Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living.

Luke 20:38

As that conversation wound down, someone leaned over to me and whispered, "Old age is sure not for sissies!"

And that's quite true. My own mother is facing some of the biggest challenges of her life, challenges that require bravery and courage - like just walking across the room when you can't see and your balance is shaky.

So it's true - old age is not for sissies. But what's true of old age is, I think, also true of the subject of this text we've just read. Resurrection is not for sissies. Once, in days long past, it was easy to believe in things for which there is no empirical evidence, like that the world was flat. People did it all the time.

Nowadays, though, it requires bravery and courage to believe in something as fundamentally non-provable as resurrection. What may come as a surprise to some of us is that this view is not new. Skepticism about resurrection is not restricted to the post-Enlightenment era, or to tough-minded scientists or even tough-minded church-going folk.

Turns out such skepticism is in fact very old, and it's even found in the Bible. The Sadducees, Jesus' sparring partners in this passage, are famous for their doubts about resurrection.

But even before that, indeed, for thousands of years, resurrection as we think of it was not part of Jewish religious life at all. And it only started to work its way into common belief relatively late in Jewish history, shortly before Christ arrived on the seen.

Perhaps because it was such a new idea Jesus himself does not appear to be a big believer in the concept. He mentions it in one parable, and alludes to it briefly in one other comment. But apart form these two references this passage right here contains the sum total of Jesus' teaching on the subject.

So we don't know much about Christ's own thoughts about resurrection. What we know for sure is that the overwhelming majority of his teaching, of his practice and of his ministry were focused on the here and now, on doing the will of God on earth as it is in heaven. In fact, it's not unreasonable to suppose that he might not have said anything about it at all in this context had he not been provoked.

But provoked he was. Socially, the Sadducees are closely aligned with the aristocratic and priestly classes of the time. They tended to be wealthy and powerful. Not surprisingly, and perhaps more than any other social class of the time, they had a big stake in maintaining the status quo, theologically, socially, economically and otherwise.

And as they listened to this guy teach, perhaps they felt the ground of their privilege shifting under their feet. As the stories spread about the hope his preaching generated amongst the poor; as the news about the alternative reality he seemed to embody began to gain currency, to gain followers, perhaps they perceived him to be a threat to their status and their privilege.

Whatever the case, it's clear from the way they ask their question that they're not really interested in resurrection as such. For the question reduces the discussion to a legal absurdity. What they really want to do, it seems, is to tie Jesus into a rhetorical knot in the hope, one supposes, of discrediting him.

Good luck with that! Clearly they must not have encountered him before or they would have known better.

But they try anyway, framing the question within the context of what's called "levirate" marriage.

As I noted a moment ago, for most of their history Jews did not believe in resurrection. They believed that a man - and this privilege was reserved for men - that a man lived on in his heirs.

Thus if a man died without having had children, his life came to definitive end. He was, in every respect, dead for eternity.

And so the priests devised a way to solve this problem, a way for a man with no heirs to live forever. In this case the law of Moses as they read it allowed, even demanded, that the man's brother take his wife as his own. (That's why it's called levirate marriage; from the Latin levir, or brother-in-law.)

The children of that union were then legally and socially considered to be the son of the dead father. Thus the man would live on in the life of his sons.

But here the Sadducees push the argument to an absurd degree. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her. It seems clear that this is not a question about resurrection, or about the nature of marriage in the afterlife. Ultimately I believe it's a question of the Sadducees' power and authority versus Jesus' power and authority.

But it may be a mistake to judge the Sadducees too harshly, especially nowadays, 2000 years later. We assume that since the Sadducees doubt the resurrection, that they are in a sense hostile to Biblical faith.

But maybe there's another way to read them. What if they're there to mark off space for all those who find the promise of resurrection hard to believe? What if they're there to invite all of us to get in touch with our own inner Sadducee? Cause I suspect we've all got one living inside of us somewhere!

For the Sadducees, the Law of Moses seemed to preclude resurrection. For us, it's the laws of physics and biology. Even at a street level, we know something's fishy about bodily resurrection, don't we? What about cremation, people often ask? Or what if someone is lost at sea, lost, in effect, to the sharks?

For many of us modern folk to suggest that the decedents in such cases will be magically resurrected in their earthly bodies just stretches credulity to the breaking point.

Fortunately the Bible does not ask us to believe such things. It does say that when we die, we will be changed. But the rest is mystery.

And the mystery is apparent in the Gospels themselves. In one of them, the resurrected Christ eats breakfast with his disciples; in another he walks through a locked door - two examples that would seem to be logically, physically, incompatible.

When we die, we will be changed. But the rest is mystery.

So why does resurrection matter at all? Why bother? Why is it written into our creeds, creeds which I know some of you find difficult to affirm in good conscience?

Resurrection matters because it speaks to the way we frame reality itself. For that's what's going on, really, in today's passage. It's a clash between two different ways, two different systems, two different frames, for interpreting life itself.

So Mr. Sadducee , Jesus says, first of all, your premise is wrong. You assume everything will be the same in the life to come. You assume that women will still be property. And that we will still depend on marriage to propagate life through child-bearing.

Maybe that was true in their frame, but it's not true in his. In his frame, that is, in the Kingdom of God, we will all be free. In this life and in the life to come, women, slaves, Samaritans, lepers, you, me - we will all be liberated and fully alive. In his frame our life is not grounded not in mere biology, as wondrous as that is. Rather our life is grounded in God.

And that life, eternal life, starts not when we die. That life starts when we are born. For God is not the God of the dead but of the living.

Now, having said that, I'm not trying to dumb down resurrection, or to minimize the role of faith in our spiritual practice. For in the end resurrection is part of this story we believe. And, yes, it does take faith to believe in it. And there is a reason for that.

The reason is it takes faith to believe that the dominant framing story of our time is not the only story. It takes faith to believe that death does not have the final say in our own life stories. Whatever the life to come may look like, it takes faith to believe it awaits us.

It takes faith to believe that terrorism and hate can be, indeed can only be, defeated without resorting to violence.

It takes faith not just to believe in resurrection but to practice it.

But I believe that's what life asks of us. I believe that's what the world's poor ask of us, to believe in resurrection, to believe in a different framing story than the one that keeps them in the tomb of their poverty.

I believe that's what our very planet asks of us, to believe in an alternative framing story than the one that says climate change is irreversible, or the one that causes it through unbridled consumption.

And I believe that's what God asks of us, for God is not a God of the dead but of the living. God is not a God of despair but of hope. God is not a God of the grave but a God of the empty tomb.

Today we bring our Stewardship season to a close. On its surface, Stewardship season is about taking a moment in our life together to ask you to make a pledge to help us pay the bills and pay our salaries.

But more deeply understood, Stewardship is a way of affirming our belief in this God of the living. It's a way of affirming our faith in a different framing story. A way for all of us who are alive to practice resurrection.

Amen