Third Sunday of Advent Year A

I am feeling great because now we are all caught up! Here is last week's sermon. Amazing.

Here is a link to the readings.

I am an impatient cook. I might be an impatient everything, really, but my impatience is especially noteworthy while cooking. I am also a cook who has very little time. Most evenings by the time I get home, I am so hungry that all I want is a meal that can be on the table with in a half hour. This week I have been thinking a lot about stirring and have come to say, that I am not very good at stirring. Our collect, the prayer which gathers us at the beginning of the service today, asks that God stir up God’s power and with great might come among us. So here is what I know about stirring: It’s not the same as mixing together. Mixing is done at the very beginning when everything is still its own separate thing. Stirring is when it is already in the same pot or bowl. It has maybe been in there for a while. Some things require constant stirring to keep them together, but many more things require delicate occasional stirring. That is the kind of stirring I have the most trouble with. This is the kind of stirring in our collect today. We ask God to stir us once a year! The third Sunday of Advent. It’s hard to tell when to occasionally stir something. You don’t want to over do it. It needs to rest, or sometimes to rise. But you do want to keep everything altogether. And you want those little bits that have sunk to the bottom and are maybe getting a little burned to bring their flavors and tastes to the top of the pot again to enrich the whole thing. I have a tendency to over stir—because really I am in need of an activity. I am impatient after all.

Maybe my impatience comes from a lack of trust. I don’t know if I can trust those bits on the bottom to brown and not to burn. And maybe the soup doesn’t know if it can trust me to leave it alone, or get to it on time. You see, one of my coping mechanisms as an impatient cook is to do other things while I am cooking. This means that while the pot is simmering away, I try to do the rest of the dishes, or wipe down the counters; sometimes I even try putting in a load of laundry. But since I am not a good cook, I often get distracted by my activity. And I didn’t really feel like I knew when I was supposed to stir anyway—I read the recipe, and it said occasional, or every 20 minutes. The thing I have learned is that really good cooks just know. Their pots seem to signal to them, it is time.  Or maybe they catch a tiny whiff of something, the hint of a smell, and then they know it’s time. I think part of the problem for me is that I am impatient, and forget to see all the activity that is taking place when I am waiting. Sometimes, I forget that the ingredients, and the pot and the fire beneath it are working hard while I am resisting the urge to uncover it and stir it all up.

Now if we properly understand our collect, we are the ingredients in the pot, and God is the one with the power and the precision to stir us up.  It seems to me that God is a patient cook. God has confidence and faith that we will be cooking while God waits to stir us up. God has confidence that we will be preparing.

Preparing is an important word in Advent. It is what this season is all about. Two weeks ago in my sermon I suggested that the preparation required in advent is not preparing for Christmas, but for the much larger concept of God with us, and for Jesus’ second coming. So I wonder then, what is the preparation that we are called into this third week of Advent. How do we prepare for God to stir us up?

As I consider our lectionary readings for the day, it seems to me the Letter to James suggests that we can prepare for stirring up with patience. Though this initially seemed frustrating to me, because patience is not one of my virtues. But as I looked more closely at the letter, patience isn’t idle waiting. Being patient is not the same is doing nothing. Rather it is being calm and relaxed about the time frame during which something will happen. In the letter we are given three examples that I want to talk about this morning about what being patient while preparing might mean.

The first patience in preparation example we are presented with is the farmer.  We are told the farmer waits not only for the early rains patiently, but she also waits for the late rains too. The rains that should have already come, the rains that make her worry that they might never come, or that the crops will be ruined in the waiting. The farmer isn’t anxious while she waits. She does not sit at home looking out the window wondering whether it will ever rain again. No. She has to have confidence that it will rain. The patience of the farmer is about confidence and faith rather than fear and anxiety. Advent gives us the opportunity to practice waiting, practice preparing while remaining calm, and faithful.

The second type of preparation in patience from James we are given is the idea that we can strengthen our hearts to be ready for the coming of the Lord. I wonder what strengthening the heart would have meant to ancient readers and hearers of this letter. For us though my first thought about heart strengthening was physical. Perhaps this activity while we are being patient is about taking care of our physical selves: eating well, exercising, caring for our bodies. But surely there is an emotional component to this heart strength. Our hearts are strengthened when we deepen love relationships, when we treat ourselves with love, when we give love to people we meet, when we are shown love from an unexpected source, and when we first begin to love someone new. Love is connected indelibly to patience in our scriptural vocabulary thanks to Paul telling us that: “love is patient, love is kind.” Our hearts can be strengthened while we wait because we are preparing for the radical nature of God who loves us so much that God sends Jesus, God’s child, to live with us, to show us God’s love for us. Our hearts must be strong enough to receive God’s love because God’s love is transformative. It sustains us, it inspires us, it helps us to love others.

The third example of patience as preparation is the prophet—which seems contradictory at first. The letter says: “As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.” Prophets seem to me to be very impatient. They are calling for us to take actions, to live differently, and that God will utterly transform our physical experiences, crooked things will be made straight. So how could prophets be examples of patience? Perhaps even as then call for change the prophet knows that they are speaking to the people of their day and age, but the prophet also has a mode of speaking that is into the future. The prophet is patient in knowing that their voice should be heard as they are speaking, but also into countless generations. God’s message of upending our world order as we know it, of waters breaking forth in the wilderness, of streams in the desert are necessary because of the deep flaws in human society, back when Isaiah was first telling folks this thousands of years ago, and today. Isaiah has to be patient—not necessarily with his own generation—but patient because it will take a few thousand years for us to hear this. The patience of the prophet then reminds us that God’s voice, God’s message is an eternal one. One that forever calls us into changing our sinful ways, as individuals and as a society. The patience of the prophet then is in knowing something about eternal time.

Our letter to James helped us to see preparation during Advent as the idea of an active patience that is confident and faithful, that strengthens bonds of love, that keeps our bodies healthy, and that knows something of the nature of eternal time. We are better able to prepare now with these tools of patience. But then we have to go and ask God to come stir us up during Advent too. The truth is though, even though we may not use the language of stirring every week, we are stirred by God when we share in the Eucharistic meal. God is among us when we break the bread, and drink the wine, because we become Christ’s hands in the world. The Eucharist is a stirring event because we go from being individual bits and pieces in the same pot to being one.

When we prepare then to be stirred, we are preparing with patience for something that has happened already, is happening now, and will happen again. That is eternal time. Advent, and the nature of the church year, is one that we are constantly repeating, but also that we enter into new. We have done Advent before, we have even experienced the miracle of Christ with us, Emmanuel. And we are preparing for it as if we have never had this transformation. The same is true on a smaller weekly scale for the Eucharist. We have shared the transformation into the body of Christ before, but we will also await patiently this transformation each week. Truly we must learn patience as church-going folk who each year have to enter our liturgical seasons anew. Enter them knowing what is to come next and yet, we still must be patient until it does come.  As the way of the Lord is prepared among us, and in us, we ask that God stirs us up, as God has stirred us before, and God will surely stir us again. 

First Sunday of Advent, Year A

And here is a sermon from early December that feels soo sooo long ago and yet was really just a couple weeks ago. 

Here are the readings.

God put a rainbow in the sky, a rainbow in the sky, a rainbow in the sky.

            Sometimes it breaks my heart a little when I learn about something—and think to myself, wow, how did I go so long not knowing this existed and how much this will improve my life. It’s that “where have you been all my life feeling!” It happened with coffee…but it happened last week too with a song. It’s a song called “God Put a Rainbow in the Sky,” and the recording I heard had Mahalia Jackson singing it. My friend, Isabel, mentioned a moving speech she heard by poet Maya Angelou where she referenced this song. Angelou called her friends and the literary community who were honoring her at the National Book Awards her personal rainbows in the sky. Rainbows are powerful images for us, but I think we often forget their meaning. It’s more than the result of weather patterns. And more than just a sign to Noah that the rain was over---the rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant never to destroy all of humanity again. It is a sign of light when it seemed like all there would be is darkness. Mahalia sings, “the sun grew dim and the days was dark, then God put a rainbow in the sky.” As we have moved into the dim, dark winter months, and as we enter the season of Advent aware of the meaning of light and dark we need the powerful image of the rainbow, as a reminder of God’s promise to all of us. The rainbow is a connecter between us and the divine.

            The rainbow as a reminder of God’s covenant helps me understand a distinction between eschatology and apocalypse which is helpful in approaching our Gospel reading. Eschatology is one of those fancy theological words that needs defining before we move on. Translated literally from the Greek it is the study of the last. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “The study concerned with the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell.” And while this is a perfectly good definition, I think it misses an essential part of our Judeo-Christian worldview: the last times are not all destruction and ruin, but the last times are the perfection and culmination of God’s created order. Culturally we understand the apocalyptical langue to be the destruction at the end of time—but as we enter into Advent and approach our scripture for today—let’s look at it from the perspective of people who know our rainbow covenant with God, and looking at culmination, completion and perfection rather than gloom, destruction and God’s fiery wrathful return.  

            So then as we approach our Gospel text we can do so knowing that we are entering Advent a time of wonder and awe. We know it is a season of preparation, but our Gospel passage suggests it is not a gentle preparation. There is urgency to our preparation. We aren’t talking about preparing for Christmas. Not talking about checking your lists, and preparing for family and fun. We aren’t talking about preparing the church with greens and poinsettias. In some ways, Jesus seems to suggest it will be hard to prepare, since we won’t know what time this will happen. But this is in part because we are in the mode of Advent-Calendar like preparation. We want to open the little boxes and draw closer to a day we know is coming, and a day we have experienced before. But this first Sunday of Advent is about something bigger than Christmas. It is a larger scale preparation. It is an eschatological preparation. How are we going to be in the last times? How will we be living? How will we as the church have transformed our society into one of Justice and love? How will we help our neighbors and friends turn their swords into plowshares? How will we help them make their spears into pruning hooks? And how will we help articulate a vision for how God wants this world to be? This is the sort of preparation that we are asked to consider on this first Sunday of Advent.

            When Jesus compares the last times to a thief in the night that we are unprepared for, there is a part of us that in our world of fear and terrorism thinks the response to this is to hunker down, to be always prepared, to see something and say something, to be suspicious of people who seem different, or to make assumptions about people of different religions. But the thing about this thief in the night is that there is no way we will know when they are coming. There is very little in truth we can do at that time--but we can change how we live up until that moment. We can begin to live into a life full of the knowledge and love of Jesus: knowing he has come, and knowing he will come again. We aren't going to know when that will be--no matter how ready we are. Similarly no one but Noah and his family knew when the flood would be--there is nothing those people could have done to know the time. So then the point is not to focus on the when-or even really the what of it. But instead we are to make the lives we are living, and the life of our community one that is prepared for transformation.

            In order to be prepared for transformation during Advent, we must first make it seem possible. I don't mean that we have to make the whole transformation in these next four weeks, but I do think part of our Christian witness is to vision an alternative. An alternative to what? you might be thinking. Fair question. Our passage from Isaiah suggests an alternative to a state of war to a state of growth and harvest. Here we have a literal transformation. The very implements of war become those that provide food. The transformation is also one filled with imagination—think of the creative genius that imagined a sword turning into a ploughshare. And in Romans Paul suggests a shift from darkness to light, from living for the flesh to living honorably. These two examples tell us about the transformation that is possible with God. Things that seem intractable and unchanging, like war, darkness and fleshy living are transformed into something new. These visions are an alternative to things in our lives that feel like inevitability--by this I mean things like climate change, global capitalism, domestic violence. Maybe those things feel to large. How about the inevitability of hungery people in our neighborhood? What about repairing a relationship with a friend or family member that has frayed? What about visioning ways of helping folks who feel vulnerable and lonely around the holidays? Those seem smaller, and more possible. And we will have an opportunity with our December outreach project to buy Christmas presents for New Yorkers in need--which will vision a world in which we at St. Ann's are better and better connected to folks in need all around us. And even the bigger visions, only have to be visions. If we take on the inevitability of Global Capitalism we don't have to start a new, more love and justice filled economy--but we do need to think about what that might look like.

            How do we do that work? How do we vision? It won't happen on it's own. And it won't happen by accident. We need to make time to sit together, talk together, and make this a priority. Somehow I think we have come to the other side of the rainbow. We understand Advent in light of God's enduring promises to us, and the transformations we are asked to prepare for at this time of year.  Our end of the bargain, our side of the covenant has to be receiving the rainbow and understanding it's significance. The significance for us of this light this first Sunday of Advent is that we must use the light to help us to see better. I know there is a lot we all have on our plates, especially at this time of year. I know we are each caught up in making plans, or maybe caught up in imagining the holidays without a loved one, or maybe just caught up in the year end crush at work. But we are compelled during this Season of Advent, and during this first week to make a concerted effort to focus on envisioning a transformation. Certainly we have some sort of an opportunity to do this as a group next week at our Annual meeting. But I would like to give each of us an assignment during this week, and it is to encourage each of us to ask someone for coffee or lunch, or maybe a walk around the block to talk about a vision. Maybe it's someone from this congregation who you have been wanting an opportunity to sit with. Or maybe someone in your wider community whose values or views you admire. It should be someone you don’t talk to every day. And more than one person is fine too—but not too large a group that everyone doesn’t get a chance to talk. It will take some time and effort--but it is our work this week. During Advent you will see our focus begins here on large transformations, and down narrows down to the Christ child over the course of four short weeks. This narrowing reminds us of our lives transformed in Christ, and God's transformation in giving us Jesus to live and die as one of us. But this week we get to think big: remember that God put a rainbow in the sky, and we have the opportunity to imagine a different end.

AMEN.  

            

Christ the King Sunday

This sermon is from Christ the King Sunday. 

Here are the readings. And again it includes references to a reading from some members of the parish. And I will look for a link to their epistle to the congregation. 

            Last week in Sunday School we did a unit rewind. This meant that we went over our last six lessons and tried to remember what it was we had learned: the different Bible Stories and try to see if there were any larger themes. As a teacher, this is a scary moment. It’s the moment you realize it's quite possible that you haven't taught your students anything. But then you find some faith, and have some confidence that the kids have been learning the stories, and connecting their faith to the things happening in their everyday life. After we had recalled the stories and some of the lessons and activities, I asked, "What have you learned about who God is and what God is like this fall in Sunday School that you didn't know before?" After a little time had passed, and some silence and fidgeting, Jahzara, a fourth grader shared her thoughts. She said "I learned that God has very different moods and that the moods change a lot." This is not a moment of the purity or simplicity of a child's faith rather it is the sophistication. I have been thinking a lot about the mood of God this past week. Especially as we are celebrating the last Sunday of our church year this week with Christ the King (or more gender neutrally the Reign of Christ)--and next week will start our new church year with the first Sunday of advent, waiting for the arrival of the Christ Child. This is a big mood swing.

            The Reign of Christ is a Sunday of celebration. Glad for the authority of Jesus and the coming of his Kingdom. The language of reign and king suggest finery, castles, gold, ultimate power and dominion. But we are in for a mood shift then when we encounter our Gospel text. The reality of the reign of Christ is God on a Cross--unable to save himself from death. Mocked and scorned by his inability to change his fate. It is immediately clear then that king, reign and kingdom are going to mean something very different than we (and all of Jesus' followers) expect them too. This is a very different model of king, and will mean a very different kingdom. The two crooks who die on either side of Jesus demonstrate two different understandings of Kingdom. The one wants to be saved from death, and wants Jesus to prove his power, his messianic state, in that saving. The other crook knows better. He addresses Jesus simply, and with intimacy saying "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." This man understands who Jesus is, and understands that it will be a different kind of kingdom. 

            In our Bible Study this fall we have been studying the Kingdom of God in Luke's Gospel. Sometimes it has been a frustrating study as Jesus never seems to come out and say just what he means by the kingdom of God. I think some of the attendees of our Bible Study were frustrated by me too--because every time one of them asked me, as the teacher: what is the kingdom of God, I tended to ask them, "well...what do you think?" Even Jesus was more clear when he compares the kingdom to a mustard seed, or to a shepherd who goes who leaves 99 sheep and goes after 1 who is missing. Over the course of reading Jesus talk about this kingdom so frequently we did learn a few things. It wasn't going to be a kingdom like other earthly kingdoms. It occurs in striving for it. It's values are not wealth and power and dominion, rather they are love and servanthood and stewardship of our planet and of those most in need. Finally we learned that the Kingdom of God is something that happens in relationship to one another in our church community.

             The values and ideals of the kingdom of God are our values and ideals as the Church--as the body of Christ here on earth. We don't always achieve those ideals--in fact the church and we all have a tendency to fall awfully short. In that falling short though we are reminded of our dependence on God, and our need for God. Our striving for those ideals of love, justice, servanthood and stewardship as a group as a community is what enacts the kingdom of God and brings it forth. I want to focus on that last word of the ideals of the kingdom of God though: stewardship. This Sunday is another mood shift for us at St. Ann's because it is that last Sunday of our month of Stewardship epistles and next Sunday will be when we ask people to start to consider what their pledge for 2014 might be. This stewardship reflects our care for one another, the value we understanding intrinsic in our relationships with one another and with God, and our realization that with our mutual striving we can make a difference here on the corner of Clinton and Montague. This morning at our bake sale we are striving for good, creating a name for ourselves among our neighbors that we care about feeding those who are hungry, and that we know some ways we can connect to that need. Our monthly outreach projects have been met with considerable outpouring--it reflects our community's intense desire to give--our need to give, and I think we are all very glad that our church is  becoming a place where we can give more and more. In order to continue and grow our outreach programs, and to begin some sustained cultural programing we are going to need to ask for every one's help. The stewardship of this community is necessary. Our church needs the financial support of those of us who regularly sit in its pews. And we will need the time and talent to support new efforts and to try new things.

            Marc and Josef's epistle this morning about aspirations for the future at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity made me think about both what my aspirations are here and how those of us who are new-er here take part in that visioning. I have been here a little over a year and a half--maybe it's almost a year and three quarters--but I think I still retain a veneer of newness. There is just so much that feels possible here. I have a tremendous amount of faith and hope for what we might be able to do here, along with God's help. Some of those things we might do have a lot to do with mission, and ensuring that we are being fed by our outreach programing and that we are also feeding others. But some of the things we might do are successes like out Early Church service, that has really, really grown. It's liturgy seems to speak to the lives of busy folk and families who appreciate the casual and warm atmosphere we've cultivated here. That service does a good job creating community in a new way around here. I wonder what else we might do in the week to reach some people who live in this neighborhood? So many of you travel from further and distant neighborhoods in Brooklyn to be a part of this special, spirit filled place, but during the week we might be able to reach some more folks who live and work in this area in some new and innovative ways.

            One of the things that really interested me as I read Marc and Josef's letter was that we are becoming something new. The influx of new folks like Marc and Josef who are figuring out how to contribute and be a part of this community will necessarily mean that we will be something new in the coming year. The pledge of new folks time, talent and treasure will mean we gain some skills and expertise as a community that we didn't have before. We will be ready to respond to new things in new ways. Or perhaps, in Jahzara's words: we will be ready to respond to God's different moods. And we don't just have to have newcomers be the leaders of our becoming something new. As we wind down our month of Stewardship letters and sermons, we have an opportunity to consider all together and as individuals, what are our aspirations here? How will our pledges of time, talent and treasure help us towards those goals? What can we do to better live into the Kingdom of God, and celebrate Jesus' reign in our lives? What we become, how we better become Jesus' missional body of Christ in the world is dependent on the contributions of this entire community. As we all give though, I can promise too that we will be fed together. We will be fed in our relationship with God, in our relationships with one another, and in our Eucharistic meal where we share the Body and Blood. AMEN.

Proper 27 Year C

 Here is yet another oldie. From November 10, 2013. I focused on the reading from Job- and on a letter that maybe you can still find on stannholytrinity.org--I will try to find the exact link to Rosanne's letter. During our stewardship drive, we asked parishioners to write letters to the congregation. Rosanne's was about her work as the co-chair of the outreach committee. 

Here is the link to the readings

Our short little passage from Job left me a little confused. What is it Job so urgently needs to write down? Why does he seem to go from wanting them in a book to wanting the words inscribed in a book? And which words is it anyway? All of these questions remind me of how little we know about the book of Job. Well—we know the words “the patience of Job” and we might have some sense that bad things happen to Job. We might even know that God does these bad things to Job because God is trying to prove that Job will love God even if things are just terrible in his life.

Some of you might know that I have a dog named Job. Most people misunderstand the name and assume I said “Joe.” A few will ask if he has the patience of Job. No. He does not. He has nothing like the patience of Job. And you know what? Neither did Job. I want to spend a little time this morning telling you about the Book of Job because it is pretty different from most other books in the Bible, and it doesn’t come up all that often in our lectionary, so it provides a teaching moment here this morning.

            Job is not a book about being patient through bad times. It’s not a book about patience at all. It is a book in the wisdom tradition written between 4^th and 7^th century BCE, and was likely written while the ancient Israelites were in exile. The book seeks to examine undeserved suffering, and it hope to both talk about this on an individual basis: why does Job suffer unduly, but also on a communal basis, why is Israel in exile again? And the book of Job hopes to discover what God’s role in human suffering is too.

            The setup is that an accuser is talking to God about Job. The accuser suggests that Job is loyal, pious and good because God has blessed Job. His life is full of bounty, his herds and cattle are doing well, he has healthy children. The accuser suggests that if all the blessings were taken away, Job would no longer be the loyal pious man that he seems to be. So then Job is stricken with disease, his cattle die off, his children all die. It’s just awful.

            The book then moves into a cycle of dialogues between Job and his friends. Each of his tree friends insist that the terrible things that are happening must be divine retribution for something Job has done. They insist that because of the covenant that their people have with God, Job’s extreme misfortune must be tied to his actions. Job’s reaction to his friends is to again and again insist upon his innocence. In the 19^th chapter, from which our short passage I taken, Job is again recounting all of this things that God has done to him unjustly. He says, “God as put me in the wrong, and closed his net around me. I call aloud, but there is no justice. He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, he has uprooted my hope like a tree.” It is these words, Job’s utter and complete frustration with God that he wants to write down. Job is so angered by God, so completely hopeless that he feels just writing them on paper will not be enough, these feelings should be carved in stone.

            Job’s desire to write out his anger and frustration at the injustice of what he (rightly) pins on God is shockingly close to Job’s assertion that Job will see God by his side. Job thinks that it will be after he is already dead. He says, “ For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh shall I see God.” The proximity of the relief Job feels knowing God will be by his side, (even if it isn’t until after he is dead) with the anger that Job feels is fascinating. In reflecting on the closeness of these two seemingly hard to put together feelings and in thinking about the long dialogues that Job has with God, I have come to the realization that among other things, the Book of Job encourages and insists upon an active relationship with God which is not afraid to call out for help, and cry out when life is unjust. The activity that Job takes is a very dialogical one—Job talks to his friends, he talks to God.

In our struggles here at St. Ann’s, and I am particularly thinking about the big tower and organ fund, we need 30 million dollars to really fix this church up right, I have heard a few people say, “well—we’ve got to rely on God to provide.” And while it is good and right to acknowledge our dependence on God and remember that all things come from God, this does not mean that we don’t have responsibilities too. What if relying on God to provide means that we as a community do some serious fundraising. We would be relying on God to provide the strength we might need to undertake a big project. But we shouldn’t rely on God in a passive way, waiting for a check to materialize from thin air. Our reliance on God is in the love we get from God, in the encouragement we get from God

            In Rosanne’s letter to St. Ann & the Holy Trinity I am reminded of the active role we are playing as a congregation in our outreach efforts. Our work of making sandwiches shows me that we understand we are in relationship with people throughout our borough and that we are connected by God. God helps us to be able to take on big challenges. How do we help when there is so much to do? How can we connect to the needs of those who need help the most? God gives us the strength to be more and more active participants in our city, and to cry out for justice when we see fit. I don’t think we have yet felt Job’s frustration so much so that we want to carve into stone.

            Another demonstration of our active role in our relationship with God is our commitment to support St. Ann & the Holy Trinity financially. Our moth long stewardship drive is a time to reflect as Vladimir did last week, and Rosanne has this week on the many gifts that being a part of this community provides for each of us, and for us to offer our support back to the church. Our active relationship here requires us not only to show up on Sunday mornings and pull out whatever loose bills are in our wallets, but it asks us to consider how we give of ourselves, and what amount that giving will look like. It asks us to consider how we will give our time, will it be as a singer in the choir, or will we volunteer to bake something for the bake sale this month, how we will give our talents, how our art or teaching skills might be of use here, and finally how we will give our treasure especially at a time when the parish has some particularly difficult years up ahead.

             We can do this in the hope that Job shows us: the hope of having God by our side even while encountering the most frustrating, unfair circumstances. This is the same hope that Jesus is talking about in the Gospel this morning too, the hope of the resurrection. We are people who know that our relationship with God changes how we understand the physical world. When the Sadducees try to trick Jesus with this question about the woman with seven husbands—they are of course missing the whole point of the resurrection and how it will function. They think the rules of this life still apply. But the special knowledge we have as Christians. We know that God is on our side, and with God on our side more is possible than we know because the rules of our physical world no longer apply. Death is defeated in Jesus’ death, and hope is restored in the hope for the resurrection of the dead to come.