Proper 27 - 2025 (w/ MSMS String Ensemble)

Sermon for Proper 27, Year C
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
The Rev. Andrew McLarty

The Sadducees come to Jesus today with a question that sounds almost absurd. They imagine a woman who has been married seven times and ask, “In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”

It’s not a sincere question — it’s a setup. They’re trying to make the very idea of resurrection sound foolish, to trap Jesus in a contractual riddle. But what’s really happening is that they’re missing the point.

They’re standing in front of the vast and holy promise of God’s justice, the mystery of eternal life — and they’re focused on a technicality.

It’s a bit like a hiker standing before a breathtaking mountain range: the peaks are shining in the morning light, the air is clear, creation is singing its hymn of glory — and the hiker is frustrated because there’s no cell service to post a picture of it. Or being given a free car, only to complain that there is not a rear cupholder...

The beauty, the wonder, the presence of God is right there — and the Sadducees are missing it because their eyes are on the wrong thing.

That’s what’s happening with the Sadducees. Jesus is opening up the reality of God’s power to make all things new, and they’re squinting at the fine print, arguing about marriage contracts. Because, remember, in Jesus’ day, marriage was a patriarchal institution, it was a transaction.

The Sadducees assume that if there’s life after death, it must look like this life — the same relationships, the same social structures, the same rules, just stretched out forever. They’re so focused on the details that they can’t see the greater truth.

But Jesus says, no — that’s not how God works. The life of resurrection is not a repetition of what has been; it’s a re-creation. It’s life as God always intended it to be — perfect freedom from possession, freedom from people as property, free from injustice, free from death itself.

When Jesus says that in the resurrection "no one will marry or be given in marriage," he isn’t rejecting love, nor am I — he’s rejecting ownership. He’s describing a world where no one belongs to anyone else, because all belong wholly to God.

And that is what divine justice looks like.

In this world, human justice is partial. It’s inconsistent. We do our best — but power and privilege often get in the way. People suffer, sometimes terribly, and there’s no earthly way to properly balance of the scales.

The resurrection is the great declaration that God’s justice cannot be contained by the limits of this world. It is the promise that every wrong will be righted, every tear wiped away, every life made whole again.

Paul says it best in First Corinthians:

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.”

Because we don't ultimately know how the hereafter will function, we have no personal experience of it. It is — something beyond imagining, of God's unique making.

We don’t know what it will look like. But we know who will be there. God will be there.

And where God is, there is justice. Where God is, there is peace. Where God is, there is life beyond all measure.

So may we not miss the mountain for the lack of cell service.

May we lift our eyes from the details and catch sight of the fullness and completeness that stands before us, the completeness of a God who will not rest until everything broken is made whole, everything dead is made alive, and everything worldly is made divine..

Amen.