Luke 20:27-38
In our century, G.K. Chesterton, is best known by the PBS crowd as the English author of the Father Brown mysteries, a series of stories he admittedly churned out quickly for pay. There were fifty stories published during his lifetime, with three more discovered after his death in 1936. There have been many adaptations of the series for film, radio, and television, with the most recent BBC television series airing its 130th episode in March of this year.
I can only assume that fifty stand-alone stories producing that many television episodes is down to a miracle akin to Jesus multiplying the loaves and the fishes, or maybe some serious theological mathematics. After all, Christian theologians routinely turn one into three.
During his lifetime, Chesterton was practically a one-man publishing house, producing eighty books, more than a hundred and fifty short stories outside of the Father Brown series, and thousands of essays. He was a public intellectual, and on the side of the angels in opposing imperialism and eugenics, as well as supporting an economic model that landed justly between capitalism and communism. In our time, it is especially notable that he was an early and vocal critic of Hitler.
A convert to the Roman communion, some have even suggested that Chesterton be named a saint in that tradition. He does not quite make my list.
In a 1909 essay, he wrote:
Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Dragons have been around a long time. John of Patmos describes Satan as a dragon in the apocalypse that concludes the Christian canon. Shakespeare mentions them in “Richard III” and “King Lear.” They appear in countless fantasy series written for children and adults, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” to Cressida Cowell’s “How to Train Your Dragon” series. Films have been made of all of these works.
I personally love the meme, found on t-shirts and bumper stickers, that advises against meddling in the affairs of dragons, reminding us that “you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”
Chesterton conflates the bogey and the dragon, both representing our fears, chaos and the unknown, the darkness that has a shape in the imagination of a child, particularly terrifying in recent decades in the writing of Stephen King, Pennywise in the storm drain. But most humans outgrow the bogey of darkness, and grow into the bogey of death, the ultimate unknown, for the monster in the dark is the deathbringer.
Our reading from the portion of Luke the Physician’s text we call the gospel deals with this bogey, specifically speaking of a post-mortem existence. Sadducees use the story of a woman who is the widow of multiple brothers to challenge Jesus about life after death.
As is so often the case, this short Sunday reading lacks important context.
First, don’t get thrown by the idea that the woman in question has married one brother after another. This practice, called levirate marriage, is usually found in clan-based cultures, and is driven by the need to keep assets in the family. It has an obvious association with polygamy, and is incompatible with modern Western concepts like individualism and marital love.
Levirate marriage does play an important role in the biblical narrative, for in Genesis, the widow Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute and seduces the father of her late husbands (plural), becoming an ancestor of David in the process, and therefore, of Jesus. But even without the levirate marriage, the question posed by the Sadducees remains: If someone has multiple spouses in this life, who is their spouse in the next one?
The Sadducees, those challenging Jesus, are what we would today call a denomination, as are the more frequently mentioned Pharisees. The Pharisees cannot act as a foil for Jesus in this particular encounter because they share a belief in life after death. In fact, that idea of resurrection was relatively new to pre-Rabbinic Judaism in the time of Jesus, a theological innovation less than a couple of centuries old.
Belief in bodily resurrection was part of a wider religious framework some scholars call “restoration eschatology,” the idea that God would take decisive action, restoring the ancient Israelite kingdom to independence after centuries of colonial rule, and honoring the transactional theology that rewarded right conduct.
We see hints of this belief five centuries before Jesus in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dried bones, enfleshed and enlivened, even the dead of Israel restored in the new kingdom. A form of this restoration eschatology also shows up in our reading from Second Thessalonians, a text scholars believe is a compilation of multiple authentic letters.
Paul’s epistles were written a couple of decades after the execution of Jesus, with the gospels coming more than a decade later, after the brutal suppression of a Jewish rebellion against the Roman occupation. Those early Christians, Jew and Gentile, shared in a slightly reconfigured restoration eschatology. They believed God would render good the individual and collective lives of those who followed Jesus and his radical message of love, would establish a new kingdom, just not the nationalist kingdom of Israelite history.
Let us park that idea, that the individual and communal lives of the Jesus-community would be rendered good, and take a brief detour into the messy thicket of what that looked like then, and the stories we have crafted to symbolically defeat the bogey of death now.
In Ezekiel’s vision, the dried bones of Israel are transformed back into fleshy bodies, filled once again with breath. Both ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek have one word that means breath, wind, and spirit, ruah in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek.
In the Christian Testament, his followers believed that Jesus was physically resurrected. Women grab his feet. Thomas touches his wounds. He cooks fish on the beach. This is the version of events that became orthodox, credal. They experience him as still present, even after they saw him executed.
There is a little fudging in the accounts, disciples who do not recognize him on the road to Emmaus, his passing through locked doors, but these are all events that occur here, in this embodied space. At the ascension, his body disappears into the heavens. This is not just a practical solution to embarrassing questions. Paul also gives us an embodied resurrection in First Thessalonians 4:16, the classic funeral text. In the vision of John of Patmos, the New Jerusalem is established here, on earth, a real thing, not a metaphor. Everything in that ancient story is real, is physical.
As time went by, Christian belief moved further and further from this notion of embodied resurrection. For example, most Christian traditions allow cremation, and almost everyone accepts that human bodies generally end up recycled in the efficient material system of creation, whether intentional or not. We have instead leaned into stories about heaven, disembodied spirits, where I will meet lost friends and family members, and even my beloved Oscar, waiting for me on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge. None of these stories addresses the question put to Jesus by the Sadducees, and an entirely new set of questions present themselves as we come to better understand creation.
In a world where we recognize the reality of animal cognition and emotion, why would we have an eternal existence while other animals do not? Why would animals who happen to be pets go to heaven, while animals who are equally intelligent, but ended up on a dinner plate, cease to exist? Were we created in the image of a divine person, or did we imagine God in our own image?
Bishop Yvette Flunder is a pastor in our United Church of Christ, where we do not have bishops, and the leader of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, a network of historically black churches that welcomes the LGBTQ community, where they do have bishops. When asked difficult theological questions, she responds “I don’t know!”
You have heard me say the same thing many times. Life is too short and too random to be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But I do know this: the stories can contain truth without being literally true. There are still dragons, still bogeys. And there are still heroes.
Every new discovery in science leads to two new questions. Quantum entanglement, what Einstein mocked as “spooky action at a distance,” is real. I am absolutely open to possibility and weirdness. But I don’t need it. The stories are there to remind us that the bogey need not win. That even when the dragon seems to win, there is still a tiny spark of hope, a tiny spark of love and the divine will to create and grow. It is in me. It is in you.
I admit it is hard to see how the life of a Jewish child born into Nazi-occupied territory in 1939 was rendered “good.” But if I spend all of my energy focusing on what looks like defeat, what looks impossible, I won’t be able to get out a bed, and I will miss a million little victories. I will not see Saint George. I will not be Saint George. Or Katniss Everdean. Or Batman, though the dude is seriously dark.
Tell good stories, and believe in what gets you out of bed, with grit and hope and love, tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow. Amen.