Looking Through the Right Lens

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
October 16, 2005

Looking Through the Right Lens
Matthew 22:23-33
1 Corinthians 15:35-49

We hear the names frequently as we read through the Gospels.
They always seem to be around Jesus,
questioning him, confronting him, demanding answers:
The Sadducees and Pharisees.
The very words sound ominous, sinister;
we hear those two words and we think, “uh-oh”.

The Sadducees and the Pharisees were leaders
in the Jewish community in Jerusalem;
they were leaders at the Temple, part of the Sanhedrin,
the ruling class,
men in position of power and authority.
They shared a common faith in Judaism,
but they did not agree on everything.
In fact, they quarreled frequently on matters of faith,
and theology, often bitterly.

One subject was more contentious than any other,
more certain to cause fireworks between the two groups:
the idea of resurrection, resurrection of the body.
Now keep in mind that this was before the first Easter,
when God raised our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Greeks often talked about immortality of the soul,
but that was not the same as resurrection.
Traders from the East sometimes talked about how a person
might come back to live again and again;
But resurrection and reincarnation are two very different things

Resurrection of the body:
the idea that the dead would be given new life
somehow someway, through the power of God.
The Pharisees argued that resurrection was indeed
a promise given to all by God.
The Pharisees believed that scripture pointed to God’s promise.

The Sadducees, though, scoffed at the very idea
arguing vehemently that there was no scriptural support
for resurrection.
The Sadducees were men of wealth, power and prominence.
They were deeply conservative, strongly in favor of the status quo.
They were literalists, who argued that only
the five books of Moses,
the books of the Bible that we call the Pentateuch
were scriptural, the word of God.
The books of the prophets – Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and others --
as well as the Psalms, the Proverbs,
they were all well and good,
but they were certainly not scripture.
And the Sadducees were defiant and adamant:
nothing in the five books of Moses supported an argument
in favor of resurrection.

The very idea that a carpenter from somewhere up in Galilee
might disagree with them made them bristle
with anger and contempt.
Besides, the carpenter seemed to side with the Pharisees,
and the Sadducees found that to be intolerable.

To the Sadducees, the very idea of life eternal,
of bodily resurrection, seemed ridiculous,
yet the firmness with which the carpenter held his opinions
provided the Sadducees with what they thought
was the perfect way to trap him.
He would prove himself either apostate,
or he would be proved a fool.
But as we heard in our lesson, their effort backfired
and they only made fools of themselves
when Jesus responded to the gaseous self-important men:
“You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures,
nor the power of God.” (Matthew 22:29)

And then Jesus interpreted Scripture
to show that almighty God was always,
is always, and will be always
God of the living, not of the dead,
Jesus knew the Sadducees well,
so he quoted from the Book of Exodus,
using one of the five books of Moses to make his case.
The Sadducees tried to define God in ways
that suited their purposes,
their own goals, their own power and position.
They put limitations on God,
It never occurred to them to think that
with God all things are possible,
that God is stronger than death itself.
Had they only read from Isaiah,
they would have heard God’s promise
to all his children that God would
swallow up death. (Isaiah 25:8)

The resurrection of the Body is a central tenet of our faith.
When we hear the word, we tend to think of Jesus and Easter.
We don’t think that the word really applies to us.
Yet it does, just as much as it did to Jesus.
When we recite the Apostles Creed,
we say very clearly Jesus Christ was dead and buried,
but on the third day he rose from the dead…
rose from the dead through the power of God.
And then we conclude by saying,
“I believe in the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.”
When we say that, we are not talking only about the resurrection
of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are talking our resurrection:
the resurrection that each of us can expect
as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Every time we have a funeral,
we give witness to our belief in the resurrection of the body.
We give witness to our hope in life eternal,
life in the very presence of God
in the very presence of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We give witness to our understanding that
God has made good on his promise to swallow up death,
that through the death and resurrection of our Lord,
God has vanquished death,
that death no longer has any power over us.

I read a lovely and moving book this past week
“A Letter of Consolation, by Henri Nouwen, a priest,
It is a letter Nouwen wrote to his father
some years ago, shortly after the death of Nouwen’s mother.
It was an attempt on Nouwen’s part to take a step back
in his grief, and to help his father as he too grieved.
He built his arguments on the hope that is ours in resurrection.
With that hope, then, he writes,
we can focus on the gift we have been given in life.
We can focus on the fact that God has given us life
not to worry about the things of this world,
but to anticipate the life that is to come,
the life that we will have in God’s presence.

Now of course we cannot possibly begin to understand
what the resurrection body will be like.
It is not likely we will resemble our current selves.
As Paul tries to explain in his reply to the Corinthians
our mortal remains die, and in our resurrection
we will become “spiritual bodies” (1 Cor. 15:44)
I cannot imagine that I will spend eternity
having to get stronger bifocals every two years!
And last week we heard Anne Lamott put it humorously
when she wrote that in heaven,
“no flossing [would be] required.”

In the resurrected life, we will be what God created us to be,
what God wants us to be.
We will be what God hoped we would be on this earth:
Children of the Spirit, filled with the Spirit,
guided by the Spirit,
children filled with love,
guided by love,
motivated by love;
rather than children of the flesh
consumed with envy,
and guided by all the petty concerns that absorb us.
In the resurrected life we will stop our snarling at one another.
We won’t act like the bloviating Sadducees,
more wind than wherewithal.

When a loved one dies,
even in our sadness and grief, we have the opportunity
to look through the lens of resurrection;
we have the opportunity to have our focus changed
restored, put back to where it should be,
where God wants it to be.
As Nouwen puts it
“eternity can break into our mortal existence”,
and help us to become transformed.
And afterall, aren’t we called to be transformed each day
in faith through Christ?

Nouwen concludes his book with this thought:
“the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the glorious manifestation
of the victory of love over death.
The same love that makes us mourn and protest
against death frees us also to live in hope.
It is with this divine love in our hearts,
a love stronger than death,
that our lives can be lived as a promise.
Because this great love promises us
that what we have already begun to see and hear
with the eyes and ears of Jesus Christ …
is the beginning of eternal life.” 93

God’s love for us, the very fact that he gave us his only son
tells us that “there must be something more than death”
at the end of our mortal lives;
that there must be a promise yet to be fulfilled.
As we focus on the hope of the resurrection,
we can look at death in a different way too,
We can look at it, as a colleague once put it,
not as a period at the end of sentence,
but as a comma that links two parts of the same line.

Our Lord calls us to look at our lives here and now
through the lens of resurrection,
the hope of eternal life that is ours in Jesus Christ.
Our Lord calls us to remember that God is God of the living
Then when we hear God’s words through the prophet Isaiah
we can understand them:
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name: you are mine.
When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you
For I am the Lord your God
and you are precious in my sight.”
(Isaiah 45:1ff)

This is not a promise of immortality;
this is a promise of God’s loving presence in our lives:
our lives in this world and in the world to come,
because “we are precious in God’s sight.”

Our God walks with us throughout our mortal lives
here, and in the life to come.
We have nothing to fear, for this a promise
made to us in the life of Jesus Christ.

When we look at life through this lens,
through the lens of hope and love,
it becomes easier to live in response to the promise,
to live in love,
to respond in love,
to leave the petty things of this world behind,
to live in the Spirit, with the mind of Christ.
When we look through the right lens
we can understand what Paul means when he writes,
“our outer nature is aging,
but our inner nature is being renewed day by day”
(2 Cor. 4:16)
renewed for the life to come,
life eternal, the resurrected life,
This is the hope given to us in Jesus Christ
the hope given to us by our loving God,
truly a God of the living, in this world and the next.
AMEN