Haggai 1:15b-2:9; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38
November 7, 2010
I have to admit something – this week I had a case of the inspiration blues. Generally, when I read the biblical texts early in the week, something strikes me – grabs my attention. I like to think this is inspiration, or the Holy Spirit. Depending on the week, you might think it is not at all inspired and certainly not by the Holy Spirit; but whatever it is, it at least gets me started down the path of sermon writing for the week.
This week, the days were coming and going and – nothing. I put the bulletin together not knowing where I would go with all this. You’ll notice there’s no title. We’re reading all three texts this morning in part because I kept thinking it would increase my odds of being inspired if I kept reading all of them …you know, keeping my options open. But, in the end, no great burst of inspiration.
So, assuming the Holy Spirit doesn’t take weeks off, I struggled to figure out what might be hindering her presence. By Friday, I was finally able to admit to myself that I actually figured it out early on, and then spent the rest of the week in denial about it. The reason I was not feeling inspired is that I am one of those Sadducees.
Now, I am usually pretty willing to be challenged by a text; I can relate more to the Pharisee in a story at least as often as I relate to the disciples. Of course Pharisees are not all bad: Jesus was from the Pharisaic tradition. Most of them were really trying to be good, religious folks. According to the authors of our gospels, while they were sometimes used as the foil, they weren’t always wrong, or evil, and some, of course, were big followers and fans of Jesus. It’s just that the Pharisees sometimes got lost in the religiosity and missed the spirituality. So, I can be challenged by that – I know I do the same from time to time.
But Sadducees are a whole other level – at least for the author of the Gospel of Luke. Whether or not his portrayal of the Sadducees is historically accurate or fair, he is certainly making a point about some people he knew. He has an impression of some fellow Jews that is, to put it mildly, less than sweet.
In Luke the Sadducees play the role not just of the “misguided, hard-headed, elite”, but of the “really bad folks.” The bottom line for Luke was that they were against Jesus in every way. To begin with, they did not believe the same things Jesus – and the Pharisees for that matter – believed. For example, they, unlike the Pharisees, did not believe in the resurrection; in this passage they are making fun of that belief. But they couldn’t just agree to disagree; it was extremely important to them to find a way to discredit Jesus in front of his followers because his movement – his followers – were becoming a problem for the Sadducees.
Sadducees were literalists…they believed you followed every word of the Torah down to the dots and tittles. More than that, they believed that their enforcement of those laws – which were often heavy handed – kept order in the temple and among the Jewish Community. And as an added benefit, the rules and the enforcement kept them right where they were; in power.
The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed in an oral tradition as well as the written Torah, and that oral tradition kept reinterpreting the scriptures for the current time and place. The Sadducees rejected this completely because it threatened the ordered system. Then, Jesus went many steps further; not only was he always reinterpreting the scriptures, bringing them to new life in new ways, applying them in ways that upset the system instead of codifying it, he also did things like predict the destruction of the temple: the locus of power for the Sadducees; he called for complete release of captives (the breakers of the law the Sadducees sought to enforce); called for nothing short of a complete reversal of how things were being done! The Sadducees were sensing a movement, led by Jesus, that would bring chaos in the highest degree, and their complete demise in the end.
Finally, what we need to remember about the Sadducees, at least as Luke saw it, is that, when they were unsuccessful at discrediting Jesus, they decided to kill him outright, and in Luke’s story, they played a large role in his execution.
All of that’s to say, it’s no fun to realize you might be a modern day Sadducee. I did not find it inspiring. But, Sunday comes week after week regardless of my inspiration, so I forged ahead.
I realized that it’s actually pretty easy to be a Sadducee for most of us. It pretty much entails doing nothing. It’s pretty much going along happy with how things are because how things are works pretty well for us. For me it’s not about being a literalist, but it is about supporting systems and institutions that keep me firmly planted in my comfortable life. For me it means denying the more radical messages of Jesus that would require of me radical change, and holding fast to the ones that make me feel good about being Christian. It means suppressing anything of Jesus that would require an overhaul of my life and the way things are, even if that means a metaphorical killing of Jesus.
And I’m pretty good at this: I suppress those more radical parts through rationalization, denial, ignorance, and distance. I explain away his more enigmatic and challenging teachings by saying he lived in a different time and place, that the authors had a different understanding of the world and science, and he probably didn’t do and say everything the authors say he did. Whenever I come up against a passage that really seems to be calling me to a different way of life, I tell myself, “I’m no Jesus. I can’t be perfect like him. I’m doing the best I can.” When it’s convenient, I distance myself from Jesus’ humanity, seeing him more as a kind of superhero in a cartoon than as a human, subject to all the limitations and temptations as I am. That way I don’t have to admit that I have the same capacity Jesus did. And if all else fails, I just ignore passages I don’t like. It’s the metaphorical equivalent of discrediting and killing Jesus – all to avoid upsetting the apple cart of my life and the world.
I know what the Sadducees knew: Jesus’ message and way of life is threatening to the status quo – and I benefit from the status quo. So, discrediting, softening, twisting the message are a way of life for me – and if those don’t work, I do what I can to kill the message altogether. It’s a bummer to realize you’re a Sadducee.
But, that realization is just the starting place. What we have in the story of Jesus, in the scriptures, and in the movement of the Holy Spirit is a way to move out of the role of the Sadducee and into the role of disciple. The bible is story after story calling us to a faithful way of life; and these stories recognize that such a life is difficult. The authors too knew what it’s like to be afraid of change, to resist the counter-intuitive ways of God and to struggle with prioritizing serving others over self-interest. “Take courage,” the author of Haggai says. “Take courage,” he says three times! The way of faith is not always easy. It requires courage.
But where does courage come from? Or better, what motivates us to make difficult choices that might disrupt our lives. What compels us to give of our time, resources, energy and image in order to serve others, seek peace and champion the least among us?
Haggai is a prophet who lived during the time the Jewish people were returning to Jerusalem after living in exile in Babylon. When they got to Jerusalem, they were trying to make everything like it was before. They had been demoralized by the experience of exile and now they wanted their old life back, beginning with the temple that had been destroyed by the Babylonians. But as they started to rebuild, Haggai knew the answer didn’t lie in going back – that would of course lead to the same results…corrupt kings, oppressive systems, widespread misery and the ultimate crumbling of the community. Haggai knew they needed a new way of being, one they didn’t know and weren’t comfortable with. Faith for them meant they had to go forward into an unknown future. For this they needed courage, and for Haggai that courage is found in God’s presence.
But when Haggai talks about God’s presence, it’s not just God being with them in the present, but in the future as well. It is this presence of God in the future that is compelling. The prophets spend a lot of time painting a picture of the future: a time when there’s no more weeping, no more wars, no more hunger or slave labor. In this case, Haggai gives them a picture of a future temple – more glorious than the past one. It’s more glorious, of course, not because it is a more beautiful building adorned with great wealth, but because it will be a part of God’s realm. It’s a vision of a world ruled by a God of grace and mercy, justice and equality and a promise that surely such a thing exists in the future.
These visions and the belief that God’s promises of such a world were sure and sound were compelling to the prophets – and presumably the people who listened. After Jesus died, this got translated into a vision of a time when Jesus would come again and institute God’s realm in full among us. Belief that such a thing would happen, literally and likely even in their lifetime, was compelling to the early Christians. It motivated them to take risks, to join in a movement that left the established world behind. It gave them courage.
But, I don’t believe that – at least not in the same way it seems the early Christians did – the author of Luke did. I don’t have the same beliefs of Haggai about temples and God wiping clean the face of the earth in order to make something better. I certainly don’t see God as a director in the sky, sending in the rain and sun on cue, and holding back the main character, Jesus Christ, until just the right moment. Maybe belief is the wrong word. I just don’t find it compelling. The idea of a second coming instills no courage in me. It’s not enough to get me to give up comfort and security in order to live as a radical disciple of Jesus. And that made me feel like a Sadducee this week.
But there is something underlying these beliefs and something in what Jesus said to the Sadducees, that connects for me. The common thread is that the prophets, the authors of the gospels, Paul and his students were painting pictures where life replaced the dead and desecrated things around them. For some this was the second coming, for some this was a picture of almost a second paradise, and for some this was a new temple in place of the one that was destroyed. For all of them, it was new life. Jesus says, “God is the God of the living, not the dead.” He says it in response to the Sadducee’s question about resurrection, but Jesus knew that question was not sincere – it was meant to discredit him.
So his answer is not a defense of the doctrine the of the resurrection. What he is really saying is that when we do the same, when we are tempted to discredit, rationalize, twist and soften in order to avoid the radical message his life brings, we should remember that we are created to be drawn into life, not perpetuate systems of death.
I’m really not the Sadducee. The Sadducee isn’t a real person – it’s a caricature in Luke. I can identify with the temptations and the inclinations of the caricature, and at times my life is driven by those temptations and inclinations. But at my core – at your core – because we are made in the image of the God of the living, we are all drawn to participate in a world that is life-giving to everyone. The barriers and challenges to that are many. Comfort is one of the biggest barriers at times. Denial is one of the biggest barriers at times. But take courage: Take courage in the fact that when we follow that pull toward life, we will find more life, more joy, more freedom than we have now. Probably not more comfort or security or social acceptance. But those are not life-producing on their own, not in the sense of life that Jesus talks about.
I think it’s our very nature. We are drawn to life – we are drawn to God as the life-force. It’s actually a movement built into creation itself, and I think we all have moments of feeling a part of this. I think this is what keeps us connected to church – those moments when we realize we are part of something larger than ourselves…maybe even a part of building a future we can only imagine in prophetic terms and will never see. I don’t think we come to learn what to believe about resurrection, or the second coming, or creeds and doctrines. I think we come because we do see the dead and desecrated places in our world and that we know there is a way to bring life to these places.
It can be easier to talk about the doctrine – to discredit outmoded, archaic ways of thinking, but I think we want to change our lives and so we seek a God not of dead doctrines but of living waters. I think we know there is something more to life than just being comfortable, or even being happy, because we know deep down how connected we are with all of creation, and that our true life is found when all flourish. There’s nothing compelling in getting the religion test right….naming all of the books of the bible or reciting the Nicene creed or having proper progressive theology.
What’s compelling is to be with people who seek ways to foster life in the world, who seek a God that moves and loves and years for the wholeness of creation, to participate with a Divine presence that wants more than what the world can give…I think that’s compelling. I think that can break through any tendencies we have to be the Sadducee. And we have that here – not perfectly, not all the time, but this is a place of the living. This is a place where people’s faiths are alive and so God is moving in our worship and our ministries and our lives. And that’s inspiring. Thanks be to God. Amen.
