Sermon Tone Analysis

Illustration

I remember using mousetraps as a kid.

We often would use the live-traps which were these little rectangular plastic tubes with a trap door on one end.

We learned that the mice that we would occasionally get were not fans of cheese so much as they were fans of peanut butter.

If we thought we had a mouse, we could just put a dab of peanut butter in there and within a night or two we would have a furry little creature to bring out to the woods.

Trap for Jesus

Well, in today’s text, the Sadducees are interesting in trapping Jesus and they think they have the right bait.

The trap that they are using is not a mouse trap but a theological quandary.

Say that there is a woman who is married to the oldest of seven brothers… but that oldest brother dies with no heirs.

According to the Laws of Moses, the woman would then marry the next brother in order that she can give heirs for the house.

But that second brother also dies… also without heirs… and so she marries the third brother.

And this continues on until all seven brothers have died without heirs and finally she dies as well.

And then the big question… in the afterlife… in heaven… who would this woman belong to since she had married seven brothers?

If we were watching a movie of this unfold, I might be yelling at the TV that it’s a trap!

Don’t go through that door, Jesus!

And we know it’s a trap because of who is asking the question.

The Sadducees are not interested in the afterlife… the Sadducees didn’t believe in the afterlife.

Part of what separated the Pharisees and the Sadducees was this very theological issue of what happens after death.

The Sadducees held up the first five books of the Torah as Holy and none of those five books mentioned anything about life after death.

As such, the Sadducees thought the whole concept of life after death was a bunch of malarkey designed to make people feel better about dying.

The Pharisees, however, believed that not only the first five books of the Torah were Holy but also the words of the prophets that followed.

And it was in the words of the prophets that the Pharisees as well as much of the rest of Israel found the teachings for life beyond the grave.

Now, this particular question that the Sadducees brought to Jesus was likely one that the Pharisees themselves had trouble with.

There weren’t any good direct answers to within scripture as to what relationships look like in the afterlife.

It was a question that created a stumbling-block for those seeking to believe in that there is something after this life.

Do some of those husbands not get to have a wife in heaven?

Does God split the wife into seven parts?

How does God decide what to do with this woman?

The trap for Jesus is set with a question that seems to have no good answer—but there are people yearning for a truth to settle their minds.

It’s bait to get this upstart preacher in trouble by making a stand and then being able to find fault in his words.

You can just imagine the Sadducees, and perhaps others as well, snickering, “Let’s see the Son of God get his way out of this one!”

Modern Day Traps

This story makes me wonder what sort of traps we fall into today.

Yes, there’s the telemarketer traps that come up when we answer the phone expecting a potentially friendly voice only to hear a life-like recording tell us that our vehicle warranty is expiring.

There are also the traps from scammers who become more and more intelligent in how they try to take our personal information and use it to their benefit.

But those aren’t the kind of traps that I’m talking about.

I wonder what sort of traps we fall into today that cause us to second-guess that which we believed to be true:

When life doesn’t go the way we hope it to go, whose fault is it?

Has God abandoned us?

Or we can fall into the trap that maybe God isn’t all about grace… maybe I do have to earn my place or at the very least my neighbor needs to earn their place.

They need to straighten up before the come into church.

Illustration

This last week I had the opportunity to meet and give a hand to a guy by the name of Jerry in his mid-50’s who has been walking and hitchhiking from Seattle, Washington on his way to Eastern Oklahoma.

Jerry called for help as he was passing through the area on one of the coldest nights we’ve had so far this fall.

We got him set up with a chicken-strip dinner from Brahms—first real food he had eaten in two days.

And we got him set up with a hotel room, complete with a hot shower which was a far cry better than he had the 3 nights before where he had slept out in the open or under an overpass.

In my conversations with Jerry, as we drove part way to his destination the next morning, I learned a bit more about some of his travels.

Jerry had previously travelled across the country with a company removing asbestos.

Before that, he had worked a variety of construction jobs.

He had been a hard worker but had made some bad decisions with his money.

And when the company he worked for closed down, he was left with no reserve funds to get him through to the next job.

One another thing about Jerry.. he also had a significant faith in God, even though he also had a deep-seeded frustration with the church—preachers in particular, in his words.

He had been told at one church that he would have to cut off his pony-tail before they would help them.

He chuckled about that one… because as he listened to the pastor preaching at him about that long hair being proof that there was still sin in his heart, this hitchhiker noted the large picture hanging on the wall behind the pastor which showed Jesus with hair down to his elbows.

At other times he had been frustrated with people in general.

Jerry said that over the past seven days as he has walked and hitch-hiked across the country he has had cans, bottles, and even an apple thrown at him from passing cars.

He said when he was hit in the back by an apple thrown from a moving car he was knocked off his feet.

And yet despite all of these frustrations with the church, with pastors, with people in general… Jerry spoke of how he knew God walked with him in his journey.

He said that he knew it was against God’s nature to give up on us… and that God would continue to be faithful in caring for and loving him even in the midst of his brokenness.

That’s what he said, almost word for word.

I wonder how often we look at someone who is down on their luck in life and assume they have nothing left to offer.

That’s a trap that I think can be easy to fall into as well.

We can judge people too quickly and dismiss them as some how less-than human.

It would have been easy for me to see Jerry as not-as-deserving as someone else.

But after spending some time with him, I think I had the opportunity to drive around with an angel in hitchhiker’s’ clothing.

Jesus’s Answer to the Sadducees

Getting back to our Gospel reading… as Jesus appears to be caught in a trap by the Sadducees, he speaks words that astound the crowd and even cause the scribes around them to approve of his answer.

Jesus’ answer is that in heaven that woman who had been given in marriage seven times in life will not be the property of anyone in the Kingdom of God.

We are all made free as children of God in a resurrection that we can never die from again.

For God, as Jesus says, is God not of the dead but God of the living.

While the Sadducees question had focused on death and law, Jesus focus was on life and resurrection through God’s redeeming power.

The trap that seemed to have been on the verge of snaring our local messianic hero backfires on the Sadducees.

Jesus goes from prey to prophet.

Thinking about my hitchhiking friend, Jerry, there were so many traps for him to fall into… so many opportunities that he had to give up on God’s goodness… but he didn’t because he knew that God is faithful even when he, Jerry, falls short of the law.

Jerry knew that God is not God of the dead and of the law, but of life and forgiveness.

While we may not have all of the answers to every question about what heaven will look like or even why the world is the way it is… Jesus’ words today invite us to not take the bait of focusing on the law but rather rely on the Grace of God as we encounter the traps and pitfalls of life.

Like Jerry, it’s not that we have it all figured out… but rather it’s that we can trust that God is God and we are not.

And that’s good news because we don’t need to have all the answers.

Instead of trying to know all the details, we can trust that God continues to be faithful to us through this life and into the next because that is the nature of who God is as we see through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

You are alive in Christ.

Peace be with you, Amen.