Sermon: Advent Disruption: An Unexpected Song; or, What Mary Did In Fact Know

First Presbyterian Church

December 7, 2025, Advent 2A

Luke 1:39-56

 

Advent Disruption: An Unexpected Song

(Or, What Mary Did In Fact Know)

 

Have you ever heard of the Bechdel test?

The Bechdel test is an informal one, typically applied to movies or works of fiction, that asks of that work two (or sometimes three) questions, to determine if the work has any sort of substantial female characters at all or is simply overrun with dominating males and subservient females. It’s amazing, to be honest, how many movies don’t manage to get an affirmative answer to the two or three questions that follow:

1)                   are there two women in the film (or story) who actually talk to each other without a man around?

2)                   do they talk about something other than a man?

3)                   (sometimes added) do we actually know the women’s names?

It’s a fairly minimal test, to be sure. One conversation between two women doesn’t necessarily change the balance of power in a movie or novel by any means, but that half of the films that get released, on average, don’t even manage to have one such scene in them is pretty amazing.

While the Bible is by no means a work of fiction, it’s pretty heavily male-dominated, if we’re honest about it. For much of the scripture that’s kind of inevitable – Jesus, after all, is pretty much the whole point of the gospels. But today’s reading is pretty remarkable for being exactly that kind of scene – two women, Elizabeth and her young relative Mary, in a conversation with each other, no men around, and not merely talking about those men. It’s a remarkable enough scene that perhaps we ought to pay attention to it and what is said.

Both of these women have had an adventurous first chapter of Luke already. Elizabeth, a woman well advanced in years, has now been pregnant for six months after the angel Gabriel announced to her husband, the priest Zechariah, that the two of them would bear a most important young boy, specifically to be named John. This son would be “great in the sight of the Lord” (1:15) and who would “make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (1:17). Zechariah didn’t respond well to the angelic announcement, and as a result was struck mute; he would only get his voice back after the child’s birth, when he managed to confirm the angel’s command in writing and got his voice back.

Perhaps deciding after that incident it would be better to go directly to the woman involved, Gabriel next appeared to Mary, announcing to her (1:26-38, immediately preceding this passage) that she would bear an even more important son. This son is to be named Jesus. Gabriel rattles off a rather substantial list of characteristics that will be attributed to him: he will be great, called Son of the Most High, receive the throne of David, reign over the house of Jacob (i.e. Israel) forever, have an unending kingdom, will be holy, and will be called the Son of God. She also learns of her older cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy. While Mary is seriously perplexed by all this, and does have to wonder how this will all work since she and Joseph aren’t even living together much less married, she avoids Zechariah’s mistake and actively gives her consent to what the angel has announced (in a modern movie, her reply would probably be something like “all right, let’s do this”).

So, by the time Mary makes her way to Elizabeth’s house, she’s already been pretty well informed about what’s going on.  She will learn more about all this in her encounter with Elizabeth, some of it in a most unexpected and unusual way, when Elizabeth literally gets a kick out of Mary’s presence, thanks to that infant in her heretofore-barren womb. 

I obviously cannot pretend to know what that sensation would be like, but I’m guessing that those of you who have experienced such gymnastics from a child in the womb probably didn’t have an experience of the Holy Spirit and prophetic utterance immediately afterwards. That’s what happens to Elizabeth, though – she (not the child in the womb) was “filled with the Holy Spirit” and let out an exultation of praise to God and celebration of this young woman before her. In Elizabeth’s words, Mary was to be “blessed among women” and the “mother of my Lord” and in particular blessed because she “believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord” through Gabriel. 

As if all that wasn’t enough to overwhelm Mary, there was more to come from the Holy Spirit. It was Mary’s turn to speak, and she clearly shows that she’s been paying attention not only to the messages she has received from Gabriel and Elizabeth, but to the history of her people. 

Her song (Luke likes to make such utterances into songs) begins with praise to God, appropriately enough. She acknowledges that she’s not exactly a person of great status, and yet God has chosen to bless her with this extraordinary event. 

Then things get interesting.

Here Mary becomes, at least for these few moments, a prophet. What she sings here is rich with echoes of those prophets of old in Israel and Judah, declarations of the Lord’s favor for the unfavored. God’s mercy is for those who fear God (and by implication not for those who don’t). God has “scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts” (but not the humble). God has brought down the mighty and lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry, and “sent the rich away empty.” 

This really is the language of prophecy, from Isaiah to Jeremiah to Ezekiel and Amos and Micah and on through Malachi. God overturns our world, upsetting what we tend to think of as “the natural order of things,” or even more resignedly “the way things are.” A world in which the powerful and rich trample over the poor and powerless is not God’s world – not in the prophets, and not in Mary’s song. Our way of living gets disrupted and turned upside down – or perhaps, in God’s view, turned rightside up. 

Mary knew plenty. And if we truly listen to it, it might make us uncomfortable, with the vast majority of us here being much more “the rich” in Mary’s world than “the hungry.” 

Maybe that’s why it became so popular to sing this song that keeps asking “Mary, did you know?” It keeps asking her about all sorts of cool stuff that does happen in the life of Jesus – walking on water, healing a blind man, calming a storm. It goes on to all these grand attributes that are going to be – Lord of all creation, one day rule the nations. Somehow, though, that song manages to avoid this uncomfortable stuff that Mary very clearly knows and has very plainly told us right here in Luke’s gospel. It doesn’t somehow get around to the stuff that, in Mary’s song, is the gospel – the “good news.”

Maybe what we most need, as Advent rapidly segues into Christmas, is to listen more diligently and more honestly to Mary’s song. Maybe we should even sing Mary’s song, and not just in the form of the next hymn. Maybe it should be something we make a part of our song, this celebration and exultation of the overturning and disrupting God.

In the end, maybe we should listen more to what these women, Elizabeth and Mary, have to say to us, through the Holy Spirit, in this most unusual text of scripture.

For Mary’s very real and needed song, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #87, Comfort, Comfort Now My People; #99, My Soul Gives Glory to My God; #500, Be Known to Us in Breaking Bread; #384, Soon and Very Soon 

Sermon: Advent Disruption: An Unexpected Hour; or, Be Woke

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

November 30, 2025, Advent 1A (the sermon that would have been preached except for the snow)

Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44

 

Advent Disruption: An Unexpected Hour, 

or, Be Woke

 

It happened Friday, late morning, more years ago than I can remember. I am not a Black Friday shopper, and in fact I slept in while others across the country were fanning out to retail stores across the country to appease the gods of commerce in the guise of “getting ready for Christmas.”

But I did want something to eat.

So, I was off to a favorite eating establishment for a very early non-turkey lunch, whilst also juggling both sermon prep and Sunday-school prep in my mind. It may sound odd, but lunchtime can be some of the most effective sermon-prep time I have. I don’t understand it, but I’m happy to take advantage of it.

So there I was, order placed, settling in at a table with my very large tumbler of sweet tea (peach-flavored, as is often the case), when it happened. “Holiday music” started attacking my brain.

I think Mel Tormé was in there, with the chestnuts roasting on an open fire. I remember both “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” being part of the assault. It was relentless. Horrifying, even. And my brain was indeed withering under the assault. I enjoyed my lunch, but no real progress happened on the sermon that was about forty-eight hours from delivery at that point. 

It is by now old hat to complain about how soon the barrage of worldly trappings that gets called “Christmas season” kicks in. There were radio stations playing Christmas music 24/7 even before Halloween, for goodness’ sake.

It’s pretty easy to get lulled to sleep by the ongoing headlong rush of “tidings of comfort and joy,” to be anaesthetized by the omnipresent greenery and bell-ringers at every retail entrance and lush soundtrack of crooned carols. If you’re fortunate enough to escape it before Thanksgiving, it only escalates beyond imagination the day after.

Today’s readings from Isaiah and Matthew are out to deliver serious disruption, a world-altering one-two punch, to such complacency and numbness.

It’s not hard to see in Matthew’s account of one of Jesus’s late teachings. This particular scripture has a long history of being “fear fodder” – the kind of passage preachers turn to who want to strike some fear into their congregation. It’s the kind of passage that gets turned into books about the “rapture” and how badly tribulation goes for the “left behind” while the “saved” presumably look on smugly and safely from heaven.

Matthew would be thoroughly perturbed at the use of his gospel in this way. For Matthew, the immediate problem in the community to which he wrote was quite the opposite; writing as he was at a time when the followers of Christ had been scattered around the Mediterranean and the eyewitnesses to the life and teaching of Christ were dying, Matthew’s community was beginning to despair of any reunion with Christ at all. To this end Matthew warns his readers not to presume that all is lost, but to remember that “about that day no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” If even the Son did not know the time for that gathering up of God’s people, how could we humans claim to know it was all called off?

Of course, that proclamation hasn’t stopped people from calculating, down to the year and month and date, and sometimes even down to the hour or minute or second, when Jesus would return. I guess Jesus must just be dumb in their eyes.

The author and retired Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor puts Matthew’s insistence on the unknowability of that time like this:

He was not concerned with reading signs and keeping timetables, at least partly because he knew how preoccupied people could get with those things. Before long they cared more about their calculations than they did about their neighbors. Once they had figured out who God’s 144,000 elect were, they did not waste any time or courtesy on the damned, except perhaps to remind them just how hot hellfire was going to be. Meanwhile, God’s chosen had plenty else to do: flee the cities, arm themselves against the enemy, purify themselves for their journey to heaven. Once they had gotten themselves all worked up about this, Matthew found it just about impossible to impress them with the fact that there were widows and orphans in the community going hungry because no one was signing up for the soup kitchen, or that there were still some people in jail who needed visiting, as well as some sick people at home who still needed looking after. But what did any of that matter, when the end was right around the corner?[i]

 

Matthew’s words are not about “skipping to the end of the book” and putting life on cruise control until the “rapture” rolls around; it’s about the utter necessity to keep living the life of a follower of Christ without relenting. You don’t know the day, you don’t know the hour; the only real option is to keep doing Christ’s work in God’s world, no matter how bleak – or even more, because of how bleak the world is looking around us. Case in point: those lines about "one taken...the other left. In the days of the Roman Empire two could be walking or working or anything and the Empire could take one away for any reason or no reason at all. If that sounds too familiar in the present-day USA, well, there's the point again. At any rate cruise control is over; the real work of being a follower of Christ begins now.

The message from Isaiah is not dramatically different. Isaiah’s prophecy in this passage has a clear “not yet” quality to it. You can scan through it quickly and see how much the word “shall” is used to translate Isaiah’s message:

“In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established…”

“…all the nations shall stream to it.”

“Many peoples shall come and say…”

“He shall judge between the nations…”

Even the most famous quote from this passage is couched in “shall” language – “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” and “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” – it’s all still an object of future happening. And we can clearly look around and see a distinct lack of such change around us.

But then, notice what follows next, in verse 5:

“O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.” Not a “shall” in sight.

Imperative – “come.” “Let us walk.” Do this. Do this now. Even Isaiah sees the need to call the people not to get caught up in future dreaming, but to do now what the Lord calls God’s people to do, to “walk in the light of the Lord.” 

As is typically the case, the first Sunday of Advent in particular is a two-sided observance. Yes, we begin the period of waiting and marking the days to the firstappearance of Christ on earth, the event we celebrate on Christmas. But this day also reminds us, a bit stubbornly, that the Incarnation is not the end of the story, and that we still live in Advent as we await that time when Christ shall come and call us unto himself. We still wait, we still prepare, and not unlike Matthew’s readers, sometimes we give up hope.

But our call has not changed. We are still charged to be followers of Christ in a world that does not want us to be followers of Christ, even though the world desperately needs us to be followers of Christ. There are still the poor, the hurting, the ones who live under regular and constant threat of violence, the forgotten, the lost, those who no longer know why they’re here, the ones whom nobody loves. They are still waiting for us to show and live the gospel to them. 

If the church’s “New Year’s Day” means anything to us, perhaps it is the kick-in-the-pants we need, to paraphrase A Brief Statement of Faith in our Book of Confessions, to receive courage from the Spirit in a broken and fearful world. In a time of increasingly open racism and misogyny and xenophobia and hatred of every kind, being enacted gloatingly and with pride even by people who call themselves Christians, we are still charged with being bearers of good news, being followers of Christ. Perhaps this beginning of Advent is a wake-up call, dare I say a call to "be woke", a call not to fear nor to gloat; a call to pay attention and keep following Jesus. 

So, no more sleeping. No more snooze button. Wake up. Be awake. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #352, My Lord! What a Morning; #104, O Lord, How Shall I Meet You; #384, Soon and Very Soon

 

 

---

[i] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Don’t Say When: Expecting the Second Coming,” Christian Century 121:19 (September 21, 2004); accessed online November 26, 2016 at http://christiancentury.org/article/2004-09/dont-say-when

 

 

Sermon: Full Circle

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

November 23, 2025, Reign of Christ

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 1:68-79

 

Full Circle

  

 

This is the last Sunday of the lectionary year, a kind of liturgical New Year's Eve as it were. Next Sunday when we show up here, provided enough people stick around after the service to get it all done, you will see purple vestments, some greenery about, at least one banner hanging, some extra candles, and maybe even a manger scene. One could magnify that fact of finality with the observation that, as the last Sunday of Year C, this is the end of not just a one-year liturgical observance but of the whole three-year lectionary cycle; next Sunday brings us to the First Sunday of Advent, Year A - we really have come full circle. 

For much of the church's relatively recent history this final Sunday of the liturgical year has been known as Christ the King Sunday, making it one of two Sundays of the year devoted as much to a doctrinal idea as to any event or sequence of events recorded in scripture. The other is Trinity Sunday, which falls directly after Pentecost Sunday, and is dedicated to the mystery that one God is also "God in three persons, blessed Trinity" as the hymn teaches us. 

Here the point is that Jesus, the one whose nativity we'll be marching toward starting next week, and the one whose life and teaching takes up most of the gospel readings across the course of the liturgical year, is king. A few hymns take us there as well, like the one we sang at the beginning of this morning's service.

What is harder to come by, however, is a great deal of scripture that is quite so direct about making that point about Christ the King, at least not in the way that we have come to understand kingship and rule in human history.

Kings, or queens in such cases as they reign, often end up seeming horribly out of touch with those over whom they rule. A couple of theatrical examples might help us see this: think of the musical Camelot, as Arthur and his queen Guinevere wonder back and forth "what do the simple folk do?" Their answers, let's say, aren't great. Or for a more farcical example from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail (and its later very loose theatrical adaptation Spamalot) that same King Arthur travels through the countryside amongst many of his subjects who don't even know who he is - "I didn't know we had a king," and other such exclamations. 

Real life offers the painful example, again from England, of the royal family's utter disconnect from their people after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, twenty-eight years ago. The royal family's initial dismissiveness after the death was met with a wave of indignation and even anger, to the point that the Queen herself (yes, the same Queen so deeply lauded and grieved at her own death not too long ago) had to come forth with what amounted to a giant public mea culpa and a rather elaborate funeral with no less a star than Elton John involved. 

If one confines one's search to the history of the people of Israel, it looks even worse. When you have some time to kill, take a trip through the books of Samuel and Kings and even Chronicles in the Old Testament and scan through the various kings of Israel and of Judah whose stories are told there, sometimes briefly, sometimes in greater detail. If you do this, take particular note of how many of those kings had their careers summarized in the words "they did evil in the sight of the Lord" or something similar. It's a lot.

Speaking of those Old Testament scriptures, take a look at 1 Samuel 8, in which God is quite explicit in telling Samuel about how the people of Israel will suffer for their desire to have a king "like all the other nations." The people don't listen, God tells Samuel who to anoint (a tall, good-looking guy named Samuel), and the trouble begins. Even God isn't all that fond of human kings, it turns out.

To be blunt, calling someone a king in scripture isn't necessarily all that complimentary. The office has to be respected, of course, but an awful lot of people who filled that office did not earn that respect. So perhaps it's not a surprise that the readings selected for this Sunday do less going on about Jesus being a king and more about what Jesus was or was prophesied to be.

Look at that reading from Luke. You might remember it from the season of Advent, of all things, a song of Zechariah upon the birth and naming of his son John, who would be the forerunner of the Messiah. This was what came some nine months after Zechariah had been struck speechless (and maybe unable to hear as well) upon his scoffing response to the angel Gabriel's announcement of the birth to come. Once that muting has been lifted upon his announcement of his son's name, this is what Zechariah has to say. (You can find a hymn version of this at #109 in your hymnal.)

There is a reference to being of "the house of David," but if you're looking for royalty or any suggestion of such, that's about it. Instead Zechariah's song speaks of a "savior," one who would preserve the people of Israel from their enemies. The song goes on to sing of mercy and holy covenant, of being able to serve this savior "without fear" - not a way human kings typically work. At last Zechariah sings of a "dawn from on high" that will come "to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet in the way of peace." Not typical king-talk of the time. Or, to put it in modern terms, not exactly a winning campaign pitch for a major presidential candidate these days.

The passage from Jeremiah looks promising, until it becomes known that this passage isn't necessarily referring to a divine Messiah, but a more earthly king. The earlier verses of the passage speak more of shepherds than kings, but then prophets of that era were inclined to compare a good king to a shepherd in how that king would rule over, and care for, the people of his realm. Colossians comes the closest in speaking of God who has "rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son...". From there, though, the passage takes a different direction with its description of "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" and going on to speak of God reconciling Godself to all humanity through this One. Close, but not quite.

Of course, I have left out one reading from the lectionary today, another passage from Luke. It starts off like this: 

When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing." And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, "He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!" The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!" There was also an inscription over him, "This is the King of the Jews."

 

That's it: a man hanging on a cross, named as "the King of the Jews."

For "Christ the King Sunday" to make any sense at all for us, and for it not to lead us off on some very un-Christlike rabbit trails that an awful lot of self-declared Christians are following these days, we have to get over our ideas of what a king is like. That's not Christ. 

Think Good Shepherd.

Think of the teacher.

Think of the one who welcomed the children and then told his disciples off when they tried to turn them away.

Think of the one who broke the bread and poured the cup. 

Think of the one who rode into Jerusalem on a mere colt.

Think of the one who raised Lazarus out of the tomb.

Think of the one who stilled the storm on the sea of Galilee.

Think of the one who was transfigured on that mountain with Moses and Elijah standing by.

Think of the one baptized, with the Holy Spirit crashing in to pronounce him as God's beloved son.

Think of the one born to Mary, placed in a feed trough, with a bunch of shepherds as the main witnesses.

And yes, think of that one crucified, the one who did not stay dead.

There's your King, the only king you want. Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #268, Crown Him with Many Crowns; #309, Come. Great God of All the Ages; #274, You, Lord, Are Both Lamb and Shepherd

 

Sermon: Scriptural Whiplash

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

November 16, 2025, Pentecost 23C

Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 21:5-19

 

Scriptural Whiplash

 

 

At first glance, one might have trouble imagining why these two scriptures were paired up in today's lectionary. If anything, they might seem to be diametrically opposed to one another. 

The words from the next-to-last chapter of the book of Isaiah are a look at a time yet to come. Images within this passage both hearken back to earlier writings (the serpent's payback in verse 25, being reduced to eating dust, seems a deliberate echo of the fall story in Genesis) and anticipate future oracles (Revelation 21 starts with a very clear of Isaiah's verse 17 here). The promise here is that the Lord, to borrow a phrase from chapter 43 of this book, is doing a new thing; not just the new heavens and earth but a "new Jerusalem" as a source of joy rather than sorrow. Long lives are the rule rather than the exception; people get to enjoy the fruits of their labor without having them taken away; animals live in harmony with one another. It is a deeply optimistic vision.

Luke's reading, on the other hand, is anything but optimistic at first blush. Jesus speaks of the temple being destroyed, an event still in the future in Jesus's time but already done by the time Luke's gospel was written. Wars and insurrections were not at all unknown in that time. Persecution is familiar to Luke's readers, with martyrdom coming first to the deacon Stephen and later to the apostle James, not to mention such early church leaders as Paul, executed somewhere around the year 62 - again, well before Luke's gospel was written. Verse 12 almost sounds like Jesus foretelling his own fate as one that awaited his followers as well. (And that instruction in verse 14, the one about "not to prepare your defense in advance"? Does that leave anyone else feeling a bit shaky? But then, the apostles in the early chapters of the book of Acts, being filled with the Spirit when brought before the Temple authorities, might be an example of following this instruction.)

So, the two readings assigned to today don't immediately seem to have much in common, and one might a kind of scriptural whiplash moving from Isaiah's joyful vision to Jesus's more hard-edged discourse in Luke. However, if we "widen the field" just a bit we discover that, far from being in opposition to one another, these two scriptures may in fact be in harmony with each other, or at least singing from the same hymnal, so to speak. 

Our reading today comes from the next-to-last chapter of Isaiah. The final portion of this book is primarily addressed to the Israelites who had returned from exile in Babylon. What they found when they returned, to be honest, was not much. The Temple, what had been the central point of Jewish worship and practice, was broken down and not functional. The same could be said of the homes and farmland that had been left behind; what had once been fertile soil and dwelling places was now mostly wasteland. 

Roughly the last eleven chapters of Isaiah are addressed to these returnees, whose current life and standing looked nothing like the beautiful vision Isaiah pours out here. These chapters contain a lot of lament from the people, a goodly amount of chastisement directed at those same people for their sins and shortcomings, and the occasional piece of encouragement, of which this is the most well-known example. That new heaven and new earth will come, but there will be challenges along the way, and some of those challenges will even be self-imposed.

Similarly, the passage from Luke does not tell the whole story. After the event at the Temple when Jesus comments on the poor widow who gave everything she had, some of the disciples have gotten distracted by how impressive the Temple was, which frankly was part of the purpose for which it was built. Jesus makes his pronouncement about its destruction (as we have already noted) and continues with the forth-telling, continuing to add more and more calamities to the list. 

But then, when his listeners might have been on the brink of despair at all manners of disasters and forebodings, Jesus throws this curveball in verse 28:

Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

 

Just when all seems lost, the tables turn and the Son of Man appears. 

In the end, it turns out, these two readings are far from opposed; one might say they're both pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle, each fitting into its place in the overall story we are given in scripture. There will be hardship and difficult times; there will be (or have already been) wars and insurrections; but still the new heaven and earth come, our redemption draws near. 

Notice one thing missing from these stories; at no point is the follower of Christ called to "go to war" or anything like that. The closest thing we get to an order is in that verse 28; "stand up and raise your heads...". That's it. We stand up and we look for Jesus. 

To be sure, standing has its own risks. You might get thrown down on the ground, choking, with somebody's knee on your throat. You might get a bunch of pepper balls shot right at your face. Nonetheless, amidst all the signs and rumors and violence and fear, we stand and look for the Son of Man. 

We know from Isaiah that a new heaven and a new earth are coming,

We know from what Luke wrote down from Jesus that there will be many fierce challenges on the way. 

And between the two of them, we know how it ends.

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #839, Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine!; #767, Together We Serve; #738, O Master, Let Me Walk With Thee 

Sermon: That's Not How This Works

First Presbyterian Church

November 9, 2025, Pentecost 22C

Luke 20:27-40

 

 

That’s Not How This Works

 

A few years ago, an insurance company ran a commercial set among a group of women who, we might say, would fit comfortably into the general age demographic of this congregation. One of the women was boasting about how, instead of mailing pictures of her vacation photos to all her friends, had saved herself time by posting them on her wall. Of course, a first thought to the social media-savvy might suggest she had posted them on social media of some sort, possibly Facebook or Instagram. Instead, the camera pans slightly and you see that the pictures are, literally, taped to the wall of her living room. One of the other women pipes up that she likes one in particular, but the third, one presumably more knowledgeable about such things, looks back and forth between the two incredulously. When the first woman boasts about having an insurance-related achievement in fifteen minutes, this third one retorts that she only needed half that time, to which the first responds, with a dramatic gesture, “I unfriend you.” Finally the third can’t take it anymore and, gesturing around the room, exclaims, “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!”

It would not at all have been out of line for Jesus to respond in exactly that same way to the question put to him by the Sadducees in today’s reading from the gospel of Luke. 

The setting here is in Jerusalem, as we approach the climax of Jesus’s earthly life and ministry. It’s the type of scriptural text that the framers of the Revised Common Lectionary like to slip in toward the end of the liturgical year, a text that at least in some way looks forward to the life not of this earth but of eternity, or heaven or however one frames it.

In this case that particular framing comes from a faction in the religious society in which Jesus lived that didn’t even believe in such a thing. The Sadducees, a competing group to the Pharisees about whom we hear so much, are lingering on the edge of a conversation in which Jesus has just smacked down a group of scribes, or their lackeys as verse 20 suggests, with the response famous in its old King James rendering as “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” That group has beaten its hasty retreat, to the hooting and derision of the crowd, and this group of Sadducees steps up for its at-bat. 

As verse 27 informs us straightaway, the Sadducees “say there is no resurrection.” This puts them at odds with the Pharisees and is a product of their particular interpretation of what constituted “scripture.” While the Pharisees, for example, took the prophets and the Psalms as authoritative, the Sadducees only read the books of the Torah that way. The prophets and Psalms speak in at least some degree of resurrection, the Torah does not; therefore the Sadducees and Pharisees disagree. While Jesus butted heads with Pharisees often, on this point they were in agreement. 

The Sadducees’ question is admittedly an absurd one, which relies on a particular allowance of Mosaic or Torah law. If a man died childless, his wife was expected to be married off to the next available younger brother, in theory as a means to provide for the widow, but frankly mostly so that the brother might produce a son to ensure the first brother’s legacy. In this trap question, the poor woman was put through seven brothers, each of whom failed to produce a son; when the hypothetical woman died, the Sadducees ostensibly wanted to know, whose wife would she be in the resurrection?

One could point out a lot of things about the beliefs inherent in such a question. One thing that cannot be overlooked is that it’s pretty clear that to these questioners a woman in such a situation is little more than a piece of property, more a subjected and captive character from The Handmaid’s Tale than a living, breathing human being and child of God and daughter of Abraham. The only thing that matters about her is whose possession is she for all eternity.

This all has to be qualified with words like “hypothetical” and “ostensibly” because in fact this batch of Sadducees weren’t really all that concerned with the answer. At the risk of including a second social media reference in the same sermon, they are trolling Jesus. The very asking of the question was its own end, namely mocking not even Jesus necessarily, but their Pharisee rivals and their oh-so-ridiculous beliefs about life after death. 

The trouble is that these Sadducees, unlike modern social media trolls who can disappear in an instant and not be held accountable for the evil that they do, could not get away fast enough. In the end, they were just as humiliated as the scribes who got tripped up on the tax question. In the world of social media, one of the most common and usually best pieces of advice is “don’t feed the trolls,” or in other words don’t give anyone who is clearly engaging in bad faith attacks a forum for their lies. Jesus isn’t most people, of course, and he is quite well-equipped to drive these trolls back under the bridge.

Jesus opens with a lesson that we modern Christians might well have trouble with. This is where the potential “that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works” response comes in.

To sum up as best as possible, marriage is a mortal concern. People marry because for most folks, going through life with a partner is easier and more pleasant than going through life alone. That’s a pretty succinct nutshell argument for why marriage is a thing at all in the eyes of God, going all the way back to the Garden of Eden and God’s remark that it wasn’t a good thing for Adam to be alone. This matters because, to put it in as stark a term as possible, we’re going to die, all of us at some point, and such times as we have to endure on this earth go better if we can endure it with someone we love. 

Those who share in the resurrection, on the other hand, are never going to die. Life is eternal in the presence of the Eternal One. The concerns of that old past mortality, worries about property and legacy and all that implied in the question, simply don’t matter. In that life the hypothetical woman is in fact a child of God and a daughter of Abraham, subject to no one else.

As much as we might not want to admit this, we don’t like the sound of this, not one bit.

Think about it. What kind of songs, for example, do we sing about Heaven? One example I can’t get out of my head is an old gospel number called “Mansion Over the Hilltop.” Perhaps you remember this one, maybe from Elvis Presley’s version?

I’m satisfied with just a cottage below

A little silver, and a little gold

But in that city where the ransomed will shine

I want a gold one that’s silver lined

 

(Refrain)

I’ve got a mansion just over the hilltop

In that bright land where we’ll never grow old

And someday yonder we will never more wander

But walk on streets that are purest gold

 

The second verse goes on to talk about wanting “a mansion, a harp, and a crown”. The question of what to do with a harp for all eternity aside, cue the lady from the commercial: That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

The song does get one thing right; in that bright land we really will never grow old. Otherwise, the metaphor Jesus uses in John 14 (another King James concoction, the one about “In my father’s house are many mansions”), the one meant to communicate how the disciples do not have to worry about life after resurrection because all is provided and there’s room for everyone, gets hardened and fixed into a dogma that we can all pre-order our gold mansions for all eternity. I wish I were exaggerating more than I am, but I’ve seen it up close too many times.. 

All such things miss the point. Whether the Sadducees intended it or not, this encounter really is about the resurrection, and the resurrection is about God, and being in communion with God and with all who are in communion with God. The resurrection is not merely an extension of this life with better building materials; it is about being in resurrection with the God who has loved us and redeemed us in Christ. 

This is illustrated by the second part of Jesus’s response to the Sadducees, the one in which he uses their beloved Torah against them by citing the words of Exodus 3:6, right out of the Torah that the Sadducees cited as the only true scripture. When God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush, God doesn’t say “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob back when they were alive”; God puts it all in present tense. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Am. Present tense. Jesus elaborates that God is “God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” If God is their God, then they aren’t dead. Their lives are held in God, thus they live and shall live, and somehow that will hold true for us too.

How does that work? Beats me. Paul expended a lot of time and energy in his epistles trying to reassure the Thessalonians and the Corinthians about what resurrection meant and how it related to earthly life, which was to say not much. We get phrases like these from 1 Corinthians 15: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable”; “we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed”; or “for this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” How? Paul doesn’t even go there, nor does Luke, and I’m not going to either. But this is the work of God in us, redeeming us in Christ and preparing us through the Holy Spirit that when our time comes, when death comes upon us, it will not be the final word. What is mortal puts on immortality, and lives in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, really forever and for all time. 

We human beings are wildly insecure. We have a terrible habit of substituting rigid belief for life-giving faith. We demand to know how it all works – witness all those preachers and pseudo-Bible scholars who insist on trying to calculate the date of the Rapture when even Jesus says he doesn’t know the day nor the hour. We don’t trust at all, when you get down to the heart of us. Are we ready to take Jesus seriously, and be the living body that Jesus calls us to be now – to do Christ’s work in God’s world – and trust that our resurrection life is secured in God? Can we do that?

We are mortal creatures, subject to all the finitude and brokenness and decline that is the lot of all mortal creatures. But that is not our final fate, no matter whether we know how it works or not. 

For the God of the living, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #645, Sing Praise to God Who Reigns Above; #238, Thine Is the Glory; #546, Lord, Dismiss Us with Your Blessing