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible - the ones everyone thought Moses wrote. For the Sadducees that was the extent of the Bible. And since nowhere in those five books is resurrection mentioned - they believed that the resurrection couldn't be real. That's conviction number one.
Conviction number two that they came to Jesus with was that, if there is a heaven, an eternity, a resurrection, then it has to be just like this life. What you see is what we get - for eternity.
So they put together this peculiar, but marginally plausible, story about a woman and seven brothers. For you see, tucked away in the corner of Moses' law, in Deuteronomy 25:5-6, is the idea that if a man died childless it was up to his brothers to create children with his widow.
All the evidence suggests that this law, which is known as the law of levirate marriage, wasn't even practised in Jesus' day. But here's a nice little theological conundrum the Sadducees can pose. Maybe they even think it's funny. It's a ludicrous situation - designed to show everyone who was listening to them question that a halfways intelligent God couldn't dream up something like eternal life if it could result in a mess like this.
It didn't strike Jesus as funny. Maybe it leaves a sour taste in your mouth too.
Jesus' response is to turn the issue around. The Sadducees have been evaluating eternal life on the basis of earthly life. He tells them that all those social and legal and relational arrangements which can be so good and necessary and wonderful here, remain here. The structures of "this age" will be superfluous in "that age - in the resurrection of the dead".
So is eternal life so absolutely different that we can't do anything to get ready?
Not quite. Remember the servant and the master. It is a journey which we will all face. It is a journey for which we can prepare - although we are often reluctant to do so.
In preparing for this sermon I thought about all the funerals I attended or even conducted. The subjects of the those funerals ranged from barely one year old to 96 years old. There have been men, women and children. Most died from so-called "natural causes" but I have had my share of accidents, murders, suicides and so on. Some funerals were attended by the tens, some by only four or five.
The point, of course, is that death is no respecter of age or status. You know that and I know that but we often live as if we were blissfully ignorant of it. What can we do?
Here are some really practical suggestions.
Have you got a driver's license? Sign the donor card. You won't need any part of your body where you're going but someone here might. It is the last desperate act of human selfishness not to give that gift.
Have you talked to your doctor and your loved ones about what heroic measures if any, are to be taken in event of serious illness? This is a deeply personal decision, to be made individually, but don't leave it to your wife, your children or your doctor outside the Intensive Care Unit to decide. Think about it. Talk about it.
Pre-arrange your funeral. Too many times I have heard the plaintive "we don't know what so-and-so would have wanted".
Have you a will and is it up to date? Or is your family going to get into a real mess because you haven't wanted to think about things ahead of time?
Several things you can do. Simple things - some of them. Things I'd be willing to help anyone through. Please, for the sake of those you love, don't leave the preparations for others to make.
But that's only one aspect of the preparations we can make - having to do with those thing we leave behind. What about being prepared for that which is to come?
I'm sure that the Sadducees were convinced that they had hard-headed common-sense on their side when they rejected the pie in the sky when we die by and by notion of eternal life. Better to stand tough and face the harsh truth that this is all there is.
But that is a position of faith just as surely as the one Jesus advances.
Opposite to the view that this is all there is - that history is nothing but a row of tombstones - Jesus places another vision. He says we'll be transfigured. That everything - our life, our relationships, even the very world itself - will be changed - as Paul puts it - in a twinkling of an eye.
How will all things be changed? And Into what? Neither Jesus, nor Paul, says.
Jesus does says that the transfigured life will be like that of angels - but to say it is like something implies it is also unlike.
In the end Jesus settles for saying that we will be the children of God. That's based on a few clear ideas.
First, history is going some place. Not just round and round. There is a beginning and an ending.
The words of the Bible are theological and religious, not historical and scientific, but the message is plain: there is a beginning, a present, and a consummation.
And God is more than just a great engineer who set it all going and then walked away.
The clear reason that we were made - was to be friends with God.
There's lots that gets in the way of that but that's our purpose, to be God's friends - now in this world - and forever in the world of the resurrection, in a world,a state, a condition, which includes those most have viewed as long dead - Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Sarah, Leah, Rachael, Rebecca, my friend Robert - our sister-in-Christ - Grace - our brother-in-Christ - Sammy.
As Jesus said - God is not God of the dead, but of the living - to him all of them are alive.
Are you willing to the friend of God - to go where God wants you to go? Are you willing to begin the process of being changed - of being transfigured - here and now? Are you willing to let go of the brief and transitory things of this world for the sake of drawing closer to God?
The Sadducees showed in their question to Jesus that they wanted an eternity as close to earthly life as possible - and of course it is ridiculous. As ridiculous and unappealing as sitting around on a cloud strumming a harp for all eternity. Jesus tries to blow the doors off that.
Whatever the resurrection is, it is utterly other than anything we have known. But, at its centre is the One we have always known, however dimly.
When John Owen, the great Puritan pastor and teacher lay dying, he was dictating some last letters to friends. He said to his secretary:
"Write, I am still in the land of the living." Then he stopped and said: "No, change that to read - I am still in the land of those who die, but I hope soon to be in the land of the living."
That is where what is real, what is love, will be lifted into the light and all relationships and all faces will be transfigured for the children of God.
In that transfigurement we will at last become the living.
To be ready for the journey, for that reality - that life - Jesus tells us that all we need to have is faith, and that all we need to do is to try to live by faith.
May the God of the living - the God of Christ Jesus - be praised now and evermore. Amen.
Blessed be God, day by day, Amen.
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