Preservation versus Time

22 Pentecost C 27 November 9,2025

Haggai 1:15b-2:9 Psalm 145:1-5, 18-22
2 Thes.2:13-3:5 Luke 20:27-38

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I entitled this sermon Preservation versus Time, to highlight one of the basic dilemmas in life, namely, how do we maintain as much as quality of life for as long as possible knowing that such quality as we know it will eventually end in our deaths?

What we call the preservation instinct is the natural proclivity to maintain our lives and in our human social settings, we not only are concerned about that we live but also how we live.  And we are concerned with how we live given the fact that our family and friends cease to live in the event of death.  We ponder their condition in their afterlives, which we cannot know with experiential precision, and we ponder our own afterlives, which we cannot know in advance, and we wonder about reunion with our departed loved ones.

One of the functional living purposes of religious faith is providing strategies for living within this dilemma of preservation versus the changes of time which threatened the permanency of any state of existence.  Is there continuity of singular identity even while everything is in a state of change and becoming?  And will our lives in time have continuity with our lives in our afterlives?

We learn to live with the unanswerable mysteries of life through the insights of perpetual "talking cures," which include the language of imagining what might be as a comfort for living with what actually is.

Without presuming to know the specific and certain writing contexts of any biblical writing of our appointed readings from the New Testament, from the words themselves we can assume they derive from people who are concerned about the afterlife of the individual and the afterlife of the community and social order.  In this regard, one can say that our readings deal with the personal afterlife contrasting subjective and objective immortality, and one deals with the relationship with a social notion of the afterlife in what might be called the apocalyptic event and its relationship to subjective or individual immortality in the afterlife.

Christians did not invent the notion of resurrection; it was already present in the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures having perhaps coming into their writings from their time in exile.  It was seen more as eventual justice and restitution to answer the question of theodicy, namely, how can we present a notion of a just God when God's chosen people seem to be in perpetual oppression.  The notion of personal resurrection is found in books like Daniel, as well as other non-canonical inter-testamental non-canonical apocalyptic writings.  It was embraced by the religious party of the Pharisees, who accepted a broader base of reading as precedence for holding personal resurrection beliefs.  Another party, the Sadducees accepted only the Torah for establishing belief precedence and they oppose resurrection beliefs based upon this interpretive principle and they could not find evidence of personal resurrection within the books of the Torah.

Jesus is presented by the Gospel writer who held views of personal immortality more in keeping with Pharisees than the Sadducees, and this disagreement is the context for the riddle quiz which the Sadducees pose to Jesus, a riddle which is full of irony.  The Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection posed more of a question about there being marriage in the afterlife, because of their belief in objective mortality through the bearing of children.

The levirate rule in the Torah required the surviving brother of a dead brother to marry his brother's widow so as to maintain the objective immortality of the deceased brothers in the offspring bore with the widow.  This would be but a "procedural and designated objective" immortality since the children's actual father would not be the deceased brother.

The words of the response of Jesus indicates the that the two notions of immortality were not compatible because the life of the subjectively immortal in their new afterlife  no longer needed marriage and children to perpetuate their objective immortality.

The logic of subjective immortality likened the afterlife of people to that of the angels.  And angels do not marry.  And further Jesus dealt with the exegetical problem of the Sadducees as whether the Torah made reference to the resurrection.  Jesus reminded his interlocutors that the Torah refers to God as the God of the living, which would mean that the Patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets would be living on as angels.

The writings of The Epistles to the Thessalonians in part deal with the delay of the end of the world in the anticipated great day of Lord.  What would happen to those who had died before the great day of the Lord?  What do we do if some people are preaching that it has already occurred?    Obviously, the leaders of the churches were trying to comfort people who were faced with confusion and anxiety regarding how their lives would be preserved individually and how the entire social order would be transformed in some impending catastrophic transitional Day of the Lord.

For those of us today, we live in the delay of our own personal deaths and in the delay of the world has we know it coming to some catastrophic end.  The delay of each traps of in this great dilemma between preservation and time.  We know that we are changing and we know that we know ourselves having continuity while we live in time, but we are not sure about what kind of preserving continuity happens after we die.  We are in fact dealing with the thought of discontinuity of personal identity after we have died with ourselves and with others.  The Gospel is not so much about solving this issue as to providing hope for us while we continuously live in this dilemma.

If one might make a anachronistic metaphor from artificial intelligence to re-appropriate the words of Jesus regarding the afterlives of people.  Jesus stated the the children of the resurrection are like angels; the word angel means messenger, a permanent and lasting messenger.  A synonym for messenger might be a living word, a living communicative being.  In artificial intelligence everything and every person has the potential entering the data storage of all language products, but as an actual person of history who can be maintained forever in this large data storage and called forth in juxtaposition with all other people who have entered the data base.

Imagine God as the ultimate Large Language Model Reservoir of all who preserves all and is able to preserve through all time everyone and everything and have them meaningfully harmonized in their attaining this subjective and objective immortality in the great preserving reservoir of the divine.

If this be but a metaphorical expansion of Gospel hope for the afterlife, it can be but in the Scriptural tradition of providing hope for the living under the conditions of Preservation versus Time.  The Gospel is a lifestyle of hope for people living the dilemma of preservation versus time.  Amen.