Anna Pinckney Straight

First Presbyterian Church ~ New Bern, North Carolina

November 6, 2022

What Question?

Luke 20:27-38

27Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 28and asked him a question, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; 30then the second 31and the third married her, and so, in the same way, all seven died childless. 32Finally the woman also died. 33In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."

34Jesus said to them, "Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; 35but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 37And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."

 

 

Sometimes, we ask questions that aren’t really asking what we say they are asking.

 

Sometimes, that’s obvious, like when you are getting ready to go out to supper and you ask your partner, “Does this outfit work?” 95% of the time I’m not looking for honesty, I’m looking for affirmation.

 

Sometimes it’s not so obvious.

 

Back in the 90s, as a new seminary graduate, I accepted a call to serve a rural congregation in Northern West Virginia. And I still had a great deal to learn about pastoral ministry. The kind of learning you can’t do in seminary.

 

And so, when this congregation said, “is there anything we should change? Please, let us know. Please, make the changes you feel we should make. Is there anything we should change?” I took them at their word. I re-ordered the worship service, moved things around in the office, changed the format of the bulletin, and more. After all, they had asked me to do these things, right? And I was so very surprised that within a few weeks there was grumbling about the things that had been changed.

Looking back, all I can say is “bless my heart.”

 

It wasn’t until years later that I had enough experience to really understand. They weren’t asking if there was anything they needed to change, they were asking me to tell them they were okay. That they’d done a good job while going five years without a full-time pastor. That they were loved.

 

I am continuously grateful for that congregation and the ways in which they loved me and embraced gracefully teaching me the things I had yet to learn. Among them, is that sometimes the question that gets asked isn’t really the question.

 

The Sadducees are not really asking about the resurrection here. Nor are they really asking about marriage - marriage which, in this context and setting is not about love or commitment but about property and birthright.   And there are some clues to tell us that this is not really the question. Chief among those clues are the numbers. Seven brothers. Seven husbands. The number is exorbitant and even more so when you consider that seven is often used to indicate a larger number, a number that is open.

 

The other clue is something we have learned – about faith in the time of Jesus. About the nature of faithful leadership. And that’s that disagreement and conversation- deliberation and even argument weren’t things to be avoided, they were embraced. That deliberative method was faithful – how they learned – by presenting different ideas and comparing pros and cons. The process of this debate was more important even than the conclusion, for it was in the process, the conversation and the trust developing that faith was formed.[1]

 

And here’s another thing that you might have noticed. They didn’t agree. Not only are the Sadducees trying to engage Jesus in a conversation about Torah, but not all of the Sadducees agree about resurrection. “Those who say there is no resurrection” implies that there ARE those who say that there is a resurrection.”[2] They didn’t all agree. And that was okay. In fact, it was more than okay. Seeing things differently, experiencing things differently, sharing and talking, worshiping, and praying together, that was how they grew. 

 

In the Presbyterian Church, this is one of our core values. That we can be people of faith and not agree on everything. While safety, humanity should never be in doubt, we don’t all have to see or understand things in the same way. As the old words proclaim, “In Essentials Unity, In Non-Essentials Liberty, In all Things Charity.”[3] Charity, of course, is the old English way of saying, love.[4]

 

This is one of the things this congregation does well. We are not of one mind, one heart, about everything, but, in my opinion, not only does that make us increasingly unique in this day and age, it makes us increasingly faithful. For we need one another.  We need one another to keep showing up, to keep worshiping God, and to keep standing on the bedrock of love.

 

[Side Note: I can easily preach this sermon here and now because there are no major disagreements at FPC - no factions or issues – this would be a very different sermon if there were, but there are not, which makes this joyous.]

 

And you see it in our food. We joke all the time about Presbyterians never gathering without food, but I want to commend you for placing fellowship at the heart of this congregation’s life because that’s where faith grows. That’s where we build the relationships that help us navigate differences. Talk about them with love. Learn new things about how God works.

 

Fellowship Dinners. House Churches. Coffee Fellowship Café. Salt. Youth Group. Lunch Wagon. Preschool snack time. Choir cover dishes. These aren’t just about food, they are about the fellowship. The conversation. The places where we can share our hurts and our hopes. Our fears and our joys. Our lives and the way God continues to call and claim us.

 

All of these outcroppings of what we will do in just a moment, gathering around a table – the communion table-  that isn’t just for some people, it is for all people. It isn’t just for people who see things in the same way, it is for all of us.

 

As David Nilsen suggests in a recent blog post[5], 

“As an adult Christian I have often disagreed both culturally and doctrinally with believers with whom I attend church, and yet we've remained in fellowship together. I have learned two important lessons from this that I will carry with me for the rest of my life as a follower of Jesus. The first is that actually talking things out clears up a lot of misunderstandings, and the second is that it's really hard to feel hateful toward people who just fed you dinner.  …..If I were not privileged to be in these relationships, it would be easy for me to demonize or belittle people who hold theological beliefs more conservative than my own. But when the person who holds some doctrinal position diametrically opposed to my own is sitting across the table from me eating chicken wings while we watch football, laughing at the joke I just made, it becomes a little harder to start a flame war with him online. We're friends, so when we find ourselves stuck between parting ways or talking out differences, we've so far been able to choose the latter.” 

And David offers two things we can all do when we find we are in disagreement with someone. When he found he disagreed with his father about something, he writes two things that kept their relationship intact.

First, he writes, "I asked (and allowed) him to explain himself at the first available opportunity, and I trusted his heart in the meantime because our existing relationship had revealed him to be an all-around good guy. If we use the same pattern with other Christians, we can often save ourselves, and I think maybe even God, a lot of grief.”


Yes. We can insist on agreement. But the more we do so, the smaller the room will become. And isn’t God about increasing and expanding both our rooms and our hearts?


We don’t all see all things the same way. But far from being a weakness in our fellowship, I believe it is our superpower. We aren’t all the same. We don’t all have the same experiences. But we are called together- not by our successes but by a God whose grace and mercy we all need. We can do this. We need to do this. We are called to do this because Jesus is at the center and nothing else.


And is there anything our world needs more right now, than to know that we don’t come to the communion table with our politics and our opinions, it is the communion table that shapes our politics and our opinions.


It is love that leads us, the love that Jesus Christ shared, the love to which he pointed.


First Presbyterian Church. What you are doing in this age? In this place. In this time. Well, it’s remarkable. 


You, we, aren’t all the same and Thank God for that.


And you are committed to keep showing up. Around the table. Where we are not invited because we are smart or wise or right or wrong, but because we are loved by a God whose wisdom exceeds our own, and a God who is a God of the living. You. Me. All of us.

 

And those Sadducees who do not believe in resurrection gathered to question Jesus.

 

In Essentials Unity

in Non-Essentials Liberty

In All Things, Love.


Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God.




[1] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/valuing-debate-and-conversation/

https://blog.jewishcincinnati.org/jc1-debate-in-the-jewish-tradition-9-ways-to-argue-but-with-respect/

[2] https://www.pulpitfiction.com/notes/proper27c/#Luke=

[3] I most often hear this quote attributed to Augustine, but its origins aren’t that clear. I don’t know anything about this website or the professor, but it’s an example of the conversation about its source. https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/augustine/quote.html

[4]

[5] http://rachelheldevans.com/guest-post-david-nilsen

Accessed July 10, 2011.

[4]

[5] http://rachelheldevans.com/guest-post-david-nilsen

Accessed July 10, 2011.