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Jay Weldon
The God of the
Living Who is in the mood for a Bible-beater sermon? I see a few hands. I also see a lot of blood pressure on the rise. Well, that is what you are going to get today—a Bible-beater sermon! “Jesus meets a group of Bible-beaters” That is what we could call this story from the Gospel of St. Luke. You know what I mean by Bible-beater, and I certainly don’t mean it in a bad way. I have friends who are Bible-beaters, and I am related to quite a few, and I respect their faith in its own way. You know the kind who have the bumper sticker on their car: God said it; that settles it; I believe it. One day as I was driving through Atlanta, I witnessed a case of Bible beater one-upmanship. On their bumper sticker, the “I believe it” portion had been crossed out in red, and underneath they had written, “I don’t care if you believe it. God said it! That settles it!” I am left wondering exactly what God said that they are so excited about, hopefully that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. The truth is that I’m not talking about the amateur variant of Bible-beater, not really. I am talking about the 100%, died in the wool, holding signs in the air as they yell at passers by, Bible-beaters! When I was still studying at the University of Georgia, I was always amused and perplexed by a gentleman who came to town every few weeks. I was told by other students that he was making his rounds of the Southeast. I don’t know if he was particularly an ACC or SEC fan, but he hit most of the colleges in those leagues. He would come to Athens and set up camp just outside the Tate student center. Megaphone in hand, he would preach to anyone who would listen, and to many who were trying not to listen. He came complete with his own cheering section, each of whom held signs in the air with the meanest and most exclusive Bible verses they could fit onto poster board. Strangely, “blessed are the meek,” from St. Matthew’s gospel, and “not all of you should presume to be teachers,” from St. James’ epistle, never made it onto their signs! One day, two students walked by holding each other in a way that suggested more than this gentleman preacher could handle, and so he pointed them out to the crowd. “Do you see those two?” he asked. “They are nothing but a couple of dogs.” It didn’t take long before most of the crowd, yelling only as UGA students could, broke out with cheers of “Go Dawgs!” His only response was to claim that it was God’s word to them and not his own. We needed to stop living for ourselves and believe his message if we wanted to get into heaven. God said it; that settled it; he believed it. It is perhaps an unfair comparison, but the Sadducees were, in their own way, a group of Bible-beaters. Actually, they were Torah-beaters, to better describe them. They were Jews, but they were a special group who only believed what was written in the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, the Law of Moses. If it came after the Israelites crossed over the Jordan and into the Promised Land, they weren’t hearing it. And they held to this belief rather strongly, allowing it to affect every aspect of their lives. I suppose their bumper stickers would have read “El Adonai Elohim said it in the Law; that settles it; I believe it.” Anything that came later, after Deuteronomy, was unimportant and invalid to them, strangely similar to the way in which Bible-beaters today ignore the 2,000 years of Christianity that has come since the end of biblical times. However, there was a twist to these Sadducees. As St. Luke reminds us, they didn’t believe in the resurrection, in the afterlife. The idea of the resurrection of the dead is not mentioned in the Torah, and so it wasn’t an option for them. In this case, God hadn’t said it, and so they didn’t believe it; that settled it. I picture it this way: as they drove around Palestine with that well-known bumper sticker on their cars, they were listening to John Lenin on the radio and smiling: “Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try./ No hell below us; above us only sky.” Not believing in an afterlife seemed to give them a certain sense of relief, a way of enjoying life. Holding to such a narrow understanding of Scripture kept them from seeing God’s ongoing activity in the world. Jesus threatened both of these. It is interesting to me how this has changed. You and I have heard the story about how we need to believe the Bible in order to get into heaven, and so it may seem strange that there were ever people like the Sadducees who would use Scripture to argue that there was no resurrection. It seems so strange to us in light of Jesus. Through him, all have been made alive, so God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. It is an idea that is at the crux of Christianity, but it didn’t begin with Jesus. We recognize it in the old story of Job that we heard today. Despite having everything and having lost everything, he still believes that he will see the goodness of God after death. The early church had placed so much of its hope on the return of Christ. In Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians that we read earlier, there is evidence of that future hope. However, I sense that Paul doesn’t want the church at Thessalonica to find itself ultimately caught up thinking only about the end of times. It is unfortunate when this same stream flows into the church today, the one that tells us that getting into heaven is the only reason to follow Jesus, that our impending doom is the reason to love and fear God. Such is the message that I heard preached those afternoons at UGA, but I don’t believe that it was the message that Jesus wanted us to believe. He went to Jerusalem that week in order to stare death in the face, ultimately to be overcome temporarily by death, and yet proclaimed this message: God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. Was it because he wanted to simply be argumentative with the Sadducees, as they were being with him? I think he wanted them to experience a meaningful live augmented, not limited, by God, because there is so much of God for us to see and experience each day. When I first came to the Episcopal Church, I was introduced to the idea of the Sacraments, that there are times and places when we are certain of God’s very real presence, like when we celebrate the Eucharist, and like when we baptize. Then, a priest friend of mine in Atlanta encouraged me one day to look for the little sacraments in life, the ones written with a lower case “s,” the ones that the church has never officially identified—like we have in communion, baptism, and marriage—but the ones that we experience from time to time and are equally overcome by God’s presence—the way that we hear a song’s message again for the first time and realize that God is speaking to us, the way that special events in life mark us forever, the way that God speaks to us on a quiet, Tuesday afternoon as we stand in line at Starbucks and hear, “grande nonfat latte for Jill.” That’s why I have been so crazy as to bring Elton John and the Grateful Dead into King of Peace, because I have recognized God’s message of hope and reconciliation even through such unlikely means. All of these are sacraments because we see that God is working in us. All of these are means of grace because God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. As we will soon say in the words of the Nicene Creed, we look for the resurrection of the dead—in the future—but we believe in God—in the present. We have experienced as real what Jesus promised to us so many years ago—that God is the God of the living, and that in Christ all have been made alive. I saw this demonstrated recently in the tragic events of a friend of Alison’s back in Atlanta. His wife of so many years, after seven long years of fighting breast cancer, could fight no more. When it became clear that there was only one possible outcome for her, the two started a new tradition. They called it happy hour—not because of the gins and tonic—but because of the way that they decided to live while she still lived. Every night for an hour, they sat together and told happy stories from the past, good things that had happened to them that day, and made sure to mention God’s many blessings—the ways that they had seen God at work in their lives. So when it had come to pass, Tom found himself walking out of the church with Sandra’s ashes in his hands, and he said that he was smiling. He was smiling because of those happy hours that they had shared, knowing that God had been at work in them while they lived. Despite this tragedy, God was still the God of the living. Phillip Doddridge lived in the 1700’s, and admitted that he struggled between knowing whether to live for the day, as some recommended, or to live only with God in mind, as others said. Before his death, he penned these words, trying to reconcile the issue: Live while you
live, the epicure would say,
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