Another World Is Possible

A sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost, Luke 20:27-38

On my daughters’ dressers, over the past few years, a world of figurines has taken shape. My oldest, Lily, long ago dubbed it: Fairydelphia.  Fairydelphia, from what I often hear and sometimes glimpse, is a lively place. When I pass by the girls’ room I hear conversations with a multitude of voices chiming in as adventures are had on the wooden dresser and beyond. I recently asked my daughter Lucia about her corner of Fairydelphia and she introduced me to a blond fairy named Griffin who is married to an unnamed man whose description began and ended with “he works.” Griffin is friends with Zigzag and they both enjoy ice skating, sometimes along with a local family that lives in the jungle.

It has been one of the joys of parenthood to watch my daughters engage their imaginations to create this world, and many others. They remind me of the aliveness of the world of my own childhood where all creatures seemed on the verge of speaking; and a long hill and a good cape were always just shy of launching me into flight.

I no longer live in such imaginary worlds of magic and possibility, but that is not to say that adulthood has brought me into a simple, cold reality. I am ever more aware that what we call the “real world” is often a code word for a settled imaginary world that takes the givens of a particular place and culture as all there is and ever will be. The philosopher Charles Taylor calls these “social imaginaries” and all of us have them. It is through these imaginaries that we in America have a common understanding of words like “freedom” and “democracy” and “rights” without question or reflection. We may disagree on healthcare plans or tax policy, but we find no one questioning whether we should be “free,” even though other times and places wouldn’t see such an idea as obvious.

Our adult imaginary worlds can be innocent and good, but they can also be destructive, even evil. The idea of Whiteness is one such imaginary. As theologian Willie Jennings explains, “Whiteness is a way of imaging oneself as part of the central facilitating reality, the reality that makes sense of, interprets, organizes, and narrates the world. Whiteness is having the power to realize and sustain that imagination.” To have white skin is not imaginary, but to attach to that skin certain meanings and power relationships is to enter into the common imaginary that has been at the heart of American racism from its inception. As Jennings explains further, “during the colonial period in America...notions of white and black would also house a theological way of seeing that formed ideas about truth, goodness, and beauty around bodies designated as white...White bodies were established as normative humanity in all its majesty or weakness.” If you want to see what I mean just look around at the images White Christians used to reimagine the brown bodies of the biblical characters and early church.

It is part of the work of the prophet to upset the obvious, to wake up the minds of a people to the imagination that has been at play in their understanding. This was the work that Jesus engaged as he joined his voice to a prophetic movement taking hold in Israel, a movement that said that God was going to interrupt the world to do something new, something so radical that the dead would rise.

The Sadducees didn’t buy it. They were the Good Ole Boys of the age, the religious aristocracy, whose imaginary was tied to a conservative reading of Torah and a belief that the only real way to worship God was through the official channels of the Temple. Their version of religion functioned like the Whiteness of the colonialists: they saw Temple and Torah as the central facilitating reality that made sense of the world and told its story. It was hard for them to imagine that any other world was possible than the one in which they were in charge.

When these Sadducees meet Jesus, it is a faceoff between the old conservative elite and the young radical, the established power against the revolutionary challenger. Comfortable in their position, the Sadducees tone is more mocking than serious. But with Jesus, they have met more than their match; in his hands their absurd example becomes an opportunity to get at the heart of what is at stake: Does God act in history, turning things upside down, making what was dead alive and what was powerful low and low powerful, or are we stuck with this life, making due with whatever modicum of justice we can squeeze from a corrupt world?

It is the latter position that made it possible for the poor woman in the Sadducee’s story to be “had” by so many brothers. In their world a woman without a male heir was without much hope. Ownership and inheritance rights were for men for women were, more or less, property.  The law provided a comfort in this cultural injustice by marrying the woman off to the dead man’s brother so that she could have a son.  Her only hope was in her progeny.

To the Sadducees and for much of Israel’s history such an arrangement was an expression of mercy. It was a kind of welfare that was looking after the interests of the vulnerable. But it was far from some new thing God was doing in the world. It was simply a way forward within the boundaries of the way things are. They had no imagination for a world that would be otherwise.

For Jesus, resurrection is not a reiteration of the way the world is, but a rupture in the fabric of creation; not an escape to a faraway heaven, but a work of justice and new life in our midst. As he explains to the Sadducees, in this new age of resurrection women won’t need to have a male child in order to be taken care of in their old age. In this new age women will not belong to men as property, and men and women will not have to claim rights against one another in order to achieve justice. As the commentator Paul Duke puts it, “The having of people, one by the other, will be finished. All relationships will be equalized, all relationships transfigured.”

Instead of our hope lying in the having of children, our hope in the resurrection becomes being children--children of the living God. It is as children of God that we can live in the hope that the world-as-it-is is not all that there will ever be; it is as children of God that we can begin to imagine a world of justice and love that does not compromise with concessions to the lesser evil. “All that is contingent, cultural, political and religious will fall away in the great discontinuity of resurrection,” writes Duke. “But what is Real, what is Love, will be lifted into light, all relationships and all faces transfigured for the children of the One whom Jesus called ‘God not of the dead, but of the living.’”

Ours is a world of corruption and injustice. The climate is in crisis, our politics in uproar, the poor ever vulnerable, greed always ascendant. It would be tempting in such a world to keep our hopes small and manageable; to focus on lesser evils and clear wins. We may accept that widows need sons to keep from being homeless and so we might arrange for that. We may look from our wearied place of power at the efforts of idealists and say, it will never work, there is no world but the world as it is. We are, so many of us, very much like the Sadducees--more hopeful in elections and technological advancements and new programs of business or government than we are in the action of God in history on behalf of God’s children. Jesus is calling us to another way.

God is already doing the work of resurrection, God is the God not of the dead but of the living, and no child of God will be left out of that loving life. We can move boldly in the world, with the confidence of the new creation, to join in God’s work of renewal. With Jesus, already risen, God’s new creation has begun, not in some distant heaven but in our midst where heaven is coming to earth. Why settle for the compromises of a corrupt world when we can claim our call as children of God and live in the confident hope of God’s action? I do not know what such a world will look like or the particulars of what we should do in this place, but I hope that we can work together to imagine it, watching for wherever the resurrection is breaking through and welcoming the power of God’s new creation with celebration and joy. Amen.