Last weekend I went to a funeral that made me so glad to be an Episcopalian.
The Episcopal funeral service is gorgeous. We have beautiful prayers and hymns, lots of scripture, invitations for the congregation to join in. And best of all, even while the funeral service mourns an end, it is also an Easter service that celebrates a new beginning.
My very favorite part of the service is the opening anthems. These are basically scripture passages about death and resurrection that are put together in a beautiful way. They are incredibly powerful and reassuring and they really set the tone for the service.
At my previous church, the clergy would walk in from the back of the church saying the opening anthems. We’d follow behind an acolyte with a cross, if we could get one, and the casket or urn, if there was one, and sometimes the family, if they wanted to process. Last came the clergy, saying the anthems.
I’ll never forget my first time officiating a funeral service and how humbling and intense the responsibility seemed as I walked down the aisle speaking these words of assurance in the first person:
As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives
And that at the last he will stand upon the earth.
After my awaking, he will raise me up;
And in my body I shall see God.
I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him
Who is my friend and not a stranger.
I walked behind the empty cross, the urn filled with ashes, and the bereaved family. And I boomed out this promise of resurrection, this assurance of God’s triumph over death, this confidence that we will meet our living God in such an intimate way. Those words became real to me in that moment.
And that was before I understood the context. They say that about 70% of the Book of Common Prayer comes from the Bible. But most of the time I don’t stop to think about where the familiar lines come from.
It turns out that this funeral anthem that rings out so bold and confident is from one of the most miserable men in the Bible.
The book of Job is about this good and righteous and God-loving man whose faith is intentionally tested by Satan, who is sure that the only reason Job is faithful is because his life is so good. And so Satan slowly starts to destroy everything good in Job’s life. First, his family dies tragically. Then his entire livelihood is taken away. Then Job is tormented by terrible pain. And then his friends come and compound his misery with their accusations — blaming Job for his own suffering, assuming that it has been caused by his sinfulness or his lack of faith.
And somehow, at this very lowest point, living destitute and alone and harangued by all around him, Job makes these incredible statements that we hear today in our Old Testament reading. Somehow in the midst of despair, Job has this vision of hope that has become a salve for the brokenhearted and a pillar of strength for the weak throughout the centuries. Impossibly, Job is lifted beyond his own torment by the certainty that his life rests secure in God. Against all odds, Job remains assured of a new life that awaits him, free from the pain and limitations he has experienced on earth.
And our Gospel reading, strange as it is, makes the same promises about resurrection. This reading from Luke - about what happens in heaven to the woman who was married to seven brothers on earth - is an odd one. And not one I had ever thought of as particularly reassuring. That is, until a friend mentioned one day how she found this reading to be an incredible source of comfort. She had been in a rough and abusive marriage, and so she heard Jesus’ words to be words of freedom and hope.
I hadn’t ever heard it that way before, but it turns out she was absolutely right. This passage is based on one of the laws about marriage found in the book of Deuteronomy:
When [a man] dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall tak[e] her in marriage, and perform[] the duty of a husband’s brother to her, and the firstborn whom she bears shall succeed to the name of the deceased brother, so that his name shall not be blotted out of Israel.
Now this law feels very foreign to us modern people, to say the least, but its purpose was well-intentioned. This passing down of wives from brother to brother would have promised a home and security for a widow who would otherwise have nothing, and also assure that the tribes of Israel endured. This law is one of the hundreds of Old Testament laws created to try to fit the religious underpinnings of Judaism into the realities of an imperfect world. When Moses and others handed down these laws, they were trying to figure out the best compromises in hard situations. We’ve all been there. But even so it is hard to watch the sausage getting made.
So here come the Sadducees, the priestly class among the Jews that didn’t believe in any resurrection. And they ask Jesus this question about what happens in the resurrection using this arcane law about marriage. They aren’t asking because they really want to know the answer, or because they care about the fate of this hypothetical woman. They are asking only to trap Jesus, hoping to use whatever answer he gives to show how ridiculous the whole idea of resurrection is. But instead, they show how ridiculous their understanding of resurrection is, assuming that earthly conditions would continue in the heavenly realm; assuming that God is somehow limited by the sausage humans create for themselves.
When the Sadducees bring up this question about whose husband this woman will be in heaven, Jesus says heaven isn’t like that. “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage,” he says, “but … in that age, they’ll neither marry nor be given in marriage.” Now, if you are sitting out there happily married, this may not sound like such great news. But imagine it from the perspective of this hypothetical woman, passed along like property from brother to brother to brother to brother to brother to brother to brother. She was no one. She was nothing. And yet, Jesus was promising that she would step into heaven on her own — a beloved child of God. She would be free from the sausage making — no longer defined by her barrenness or her widowhood. In the resurrection, new life and freedom would rise out of the ashes of her disappointments and crushed dreams.
The resurrection may not make much sense to people like the Sadducees for whom it was merely a matter of idle curiosity and ill will. But to those who come to God with longing, like Job, like the hypothetical woman, the promise of resurrection is real. It can be a life-line to someone who is dying, loving arms wrapped around someone who is mourning, an open door for someone to whom this life feels hopeless.
God is so much bigger than us.
God’s ways are so different than the ways of the world.
And the resurrection is not bound by our limited imagination.
“For God is the God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive.” Amen.
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