November 9, 2025

Sermon Transcript

Jesus said, “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.”  (Luke 20:37-38) 

Have you ever needed a reminder that the resurrection is true – even that the dead are raised?  If so, and if you are a fan of old movies from Hollywood’s golden age, allow me to recommend the 1951 classic, The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.  The movie is set in German East Africa in September of 1914, just at the outbreak of World War One.  Humphrey Bogart plays Charlie, the owner and operator of the African Queen, a small, pathetic looking, 30-year old, steam-powered river boat that he pilots up and down the jungle waters of the Ulanga River.  Katharine Hepburn portrays Rose, an English Methodist missionary left alone after German soldiers burn her village.  Charlie convinces Rose that they need to flee the Germans, and the only way to do so is on the river, aboard the African Queen..  Rose agrees, and then wants to take things a step further.  She wants to follow the river all the way to Lake Victoria, where they could use the boat in the war effort.  Charlie assures her it can’t be done: “There’s death a dozen times over down that river,” he says.  But Rose is strong-willed and stubborn, so down the river they go.

True to Charlie’s prediction, the journey proves perilous.  Nevertheless, the quarrelsome couple makes it through the rapids, over a water fall, and past a German fort.  They avoid swarms of crocodiles.  They endure mosquitoes, killer bees, leaches, and each other.  But finally, the voyage comes to a halt.  Shallow water, mud, and thick, tall reeds for as far as the eye can see defeat them.  Charlie climbs to the top of the boat’s mast, but he can get no perspective on where they are.  Mired in the mud, the boat will go no further.  Exhausted, feverish, and hopelessly lost, Charlie and Rose collapse in the bottom of the boat and wait to die.  If you had asked them about the resurrection then and there, they would have said, “No, the dead are not raised.”

Suddenly, the camera begins to rise above the reeds to give us the view that Rose and Charlie cannot see.  Yes, the African Queen was lost in the reeds and stuck in the mud.  But it was less than 100-yards from the vast expanse of Lake Victoria, their destination.  Just over one small patch of reeds was the sparkling sea, well within their reach, but hidden from their sight.  Could it be that God’s new life is well within our reach, but hidden from our sight?

I ask again: have you ever needed a reminder that the resurrection is true?  If so, you might pay close attention to today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke.  Luke tells us that some Sadducees came to Jesus to pose a question.  The Sadducees were an influential group within first-century Judaism who had the particular responsibility for the worship of the Temple.  They were the priests, but today we remember them mainly for their disbelief in the resurrection of the dead.  Why didn’t the Sadducees believe in the resurrection of the dead?  The answer is simple: Torah makes no explicit mention of it.  The Sadducees limited the voice of the Lord to their own literalistic reading of the Bible’s first five books – the Torah.  The later prophetic books which allude to, and foreshadow a reasonable and holy hope of resurrection were of no consequence to the Sadducees.  They believed that everything God had to say to the world, he said it in Torah.  Truth was a closed system.  If you couldn’t find it in the Torah, it wasn’t true.  Therefore, the Sadducees said there is no resurrection.

Today, Luke tells us how the Sadducees attempted to entangle Jesus in his talk of resurrection.  They proposed a scenario that, frankly, only a group of men could invent.  Suppose a woman out-lives seven brothers who each, according to the laws of Moses, passed her down as wife, one insufferable brother to another.  Finally she too dies.  Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?  It was not a serious question.  The Sadducees put forward their crafty dilemma in the attempt to discredit Jesus, and ridicule the talk of resurrection.  They succeeded only in demonstrating how lost in the reeds they really were.  Bogged down in the weeds of tradition, the Sadducees could not imagine the sea.  Limited to the confines of Torah, any life to come, if such a thing existed at all, would merely be more of the same.  So they reasoned among themselves.

The Sadducees were hardly the first Biblical figures who needed reminding that the resurrection is true.  Consider Job.  Today’s short reading (19:23-27) from the Old Testament book that bears his name is actually a speech in two parts.  Most of us know the story of Job, a God-fearing man who has catastrophe come upon him suddenly.  In the space of an afternoon he loses everything: health, wealth, and family.  So Job rages at God and at life, and curses the day he was born.  He loses the bird’s eye view of any larger purpose to his existence.  The disaster that his life has become blocks his view.  The wreckage of who he was is all he can see.  In the first part of today’s reading, he wants his words of complaint engraved on a rock so that people for all time will know that God, if there is a God, is not to be trusted.

Likewise, consider people today.  Consider Bob Odenkirk, who portrayed Saul Goodman in the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul television series.  In 2021, while filming the final season of Better Call Saul, Odenkirk suffered a massive heart attack and collapsed on the set.  Thanks to the immediate attention of fellow cast members who knew CPR, Odenkirk survived until emergency medical personnel arrived and were able to restore his heartbeat.  Reflecting later on the ordeal, Odenkirk declared, “I basically died for a little while. And I have to say, I saw nothing.”  He returned to the topic of heaven’s possibility later in the interview, saying, “By the way, I saw exactly no light when I was dead. The whole heaven thing is a hoax. Follow the money.”[1]

“Follow the money,” quips Odenkirk.  Heaven is a hoax, the dead are not raised, there is no resurrection, so follow the money.  Here again is the same closed-system thinking of the Sadducees in a new guise.  What you see is what you get.  That’s all there is.  There isn’t any more.  So you’d best grab as much as you can get while you can – even if it’s orange traffic cones.  That’s right: orange traffic cones.  Lately, we’ve been struggling with Amazon delivery trucks, who want to park in front of the church every day, all day, to stage their distribution of packages.  It’s a no-parking zone, but they take it anyway.  We have deliveries of our own that need to arrive, especially with all the construction.  But they don’t care.  They are neither for us nor against.  They are simply out for themselves.  “We are only following orders,” state the drivers.  We’ve found the only way to keep the zone clear is to get out there first and put traffic cones where they aren’t supposed to park.  It worked – that is, until someone stole the traffic cones.  Such is the world in which we live.  Grab what you can now, because, according to the Sadducees, that’s all there is.  There is no resurrection.

Guess who disagreed with the Sadducees.  Jesus disagreed.  Jesus declared and demonstrated that the resurrection was true.  He told them that the resurrection is not just an endless series of days with the same old people, doing the same old things: “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.”  Then he argued his case from the Torah itself, the portion of Scripture the Sadducees held to be definitive: “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.” 

Did the Sadducees come around to Jesus’ way of thinking?  We don’t know.  Apparently Job came to believe.  Job’s story was written long before the days of Jesus and the Sadducees.  But eventually he came to the conclusion that the resurrection was true.  God can always do a new thing.  God can always bring new, unexpected life to any party.  In the second part of today’s reading he announces, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. 

Guess who else came to believe.  Charlie and Rose came to believe.  I won’t spoil the ending of The African Queen for you, only to say they arrive at the sea that was just beyond their reach.  They discover resurrection on this side of the grave, complete with Easter lilies if you watch the movie carefully enough.  To be lifted into resurrection faith and Job’s new perspective is to receive the mindset of Jesus.  It is, I believe, why we come to church.  Mired in whatever mud and reeds we are, being here lifts us up to glimpse the sea close at hand.  We come to hear God’s Word spoken through the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles.  We come to receive the living presence of Jesus through the Sacraments.  And we come to encounter other people in this Christian community who bear witness to God’s new heaven and earth.  Neither the Sadducees nor the likes of Bob Odenkirk (who of all people should confess that the dead are raised) need have the final word on whether or not the resurrection is true.  Their voices are important.  We welcome them.  But others tell a different story.

I can never hear today’s Gospel passage about the Sadducees and the resurrection without thinking of some parishioners in the first church I served.  Jane was a widow who was 75 years old.  She and her husband, who had died some years earlier, had been married for 46 years.  They’d raised six children on a farm outside of town, and had a rich and full life together.  After her husband died Jane stayed on the farm a few more years, but the time came when it was too much to manage.  Property taxes were high, none of the children could take it over, and the town was moving closer and closer.  Jane didn’t want to see her beloved acreage turned into a Wal Mart or a strip mall, but the developers were circling like sharks.

Just then, into Jane’s life, came a man named Luther.  Luther was a retired lawyer about the same age as Jane.  He was a widower.  He too had enjoyed a long and happy marriage, and raised two children.  Luther was on the board of an Episcopal retirement community that was looking to build a new facility.  He approached Jane about the possibility of her land.

One ending of the story is that yes, Jane liked the idea, and agreed to sell to the retirement community.  The other ending of the story is that through the negotiations, Jane and Luther fell in love with each other.  They wanted to get married, but they really struggled with the love they still had for their deceased spouses.  Could they give themselves to another without diminishing their prior loves?  Would they be unfaithful by marrying someone new?  Whose spouse would be whose in the resurrection?  Well, they finally decided that God’s economy is not a closed system, and that God could do new things without being unfaithful to former things.  They could risk giving themselves to each other until they were parted by death.  By marrying each other in this age, they would neither dilute nor divide the love they shared with their former spouses.  The age to come was in God’s hands.

It was today’s Gospel passage about marriage and the resurrection that broke the log jam in their thinking, and this was the reading they chose for their wedding Eucharist.  I’ll never forget the look of delight and surprise on their faces as they stood before the altar ready to exchange their vows: delight in each other, and surprise that God would send such a blessing into their lives.

Whenever I need a reminder that the resurrection is true, I think of Jane and Luther.  They were children of the resurrection, even in this age.  They knew that heaven was no hoax, because they had glimpsed the power of God in the here and now.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all are alive to God – yesterday, today, even forever.

[1] Eli Yudin, Bob Odenkirk Told Marc Maron About His Near-Death Experience: “The Whole Heaven Thing is a Hoax.”  Cracked.com, July 19, 2025.