The Rev. Canon Anne E. Kitch
Haggai 1:15-2:9 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17 Luke 20:27-38
What is the real color of a leaf? This was my seven-year-old daughter’s question as we drove to church this morning past the glorious fall trees. Is the true color of a leaf the bursting green of mid-summer, or the wild orange of November? And what if you had never seen a fall in the Northeast? When our vision is limited, we don’t always get the full story, or the full beauty.
My friend Robert was walking along a beach in Florida one morning last summer, acutely aware that this particular morning was the one year anniversary of his father’s death. As he walked, he came across a spectacular sandcastle, perhaps the most beautiful he had ever seen. It delighted him and seemed to invite him to come and play. He recalled sandcastles that he and his father had built together long ago. Being the reflective person that he is, he saw it as a holy gift given him that morning. A few hours later as he walked back along the beach he encountered a park ranger aggressively destroying the sandcastle with his vehicle. My friend was overwhelmed. He thought of his own father and the sand castles they had built together. He imagined the parents and children who had worked hard to build this sand castle. He felt himself become annoyed and angry. Now, he could have walked away at this point. I am sure you can imagine the story he would have told. But Robert is one of the most generous people I know and instead he spoke a friendly “good morning” to the grumpy looking stranger. He was surprised when the man turned a friendly face toward him. “So, you’re getting rid of a sand castle?” The park ranger explained that people were welcome to enjoy the beach but they asked everyone to take down their own sand castles. The beach was a nature preserve and a nesting ground for turtles. If the turtles walked into a sand castle they cold get trapped and die. “We have to keep the beach level for these friends of ours,” the man explained.
What a difference that conversation made. How often do we come to wrong conclusions, make faulty decisions, because of our limited vision? as he reflected on his encounter, my friend Robert remarked, “how tempting and treacherous it is to live with my assumptions…my own ‘stuff’ can easily become death energy.”[i] About a year ago I had to give up my contact lenses for eye-glasses. No matter what we tried with the contacts, I could only see two out of three distances. I could read and drive but not see the computer screen. Or I could see the computer screen and drive but not read the map. For several months I tried to compensate and colleagues often found me squinting at the computer screen. I needed a new kind of correction in order to see well. Thank God for progressive lenses!
But what about our spiritual vision? When was the last time you had an inner eye check-up? How much of our spiritual life is based on assumptions that we haven’t taken out and checked lately? How is our image of God limited by our own limitations? This of course brings us right to the Sadducees.
The Sadducees were one of several groups of Jews at the time of Jesus. Just as we have many Christian denominations today, so there were many factions within Judaism and I am sure each thought they had the best picture of God. The Sadducees limited the scope of their vision to only the first five books of the Hebrew bible—the Torah, the law, the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They did not read the prophets. No Isaiah or Jeremiah for them. They did not think of the psalms or the book of Job as scripture. For the Sadducees, if it wasn’t found in the Torah, it wasn’t worth knowing about. They could not imagine that God had any revelation outside of those five books. Among other things, they did not believe in resurrection. So they come to Jesus with their own trick question (as others had done). They want to point out how absolutely absurd the idea of resurrection would be. Thus their complicated story about marriage in heaven. But while they did not believe in resurrection, their story does reveal their anxiety about death and their desire to live on through the procreation of children. They placed an extremely high value on keeping the family line going. So they pointed to the tradition of “levirate marriage,” in which a man was to marry his brother’s widow if there were no children simply to ensure that there would be children (which would somehow be his brother’s) and that the family line would not die out. The women apparently did not have much to say about this! In reality, levirate marriage was an extreme way of grasping a sense of eternal life through the family line.
Jesus’ response it to tell them they need new glasses. Look around he says, this is a new age. You do not need to be limited by old ways of seeing and understanding the God that you and I both worship. This is the God of Abraham… and Isaac… and Jacob This is the God that Moses met at the burning bush. This is the God of the living , not of the dead! The questions of who is married to whom in the resurrection makes no sense in the new life that Jesus is talking about. Life as children of God is so much greater, so much more full than we can possibly imagine with our limited vision. Jesus dares to suggest that God reveals Godself in new ways all the time. He exclaims that we do not, simply cannot, understand the ways of God.
The Sadducees suffered from spiritual myopia. Their bible was too small. Their experience of God’s revelation was too small. Their understanding of the resurrection was too small. What about us? There are many temptations to keep our visions limited. We can also be satisfied with being nearsighted, seeing and engaging with only that which is right in front of us at the moment. I’m guessing that like the Sadducees, we too limit our reading to only certain books of the bible. Not out of a particular theology perhaps, but at least out of habit. Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Brown Taylor describes her well-worn bible, one in which she has spent years mining treasures: “If you look at it from the side you can discover my favorite places to dig: Exodus, Job and Hosea in the first testament; Mark, Luke, and Acts in the second. Like most Christians, I have my own canon, in which I hear God speaking most directly to me.” But she goes on to remember that God has more to say to her than what she finds in those familiar and comfortable passages. “But I also like the parts in which God sounds like an alien since those parts remind me that God does not belong to me.”[ii]
We can also be over invested in being far-sighted, looking only far off into the distant future, or to the distant past. We can blind ourselves by focusing on the Good Old Days. This is the complaint of the prophet Haggai. Haggai lives and writes in 520 BCE, after the first group of exiles has returned to Jerusalem. They seem to have no energy for rebuilding the temple that was destroyed. They are caught in nostalgia.
“You remember how great the temple was that Solomon built? We could never build that, so why bother!”
“Which one of you even saw that temple?” Haggai cries out. “Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory?” Stop pining for the “good old days” and recognize that God is here now. Take courage! Your God, the Lord of hosts speaks, “take courage…work for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts…My spirit abides among you; do not fear.” Our God is a God of the living, not the dead, proclaims Haggai. This is a new age, proclaims Jesus.
In addition to spiritual near- or far-sightedness, we can also limit ourselves by keeping to the middle distance, never examining our theology or motives too closely, nor looking too far beyond our comfort zone. Any of these choices does not give us a complete view of God. But what does? In fact, is there any way for us to have perfect vision when it comes to God and God’s revelation to us? Of course not! We cannot escape our limits. Human life is always so constricted by human sin. So what do we do? Jesus’ answer is to widen our vision. Know that a new world is coming. Expect a new age in this world.
Our image of God will always be too small. What can we do? Give yourself a spiritual vision check. Expect there to be more than you have seen. Stop and ask questions. Be willing to listen. Read something in the bible you have not read before. Notice sandcastles on the beach…and nesting turtles as well. Believe that God’s power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Expect a new revelation.
[i] This story was published in the October 2007 issue of The Rubric, the newsletter of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, Washington by the Dean, Robert V. Taylor.
[ii] Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (HarperSanFrancisco 2007), p. 216.
Copyright ã 2007 by Anne E. Kitch
