Proper
27 :: Job 19: 23–27a / Psalm 98 / II Thessalonians 2: 1–5, 13–17 / Luke 20: 27–38
This
is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker
on November 10, 2019.
“IS THIS ALL THERE IS?”
(Homily texts: Job 19: 23–27a, II Thessalonians 2: 1–5, 13–17
& Luke 20: 27-38)
“Is
this all there is?” “Is the world we live in and the things we can see all
there is?”
All
three of our appointed readings emphatically answer these questions: “No, the
life we live now, and the things we experience now, aren’t all there is!”
We
must be getting close to the season of Advent, that time of preparation in the
Church Year when we spend four weeks getting ready for the Lord’s first coming,
an event we celebrate at Christmastime. The Advent season has a two-fold focus:
Getting ready for the Lord’s first coming, but remembering that, in the
fullness of time, and in God’s good time and in accordance with God’s design,
the Lord will come again. This last point is a truth we affirm nearly every
Sunday, as the liturgy urges to remember this truth in the Memorial
Acclamation, which says, “We remember his death, we proclaim his resurrection,
we await his coming in glory.”[1]
How
can we know that the question, “this is all there is,” demands an answer that
points beyond this present life and this present reality? Three possibilities
offer themselves:
·
The witness of the Apostles to the Lord’s
resurrection,
·
The witness of Holy Scripture,
·
God’s ability to create, and to re-create.
We
should begin with the witness of the Apostles, those original twelve Disciples
(OK, minus Judas Iscariot; but then plus
Matthias, who took his place; and then plus Paul…a “baker’s dozen” Apostles).
All of them witnessed the Lord’s rising to new life again on Easter Sunday
morning. The proof of the reality of the resurrection as an actual, physical,
real event lies not in our ability to look into the empty tomb ourselves, but
to see the amazing transformation of these original eleven (minus Judas)
Disciples’ lives. Prior to the resurrection, and especially after the giving of
the power of the Holy Spirit at the Feast of Pentecost, this original group was
a bunch of bumblers, uncertain in their role in the things that God was doing,
and possessed of an incredible ability to miss seeing what God was about. All
that changed on Easter Sunday morning. After the raising of our Lord, the power
of God, made known in Jesus’ new and resurrected life, became the overriding
Reality (with a capital “R”) in these followers of Jesus’ lives. Not even the
specter of a martyr’s death could intervene to overcome their knowledge that
Jesus, had, in fact, been raised to new life on that Sunday morning.
Next,
we might turn to the pages of Holy Scripture. Here, in our reading from Job, we
read the familiar words, “I know that my Redeemer lives…” (Can’t you hear the
magnificent soprano aria from Handel’s “Messiah” in those words?) St. Paul picks up the theme in his second
letter to the Thessalonians, “As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our
being gathered to him….” Paul wants us to lift our eyes heavenward, to see that
God’s got a plan, a wonderful plan, for the future. (Apparently, the early church
in Thessalonica was deeply concerned about the unfolding of the events of the
Lord’s return, for Paul has to address these concerns in both of the letters he
wrote to that group of Christian believers.)
Our
Gospel text, appointed for this morning, narrates the interchange between Jesus
and a group of Sadducees. (The Sadducees were a group of priests, serving in
the Temple in Jerusalem. They constituted the highest of the three orders of
priests which were established under the Law of Moses.) Their question to the
Lord is disingenuous, however: Luke takes pains to insert an editorial remark
prior to the recounting of the interchange between the Sadducees and the Lord,
telling us that the Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead.
(Neither did they accept the authority of the writings of the prophets, by the
way…they accepted only the five books of Moses as being authoritative.) No
doubt Jesus knew of their beliefs at the outset of their outlandish tale of the
woman who is widowed seven times. But, in the final analysis, Jesus affirms the
reality that there is a resurrection from the dead. He, Himself, will
experience the resurrection, and will offer us, by extension, the blessings and
the benefits of life evermore.
The
third place we might look for evidence that there is a Reality (again, with a
capital “R”) beyond this present world and this present reality lies in the
reality which is before us: The created order. The point to be made here is
that, if God is the creator of all that is (a truth we affirm each Sunday as we
recite the Nicene Creed), then God also has the power to not only create, but
to re-create. God’s handiwork, seen in the things that are, point to the
reality of the God who stands outside of time and the present circumstance, but
who is active within this present time and circumstance. In other words, God
has the power to make all things new, as we read in the Book of Revelation,
chapter twenty one, verse five.
Our
life in Christ has everything to do with training our eyes to see beyond this
present time, age and circumstance. Each Sunday, our worship honors the God who
created all that is, those things that we can see and those things we can’t.
Each Sunday, we come to be reminded that there’s more to our lives than what we
have to be concerned with each and every day, the reality that God is present
in the here and now, but also in the hereafter.
Thanks
be to God!
AMEN.
