Valois United Church

Job 19:23-27a
Luke 20:27-38

I’m not sure that we all are clear on the differences between Pharisees and Sadducees, seeing as how we don’t know any people from these two groups.....  Often it doesn’t make too much difference for us.  But this week we end up with the Pharisees happy, and the Sadducees very unhappy with Jesus.  
    
The Pharisees believed in life after death.

The Sadducees held that only the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, were authoritative. Not finding mention of life after death in these books, they rejected the existence of live after death.

But the Sadducees knew that Jesus was saying that there was life after death.  So they set out to prove him wrong in their questioning.....

    "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.
    
    Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless;
    then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless.
    
    Finally the woman also died.
    
    So, in life after death, whose wife will she be?”

Jesus’ answer is a little convoluted, but after study the words boil down to:
    The marriage question is irrelevant.
    We become children of the resurrection, like angels.  
    Life after death is different.
    Life after death is real.

Now, Jesus knows that the Sadducees will not accept anything not the Pentateuch, and they have found nothing supporting the idea of eternal life in those first five books of the Bible.  But Jesus has, and he says:
    “And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where Moses speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

It is clear that the verb tense in the original is the present:
God IS the God of Abraham.  Not was.
God IS the God of Isaac.  Not was.
God IS the God of Jacob.  Not was.

So if God is their God still, at the time of Moses, and indeed in the time of Jesus, and in our time today, then there must be life after death.

And Jesus ends with:
    “Now God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."

It is clear that God does not see things the way we do.  
Where we see death, God sees something else -
    a transition of some sort from life to life.

Some preachers, looking at this text, thought that the intent was to tell us that in life after death that there are no marriage relationships, and then debate over whether to put that into a sermon.

I don’t think Jesus is talking about what happens with existing relationships, though perhaps he can be understood to say that one does not get married in heaven.  Perhaps he could be understood as saying that the most holy people do not get married at all.

But none of this is his real point.  
His real point is that
    We become children of the resurrection, like angels.  
    Life after death is different.
    Life after death is real.

So, being inquisitive, we want to know more.  
We want to be like demanding clients asking a real estate agent about housing possibilities in a new community.  

And then on our really logical days, we sometimes have questions about the fundamentals.  Part of our problem is that the old world view, from which scriptures were written, had layers:
underworld - including hell
earth
sky
and then the heavens above, with God in the highest heaven, up among the stars.

And the traditional world-view that comes to us, filtered through the years, adds the devil wandering around below with his pitchfork.

Yet, as I say, on our logical days this world-view clashes with what we know.  
That there is no ultimate underworld, because the farther you go, the closer you are to Australia on the other side of the world.
And we have no problem with the earth’s surface
and the sky, which we call atmosphere
but then we go to outer space,
with telescopes peering light-years away
    with no glimpse of a towering golden city.

And the old world view clashes with the new world view, and I’m not sure that we have really thought much about how to re-state what Jesus and Paul and the book of Revelation and others want to tell us:
    that life after death is reality, a new reality.

Well, let me just try, though I am not much relying on anyone, the academics and the preachers, who usually help me out.

First, heaven has nothing to do with up.
Because God has nothing to do with up.
God is just as much here as on Jupiter - perhaps more so, because God is a God of relationship, and here on earth there are creatures who are ready for relationship, capable of relationship, like you and I.

God is here.  Not sitting up in heaven, far away.
So, where is eternal life?

I’m sure there are many ideas about this.

I have not come up with a simple way to explain my thoughts.  My thoughts come from manipulating multi-layer computer graphics.  When you look at the computer screen, there is only one graphic, the picture intended for the every-day observer.
That is our life.  We see the picture of creation intended for the every-day observer.

But in computer graphics, you can peal back layers of the graphic, of the picture, and below are other layers which were not evident.  Plunging to the final, ultimate layer, you may find yourself looking at the page itself that holds all the rest of the graphic elements.  This was not to the right or the left, top or bottom.  It was in another dimension, the layers of graphics.  Some of the layers you could hardly see what they do.  Some were evident.  But that ultimate layer: upon it, all the other layers are laid out, each in relationship to the one, and each in relationship to each other.

And when one is working with computer graphics, one can click on one element and moved it back through the layers, and once can even group it with another layer.

Is that what happens to us as we move from life to death?  That we are moving from one layer to another, like changing dimensions, moving closer to that ultimate layer or, some would say, even becoming grouped with that ultimate layer that is the divine.

Now, those are my thoughts, my image.  And it may not have made sense to many - that’s okay.

But perhaps our lives should not be seen anymore with the old world view of 2000, 3000 years ago.  Perhaps we need to find new models for understanding.
And when we find the right models, we will again know what Jesus promised:
    We become children of the resurrection..  
    Life after death is different.
    Life after death is real.
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The Body of B. Franklin, Printer

Like the Cover of an old Book
Its contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering and Guilding,
Lies here, Food for Worms,
But the Work shall not be wholly lost:
For it will, as he believ'd,
Appear once more
In a new & more perfect Edition,
Corrected and amended by the Author.

 - Benjamin Franklin.