Jack Hardaway
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We are forgetful.
We forget who we are.
We forget one another.
We are all eventually forgotten, our memory endures for a time among the living, perhaps our name remains behind written somewhere for future generations to wonder who we were.
We are forgetful. We will be forgotten.
But God remembers. That is the lesson from the Gospel lesson today.
Seven weddings and eight funerals.
It sounds like the title of a crazy story, or movie, a romantic tragi-comedy.
It is another one of Luke’s humorous episodes meant to disarm us and expose our deepest insecurities: of being forgotten, of never being seen, or noticed, or loved.
The story that is about forgetting and remembering, and worrying, does anybody really care?
And the answer is that there is something called the resurrection.
Life belongs only to God, the author of all that is, whose word speaks all things into creation, whose word holds all things together.
Nothing in us endures apart from God, we are not immortal, we are rather mortal, temporary beings spun of the dust of the earth, to which we return.
Those who live in love belong to God and in God they find life, and that love never dies.
Those who live and share this love are the children of the resurrection, those whom God remembers because they love. Without love there is nothing to remember. Without love we are forgettable.
The Gospel encounter today with the Sadducees is about the deep mystery at the heart of creation, at the heart of our faith, that connects the living and the dead- the mystery of resurrection and the children of the resurrection.
We get in trouble when we try to overly define eternity, turning the dazzling mystery of the Holy God into a set formula.
The things that we can safely glean from the faith, life and words of Jesus are: 1)that love endures, 2) nothing else does, 3)God remembers and 4)God can be trusted.
Jesus is that word of love that endures, who holds all things together, and to live in love is to live in that word that never dies.
The resurrection brings a challenge, that the flesh and bones of this life carry the miracle of God’s redeeming presence.
That means that we are challenged to look for how God has been made known in this life, how God’s love and God’s image are shared in the physical stuff of existence.
The resurrection means that being spiritual is a very physical thing.
The resurrection is this bright and painful mystery that we endure, because it doesn’t so much solve the problem of suffering and death as it does break the habit of the many ways that we are bound and addicted to the way of death and fear.
The resurrection challenges us to live unbound that we may know the freedom that is love.
That is the witness of the saints, of the children of resurrection, that love rises from the grave.
It is easy to forget this bright burning mystery and to settle for the cheap spiritualities of the modern mind.
Forget something that is overwhelming and terrible and splendid and settle for something less.
Settle for historical sound bites.
Become victims of bullet point theology.
Scavengers of bumper sticker spirituality.
To no longer swim the depths but only tread the surface of shallow ideology.
The Resurrection.
The communion of the saints.
Those who have blinked their eye to wake up at the renewal of all creation.
We are born on that day that is not here yet.
We are children of the resurrection.
Live in love, everything else is forgotten.
Now we remember the names of those who have gone before, whose names are written on God’s heart. Please stand.
(And now we baptize and celebrate the names of the living who are born anew this day.)