The Age to Come (Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost)
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I think one of the reasons that the Star Trek franchise has been so popular – and continued for so long – is that it can be fun to envision what the future will look like. Unlike some other types of science fiction which envision a mythical place or a time long, long ago, Star Trek posits a future of this world, but where things are different and have evolved.
Sometimes, those evolutions are comforting because the writers envision a world where there’s no hunger, poverty, racism or disease. Sometimes, those evolutions are exciting, because they envision a world in which the constraints of time and space seem no longer to apply. But I’ve gotta confess that one of the reasons Star Trek is so much fun to watch is because it envisions all kinds of cool, techie toys that the future is supposed to hold!
Even so, envisioning what the cool, techie toys will look like – and how they’ll work – can be hard. And this is particularly evident when you re-watch the original episodes from the 1960’s. There, one of the cool techie toys was the “communicator”, which seemed like magic in the days before cell phones. As kids, we had “walkie talkies” that looked like (much larger!) communicators, so we could pretend we were already living in the future.
And yet – especially now that we all carry cell phones – it’s really dated to see how the writers envisioned those “communicators” working in the 23rd century. This is most evident whenever Captain Kirk gets in trouble on a planet surface with some bunch of aliens and has to call for Scotty to beam them up quickly!
But in order to do this, Captain Kirk has to whisper very softly into the communicator and tell Scotty to keep his voice down when they talk. And that’s apparently because the Star Trek writers only envisioned the “speaker phone” feature on the communicators. And mostly, it’s because – in a world where the writers could envision converting matter into energy and back again – they apparently couldn’t envision texting!
Envisioning the future is hard. And that’s actually what’s at the core of the discussion in today’s Gospel reading between Jesus and the Sadducees. You may recall that there are a number of groups of Jewish people mentioned in the New Testament – Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots and others – who we sometimes lump all together. But, these groups all had distinct characteristics.
Sadducees were a group of Jewish scholars who were eminently practical. If it didn’t seem possible in this world, it probably wasn’t possible at all. And so while they believed in God, and that God gave life, they also believed that once your life was over, that was it. There would be no resurrection. And they also didn’t believe in other-worldly beings – like angels. Probably, they figured that whenever an “angel” appeared in the Old Testament, it was a just a person who may have been speaking for God – like a prophet. But, angels didn’t really exist, so when Jesus tells them that people in the resurrection are “like the angels” he knows he’s yanking their chain even harder!
The Sadducees never come off looking very good in the New Testament, and it’s easy to simply dismiss them as people who didn’t understand the Bible and the promises of God very well. But that’s not their biggest problem. Their biggest problem is a problem we all share – that it’s hard to envision the future. How can the future be fundamentally different than it is right now? How can things work if they don’t work the way they do now? And how can even God clean up messes and problems that have vexed humanity for its entire existence?
On the one hand, while the hypothetical question about the woman who’s been married to all seven brothers is intended as a ridiculous example, how is it that complicated human relationships can be untangled in the resurrection? Jesus doesn’t neatly wrap that up.
Or, more importantly, how is it that God heals brokenness and hate and anger that have infected our lives in this life? How is that we can be the people God wants us to be, yet still be ourselves? How is it that I can be reconciled in the resurrection with people who don’t want to be reconciled with me in this life?
In some ways, it seems like Jesus is giving a flippant answer to people who don’t believe any of this is possible. But it’s not a flippant answer. Jesus is actually simply confronting the Sadducees with the reminder that envisioning the future is hard, and that if you limit yourself to what you can see and imagine, you won’t be able to begin to see or experience what God has in store for you and for the whole world.
And so rather than explain what the future looks like – or how God will make it all work – Jesus’ words to the Sadducees, and to us, call us to be people who trust in the God who gave us life in the first place. And Jesus calls us to be confident that God’s future for us is much more than we can imagine.
And so rather than explaining how all of this will work, Jesus instead invites us to live:
- Free from having to figure out what the next age will be like – and when you don’t have to figure out what tomorrow will look like, you can be free to live today and not worry so much about the next year or the next decade. Indeed, the promise of the Resurrection is that it’s the gift of the future that God gives you, and so it’s not something you need to find now in this life or you’ll miss it…
- In hope – because if you need to figure out the future – or how to bring the “correct” future about – then like those science fiction shows, you can mess up the timeline without even trying and bring disaster upon yourself or all of humanity! But if the future is finally in God’s hands – and God knows how to make it all work – then you can be free to live with the hope that the current messes the world is going through will not endure forever, and will not have the final word… (and it’s also the promise that God can and will actually bring about the future God wants, even when everything seems to be going in the opposite direction right now…)
- Boldly in the present – by doing the things that God calls us to do right now. And indeed, what we do in the present moment can make things better or worse for people right now. But finally in the end, the future doesn’t depend on us or our actions. And this is why Luther talked about “sinning boldly, but believing more boldly still”… but you can only “sin boldly” if you boldly believe in both God’s forgiveness and God’s ability to bring about a future that’s greater than anything you can envision …
So how will things work in the “age to come”? I don’t know an Jesus doesn’t give us a blueprint. But Jesus does promise that the new age of the kingdom of heaven is coming to us all. Jesus invites us to live the hope of that future, even and especially when things seem to be falling apart right now. And Jesus calls us to act boldly right now, not so that we can bring about the future, but so that we can – through our words and attitudes and actions – be a sign and a foretaste of the age to come.
Amen.