Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 7, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

To us, death is real. I doubt that that statement comes as a surprise to anyone, except perhaps the surprise that I would actually get up here and bother to say it. I’m sure everyone in this room, or if not everyone then nearly everyone, has experienced the death of a loved one-a parent, spouse, partner, child, or a grandparent or other relative or beloved friend. Those deaths are real to us. When they happen they can devastate us. In some cases we never get over it. I still grieve the death of my first wife Francie, and I know some of you who are still grieving devastating losses in your lives. Those losses hurt us deeply, and the prospect of our own death scares us.

Today we are marking All Saints, or All Souls, Day. It is a day to remember all those who have passed into God, all those whom we have loved and lost to that reality that seems so final, so ultimate. But on this day when we remember those who have died, I’m here to tell you something that you may find hard to believe. That something is: Death is not real. Not really real, not the ultimate reality. It seems real alright, but in the end it is not. This news came as something of a revelation to me this week as I worked to prepare today’s sermon, and it came straight out of Luke’s story of the question the Sadducees posed to Jesus about the resurrection of the dead and, more specifically, from Jesus’ brilliant, masterful, creative answer to that question.

That story is set against the background of a dispute in first century Judaism over the question of resurrection, meaning bodily resurrection at the end of time. Suffice it to say here that traditionally Judaism had no belief in a meaningful life after death. By the first century, however, some Jews, notably the Pharisees, had come to believe that at the end of time there would be a bodily resurrection of those who had died. This is the view of the matter that the first Christians adopted. A sect called the Sadducees, however, held to the more traditional Jewish belief that there is no resurrection of the dead. According to Luke’s story, some of them tried to demonstrate the logical absurdity, as they saw it, of belief in a bodily resurrection by asking Jesus whose wife a woman who had had multiple husbands would be in the resurrection. Jesus’ answer, as usual when he’s asked a trick question, neatly sidesteps the matter and turns the questioners’ assumptions on their ear; and it provides a wonderful way of looking at the matter of eternal life.

Jesus boxed his questioners in by quoting scripture to them-their scripture and his, the Hebrew Bible. He reminded them of a scene in Exodus, Moses’ theophany at the burning bush. There, speaking from that famous burning bush, Yahweh says: "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." Jesus then gives a remarkable exegesis of this famous passage. By the time of Moses, the patriarchs whose God Yahweh said he was were long since dead from the human point of view. Nonetheless, Jesus says: "Now he is the God not of the dead but of the living." How can that be if he’s the God of those dead patriarchs? I had always taken it to mean that Yahweh was the God they had believed in and followed during their lives, but Jesus gives a very different explanation. He says God is the God of the living "for to him [i.e., God] all of them are alive." In other words, while those who have passed away may be dead in our experience of the matter, they are alive in God’s experience of the matter.

How can we understand that? Here’s a suggestion that may, or may not, help. We experience life through time. To us, over time, people are born, live, and die. But here’s the thing: God does not experience life through time. God, at least in God’s transcendent aspect, does not experience time at all. How can we know that? Well, we know that time is a feature of creation, of created being. Those who have died seem dead to us because we experience the passage of time. Earlier in time they were alive, then they died, and now in this time they are gone. However, they are not dead to God but eternally alive because God is not limited by the created category "time" as we are. With God there is no was, is, and will be. There is only is. There is, to go back to the Moses story, "I am." Everyone who ever was, all who are, and everyone who ever will be is eternally alive to God.

Now, maybe that explanation helps you and maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t that’s fine. Just disregard it. Whether it does or not, I want to invite you this morning, as we celebrate All Saints’ Day, to think about one or more loved ones whom you have lost. To us they died and are gone. I certainly don’t want to minimize that reality or its pain. I feel it every day. But I invite you to picture in your mind your loved one, of loved ones, not dead but alive to and with God. Try it now. [Pause] See them alive, well, and surrounded by God’s love. [Pause] See them held safely in the palm of God’s hand. [Pause] That, friends, is their true reality, and ours. God is the ultimate reality, and in that ultimate reality our departed loved ones are alive and safe in God’s hand. And so are we.

So, on this All Saints’ Sunday, let us remember our departed loved ones. But let us remember them not as past, not as gone, no matter how much we miss them. Let us remember them alive, because that’s what they are, "for to God, all of them are alive." Amen.