A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ of Harrisburg, PA
by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025
22nd Sunday After Pentecost/C • November 9, 2025
Luke 20:27-38
Isn’t it good for us to gather here this morning? The Book of Job imagines all the angels of the Lord gathering one morning; I think it was just like this.
One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them.The LORD said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the LORD, “From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.” [Job 1:6f]
Well, none of you are Satanic but you’ve been out in the world. How was your week? What did you see that made you angry? What did you see that uplifted you? What was troubling? What made you smile? You’ve had to answer some questions: what’s for breakfast? What are we doing today? Why is that guy standing in the middle of North Third?
Here’s one you probably didn’t spend any time on this week: “How many angels can stand on the head of a pin?” What do you think? Supposedly, this was a big theological question in the Middle Ages. Actually, historians now find almost no evidence anyone worried about this until after the Reformation when people began to make fun of it. The answer depends on whether you think angels have substance. If they don’t, then an infinite number can stand on the pin; if they do, then just one. There: out of all the questions you’ll have to answer this week, that one is settled. You can go onto more interesting questions like what are we doing for dinner.
I bring all this up because today’s reading from Luke is about a question no one is really asking, just like the angels on the pin. Last week we left Jesus going to dinner at Zaccheus’ house; we’ve jumped ahead of the whole Palm Sunday story and Jesus is in Jerusalem where he encounters a group of Sadducees. It’s the first and only time we hear about the Sadducees in the Gospel of Luke. They’re a group centered at the temple who were generally more well to do than the Pharisees we’re used to hearing about. They’re actually opponents of the Pharisees. You see, the Pharisees have accepted the prophets and some books lie Job called ‘the writings’ as God’s Word—holy scripture. The Sadducees, on the other hand, are purists; they only accept the first five books of our Bible, the Torah.
“Why are we talking about obscure first century Jewish theology?”, I hear you wondering. Hang in there with me; we need to understand this question Jesus is being asked. Now, The prophets speak of God resurrecting the people of God. Ezekiel, for example, says
[God] asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign LORD, you alone know.”
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!
This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. [Ezekiel 37:3-5]
This ability of God to resurrect and make new is central in the prophets. So the Pharisees are preaching this. But as I said, the Sadducees don’t accept the prophets, so they don’t accept resurrection.
Jesus is preaching resurrection. He tells his friends that he is going to be killed in Jerusalem but God is going to raise him up again after three days. So, the Sadducees have come to confront him about this and that’s where we pick up the story in Luke. Do you ever ask a question without really caring about the answer? My dad did this: “What do you think you’re doing?” I’ve done it. “What’s all this mess?” That’s what the Sadducees are doing: they’re asking a question without really wanting an answer; the answer they want is Jesus saying, “Wow, I don’t know.”
So they’ve come up with a rule from Deuteronomy. This is the rule.
If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her.
The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel.
However, if a man does not want to marry his brother’s wife, she shall go to the elders at the town gate and say, “My husband’s brother refuses to carry on his brother’s name in Israel. He will not fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to me.”
Then the elders of his town shall summon him and talk to him. If he persists in saying, “I do not want to marry her,” his brother’s widow shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, take off one of his sandals, spit in his face and say, “This is what is done to the man who will not build up his brother’s family line.”
That man’s line shall be known in Israel as The Family of the Unsandaled. [Deuteronomy 25:5-10]
Now, there are some things where our common sense can lead us astray when we put them back in the Bible. One of them is the whole concept of a widow. Throughout the Torah and the Prophets, God shows a particular care for widows. But who are these women?
They are women in a patriarchal society. They couldn’t own property; they couldn’t function in regular economics But if they can’t own property and can’t earn money, how will they survive? Add to that is the fact that many women were widowed when young. When we say ‘widow’ we often think of an older woman who has lost her husband late in life. But Israel had to consider how to care for young women. So they did what many societies have done; they provided a way to marry them off.
Israel also had a particular concern about biological descent. God’s blessing was understood to be carried on this way. So it’s important that each family be continued. This rule takes care of both problems. Who’s going to marry a widow? I’s not a matter of romantic attraction; there’s a rule. The rule is, your brother marries her, has children with her, and those are considered your children. Problem solved, right?
Except for all the problems this raises. What if these two don’t like each other? When Jacquelyn and I were married, I had two brothers. My brother Allan was tall and handsome, much more handsome than me. My brother David is more charming than anyone I’ve ever known and he’s a rich lawyer. But you know, love isn’t always reasonable. This text comes up every three years and it came up about a year after we were married. After the service, Jacquelyn quietly said, “No matter what happens to you, I’m not marring either of your brothers.” The Sadducees think they’ve found another problem: “If, as you say, Jesus, there is resurrection, whose wife will she be after marrying seven brothers?” It’s a gotcha question!
I think of them gathered around, someone proposes the question, just as we heard: “Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless;..” And so on. I think of them smiling in their arrogance, knowing they’ve got him. The crowd is quiet, listening, Jesus looks back at them for a moment, perhaps sad at their lack of imagination, their lack of faith in God creative power, and simply says,
“Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. [Luke 20:34f]
Wow. That’s it: God’s able to create and recreated and resurrect is so far beyond our present experience, our present lives, that we can’t carry all the things we know into it. So there’s no problem; God’s love is so great, it’s beyond what we can imagine.
Jesus isn’t content to brush aside their gotcha question, though. He goes on to point something out from Exodus, from the very scripture the Sadducees claim to represent.
the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.
This is what we should take away from this section: God is God of the living and all of us are all the time alive to God.
The closest we can come to this is the way parents are with children. Every parent, I think, has this experience: they are alive to us in their whole history, in all their ages. May is 35 but in my head, she’s also the little girl who was fabulous at her sister’s wedding when she was 10, she’s also the 15 year old who taught me to enjoy alternative music and rap, she’s the 20 year old college girl and so on. The same is true of my other kids. My daughter iAmy has grown kids now but to me she’s still the high school girl who outsmarted me. She used to go out on Saturday nights; she had a midnight curfew. I’d do that dad thing starting about 11:30; I’d start thinking she was going to be late and get mad. By 11:45 I’d be all worked up. By 11:55 I’d be ready to deliver a real dressing down to the late Amy. But Amy would sit outside in the car with her date until 11:58, then waft in just as the clock struck 12. I’d be obviously mad, ready to yell, but with no reason; she was on time. She’d look at me and say, “What?” And I’d have to stifle it. Maybe you know how awful it is to go to God full of unexpressed righteous anger. I could go on about Jason as well. What’s true is that all these are alive to me in all their ages, not just their present.
That’s what Jesus is saying about how God is with us: we are all present to God in all our ages, in all our lives. Our past is present to God. Our present is present to God. And our future is present too, beyond death. Death is one of the structures of this world, not God’s love. We don’t know how this works; we don’t know what this is like. So we imagine all kinds of things, most of them based on what happens here. That’s fine, as long as we realize that’s us. God’s love is beyond ours, beyond our imagination.
We’re going to sing a song in a few minutes that’s one of my favorites: “In the Bulb There Is a Flower”. Most of you know this song: in the bulb, there is a flower, in the seed, an apple tree. There’s nothing about a bulb that suggests a flower. There’s nothing about a seed that suggests an apple tree. Yet that’s their future. In the same way, Jesus is telling us, nothing about what we are now is big enough, full enough, to show God’s love for us. He invites us simply to believe in the love of God, beyond our imagination, beyond our experience. In that love, we are, we were, we always will be, embraced in the love of God. Who you truly are, who you truly will become, is indeed, as the song says, “Something God alone can see.”
Amen.