“Indeed they cannot die anymore… being children of the resurrection.”

"Those words sound radical, almost too good to be true. They encompass more than a physical death, but perhaps aim at the littler (but not little at all) deaths which come to mark our existence. If Paul Tillich was right, that death isn’t a moment, but a process we are living every day fulfilled finally in one moment, what does it mean for us to be progressing in death while simultaneously progressing in life? Just as physical death is the culmination of the slow dying that is life lived, is the resurrection of the body also the culmination of the slow living that is death dying away?

In Li-Young Lee’s poem entitled “From Blossoms,” these words snag me in similar ways to how those of Jesus do:

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background, from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom."

 http://www.ekklesiaproject.org/blog/2013/11/to-sweet-impossible-blossom/

The day of the Dead

Halloween and the 'Day of the dead' are big news this week. They reflect our understandable fascination with death and the after-life. The gospel this week tells the story of yet another smart-alec trying to trick Jesus with an ethics-twister of a question and yet again Jesus turns it all around. The Sadducees asked Jesus a question about the after-life and the nature of family and judgement and power. I remember once when i had just finished a grave-side funeral service, being approached by a friend of the family who was concerned that the person who had died had not been a Christian and therefore would not be 'saved'. I was taken aback by the question and the timing, but answered her that i felt that if we take Jesus' teachings about the after-life, then his main teaching was that only God knows the nature of that space after death. Just like in today's gospel, he gives an answer that points us more towards mystery that clarity. On the occasions that Jesus does speak clearly about the afterlife he tells us stories like that of Lazarus and the rich man that focus on the tables being turned and on justice for the poor and merciful. Much of our modern teaching about life-after-death is more tradition than theology. Our funerals imply that their is a heaven where we will meet our lost loved-ones, but this is not the church's teaching. Strictly speaking, the traditional teaching of the church is that the faithful will be physically resurrected on the day of judgement. This is one of the reasons behind the Roman Catholic church's seemingly strange pronouncements against the scattering of ashes.
For myself, i am happy enough to stay with the mystery that Jesus implies, and to rest in the spirituality that acts from the certainty that 'nothing can separate us from the love of God.'
Rev Gordon Bannon

God is a God of Life.

"Now we could unpack Jesus’ answer as it relates to understandings of marriage, and of the differences between life before death and life after death and how they relate to marrying or not marrying, but the stuff about marriage is not really the main point. The question about marriage is only a furphy designed to ridicule the idea of resurrection, and although Jesus does dignify it with a quick answer, he quickly turns to their main point: “The fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” Luke has softened Jesus’ response a little. In Matthew’s and Mark’s versions, Jesus begins his reply to the Sadducees by saying, “You are wrong, because you do not understand either the scriptures or the power of God.”

And really what Jesus is doing, in all three versions, is turning the issue to our understanding of God and the power of God. In particular, he is saying that God is a God of life, a God of the living, a God who is all about life, life and more life. And he is calling us to recognise how radically this contrasts with what we are on about and what we mostly think God is on about. Because what the Levirate law really shows, Jesus is saying, and what the way we mostly conduct funerals nowadays is saying too, is that we are obsessed with death and with a fear of what will happen if we die before we have carved out a lasting legacy in the world that will ensure us some kind of ongoing impact in the land of the living."

http://laughingbird.net/ComingWeeks.html

questions that matter

"So here are these Sadducees, learned men who are members of the branch of Judaism that does not believe in a resurrection after death. These Sadducees finally get to encounter Jesus. This is their moment--this is their time in the sun. Yet, this is what they say: Teacher, if seven brothers die in succession and each marries the same woman, one after another, to whom is she married in heaven?

Excuse me? Here they are before the Christ--the Anointed One--and this is the best they can do?

There is a Jewish saying that says, “Rake the muck this way; rake the muck that way. It’s still muck. Meanwhile we could be stringing pearls for heaven.”

How often do we waste our time raking the muck instead of stringing pearls for heaven? How often do we waste our time playing word games instead of seeing the Christ right in front of us?

There’s a character in one of Saul Bellow’s novels who says, “I had boasted…how had I loved reality. But…unreality. Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled…life.” Well, let us ask ourselves if that is our scheme as well? Do we avoid the reality of questions that matter?"

http://day1.org/814-love_the_questions