For to God all of them are alive.

Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive. Luke20:38

There have been 187 zombie movies made in the last 10 years…20 or so in the last 12 months! Truth be told, Lisa and the kids and I are really looking forward over Thanksgiving to watching the release of the sequel to Zombieland, one of our favorites. Do dead things come back to life? Do dead people come back to life? Will we come back to life? The Sadducees in today’s Gospel reading were certain the answer is “no,” but surely these questions have, since the beginning of human consciousness, been one of the most fundamental ones we ask.

The Sadducees were a group of leaders and priests in the temple at Jerusalem, of high aristocratic status. They rejected the authority of oral tradition and any later writings, saying that only the five books of Moses, the Torah were to be used, and denying belief in resurrection or angels or the Spirit. According to them, everything ends with death. Since their privileged lives were easy, and they preached a sort of a precursor to the prosperity Gospel that is so popular today, a straightforward and simple worldview: God rewards those who follow the Torah with wealth and health and status here on earth, and that’s it. So the question the Sadducees ask Jesus is a trick question. Their comfort insulates them from the real pain implied in this story of a poor woman, surely racked with grief and despair, who was passed from one brother to another, never finding the security of home and family. Likewise, their confidence and arrogance believing that their own self-made success was a sign of God’s favor insulated them from the need to change the lives of those real people around them who suffered, since the suffering was a sign of God’s disfavor. The Sadducees create this absurd example to show that belief in the resurrection doesn't make sense--if there were seven brothers and each in turn took the woman as his wife and then died, but none could give her children, whose wife would she be in the resurrection?

According to the Torah, if a man died childless, his brother was obligated to take his wife and have children by her. This arrangement ensured that family property stayed within the family, and according to the Sadducees you “lived on” in the only way possible—in the memories of your family. In an ancient patriarchal society without any social security, insurance, 401K's--or, really, any occupational opportunities at all for women, those women who did not have a husband, father, or sons to care for them were left destitute, unprotected, and even more marginalized than married women. This is why widows are always included in the biblical command to protect the poor and the orphans.

Jesus’s critics work out of an old world, a world of injustice. Our hearts go out to the poor woman in the Sadducees’ story. She has been the property of one husband, then another, and another. “Now, in the resurrection, whose property will she be?” is really what they’re asking. Jesus replies using the Torah, the book of Exodus. “When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush,” Jesus says, God announces, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Jesus says this wasn’t just "once upon a time."  It’s not the case that this was true but is no longer, now that they’re dead and gone. God continues to be now and forever will be "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." God’s relationship to these three is in the present, not the past. Jesus proclaims the message that we just heard on All Saints Day: “To God, all of them are alive." All who lived before us, all those we love but see no more, are living “to God.” We do not live without them; we are today, together with them, the whole people of God.

Jesus tell the Sadducees that "Whose wife will the woman be?" is the wrong question, because the resurrection is not an extension of our current earthly life—it is a completely new existence transformed by a gracious and loving God. The Sadducees’ question comes from a perspective in which marriage is viewed as an arrangement of a man's rights to “own” a woman, and a woman's need for male protection and support. Jesus tells them in the resurrection there will be no need for such arrangements. In the kingdom of God, security is to be found fully and only in God—not in one’s spouse or family or descendants or wealth. The resurrection is not more of our age, an extension of our world—the resurrection brings God’s saving, creative work to fulfillment, it brings us into a complete, loving, intimate relationship not just with God but with everyone. Jesus is not saying that marriage and family don’t matter, Jesus is saying that marriage, family, and procreation belong to our age, to pre-resurrection time, and in post-resurrection time will be replaced with love so all-encompassing we can’t even imagine it now.

N.T. Wright, the most renowned living New Testament scholar, says that this passage is the most important one about the resurrection in all the Gospels. Jesus distinguishes sharply between these two ages—the present age, when marriage is appropriate, and the age to come, when it is not. This is not because of anything evil about marriage, nothing evil about sexual identity and behavior; it is because the ‘age to come’ will be characterized by immortality. Those who attain it cannot die any more. Resurrection will not simply mean resuscitation, like the biblical stories of Jairus’ daughter or Lazarus. It will not mean starting off again in exactly the same kind of world as at present, right where we left off. It will mean going through death and out the other side into a deathless world.

Jesus says those who are raised from the dead do not get married, but they are "like angels," "children of God," "children of the resurrection.". Wright insists it is critical to note that Jesus doesn’t say “they become angels in heaven,” but that, like the angels in heaven, there is no need for marriage. Wright says that for many centuries now it has been incorrectly assumed in western Christendom that the ultimate point of being a Christian is to ‘go to heaven when you die’. According to Wright, our image of sitting on a cloud, disembodied, playing our harps, is just completely wrong (thanks be to God, he says, because it would just be so boring!). The biblical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection do not fit at all with this cloud-sitting confusion, either—Jesus did not “go to heaven” on Easter when he was resurrected—Jesus did not “become an angel”—he walked this earth in his body, healed wounds and all; he ate fish on the seashore with his stunned disciples. Later on, Luke’s account of Jesus ascension into heaven, in Acts, makes it clear that it is all of Jesus—body and soul together—that are ascending and will return in glory.

And, despite what popular fiction says, when Jesus does return, it will not be to snatch away a handful of faithful followers and burn the earth to a cinder—that’s just not what the Bible says. No, according to Jesus’ words in the Gospels and the Book of Revelation, his return will be to bring the new heaven and the new earth, re-created, healed, and perfected. Revelation 21: 3-5 says, “Behold, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them; they will be God’s people, and God himself will be with them; God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away…Behold, I am making all things new.” The life of the resurrection is, especially for the least, the lost, and the left out, a life lived in communion together in the fullness of God’s gifts and the joy of God’s love. The hungry will be fed, the naked will be clothed, the poor will be lifted up, and the oppressed, like the widow in our story, will be set free.

Paul in First Corinthians 15 says: “We will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed…When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: “Death has been swallowed up in victory…But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

Resurrection is not zombification, not resuscitation or reanimation of the corrupt physical body; neither is it some ethereal, disembodied, ghost-like existence that denies the beauty and joy and sacredness of God’s creation. Rather, resurrection is the active work of a loving Creator who transforms the entire human person, soul and body, and the world we live in. To believe in the resurrection is to believe that God can work wonders in creation, that the Creator of time and space has the power to liberate, to heal, and make perfect. We have seen this first in Jesus, who will one day return to complete the work he began, the work he asks us to continue until then. That is why Paul ends his beautiful song on resurrection in Corinthians as he does:  Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

This world, every lily of the field, every sparrow, every creature in it, all of us, we are all beloved. It is not trash, and we are not trash, to be burned into an ash heap, and it will all one day be fully restored and fully redeemed. The Sadducees were wrong to deny the possibility of resurrection, and they were wrong to have such little compassion for those in need. Everything we do here matters: every hungry person we feed, every kind word we offer, every healing embrace—all of our living and loving—is done with and for fellow children of God who will, always, be alive to God, and who will join with us on that great day that is more mysterious and wonderful than we can ever imagine. In the approaching season of Advent, we will hear Jesus’ pleading with us to be ready and watchful, to lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, preparing for that day when he returns. I pray that we will hear that pleading, and will therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because we know that in the Lord our labor is not in vain. Amen.