Reliable

Luke 21:5-19

Do you know one of those people who seem to find it reassuring when things go badly?

 “See, it’s raining on the company picnic. I knew May would be too wet!”

“Oh, the projector isn’t working for the main presenter? I’m almost glad to have something to fix. This conference was going too smoothly to be real!”

Or maybe you’ve felt that way yourself sometimes – that it’s a relief to have your low expectations met. Or that it’s better to know the worst than to wonder. 

Today’s gospel, then, is for you. For all of us who sometimes find reassurance in disaster, even – well, especially – if you don’t enjoy the disaster at all.

Jesus is telling his disciples – and any of the crowd in the Temple who want to listen in – that the beautiful stonework of the house of God is going to be completely destroyed. Not only that, but the holy city will be at war, the “good guys’ are going to be arrested and put on trial, and terrorism, famine, and natural disasters will wash over them all.

It’s deeply distressing and disturbing. And it’s also meant to be reassuring; to be comforting and encouraging in two ways.

First, there’s Jesus’ promise to those disciples listening to him right there in the threatened Temple: In the midst of all that is awful, not a hair of your head will perish. You will be protected, you will speak God’s word, and you will “gain your souls” – an ambiguous phrase, but one that I believe means that we will become spiritually whole. Jesus promises protection and spiritual fulfillment when there’s disaster all around.

A promise that’s meant to give the disciples, give us, that confidence in the work of God that can counteract the natural fear, worry, and unrelenting stress of seeing everything else reliable destroyed and leave us confident and brave.

And this story is also meant to prove that Jesus’ word is reliable; that what he says to his disciples, to us, is both true and trustworthy.

By the time Luke is writing his gospel, you see, everything Jesus predicts for his disciples here has already happened. In the year 70 – a decade or two before Luke’s gospel narrative was probably completed, the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple was demolished by fire and occupying forces. By the time the Temple fell, Israel had experienced plenty of riots and uprisings, civil war and international war. 

The Christians who first read Luke’s account of Jesus already knew the stories of the arrests and trials that many of Jesus’ disciples and early church leaders had faced, the stories of inspired testimonies before governors and kings, and the stories of earthquakes, famine, and plagues experienced by many of the early Christian communities.

In other words, everything Jesus describes in this conversation in the Temple before his death had happened – and was known to have happened - by the community of disciples reading Luke’s story.

The story we hear Luke tell today is not just a story of Jesus promising protection and fulfillment when we are face to face with disaster.
It’s also a story that proves Jesus’ promises reliable: true, and trustworthy, proven by experience.

The good news that Luke wants us to know is that God’s Word is reliable. Jesus is trustworthy.

He’s right about the disasters we’ve seen and experienced, so he’s also right, reliable and true, about the promises we haven’t yet seen for ourselves, about the nearness of the kingdom of God that hasn’t quite come in the readers’ lifetimes – Luke’s first readers, or you and me.

This is important. It’s an essential matter of our faith. It’s critical for Luke’s audience, for you and me, to know that all of Jesus’ words of promise and resurrection are reliable; that on the eve of his own arrest and death the future is, in fact, assured by God beyond our doubt, fear, or failure.

It matters to anyone facing disaster – fire, flood or earthquake; the loss of a home, a precious job or activity, a loved one – that God’s care for us in danger and loss is absolutely dependable.

It matters to any of us losing trust in our world – in the safety of food, the reliability of the seasons, the stability and honesty of government, the security of our retirement or children – that God is trust-worthy beyond doubt.
It matters to our souls to believe, to know, that we will experience God’s faithfulness; that our own lives will prove God’s dependability not just in disaster but in the weariness and excitements of the everyday.

It matters to anyone following Jesus that Jesus is reliable, trustworthy, true. Or why are we even here?

It can be harder to know that God’s trustworthiness is meant for you and me, personally and together, when the disasters that roll over us – strokes or school shootings; home floods or work failures – aren’t the things predicted and promised protection by Jesus. Or when the bad news that floods our days from the internet or the TV – political upheaval or unearned prejudice or unreasonable weather – seems to have a lot more to do with human failures, our own or others, than with God’s plan for salvation.

But Jesus and Luke both want us to know not only that God is reliable for protection and spiritual growth in all that, but that Jesus can be relied on to make us witnesses of God’s truth in spite of anything that’s happening around us; in spite of our own doubts or ignorance, fears or failures.

And that speaking the reliable truth of God in the midst of a very unreliable world is in fact our purpose – yours and mine, confused and inexpert as we may be, just like those earliest disciples of Jesus.

When I am working with children to prepare prayers for our worship, I often ask questions about “who is in charge?” in order to prompt ideas about who needs to be prayed for in our country, or our community. Usually the children quickly name the president (or the police, or teachers, or parents, depending on the age of the group!). But this week, as my friends in the Preschool were helping me write the prayers for today, every time I asked the question “who is in charge?” – about our nation, our school, or any other group, including your families – one or two or three children answered “God.”

God is in charge.

On a day when every TV I passed was tuned to impeachment hearings; when I was struggling with exhaustion and migraine, in a week of worry about ill and injured friends and parishioners – when none of the everyday disasters were world-ending but nothing felt very godly – the word of God came loud and clear from our Trinity Preschoolers:

God is in charge.

And that reminder itself was proof in my own life that God is reliable. Trustworthy and true.

Not only to be present and protect and encourage, but to make us witnesses of that presence and power and love, to speak reliable truth even when we don’t know what we’re saying.

God is in charge.

And not only is God reliable; not only is Jesus trustworthy and true,

but Jesus makes us reliable, too.

God makes perfect teachers out of four and five year olds whose only business is to learn.

Jesus puts truth that you and I need to hear into the mouths of long ago disciples;

and Jesus puts truth that others need to hear into your mouth and mine.

As we put our trust in Jesus, God makes us trustworthy to stand with each other, with any of God’s people, in the face of national and natural disaster, or personal calamity or daily defaults.

God makes us reliable witnesses of what God is up to in the world in the midst of disasters and disappointments large and small (and the joys of daily life). Jesus makes us truer than we ourselves could ever be.

And by that steadfastness – by relying on the faithfulness of God in ourselves, in our community, and in Jesus – we gain our souls.

Wrong About Resurrection

Luke 20:27-38

It’s hard to keep politics out of the pulpit when Jesus gets himself embroiled in Temple politics – which is what we are hearing about today.

This conversation about resurrection and marriage that Luke reports on today happens when Jesus has traveled to Jerusalem to come face to face with the forces that are going to kill him (and, not incidentally, lead to resurrection).

He’s been teaching in the Temple every day: sitting down with his disciples and a crowd of the curious in the Temple grounds, telling stories, interpreting scripture, and being challenged to debate by other religious leaders and teachers who disagree with him.
Now the Sadducees – a group made up mostly of the religious elite in Jerusalem – come to test him on this idea of the dead being raised by God at the last day that’s grown popular among the faithful people of their time.

Sadducees don’t believe in resurrection, you see, because they can’t find it mentioned in the “books of Moses” – the books we now know as the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. All the prophets and sacred histories and poetry that comes after – that you and I read in our Bibles, and that other Jews read in synagogue at the time of Jesus – none of that counts, according to the Sadducees. And they have a power conflict with the Pharisees about that.

So they tell Jesus a bizarre hypothetical story – about a woman married over and over by a family of brothers – that’s designed to make resurrection look ridiculous. Look, this one woman can’t be married to seven men at the same time when they’re all alive again! Ridiculous! Right?
It’s a trap to make resurrection logically impossible and prove that they, the Sadducees, are right about God.

If you defeat your opponent’s arguments; make someone look ridiculous in a debate, it means that you’re right, doesn’t it?

(That’s the premise we still follow when we put a whole bunch of candidates for election on stage and moderators and debaters all try to trip each other up).

And it matters to be right – or to be on the team of the winning debater – because our salvation depends on being right.

Or even if we know that’s not literally true, at least that’s how it feels.

This year in America, it sounds like if we don’t pick the right debater, you or I or someone we love is going to die of bad health care with the wrong people in charge. Or melt, starve, and smother because of the wrong balance between climate care and economic growth.  Other times the existential threat is Communists or terrorists or nuclear war; paroled criminals or deficit and debt.

There’s immense cultural pressure on many of us to “get it right” – to back the right choices, to be morally and practically correct in what we do with our votes, money, parenting, recycling, medical decisions, everything… so that we can secure our future and the future of those we love and maybe even the future of the human race.

In other words, so we can assure ourselves of salvation from death, evil, error, and despair.

For the Sadducees, it mattered that they be right about resurrection because if they were wrong about that, they might be wrong about how God teaches us to live, and where God is revealed in scripture. Salvation – ultimate relationship with God and feeling right and confident about our life choices – depends on this, for them. So they try to bring Jesus into an argument between themselves and the Pharisees; prove themselves more right than their opponents about God, and reassure themselves that they’re getting their own salvation right.

Temple politics mattered in Jesus’ time for the same reason religious and secular politics matter in our own: because we care about protecting ourselves, our families, our friends from evil and harm – in other words, because we care about our own salvation. We care about our physical, practical, immediate protection from danger and evil; and we care about the assurance of our future, assurance of peace and comfort and reward in heaven and on earth. And so we argue with one another, and sometimes even with Jesus, trying to assure ourselves that we’ve got it right.

But saving ourselves is not actually our job.

And that’s the concern that Jesus answers when he tells the Sadducees that nobody marries in the resurrection. Jesus isn’t telling us that we won’t still love and be intimate with our spouses and children in eternal life with God, but that resurrection is so different from what we know that in resurrection we have no need of the rules and customs and institutions meant to extend and secure our mortal life – the customs meant to save ourselves and our families, our communities.

In Jesus’ time, marriage was as much a life-insurance policy as it was anything else. Children were regarded as the only guarantee that you would live on and not be forgotten after death, and a spouse and children were the best – maybe only – investment you could make in protection for old age or illness.

That was the whole point of this brother-in-law marriage, you know: to provide a secure future for both the widow and the dead man.

But in resurrection, we never have to worry again about the threat of death. Never have to worry about securing our future, or the future of those we love.

Jesus is telling the Sadducees, the disciples, the crowds in the Temple – and you and me here and now – that God has a plan for our salvation – for the assurance of our future and the future of those we love – that doesn’t depend on any of the strategies or rules or customs we use to protect ourselves and our families from death and distress.

Jesus is also telling the Sadducees, and you and me, that we don’t have to be right about God to experience salvation. They can be wrong about resurrection and still be raised. They – we – can be wrong about what scripture is the right scripture and still grow right with God through what we learn in the scripture we do read.

They – we – can lose the argument, lose control of the conversation, and God can still choose us to be children of God, people through whom God heals and saves the world.

You and I and a whole lot of people around us can be wrong about which debater should be president, or sheriff, or control the legislature, and God can still assure the future of those we love in ways we never would have asked or imagined – even in ways we thought would be wrong.

In fact, Jesus tells the Sadducees, tells you and me, that we don’t have to be right about God; don’t have to be right in any argument; in any of the differences that make up our religious and secular politics then or now), in order to assure our own salvation or the future of those we love. Because that salvation, that future, are already fully held in God’s hands.

So the Sadducees can stop defending themselves against new scripture, and new teachings about resurrection. You and I can stop defending ourselves against people on the internet, the news, or the ballot who disagree with us. We can stop trying to be right, or prove ourselves right, and be free to know ourselves – and everyone who disagrees with us! – as loved, assured, and saved by the God we’re probably wrong about, but who insists on giving us life anyway, now and always.