One of our bible readings for Sunday

For families (it changes every week)

Apologies for the sound issues

https://youtu.be/1t1jTIgVdqU

There is an old chestnut that often gets taught to Sunday School children regarding the passage we read this morning from the Gospel of Luke. When people reading this story wonder, quite naturally, who these Sadducees are, the explanation goes like this. The Sadducees were sad you see because they didn’t believe in life after death.

But there is something about that old saying that is not quite right. It implies that they didn’t believe because they were sad, because they were old spoilsports who didn’t want to believe in anything. It maybe even suggests that they were proto atheists who didn’t even believe in God.

Who were the Sadducees?

I just wanted to let you know that that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Do you want to know who the Sadducees were? They were members of the most elite and wealthiest families in that society. They had life pretty good. And far from being atheists, these families counted many priests and high priests among their numbers. They made their living serving and sacrificing to God. And, in fact, the reason why they didn’t believe in the resurrection was because they saw themselves, above all, as good Bible-believing Jews.

But here is the thing, the Bible, for them, was a very small well-defined thing. Most Jews at that time would have recognized, pretty much, the whole of the Old Testament as we know it to be scripture. But the Sadducees were far pickier. For them, only the first five books really counted as scripture – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – known as the Books of Moses.

No Resurrection in the First Five Books

And they had noticed that the notion of the resurrection just doesn’t come up in those books, like not at all. It doesn’t come up because nobody seems particularly concerned about it. People like Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses are completely focussed on this life and not on the next. God’s promises are also focussed on what happens here and now and in generations to come.

In fact, that is not just true of the first five books, it is actually true of a great deal of the Old Testament. The question of a meaningful afterlife just doesn’t come up. Oh, you can find it in a few places – the Books of Ezekiel and Daniel, for example – but those are books that were written quite late. In the oldest Hebrew literature, it is really just not there. So, in many ways the Sadducees were just trying to take the Bible seriously – something that we’re all supposed to do, right?

So Why did Everyone Else Believe?

But that doesn’t change the fact that, in the time of Jesus, the Sadducees were probably the only major Jewish group that did not believe in the resurrection. So, obviously, something had changed for most Jews by that point, but this change was not primarily based on what they were reading in their scriptures. So where did this conviction come from? Well, it turns out that I can tell you exactly where it came from. It came from a story.

Antiochus Epiphanes

About two centuries before the time of Christ, something terrible and horrible happened to the Jews living in the land of Judah. They were ruled over by the Greeks at that time. You have maybe heard of a famous fellow named Alexander the Great who conquered the world? Well, one of the places he conquered was the land of Judah.

And, generations later, the descendants of his generals still ruled over that land. And one of those rulers, Antiochus Epiphanes, was a bit of a jerk who was full of himself. And he had been having trouble with the Jews that he ruled over. And so Antiochus made a fateful decision. He decided that the problem was Jewishness itself.

Now, Antiochus did not set out, like certain other tyrants of history who shall remain nameless, to actually kill all of the Jews. His policy was not traditional genocide, but it was cultural genocide. He wanted to exterminate Jewish practices like circumcision and the Kosher diet and their strange exclusive worship of just one God. And so, he made all of that stuff illegal. But, much to his surprise, the Jews did not appreciate his policies. They resisted. And so, the king decided to up the stakes.

The Story of the Seven Brothers

And that leads us to the story that changed every Jew’s perspective on resurrection except the Sadducees. This story is told in the Second Book of Maccabees, a book that is not in our Bible but that is part of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bible. According to this book, the king arrested an entire family of seven brothers and their mother. They were arrested on suspicion of, well, acting Jewish. And so, the king brought them before him and demanded that they eat a little bit of pork. The brothers refused.

What follows is a story so bloody and graphic that I don’t really feel as if I could tell it to you. Look it up and read it for yourself in 2 Maccabees 7 if you really want to know it, but you have been warned! In the story, the king has all seven brothers tortured to death. And the torture is particularly physical as he cuts off body parts and roasts them over the fire. And so all seven brothers die. And the woman, their mother, dies as well.

The Faith of the Brothers

But the bloody details are not what are important about the story. It is the reaction of the family that stands out. They are there because of their faith and because they do not want to betray it in the face of the king’s decree. And they are there, above all, because they trust in their God who told them to live in certain ways to save them.

And at first, this faith leads them to believe that their God will save them from what the king wants to do to them. Because the promises that they know about God are all promises for this life. That’s what they have learned from their scriptures.

But, of course, that is not what happens. One by one the brothers are painfully put to death. One by one they all watch horrified as various body parts are lopped off and thrown into the fire. And God does not save them. And so, they are left with a choice. Either God’s promises have failed, or they are going to have to understand God’s faithfulness in a new way.

A New Understanding

The terrible holocaust they are being put through convinces them that if God is truly faithful, then God’s promises must also extend beyond this present life. And if their enemies are going to destroy their bodies because they remain faithful to God, then God’s faithfulness and justice have to mean that God will give them those bodies back again.

Basically, they believed that if God had been able to create them in the first place, then surely God would be able to raise them up and create them as new bodies at the end of all things. So, the belief in the resurrection became established when people heard the story of what that family had experienced. And by the time of Jesus, it had become accepted by the great majority of Jews.

The Sadducees’ Version of the Story

And that is what makes it so hilarious when this group of Sadducees come up to Jesus one day to try and convince him that he is wrong about the resurrection, and they do it by telling him a story about seven brothers and one woman who all died. Oh, I’m sure they thought they were being clever, but I’ll bet their story went over with the crowd like a lead balloon.

Everyone in the crowd knew the story of King Antiochus and the seven brothers; everyone in the crowd believed in the resurrection because of that story. But the Sadducees thought that they had found the one weakness with that story. If only one of the brothers had been married, they argued, then for them to be raised from the dead would have broken one of the obscure laws in one of the Books of Moses because it would have meant that that one woman would be married to all of them in the afterlife.

It was a ridiculous argument of course, and I am betting that Jesus and everyone else were laughing at them as Jesus gave his answer. But do you want to know what they got wrong? They were trying to do their best to respect the scriptures as they knew them. But they forgot one key thing.

The Greater Truth

The scriptures are there to point us towards the truth. But the truth that they point to is not merely certain doctrines or laws. They point to the greater truth of who God is. And, as Jesus said to the Sadducees, who God is is the God of the living. A God whose essence is found in love and life itself.

The complete knowledge of such a God could never possibly be contained within the pages of a single book, no matter how extraordinary. Instead, the book points us to the experiences that others have had of God and to the experiences that we could potentially have. For it is only through human experience that we can come to know God, because human experience is all that we have.

So, the experience of the Jews who lived through the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanies led them to the new insight that their God was a God who would raise the righteous from the dead. In the same way, when the first Christians experienced that Jesus was still alive and with them after he had been crucified, that also taught them to trust in the God who would raise them from the dead.

When we are limited to what we find in the written word, when we allow that to dictate our experience, we will never know the fullness that God wants us to have.

The Suffering of War

On this Remembrance Sunday, we remember all those who suffered through the horrible trauma of war. We remember those who never returned. We remember those who came back broken in body and in spirit. We mourn the terrible loss and destruction that have been brought upon the earth as a result of war and we recommit ourselves to doing whatever we can to build a just and peaceful world so that no one will resort to war. I hope we can also commit ourselves to learning the lessons of wars and conflicts past. After all, as they say, those who do not learn from such histories are doomed to repeat them.

In the fires of the terrible affliction that the ancient Jews suffered under the Greeks, they discovered something important about their God. They discovered that their God was committed to them, not only for this life, but also beyond it. They learned that the God who had created them would give them new life again.

What have we Learned?

What have we learned, I wonder, as a result of the wars, police actions and peacekeeping that we have been involved in? You would hope, of course, as a result of our involvement in World War II that we might have learned something about the dangers of building a sense of nationalism out of ideals of racial purity and excluding the ones who are different. You would hope that, but sometimes looking around I do wonder if we are forgetting that lesson.

You would hope, based on our tragic experience in Afghanistan, that we would have learned something about using religion – any religion – as a tool for motivating terror and hatred. You would hope so, but I sometimes wonder what we have learned.

Growing in our Knowledge of God

But the most important lessons, I would still insist, are the lessons we learn about our God. I know there are many who learned faith in God in the midst of the trauma of conflict. I also know that there are many who learned that the image of God that they had been given was totally inadequate in the midst of such trauma. Both of those lessons are equally valid and essential.

I believe that the error that the Sadducees made was to think that they had come to the end of understanding who God was. They had a wonderful book, but the problem was that they believed that that book limited who God could be. Jesus challenged them to open up their minds to new possibilities about who God would be for them, even in the midst of the worst traumas of their lives.

But I suspect that the Sadducees were a little bit too comfortable in their lives, they had too many things going their way, so they were not open to learning something new about God. And that is kind of sad, you see.

One of our bible readings this week

For families this week

For our community

Our worship this morning

https://youtu.be/1EtnICO3Too

That a Runner may Read it

Hespeler, 30 October 2022 © Scott McAndless – Anniversary
Habakkuk 1:1-11; 2:1-4, Psalm 119:137-144, 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12, Luke 19:1-10

The prophet Habakkuk is one of those guys who just seems to have the ability to be completely open and honest with God. He opens the book that bears his name in the Bible with a question that I think many of us could ask if we dared to be so honest. “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack, and justice never prevails.”

Habakkuk was obviously living through some pretty hard times – times when it seemed as if the very structure and conventions of society were breaking down. And I could probably spend some time going through all of the ways in which things were breaking down in his day, but I honestly don’t feel like I need to. I kind of feel like we are living through it.

Crisis Times

I constantly hear today about how some of the basic conventions of our society – the things that once held us together and allowed us to function – are no longer working for us. We see it in a growing mistrust of the basic assumptions of democratic government. I realize that this is something that probably started in the United States in the aftermath of their last Presidential elections, but it has absolutely spread to Canada and many other parts of the world.

Crisis in Confidence

Growing numbers of people everywhere have lost confidence in the security and fairness of democratic elections even though these things continue to function well. Suddenly it seems that losing candidates only need to say that the election of their opponent was unfair, without needing to offer any evidence at all, and huge groups of people will believe them. And I have to wonder how we can possibly manage to govern ourselves if people are attacking the very foundations of that system.

And it’s not just there that we see the breakdown. The whole experience with the pandemic has led to a huge loss of confidence in both public health measures and medical expertise. And I’m not even saying that this didn’t happen without some reason. In many cases, the implementation of even the best advice left a great deal to be desired. As a result, many people have felt let down and I fear that it is leading us to a place where so many people are going to mistrust all expertise in healthcare. If a sufficient number of people no longer follow sensible public health recommendations, it probably doesn’t matter what the rest of us do. We will all get caught up in the public health crises that follow.

Civility Breakdown

But it is not just in the big public issues that we see this kind of breakdown. In all kinds of ordinary interactions and discourses it certainly feels as if the very rules of civility that we took for granted no longer apply. All of a sudden, we hear people saying racist things or hateful things about women, people who don’t fit traditional gender roles and others. These are things that, just a little while ago, would have been unthinkable for people to actually say them.

And, sure, maybe people were thinking those kinds of things all along and just didn’t dare to say them. But I’ve got to ask the question what does it mean for our society when the inhibitions that once stood in the way of people actually saying them are no longer there?

And maybe this is just me, but I am rather concerned about the impact of all of this on the Christian Church. I’m not just talking about all of the ways in which the church seems to be declining as a recognized institution in society, though I guess that is part of it. What disturbs me more, however, is how some of the worst tendencies we see at work in society are being so thoroughly associated with certain brands of Christianity.

What is a Christian?

What I mean is this. Not all that long ago, if you asked people in general what a Christian was, you would have gotten answers like that a Christian was someone who went to church fairly regularly, who at least tried to act morally and ethically. They may have even said that Christians were people who tried to take care of the less fortunate.

You want to know what kinds of answers you get to that question today? People are much more likely to reply that Christians are people who are anti-immigration, who have animosity towards LGBTQ people, who are perhaps even white nationalists. In fact, in some recent American studies, there was a stronger association between voting Republican and being a Christian than there was between going to church and being a Christian.

Working in Reverse

The association between these things has gotten so strong that it seems to have started to work in reverse. Some people look at themselves and say, “Look, here I am. I am against immigration, I don’t much like LGBTQ people and think that white people really ought to be in charge, hey, I must be a Christian even though I never go to church or read the Bible. That is what the understanding of Christianity has become in many circles.

Now, please understand me that I’m not saying that that is what Christianity is or that all Christians think like that. That is anything but true. No, it is just that a certain very intolerant expression of Christianity has become very successful at representing itself to the world as the only legitimate kind of Christianity. And I find that very disheartening.

Habakkuk Demands an Answer

So, these, for me, are the signs that the structures and conventions of society are breaking down under pressure. You might point at different indications, and that is fine. But the feeling that these things are breaking down is very pervasive these days. I feel very much in tune with Habakkuk and what he is saying. But the wonderful thing about Habakkuk is that he doesn’t just dare to talk about what he sees going wrong with the world, he actually demands to know what God is going to do about it. And God answers.

God’s answer comes in the form of a vision that Habakkuk receives. Habakkuk is assured that God is at work in some of the disturbing things that are happening in the world. God says, “I am raising up the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people, who sweep across the whole earth to seize dwellings not their own. They are a feared and dreaded people; They are a law to themselves and promote their own honour.”

Does God Endorse War?

Now, let me reassure you that that does not mean that God endorses or enjoys the terrible things that are associated with war and invasion in this world. God does not endorse the incursions of the Babylonians any more than God today endorses the incursions of Russia into Ukraine.

No, what the prophet is saying is that God is at work even in the terrible things that sometimes take place in this world. God doesn’t endorse the violence and terror of war, but God is able to bring goodness and hope even out of the worst of all situations. So the message of this part of the prophecy is that we should not lose hope even when things look bleak.

But Habakkuk wants to know more than just what God might be doing. “I will stand at my watchpost and station myself on the rampart;” Habakkuk says, “I will keep watch to see what he will say to me and what he will answer concerning my complaint.” Like I said, I like this guy. He wants to know what God wants him to do in the midst of all this and amazingly he gets an answer.

God’s Answer

This is what God tells the prophet: “Then the Lord answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.”

Now, there are two parts to this answer. The second part is essentially a command to not lose hope and wait upon the Lord. “If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.”

And honestly, holding onto our hope and expectation of God during times when it feels as if everything is falling apart is a very difficult thing to do. It is so much easier to give into cynicism, to throw up our hands and conclude that the evil forces at work in our world are going to win and so we might as well just go along with them. It seems easier to give in to the hatred, the selfishness and the xenophobia that is overtaking our world. But God tells Habakkuk and all of us to hold on.

Write the Vision

But the first part of God’s answer to Habakkuk also matters because it tells us what we can do while we wait on God. “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it.” And I will admit that that instruction made my mind race. I had images of us setting up huge billboards on the side of our church building that would proclaim our vision in letters so large that not only runners but even street racers and motorcycle clubs driving at top speed would have not a choice but to read it.

There is something about how he puts that that speaks to me. He talks about creating a vision that is so clear and compelling that even somebody who is running past you – someone who was moving about as fast as anyone ever moved in that world at that time – will totally understand exactly what you care about and what you stand for.

How Good are we at This?

And I am not sure how good the church is at doing that today. Are we so clear about our vision that somebody running by at their fastest could capture it? What would such a brief and clear statement be today? I suspect that many of us, if we were asked to summarize in a few words what it meant for us to be followers of Christ, might come up with a few platitudes and maybe some good intentions, but would we really be able to communicate what we stand for?

Jesus was a Jew

There was a German preacher, for example, who, in the midst of the worst anti-Semitism of the Second World War, proclaimed that the whole Christian Gospel could be summed up in just one phrase: Jesus was a Jew.

Now, of course, under normal circumstances, that would hardly be a good summary of the gospel. But in those circumstances, when the German Church was not only supporting the rounding up and murdering of millions of Jews but also actively purging the church itself of all traces of Jewish origins and influence, it was a bold statement that immediately communicated what living for Christ meant at that moment in time. It was four words that could totally communicate what a believer stood for even if you only saw them when you were running by at top speed.

What Message Does that Today?

That is not the specific message, but it is the kind of message that the church needs to be offering today. In a world where many are defining their faith in terms of who they hate, we need to boldly say that we do not hate. In a world where many assume that Christians are simply people who are intolerant, we need to not be afraid to loudly proclaim our tolerance. We are no longer living in a world where we can just put out a few vaguely positive sentiments and expect that people will admire us for it. It is time for us to write our vision of a better world, of inclusion and hope and love even for the outsiders on a tablet so large and so clear that a runner may read it.

What that specific message might be, I want to leave that to your imagination for a bit. In fact, I would encourage you to write down just a few words on the papers I have distributed today or send me a text or an email. Make it as simple as “Jesus was a Jew” or “God’s love includes Immigrants” or whatever it might be. What is the vision for a better world that we could proclaim so clearly that a runner could read it?

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