You Have Spoken Well

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

November 7, 2010

You Have Spoken Well

Luke 20:27-38

There was Riley with his rhymin’ and his rappin’;

We were all goin’ with it, no one nappin’.

He was telling us ‘bout Martin Luther,

and we learned Reformation from the Youthers.

Calvin, Zwingli, and John Knox the Presbyterian;

all those dates, all that writin’, it was wearyin’.

But the message was so simple, ain’t no foolin’,

it was there but it needed some retoolin’:

By grace we are saved, that’s God’s promise;

Got his blessing and his love always on us.

No penance to be paid,

no clergy to be bribed,

ain’t no worry from our birth to the day that we die.

Give it up to our Savior.

Give it up to our Savior.

So we got it, we are loved through Christ Jesus.

Take away all our worries God will ease us.

Our lives they are his, that’s the core of this biz:

grace alone, faith alone, you’re never on your own.

Give it up to our Savior.

Give it up to our Savior.

Give your life to our Savior.

Give your life to our Savior.

The gospel put in rap,

laid it neatly on your lap.

To the ears of the Sadducees,

Jesus’ preaching and teaching must have sounded

a lot like rap sounds to many of us:

a little too different,

even a little threatening;

definitely not what we’re used to

when it comes from a 50-something WASPish preacher!

The Sadducees were elite priests at the Temple,

leaders of the Jewish community along with the Pharisees.

The Sadducees were the priests for the rich,

those at the top of the economic pyramid,

Jerusalem’s versions of Wall Street bankers,

and corporate CEOs.

They were fierce traditionalists,

and they read the Hebrew Scriptures literally.

Their theology differed from that of the Pharisees

on many issues;

no issue more than resurrection.

The Pharisees believed in resurrection,

while the Sadducees rejected the very idea

that the dead would be raised to new life.

In denying that there was any such thing as resurrection,

the Sadducees actually stood on pretty firm ground biblically.

Read through the books of the Old Testament

and you’ll see that in Moses’ time,

David’s time, Solomon’s time,

death was the end.

You took your last breath and then,

in the language of the Scriptures,

you “slept with your ancestors”,

as you went to a place called Sheol,

a place that was neither heaven nor hell,

but simply the place where everyone, good or bad,

went once they died.

The idea that there might be something more after death,

the idea of resurrection,

did not appear in any writings until about 200 years

before the birth of Jesus.                           

We find a hint of it in the newest book of the Old Testament,

the book of Daniel, written about that time, where we read,

“those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake…”

(Daniel 12:2)

It’s in apocryphal books – books from that time,

but not included in the Bible, like the Maccabees and Enoch,

where we find the idea of resurrection developed and expanded.

By the time Jesus walked the roads of Judea,

resurrection of the dead was accepted

by almost all but the Sadducees.

When they confronted Jesus,

the Sadducees weren’t interested in debating the point with him.

They were an arrogant, cranky lot

who couldn’t even get along with one another.

(Josephus, Wars, 2.8.14; 166)

All they wanted to do with Jesus was humiliate him,

so their question to him was absurd:

“whose wife is a woman in the resurrected life

if she’s had seven husbands?”

Now those who have been married more than once

may think the question perfectly reasonable –

but don’t you see –

the question assumes that our resurrected life,

our lives in heaven,

will be similar to the lives we have had on earth.

Heaven for a teenager might be a place with no school

and unlimited pizza and texting;

For a golfer it might be unlimited rounds at Augusta

with no greens fees.

For me it would Vermont’s Northshire Bookstore ,

where I would need neither money nor glasses.

Jesus takes the Sadducees question and

masterfully turns it into a teaching moment,

helping the Sadducees and us understand

heaven is not like anything we know on earth.        

Jesus helps us to understand that the resurrection life

won’t be a continuation of our earthly lives,

it will be new life,

a gloriously new life.

It will be a life of love,

eternal love in the company of the eternal God.

It will be a life in which we will be community

as God intended us to be.

We’ll be in communion with all:

including those who have gone before,

those we live with in the present,

and those who will come long after us.

We’ll live in full communion with one another

with no strife, no differences, no quarrels

There will be no elections,

no Democrats, no Republicans;

no right, no left;

no rich, no poor;

no sick, no frail, no outcast;

no haves, no have-nots.

Jesus helps both the Sadducees and us to learn

that Scripture, even the Old Testatment,

does teach us that there will be a new day,

a new place, a new time,

where all God’s hopes for us will be fulfilled.

Scripture teaches us that there will come a time

when the powerful will be brought low

and the lowly lifted up,

the rich cast aside,

the poor fed, the sick healed,

war will cease, peace will reign.

(Luke 1:52-53; 1 Samuel 2:3-10)

Doesn’t our Lord himself teach us that

it will be the meek and the humble

who will inherit the earth,

not the powerful or the influential?

Yet we seem so intent on building a world just the opposite,

where it is the rich, the powerful, the influential

who are in charge.

The resurrected life will be utterly different

from the life we create here and now.

                 

And here’s the wonderful thing:

we can have a glimpse of it

here and now here at this Table,

for this Table is a place where we all come together,

commune together, all of us,

along with all the saints who’ve gone before.

Here at this Table we eat the meal our Lord has prepared for us

and are lifted into Christ’s presence,

even if just for a few moments,

all of us reconciled, differences melted away.

But we come to this Table

not just to get a brief look at the future;

we come here to be fed and nourished,

so we can go out into the world

strengthened in spirit and discipleship

to do the work Christ calls us to do,

which is: build the world that God wants us to build,

a world which anticipates the resurrected life.

The Sadducees, for as arrogant as they were,

got it; they learned the lesson,

and before walking away from Jesus,

said, “Teacher, you have spoken well.”

Nourished by this meal,

we can speak well, too.

if we go from here speaking of

grace, mercy, justice, and peace,

speaking through both words and actions,

building on those things that we find so intermittently,

but which God wants us to have in abundance.

Come to this Table

and be renewed and refreshed.

Come get a glimpse of the life that awaits us,

the glorious new life.

But you will see it, of course,

only if you,

“Give it up to our Savior;

Give your life to our Savior.”

AMEN