This week I saw the most beautiful picture! Oh, it’s just some squiggly black lines interspersed with white streaks, but it is the first visible evidence of my granddaughter. It also represents for me a certain death and resurrection. When my son Andrew, married this beauty’s mother my relationship with him changed. I had to give up the idea that I was Andrew’s primary provider and protector. I had to die to those things. And now my role changes again. I have moved from disciplinarian to spoiler, from former to coddler! And if I have any say in things, she’s destined to be the most beautiful, talented, and skillful falconer in all of Texas! I have found life in the midst of death.

This is, really, what Jesus is teaching the Sadducees in today’s Gospel lesson. They didn’t take to this new-fangled Greek idea that there was life after death. Moses and the prophets said nothing about it, so why should we? Eternal life consists in one’s children, nothing more. Like the authority of Scripture in the church today, or alcohol or tobacco 80 years ago, or textual criticism 120 years ago, or the authority of the pope 600 years ago, the resurrection of the dead was the watershed question of the day that forced a person to show their hand. And so they come with this litmus test: According to levirate law, the widow of a man who died with no children must be married to his brother to keep his brother’s family line going. So, just say a woman ends up married to all of seven brothers? At this so-called resurrection, whose wife will she be?

To grasp the radical nature of Jesus’ response one has to step into the shoes of the woman. Her value consisted only of raising up children for the man assigned to her. It is understandable why a sterile womb was accounted accursed. This woman would have left little doubt of her curse, since she bore no children to seven men. Clearly, her body was dead. What good, then, would a resurrection do her if it only extended her curse for eternity? Into this morass Jesus says something totally startling. The value of a woman in heaven is not based on her reproductive capacity (by extension, neither is a man’s!) It is based on God’s redemption. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, and all are alive to Him. Jesus is not speaking as if there were two gods, one of the living and one of the dead, and our God happens to be the god of the living. No, God is God of all and He is Life itself. He does not rule over deadness, but over the living, therefore even the dead are alive to Him. Can you imagine the good news this would be to this imaginary woman? Neither her curse nor her status as a woman, both death-dealing in this world, make her dead to God. She is alive to Him!

What does this mean? There is a story about a town ruled by a tyrant. One day the people of the town rose up and imprisoned the tyrant in a cage in the town square. At first people jeered at him, finally relieved of his cruel ways. But from the cage he soon began shouting orders, and one by one the people began obeying because it was what they knew. Before long the king reigned once again, even from within the bars of his jail. The voices that once enslaved us were vanquished and caged on the Cross of Christ. But we too quickly hear the voices that deal death and pay them our allegiance, voices of addiction, hopelessness, powerlessness, worthlessness, loneliness or meaninglessness. But we must learn to see things from God’s point of view: One time Penrod, my one time falconry hawk, began being quite aggressive toward me. She would land on my shoulder and push those sharp talons through my coat and into my skin. I could think of nothing to do that would get her to be her nice sweet self—I was trapped. In the same way you may be saying, “That’s nice of you to say, Fr. Paul, but I don’t see a way out. I look around for this life you claim is here, but all I see is death.” One day I shared my dilemma with an older falconer. He shared that he, too, had faced that issue. He pointed out the mismanagement that I was practicing in her husbandry; a minor change, and the aggression dissipated. In the same way, we, too, need a soul-management adjustment. We must hear Jesus’ words to us: “those who are accounted worthy to attain to…the resurrection…are sons [and daughters] of God.” You are a child of God. You are loved by Him, you are under His dominion, and that dominion is of life, not death. Perhaps, most powerfully in the very midst of what you feel is wrong, God is present to you. When we live thus under His dominion then our dominion becomes an extension of His, dealing life into this world, rather than death.

Wherever WE are that feels dead is not dead to God. We as a parish are struggling to move into a new way of working. It seems like we loose and gain at the same time, to those who have been here a long time it doesn’t feel like the church they always knew. And then the priest tells you that God spoke to him, and that we’re supposed to grow and change even more! It’s easy to vote with one’s pocketbook at that point. But God is in this. Even in the midst of the anxious feelings, the occasional disorientation and confusion, even when we inadvertently step on each other’s toes, God is not the god of the dead but of the living. To Him we are not dead, but alive! If we cannot feel it that is hardly His fault! We ARE under His dominion of life! Stay the course of change, keep on trucking, and don’t give up now: Who needs to listen again to the voices of smallness and death? The Church should be an extension of God’s life-giving dominion in this death-dealing world. (A word about our National Church: I believe with all my heart that God is also in the brokenness of the world-wide Anglican Communion. He is to be found in the midst of our struggles, and that is sufficient for me.)

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. We will honor all those who have served in war in our Nation’s defense. We do not honor more those who returned with purple hearts than those who returned without honors. And there is equal honor for those who came back incomplete in body and those who came back whole and sound. Our local LULAC Council is honoring a Puerto Rican regiment, the Borinqueneers, this week, perhaps to offer equal honor to those who did not get it as they should have in their day. In the same way, all of us are equally children of God. God does not love us more if we serve Him more, nor does He despise any of us more for anything we might have done. We are all broken, we are all redeemed by Christ’s blood, we are all freed to live the life He has bought us. Fear not, then, your brokenness and deadness, for in it you will find the God of the Living, not of the dead.

Fr. Paul Moore+