Sermon 10th November – All
Saints Day
Text: Luke 20:27-38 – Life, but not
as we know it.
Today we acknowledge All Saints Day
and a day of remembrance for those who have given of their lives to defend our
nation.
It is a day when we give thanks to
God for their lives but even more than that we give thanks for the hope of the
resurrection which enables us to take comfort that death is not the end but a
doorway of entry to eternal life.
While death ends life here on earth
that life is continued in eternity in Heaven with God.
And it won’t be just a continuation
of life here.
I mean who would want that?
Who would want to have to go through
all the pressures of life again – working and all the struggles of life here?
I know I don’t.
And that’s what Jesus is trying to
teach the Sadducees today.
They didn’t believe in an afterlife
so they just presumed that those who did thought it would just be a
continuation of life here on earth.
The Sadducees were one of the
religious groups of the Jews who didn’t believe in the resurrection to eternal
life.
So they asked a long, somewhat
convoluted question about marriage in order to trip Jesus up about the
resurrection.
They weren’t trying to find out about
eternal life but just to prove Jesus wrong.
So they put up this seemingly crazy
situation before Jesus about a woman married to 7 different brothers who had
all died and had married her as part of the Old Testament law of succession,
wondering whose wife she would be in the afterlife.
Jesus showed them that they were
taking situations that belong to our human, finite life and trying to apply
them to the afterlife, which is infinite and beyond our full comprehension.
The bible tells us in several places
that while life continues after we die it is not the same as it is here.
For those who have suffered in this
lifetime there is the hope that they won’t have to go through that again when
St Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:
So will it be with the resurrection
of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it
is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is
raised in power; it is sown a natural
body, it is raised a spiritual body.
For those who have grieved in this
lifetime for loved ones St John says in the Book of Revelation:
‘God will wipe every tear from their
eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old
order of things has passed away.”
For those who have found life a toil
through back breaking work just to make ends meet, working from sun up to sun
down, again the Book of Revelation says:
There will be no more night. They
will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God
will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.
For those who have experienced
persecution or injustice that has never been made right the Book of Revelation
says:
Nothing impure will ever enter it,
nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose
names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. And … Then I saw “a new heaven
and a new earth,” a for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away,
and there was no longer any sea.
The sea was symbolic of where evil
spirits would find their home – hence Jesus walking on the water showing his
authority over the evil spirits including the pigs who rush into the water once
the demons entered into them.
Jesus explained to the Sadducees that
the resurrected life in Heaven will not be the same as human life, so it is wrong
to apply the same categories of marriage to it.
He says 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.
It is difficult when someone we love
dies because while they are in that new existence of eternal life we are still
here dealing with the earthly realities of life and death – grief, sorrow,
loneliness.
And that’s really hard because even
though we are comforted for them we still deal with the struggles of life while
we wait for Jesus to bring us home.
But we need to remember that whilst
our loved one is in the presence of God, so are we.
As Jesus said to them: Now he is God
not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."
Again, that is hard to fathom because
just as the Sadducees were trying to apply earthly parameters in heaven, we are
trying to understand heavenly parameters while we are still on earth.
But that’s exactly the reality we
have as Christians when St Paul says to the Colossians:
Set your minds on things above, not
on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in
God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him
in glory.
All Saints Day often gets criticised
by those who don’t understand it and believe that we are glorifying the dead.
That could not be further from the
truth.
It is giving thanks to God for the
life that he gave and for the faith that
he gives.
Also unfortunate is our hesitance as
Lutherans to use the words saints because of the Reformation where Luther
object to prayers to the saints.
But “saints” is a word used widely by
St Paul in his letters when he wrote to the churches.
Saints were those who put their faith
in Jesus Christ and he made no distinction to the living or the dead as those
who had died in faith continued in the church through their heavenly worship
with us.
That’s why in our creed we refer to
the Communion of Saints as we gather with the angels and archangels and ALL the
company of heaven when we worship and celebrate the sacrament.
So let us remember that God is a God
of the living and that the living includes us and those who have gone ahead of
us to their new life in the presence of God.
As the angels said to the women at
the grave on Easter Sunday, we don’t look for the living among the dead –
We don’t understand death while we
are in this life because we have no idea of the immensity of what is waiting
for us.
In 2 Corinthians St Paul said he was
taken up into heaven and given a glimpse of what was waiting for us and said he
saw things that humans are not permitted to know.
He also said in Romans that he
considers that our present sufferings here are not worth comparing to the glory
that awaits us in heaven.
There is a total inability to
understand the afterlife compared to our present life
So I’ll leave my final words to St
Paul who said in our reading this morning:
Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself
and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and
good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.
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