The year is winding down, and the scripture readings for these November Sundays nudge our hearts and minds toward considering endings. It’s not a difficult thing to do this time of year when we drive home in the dark most days, and, during the shortening hours of daylight, watch the leaves turning and falling from the trees, revealing growing patches of blue between the naked branches. Richard Wilbur, who died two years ago at age 96, left us a beautiful poem he wrote, called “October Maples, Portland.”
The leaves, though little time they have to live,
Were never so unfallen as today,
And seem to yield us through a rustled sieve
The very light from which time fell away.
A showered fire we thought forever lost
Redeems the air. Where friends in passing meet,
They parley in the tongues of Pentecost.
Gold ranks of temples flank the dazzled street.
It is a light of maples, and will go;
But not before it washes eye and brain
With such a tincture, such a sanguine glow
As cannot fail to leave a lasting stain…[1]
In October, even in Nashville, maples like gold ranks of temples flank the dazzled street until, in November, the killing frost arrives at night and throws its icy blanket over everything. Soon the glorious light of maples will only be a memory.
We don’t think much about time in the spring when everything around us is beginning, blooming, bursting into life. In the spring, time is the friend that reveals the wonder of life to us – but in the fall we look at life from the other side. In the fall, unless we’re safely at home with a new baby, the world reminds us of time as the relentless taker, ever eroding, dissolving, swallowing, and burying. “Time, like an everrolling stream, soon bears us all away,” Isaac Watts wrote; “we fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”[2] It’s a November song, with a touch of melancholy, and yet, even in acknowledging the everrolling stream, with this song we also sing of waking up in the morning of a day beyond time, when dreams give way to the wonders that abide.
The song teaches our anxious hearts to trust the faithfulness of God in the winter of life. “What will become of me when I die?” we ask ourselves. Can it be that it all just ends? What about my life, my relationships, my dreams, my longing for all to be well – will it all just fall like leaves and be blown away?”
Those of you who were in the room when someone you loved was dying, remember the deep sense of absence you felt after they breathed their last. The body was there, but the person you knew and loved was not. In an instant, everything about them turned into memories in the lives of those whom they had touched with their presence. The body was there, but you wondered, “Where is he now? Where is she?”
We understand intuitively how, across cultures, ideas emerged that describe human beings as consisting of body and soul, with the body returning to the earth at death, and the soul flying into the world beyond. In old pictures, the soul is often shown as a tiny winged human being, winged so that after the death of the body, the soul, no longer weighed down by earthly concerns, could fly into the freedom of heaven. Many Greek and Roman philosophers even thought of the soul as entrapped in the prison of the body, so that death would come as its liberation.
The ancient Israelites had little use for such ideas. They affirmed the goodness of the body as God’s creation, intricately woven, fearfully and wonderfully made. Human life was embodied, or it was neither human nor life. In ancient Israel, a good life meant living to a ripe old age and seeing one’s children grow up and one’s children’s children. A man’s name lived on in his sons, and family memories of parents and grandparents became stories about the ancestors, passed down from generation to generation. In Genesis we read of Abraham’s death, “he breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his ancestors.”[3] The story continued with his sons Isaac and Ishmael, and the web of relationships across generations was a source of comfort and hope for the living. For them the crucial question was, “What if a man dies childless? How will his name and memory continue?” In the Torah it is written,
When brothers reside together, and one of them 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 go in to her, taking her in marriage, and performing 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 may not be blotted out of Israel.[4]
This family arrangement was to make sure the name and memory of the deceased man continued. It also made sure his property stayed in the family and his widow was protected and taken care of.
The Sadducees in today’s gospel passage referred to this tradition to make fun of the notion of resurrection. What if there are seven brothers, and each dies without an heir, and each marries the woman in turn? To whom will she belong in the resurrection?
The Sadducees were part of the wealthy aristocracy in Jerusalem; they held leadership positions at the temple. Politically they were pragmatists, committed to maintaining the institution, regardless of what power happened to claim Judah as its territory. Theologically they were strict traditionalists. In contrast to the Pharisees, they accepted only the written Torah, not the oral tradition of its interpretation in the debates of the great teachers. The Sadducees rejected newfangled beliefs like the resurrection of the dead, because they couldn’t see a scriptural basis for it in the five books of Moses. The story suggests that they had fun painting this scene of a woman in the world to come, looking at seven brothers, wondering whose wife she would be.
Perhaps you noticed that, with the exception of the poor woman widowed seven times, women and girls were strangely absent from these reflections on life and death and memory. It would appear that they were put on earth for the sole purpose of providing men with sons. It’s men who have names, women have children. Things didn’t look any better in Greek philosophy where women’s status as fully human was in question, since learned men weren’t sure if women even had a soul.
Jesus, in his response, surprised these privileged gentlemen by pointing out that the resurrection life is not a mere continuation of life in this age. “Those who are considered worthy of a place in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage,” he said, “for they cannot die anymore.” There’s no need for marriage arrangements to secure offspring and property and memory. In the resurrection, men and women live as children of God, whether they were married or not, whether they had children or not. In the resurrection, they live in relationships no longer distorted by our great capacity for self-centered injustice; they live fully and solely in the life of God, the life of life. They live in the light of light, brighter and even more glorious than the light of maples, and November comes no more.
But you can’t convince Sadducees with visions of beauty and justice. “We can’t find this resurrection in our texts,” they say.
“Moses himself showed it,” Jesus said to them, “in the story about the bush.”
The voice of God out of the burning bush didn’t say, “Many generations ago, I used to be Abraham’s God, and then also Isaac’s and Jacob’s, and now I’d like to be yours.” No, the voice said, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” The voice of God didn’t refer to a past reality that was gone, but to a living relationship that time and death had not been able to tear apart. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive to God, according to Jesus.
Now that is a highly imaginative reading of the text, perhaps a little too imaginative for Sadducees and for some of us, but without Jesus-shaped imaginations we may never see the new thing God is doing in our midst.
November’s killing frost threw the coldest blanket on Jerusalem, putting an end to Jesus’ life of grace and truth and compassion – and time, like an everrolling stream bore him away, and it was like the light had vanished from the world forever.
We know it wasn’t the Sadducees who began to speak of his resurrection — the women did. Mary Magdalene and the others who had followed him from Galilee barely had words to speak of what they had seen and heard, but they spoke. They spoke of Jesus, they spoke of his body and his voice, and of life, embodied life no longer subject to sin, suffering, or death, but glorified and fulfilled in beauty and justice. They spoke about this new beginning God had made in the world and for the world, a beginning that would not merely be yet one more episode in the everrolling stream of episodes, but a gate through which all of life flows into fulfillment like a river flows to the sea.
Soon the disciples didn’t just talk about the life of Jesus, they began to live it with humility and boldness, as brothers and sisters of Christ.
There is an exuberance in this proclamation of new life and new hope that is easier to catch in the spring. But November is the season when we say with Paul, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life ... nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[5] November is the season when amid the falling leaves and the descending darkness we sing of the faithfulness of God and of life fulfilled in justice and beauty and joy. So let us sing.
[1] Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943-2004 (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004), 274.
[2] O God, Our Help in Ages Past, Chalice Hymnal #67
[3] Genesis 25:8
[4] Deuteronomy 25:5-6
[5] Romans 8:38-39