The Twenty Second Sunday after Pentecost - The Rev. Lauren Byrd

 

Mrs. Saducee

In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?   (Luke 20:33)

Last Sunday, leaning into the hope of the Resurrection, we prayed for those who died in the last year. Churches everywhere did the same, reciting by name those we love and see no more. And today, in the wake of those prayers, we meet up with a woman I’ve come to call Mrs. Sadducee, because if you’ll notice, though the Sadducees never give her a name, she is clearly useful to them as an idea. She is a figment of their imagination.

It’s not love or neighborly concern or even marriage that shapes their question about what becomes of her when she dies. But rather their own certainty that, in the end, nothing will become of anyone because there is no resurrection from the dead. And yet, oddly enough, even though Mrs. Saducee arrives as an abstract figure, she nonetheless pulls on our heartstrings, mine anyway.  After all, she’s not only a widow, but a widow with seven husbands, and apparently, just inside the pearly gates, all seven of them are waiting to flip a coin for her.

Though her predicament is laughable, to my mind it also leans into the anxiety and longing we all have about death and dying. It raises a question Jesus initially answers with his own list of names: Moses to begin with, followed by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And while that list of names is sacred to the Saducees, it fails to lead them into deeper fellowship with anyone but themselves, certainly not into fellowship with the dead.

And sensing the Sadducees aren’t all that interested in other people or in what becomes of them when they die, I imagine Jesus recites the names of those men to affirm their continued existence with God, who in his words is the “God not of the dead but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

To my ear, that gracious “all” gathers up the living and the dead, along with Abrahm, Isaac, and Jacob, and surely means also to open the hearts of the Saducees to the hope of resurrection. Not to certainty, but to hope. Hope, you see, is an enlivening practice, central to our faith and central to our efforts at love. It takes courage to hope and courage to love.

Our own personal experiences tell us that much. Both of my parents are among the dead, and yet I feel their presence, and can’t help but talk to them, and I believe they are among the living. And in hope, I trust that, through Christ, we will meet again and know ourselves redeemed. That hope enlivens my days and gives me courage to risk my heart and love others even when it hurts.

Recently, I revisited words from C.S. Lewis, who wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give your heart to no one.” [1] I suspect those long-ago Saducees struggled both with giving their hearts to others and with the vulnerability of hope itself. Hope, you see, in the Christian Tradition, asks you to proclaim the mystery of Christ: Died, Risen and Coming Again: and to trust that proclamation as you lean not into an easy life, but into your own struggles and joys, blessings and losses, fears and worries. As followers of Christ, believing in the fellowship of That Gracious All, we proclaim not a hard certainty but a sure and certain hope in the Resurrection from the Dead

It’s where Mrs. Saducee lands us every three years on a Sunday: she aims us toward fellowship with the living and the dead, and always she arrives in the Lectionary between All Saints Day and Veteran’s Day.  Both of those days mark our fellowship — our communion — with the living and the dead.

Here in America, Veterans Day falls on November 11^th, and we settled on that day in the wake of World War I. November 11^th, you see, was Armistice Day, when peace was declared and the world began to reckon with an overwhelming loss of life. Three-quarters of a million soldiers in Britain alone ­– 750,000 men, mostly young and unmarried – had lost their lives in war. And would never come home to their families. 

Poet Laurence Binyon wrote of them, “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; . . . [but] at the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.” 

Unfortunately, in the wake of a generation dead, there was no provision in the Book of Common Prayer to pray for the dead.  As you may remember, in the Protestant Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, the Church of England forbid the saying of prayers for the dead.  Names could be read and Christian promises affirmed, but praying for the continued flourishing of the dead was forbidden.

Most often we remember the dead by name. But names alone are not enough to answer the enlivening hope within us. Prayer itself leans into the fullness of all life, living and dead. And, thus, it was, under the weight of staggering losses, praying for the dead took on a flesh-and blood shattering urgency.

And how could it not?

Responding to the pastoral crisis of so many young lives cut short and so many other lives full of grief and guilt, longing and memory, the Church of England drafted new prayers to be included in the Prayers of the People and in the Burial Office. And following suit, in the prayerbook revision of 1928, the Episcopal Church also gave way to praying for the dead. 

Faithful people full of longing and hope were weak for those prayers.

I understand this as a kind of surrender to a loss too big for former theological certainties, a surrender to the kind of hopeful grief that has nowhere to go but to an Eternal Father strong to save. And so, in 1928, Episcopalians began to pray: “We bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to grant them continual growth in thy love and service.” And in the burial office, we returned to the use of ancient prayers, asking God “to receive [the departed] into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of saints in light.”

Today, regular prayers for the dead are part of us. Every Sunday the prayer book requires us to pray for the dead during the Prayers of the People. And by way of those prayers, and others, we’re given the grace to imagine and believe he dead and the living are both alive, their hopes unfolding finally within the love of God even now. 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.

 

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, London: Georffrey Bles, 1960.

[2] Laurence Binyon, “For the Fallen,” The Winnowing Fan: Poems on the Great War. London: Elkin Matthews, 1914.