Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.” Jesus said to them, “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. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And 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.” Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” For they no longer dared to ask him another question.
(Luke 20:27-40)
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I found it interesting to look at the cover of this month’s edition of the United Church Observer. The cover article is about ghosts. It’s entitled “Ghost Whisperers,” and the subtitle is “Do the dead remain among us? Paranormal investigators are determined to prove what science rejects, Christianity scorns - and half of Canadians believe.” I readily admit - I like stuff like this. Ghost stories; the paranormal; a good horror movie. My favourite TV show is “The Walking Dead.” They’re all fun. So I read this article pretty closely, and some of the statistics it cites surprised me. It seems that belief in ghosts is not exactly rare. Although the church has routinely condemned belief in ghosts - and sometimes quite vociferously - apparently that hasn’t had a lot of impact on what people actually believe. I was surprised, for example, to discover that in 2009 a survey suggested that 20% of evangelical Christians believed in ghosts. The numbers were about 30-35% for both Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants. In the United Kingdom, more people believe in ghosts than in God. 48% of Canadians believe in ghosts, 18% say they’ve encountered or experienced a ghost and 10% believe they have a ghost in their home! Even in very secular countries like Japan and Sweden, belief in ghosts is very high. I found those numbers fascinating, and it’s another piece of evidence to me that while people might not be as interested in church or Christianity as they used to be, there’s still a very high degree of interest in spiritual matters and spiritual things.
I will come clean with you this morning and confess that I don’t believe in ghosts - although given the numbers it’s likely that at least a few people here do. But even if I don’t believe in them I am interested in the belief. These words never appeared in the article in the Observer, but it seemed to me that belief in ghosts (just as much as belief in God) reflects the deep seated yearning expressed in the question “is there life after death?” That question - or at least a variation of it - is in the Bible. It comes from the lips of Job, who asked “if a man dies, will he live again?” I think that for as long as we humans have understood the concept of death, we’ve wondered if it’s really the end. The widespread belief in ghosts, combined with a still widespread belief in God suggests that most people believe that there is something of us that continues on when our lives on this earth have ended.
That was one of the keys to what Jesus was speaking about in today’s passage. The Sadducees - one sect of Judaism present in his day - were people who didn’t believe in life after death. They didn’t believe in resurrection. They believed that once you died, you were simply dead. They tried to trap Jesus with this nonsensical question about a woman who had had many husbands, wondering - with a smirk on their faces as they asked the question, I’m sure - whose husband she would be after the “resurrection” (said with a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” undoubtedly.) They assumed Jesus would be left speechless. How can there be an answer to that question? How could Jesus possibly find a way out of this one? It was a trap. And it seemed to be a good one. But Jesus had an answer. “You silly people,” he seemed to say. “The next life isn’t at all like this one so your question is pointless. And we know that there’s life after death because Moses ‘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.’” Is there life after death? Apparently so. But I thought of another question: is there life before death?
Yes, you heard me right. Is there life before death? It might seem obvious on the surface, but maybe it’s not. There are a lot of people who seem to exist without really living. They lose sight of the things that make life worth living. It was Bob Dylan - who, you may have heard, recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature - who said that “if you’re not busy being born, then you’re busy dying.” I thought about those words as I reflected on the Sadducees and the story they told about this woman. It was a story, of course. The woman wasn’t real. But the basic problem is that the Sadducees clearly didn’t believe people could be busy being born - and so they must have assumed everyone was busy dying. It’s a strange idea, perhaps, that Bob Dylan had - but it makes a lot of sense from a Christian perspective. We speak about rebirth in the Christian faith - being “born again” or “born from above” or experiencing “new life” (however you choose to put it.) Basically we believe that people change; that people aren’t in a static state of existence. About this woman the Sadducees thought that she would always be what she had always been. They would deny her (or those like her) the dignity of being alive by denying them the possibility of rebirth and new life. And if we’re static, and if we’re unchanging, and if we’re satisfied with simply being rather than with becoming, with what we are rather than with what we could become - then in a way we are dying, just as Bob Dylan said would happen to those who aren’t busy being born.
This all seemed relevant to me today because next week we’re going to have a special service to commemorate the 27 years that Pickering Village United Church has worshipped in this building. I think that what Bob Dylan said about people applies to churches as well: if we’re not busy being born, then we’re busy dying. If we’re satisfied with ourselves as we are then we are never going to be more than a shell of what God wants us to be. If we lose hope that we can be more than what we are then we’ve given up not just on ourselves but also on God. Anniversaries can have a tendency to make us focus on the past at the expense of the future. I’m hoping that what we’ll be able to do next week (and perhaps more next year, because we have some special plans coming up) is to reflect on the past not as a way of giving up on the future, but rather to inspire the future - to point us to what God would have us be and to give us the hope and the assurance that we will become what God would have us be. After all, if we’re not busy being born then we’re busy dying. I think we’re still busy being born. I think we have a lot of life left to live, and that we have a lot of lives left to touch.
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