A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

22nd Sunday After Pentecost, November 10, 2019

Proper 27C: Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38.

I read recently that in the ancient language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, looking at the past was phrased as looking in front of you; looking at the future was looking behind you. It’s the reverse of our English usage, but it makes a certain sense. You can look at what’s already happened. The future is always something of a mystery to us until the day it turns into the past. 

That doesn’t keep us from imagining the future, of course. Maybe it will be just more of what we already know and experience. Maybe it will be a time of surprises, good or bad. Probably some of each! In any case, our interest in the future isn’t just a matter of idle speculation. What we expect of the future has a lot to say about how we live our lives in the present. A boring future is one thing. A foreboding one another. A future with an element of hope yet another. And a hopeful vision of the future is what all our readings this morning are about.

Sometimes the future vision is quite specific and immediate. Haggai kindly dated his prophecies for us to the year 520 BC. That was just eighteen years after a group of exiled Jews had returned to Jerusalem, with the encouragement of the Persian emperor, to rebuild the city. They’d built homes for themselves, but the centerpiece of that city was still missing: the temple still lay in ruins. It was Paris without Notre Dame, London without Big Ben, Washington D.C. without the Capitol.

But this group of settlers—relatively few in number—were daunted. They couldn’t see how to move ahead until Haggai gave them a picture of new and splendid future. He addressed his prophesy to all of them, particularly to their two leaders, Zerubbabel, a Davidic prince who was governor of what was now the Persian province of Judah, and Joshua the son of Jehozadak, who, as chief priest, was the religious authority for the community.

Haggai starts by admitting that the situation is discouraging: “Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?” He tells the people to take courage. And holds up a promise for the future: 

For thus says the Lord of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth . . . the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor. . . . 

It sounds extravagant, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t inconceivable. What he was predicting was that Jerusalem would once again become a great pilgrimage site. People would come from far and wide to worship there and they would bring their gifts and Jerusalem would become rich once again. And, indeed, with a few brief lapses, Haggai’s prophecy has proven true ever since. It’s still true today, when Jerusalem is a holy place for not one, but three religions.

None of this subsequent history would have been possible, had not those few returned refugees found the courage to embark on a seemingly hopeless task. Haggai’s vision of the future made the present different. It offered them hope. It helped them achieve things they hadn’t thought possible.

In our reading from Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, we get a different picture of how present and future may interconnect. According to Acts of the Apostles, the church at Thessalonica had experienced persecutions almost from the moment of its founding (Acts 17:1-10). Here were people who had embraced a vision of the future that would culminate in “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him.” But now, they’re growing uncertain. Life, for this community, has been difficult. And divergent speculations about the coming of Jesus leave people confused. 

Some people are even saying that “the Day of the Lord is already here.” That must have left people thinking, “Then, you mean this is all there is? This is as good—as holy, as joyous— as it’s going to get?” Would that mean that their faith and hope and endurance were all wasted? Some must have thought so, for Paul takes great pains to sketch out a more complex vision of the future. It doesn’t move in a straight line. The day of the Lord will indeed come, but not before the future first takes a turn in the opposite direction. Things will get worse before they get better. It will get very dark before it gets light. 

For the Thessalonian Christians, then, the immediate future isn’t about some great project, like rebuilding the temple. They don’t have the power to change the world around them. But they do still have a hope and therefore they have the power to maintain the beloved community, the community of trust and hope and love. That’s no small achievement in any era, including our own. It’s about hanging on through thick and thin, maintaining the primacy of love in a society that thinks things like power and wealth are more important. Paul urges them, “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm. . .”

So, we’ve heard Haggai offering a vision of the future that helped people to build in the present. And we’ve had Paul offering up a very steely-eyed vision of a future that still holds hope, but only after an intermediate period of trials and tribulations, and he offers that vision to help people to hold firm by what is good and true. And, finally, our reading from the Gospel of Luke opens up the biggest question of all about the future. What kind of future comes after death?

Now, the Scriptures have no single, simple answer to that question. The scriptures of the Old Testament don’t even have much interest in it. And the scriptures of the New Testament use a variety of images in speaking of it. 

And if I look around the world today, I find no unanimity about it either inside or outside the church. For myself, I’ve never had much trouble with the idea of the resurrection. My whole life seems to have been full of resurrections, small and great, and there’s no obvious reason why that pattern should cease with the death of the body. But I’ve also known devout Christians who don’t believe in the resurrection at all, who feel that one life is quite enough for anyone. And just to complicate matters a bit further, I read this week a short blurb in The Christian Century (11/26/2019) about a long-term British study of atheists and agnostics which reported that “about three-fourths of the atheists and nine out of ten agnostics are open to supernatural phenomena, including astrology, the existence of supernatural beings, and life after death.” So human beings, Christian or not, are basically all over the map about this topic. 

The Sadducees, in our gospel this morning, objected to the idea of resurrection because it could create an anomaly, a situation that the Torah specifically forbids. A man was not allowed to marry his brother’s wife except under the specific condition of the brother’s having died without an heir, in which case, the next brother in line is obliged to do so. In the resurrection, however, the woman could not be the wife of one of the younger brothers, because that would violate the prohibition on marrying the wife of a living brother. But she couldn’t return to being the wife of the eldest brother, because the Torah specifically forbids a man to remarry a former wife who has been married to another man in the interim. 

But Jesus objects that they are imagining the future as simply a continuation of the present. But the future is inevitably different. Jesus doesn’t try to map it out in detail. He simply says that in the age to come people will not die and there is therefore no occasion to produce heirs and no need for marriage. In the age to come, we are no longer described as son of this person or daughter of that person. Each of us is there in our own right. Every person is equally present to God. Every person! God is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and they are alive to God. And we, too, will be alive to God in the age to come—this remote future hidden from us in this world.

And if we will be alive to God in the age to come, what does that say about who and what we are here and now? It makes each and every one of us a person of extraordinary importance here and now, a person beloved and strengthened by that love. It places each and every one of us in friendship with God, here, now, and always. 

Paul put it this way in his Epistle to Romans:

We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. (Rom. 14:7-8)

And if our future is a life of communion with God, so is our present. It is a life of trust and hope and love. Our vision of the age to come is what makes us who are now as Christians, as saints, as people who live in the here and now with generosity and courage and joy. Perhaps we may have the opportunity to do great tings, like the returned exiles of Haggai’s day. Perhaps we may encounter times when we can only hunker down and hold firm against the corruptions and temptations of the world around us, like the Thessalonian Christians of Paul’s time. But in every age, we can and will be shaped by this assurance from Jesus: “God is not God of the dead but of the living, for to him all are alive.” Yes, you and I. Yes, now and always.