The following sermon was preached on November 6, 2022 at St George’s Transcona. You can learn more about St George’s and find links to their YouTube channel by clicking here.

Photo:  A gravestone in the cemetery at St Andrew’s on the Red.

 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

This past week the church celebrated a series of holy days – Monday was All Hallows Eve – which has become known as Halloween, Tuesday the feast of All Saints, and then Wednesday was the Feast of All Souls.

Because we don’t typically meet on those days we have followed the common practice of moving the feast and celebrating All Saints today.

All Saints is a day to remember all the saints, all of them, not just the famous ones who get stained glass windows and other sorts of fancy memorials. Today is a day to remember every single person who makes up the body of Christ – the living and the dead.  It’s a day to remember that we are a part of a community that is much bigger than the group of people gathered in this building.

And although it is a day to remember the living and the dead, a day to remind yourself that you are also a saint, it’s also a day when we tend to remember the saints that we are missing in a particular way because they died recently. We will do that a little later in this service.

In our gospel reading, some religious leaders approach Jesus and ask him a question. They ask him a series of questions, actually, but we only get one of them in today’s reading:

There are seven brothers. One gets married and then dies. As is our custom, another brother marries his widow. He also dies.  This happens seven times and then, to quote directly from verse 32, “Finally the woman also died.”

Finally indeed.

So that’s the context, and here’s the question: “Whose property will she be in the life to come?”

It’s a patriarchal, heteronormative question asked not because the questioner genuinely wants to know the answer, but because they want to know how Jesus will answer.  There is no real woman who had to marry seven brothers.

And the men asking the question don’t even believe in the resurrection.  But they do believe in debate as a way of understanding, and they do know that a true teacher of the faith won’t be threatened by this kind of questioning.  So if Jesus answers well, he just might be who he says he is, but if he doesn’t….

Whose property will this poor, tired woman be when she finally dies?

No one’s.

Jesus says that the norms and practices of this world are not the norms and practices of the resurrected life.   This woman will not be anyone’s property. She will no longer be a wife, she will be like an angel, she will be a child of God, a child of the resurrection. (36)

Jesus is saying, as Jesus says so very often, my ways are not your ways.  If you want to follow me, you will have set aside your assumptions and learn to see the world in a new way.

For example, since the world that Jesus has come to bring about does not include a system that treats women as property, maybe we can also re-think our earthly systems that to this very day still tend to treat women this way?

Maybe we can apologize for all the ways we  – in the world and in the church – have privileged heterosexual marriage with children as the golden standard of Godly living and begin to celebrate a greater diversity of ways of living.   If you don’t happen to be a single person, take some time sometime to listen to the experiences of single people because I fully expect that it will break your heart when you discover all the ways, subtle, and not so subtle, that they are told that they don’t quite measure up.

We can do better.

If you read a little bit further than the passage given to us by the lectionary, you will discover that after Jesus answers their questions, the men say, “Teacher you have spoken well.” (39)

Jesus passed the test. They recognize him as a teacher, they acknowledge he spoke well.  Jesus gave answers that were so solid the men no longer wanted to debate with him. In fact, it says that they “no longer dared to ask him a question.” (40)

In the life to come, women are not property.  Jesus speaks well when he answers their questions and then he says something that I find strikingly beautiful. “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” (38)

Over and over again in scripture, we are told that the way of Jesus is the way of life.  In John 10:10 we’re told that Jesus came to bring life and life to the full.

A full life is not an easy, happy life, it’s … well it’s full.  The life Jesus came to bring is one where we will feel fully alive, fully ourselves at all times. Whenever you feel like that, whenever this parish feels like that, it’s a sign that we are living into who we were created to be.

In our gospel reading, we have a group of people questioning Jesus about the resurrection, and in our reading from Thessalonians, we find Paul trying to correct false teachings about the life to come.

Paul is not my favourite writer. His words have been used to hurt me and many people I love very deeply.  But Paul is also a writer I can’t simply dismiss unless I also want to dismiss a large portion of the scriptures.

Today is not the day to unpack all the ways that Paul’s words have wounded people and the myriad of ways he has been misunderstood – often willfully misunderstood – but we can look in more depth at today’s reading to discover a man who seems genuinely distressed that his teachings are being misinterpreted.

In her excellent book, “One Coin Found,” Reverend Emmy Kegler, who as a queer woman with a call to the priesthood has had her own struggles with Paul, imagines his life and his work in this way:

“I began to retrace Paul’s backstory. A young man, convicted in faith, watching the stoning of a seeming heretic. A righteous man on the warpath for the Lord. Well trained in scriptural interpretation and overly confident in his application.

Oh, no.

A perfectionist who pursued God with zeal but got knocked off his high horse and had to change everything he understood about faith? Explaining what God had done in his life, blending his experience with philosophy and Scriptures? Periodically horrified by what other so-called Christians were up to? Periodically his opinions on how everyone else should think and act were totally wrong?

This was sounding irritatingly familiar.” (142)

Later she writes, “I was coming to know him not as my opposition but as my brother, as flawed as I was but as hopeful too.

I heard his hope in the letters he wrote to his communities. He planted churches and then moved on, trusting in the work of the Spirit to move them more toward Christ, only to receive letters with questions that could not be answered. Scholars consider his letter to the church in Thessalonika – the letter we read from today – the first written words of the New Testament (predating the gospels). Our best guess, given the content of his letter, is that his new church was confused: he had promised the return of Jesus, to gather the faithful and transform the world, but instead Jesus had not yet returned, and faithful members of the community had died. Death was supposed to be conquered; Christ was supposed to be victorious. How could this have happened? [Emmy imagines] Paul pacing his tent, dictating to his scribe: Do not grieve as those to who have no hope. Death is not the end of the story, those who have gone on before us will not be away from us for long. I [am?] comforted in Paul’s promise of Jesus, both powerful enough to resurrect the dead and humble enough to take on flesh.” (150)

Like Emmy, I can imagine Paul full of energy, unable to stay still, pacing around in his tent and dictating this letter to a scribe – Paul rarely wrote anything himself.

The section we read today begins, “As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you…”

I tend to think of Paul as exhorting, correcting, challenging, but begging? This must be serious stuff.

“…we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed…”

Mariam Kamell explains that the word we have translated as “shaken” implies a “violent movement, like an earthquake.”   “What is occurring in this church is not a mild questioning about how things might work out but an earthquake of theological doubt that is leaving vast destruction in its wake. Likewise, the word for being “alarmed” is the fear caused by surprise. Having begun in one direction based on the teaching of Paul while he was with them, they have been surprised by this new teaching and their fear is that of having their foundation pulled out from underneath them. They are paralyzed, scared, uncertain about what to believe and, from that, how to act.”

And Paul knows how scared and shaken they are and that is why he writes with such urgency.

The people are shaken and alarmed because they have heard conflicting teachings about what is going to happen next.  When is Jesus returning? Has he already returned? Did Jesus leave them behind?

Paul, after begging them not to be deceived by false teachings, reminds the church in Thessalonika of what he has taught them before saying, “Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you?” (5)

I wonder what Paul would think about all the ways his words have been twisted and misused throughout the history of the church. I suspect it would break his heart. Here he was in his lifetime having to counter false teachings from others, imagine what he would think if he discovered that his own words have been deformed into false teachings in our present day.

The community in Thessalonika, once solidly committed to Paul’s teachings about Jesus, are now unsettled by false teachings that are coming from all sorts of sources. Paul says these false teachings may arrive “by spirit – by which he means something other than the Holy Spirit – or by word or by letter, as though from us…” (2)   That’s how false teachings spread, once they begin to take root in a community it can be almost impossible to trace them back to their original source.

Many people, from Paul’s day to today, have been very interested in trying to predict the future. Entire industries have been created where people try to match up current events with biblical prophecies and they can be really convincing and it is easy to get sucked in, but Paul is begging us not to be deceived.

If you want to have a discussion about what all of these things might mean that can be a fun academic exercise. If you want to, like the men in today’s gospel reading, explore a hypothetical question about relationships in the life to come, go for it.  But don’t take these things so seriously that you can become obsessed or deceived by them. There are way better ways to spend your time.

What I do think we should take seriously, is Paul’s desire that we resist being “quickly shaken in mind or alarmed…”

In November the lectionary always throws the weirdest most difficult readings at us and today is no exception. It may be hard to find yourself in these stories about fairly abstract ideas from the earliest days of the church but I suspect that we all can identify times in our lives when we’ve felt shaken to our core. When it wouldn’t have surprised us at all to discover that we had lived through a literal earthquake.  When everything we thought made sense, everything we thought we could trust, everything we thought was a firm foundation crumbled under our feet.

I suspect we can all identify times when nothing seems stable, nothing seems secure, times when you are desperately looking around from something – anything – solid to grab on to but you can’t seem to find anything at all.

I’m not entirely sure why, but when I look back at my life, October is so often an earthquake month for me. Things just seem to happen in October that shake everything up. It happened to me again this year and I’m still nowhere near feeling settled.

I can’t identify with the specific issues the church in Thessalonika was dealing with, but I can identify, acutely, with that feeling of being shaken.

And so, I also take comfort in Paul’s counsel to those early Christ followers. Sometimes I believe him with all my heart, sometimes I need to grab onto his words with the defiant hope that even if I don’t believe them today, I might believe them tomorrow.

Sometimes a defiant hope in the possibility that I might believe is all I have.

Paul ends this section of the letter with words of encouragement.  He reminds the people that they are God’s beloved, that God’s love for them is solid and trustworthy.  (13)  God’s love is the foundation that will allow them to, as Paul writes in verse 15, “stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.

And isn’t this exactly what we need to hear when we’re feeling shaken? Especially if we feel like God has forgotten us as the church in Thessalonika did? When we have been shaken and feel abandoned, we need to be reminded of this foundational truth: We are God’s beloved. God will never, ever abandon us.

And then Paul closes the section of this letter with a beautiful blessing. May it be an encouragement to each one of us today and in the days to come:

“Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and work.” (16-17)

May it be so. In the name of our steadfast God who is Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Amen.