The Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (C), November 6, 2016 - Luke 20:27-38

If This Be Love

A person dies, someone you love.
Mother, father, sister, brother.
Then this headline, which today blared,
"Girl, 9, dies in bus accident."
Oh, dear God, who can bear such news?
How could any of us survive?
That any do, is miracle.
I weep to think of deaths I've known.
And yet. And yet. Perhaps it's true
That for our God, all are alive.
I know not what that means, except
Even when I'm long forgotten,
Just a tombstone name, in some book -
I'm alive, you're alive, and all
Who've ever lived, in him, somehow
Live, and move, and have our being.

Scott L. Barton

Another poem on  Luke 20:27-38 (see also Haggai 1:15b-2:9; plus Paul, Synoptics, John - you name it!)

The Heart of It
This really is the heart of it, isn't it?
They "neither marry nor are given in marriage."
Or try this:
"The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former."
"We will all be changed."
"They thought it was a ghost."
"Because I live, you also...."
Like a Sadducee,
I just can't wrap my head around any of this.
And maybe that's the point.
This God
...this word
...this news
...this love
Changes everything.
Most of all, my heart.
This really is the heart of it, isn't it?

Scott L. Barton

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.” Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”