Have You Hugged a Sadducee Lately?

25 Pentecost C  27    November 10, 2013          

Job 19:23-27a   Psalm 17:1-9

2 Thes.2:13-3:5     Luke 20:27-38

Lectionary Link

  I should get one of the worst puns ever out of the way from the outset; The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, that is why they were Sad, you see.

  You and I should have pity for the Sadducees because they fare only second to the Pharisees in how we have come to characterize them as evil opponents of our hero, Jesus.

  Let’s deconstruct.  Let’s you and I be like a Sadducee today to find points of empathy.

  The Sadducees during the time of the writing of the Gospel of Luke were facing great transition and change in their lives.

  We too are people of transition and change.  Life, by definition makes us nomads; the only question is how fast we are moving from place to place or having to change our thinking because of new events and circumstances in our lives.

  How many of us here today are cradle Episcopalian?  How many of us have been in and out of various faith communities?  How many of us have been in Episcopal parishes that are significantly different from each other?  How many of us have tried agnosticism?  Atheism?  Humanism? Yoga?  Tai Chi?  TM? Zen Meditation?  Veganism?  Paganism? Fantasy football?  What are the circumstances that have forced us to move our location or forced a change in the habits of our mind?

  How many Roman Catholics have felt “kicked out” of their church when they went through the excruciating experience of divorce?  How many of them have looked to another faith community because of this?  How many Protestants have married Roman Catholics and Orthodox and ended up in the Episcopal Church as place of compromise?  How many gay and lesbian persons have felt kicked out of their religious communities?  How many people have changed churches after getting a college education and doing some critical thinking?

  We are nomads by virtue of our existence.  So let us pity the poor Sadducees or better yet let us invite people like them to journey with us.

  Why should we pity the poor Sadducees?  The Sadducees were a religious sect of Judaism. And even in the occupied city of Jerusalem, they probably fared the best of all of the Jews.  They were in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem.  They were the priestly caste; they also had a political role of negotiating the well-being of the Jewish people with the Roman occupiers.  So you can imagine what happened to the Sadducees in and around the year 70.  The chief identity of the Sadducees came from the Temple.  So what identity did they have after the Temple was destroyed?  They essentially were unemployed.  There was nowhere to do sacrifices.  The Sadducees sort of died out and became extinct like the Shakers did in America, albeit for different reasons.

  What is the point of bringing up a debate between Jesus and Sadducees after the year 70 when the Temple was destroyed?  Was it for the purpose of just rubbing it in?  I would suggest to you that the writer of Luke was more interested in inviting Sadducees to become followers of Jesus.  We are so used to treating the Gospels as a negative polemic against so called antagonistic opponents of Jesus; we can easily forget that the followers of Jesus were Jews and that they wanted to invite all Jews into the fellowship of Christ.

  Who needed a fellowship more than the Sadducees after the Temple had been destroyed and after Jerusalem had been leveled to the ground?

  Let us switch our thinking about this Gospel reading today and see it as an invitation of the early followers of Jesus to invite the Sadducees into community after they had suffered the most devastating blow of all to their community life with the destruction of the Temple.

  The encounter between Jesus and the Sadducees is presented as a highly ironic debate.  The Sadducees are presented as sort of Harvard trained lawyers who are going to take this Matlock-like country bumpkin rabbi Jesus to the intellectual woodshed.  So a mockingly scornful highly improbable scenario in a case study is presented to Jesus.  The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection because they did not believe in “legislating from the bench.”  Why?  To establish religious case law one could only use the Torah; Sadducean scholars could find no evidence, no textual precedence for the resurrection and so it could not be declared or held as an official belief.  Pharisees and other Jewish sects accepted more writings in their Scriptures than just the five books of Moses for setting precedence and so they found support for the resurrection in these writings, including this writing that we’ve read from Job today.  (A writing often used in funerals and memorial services).  If one did not believe in the resurrection how does one believe in the meaning of one’s life beyond death?   For the Sadducees, it would be more practical to be made objectively immortal in one’s offspring.  Having a child was the way to become objectively immortal.  And so do you see how the case study mixes the objective immortality of having children with the subjective immortality of the afterlife of the resurrection?

  The case study involved the ancient Mosaic notion of the Levirate Marriage.  If a married man died without children, his brother was obligated to marry the widow to have a child that would be designated as his dead brother's offspring.  Apparently, if the two had become one flesh, the widow retained something of that one flesh to be able to have a child for her departed first husband even though her new husband was a former brother-in-law.  You could also see how this Levirate law protected the social welfare of a widow as well.

  The Levirate practice in the time of Jesus was not practiced, not even by the Sadducees and so you can see the hypocritical play that was involved in posing the case study to Jesus as a way of questioning his validity as a teacher.

  Jesus invited the Sadducees to see their future in other ways;  just as the Lucan church was inviting the Sadducees to see a new future after their very life identity had been destroyed with the destruction of the Temple.  What was the objective immortality of the Sadducees after the Temple was destroyed.  In a strange way the words of Jesus invites the Sadducees to see their future in a different way.  Does a Sadducee have any future life at all without the Temple?

  What is the point about quibbling about the afterlife about which no one can have specific empirical knowledge?  The function of the metaphors of the afterlife is to inspire faith, hope and comfort now.  And the issue is not really about marriage in the afterlife, or being like angels, it really is about us not limiting God in our present or in the future.

  If God is a living God, if God is a Plenitude that was before us who was with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Moses; if that God is a Plenitude in whom we live now, then that same Plenitude will be the future after we are gone.  That same Plenitude is able to be all of our possible imaginations of a future and even more.  If we can dream a future, then God as Plenitude is even more.

  I believe this dialogue between Jesus and the Sadducee was a wisdom dialogue about having faith in a living God.  We are limited as humans in our life span because we cannot endlessly preserve our lives in their extant conditions.  To believe in the living God is to believe in someone who can preserve more than we can preserve.  In computer hard drives we are talking terabytes; God or Plentitude must include ultimate memory of all things in such a way as to at least permit the possible narratives of a preserving resurrection life. This is to believe in God as the realm of the possible.  And resurrection is an imagination of the possible.  It is a narrative of hope that is true because having hope is true.

  So, my question today is, Have you hugged a Sadducee lately?  Let's not demonize the Sadducees.  Have you given hope for the future to someone whose life circumstances has just been changed by devastating events?  Have you offered new community to the one who has lost community, location and identity due to the terrible crises of loss?

  Have you and I ever been in a situation of one like a post-70 A.D. Sadducee when we have needed hope beyond what our own system of belief could provide?  We, too, often have been needy like the Sadducees who need new hope and a new future offered to us through invitation and acceptance within a community.  

  A Sadducee could come to believe new things through an encounter with Jesus.  A Sadducee could add a different nuance to his or her Judaism through an encounter with the risen Christ.  We, too, know the risen Christ to be with us today as representing the Phoenix who rises out of the ashes of what is lost and gives us new hope and new possibility.  And as the church and as a parish family, we are to be a place where possible hope becomes actual hope for people who need it.  Amen.