Luke 20:27-38

Jeremy Richards

Theologians

They don't know nothing

About my soul

I'm an ocean

An abyss in motion

Slow motion

Inlitterati lumen fidei

God is with us everyday

That illiterate light

Is with us every night

Theologians

That don't know nothing

About my soul

Oh they don't know

They thin my heart with little things
And my life with change
Oh in so many ways
I find more missing every day[1]

So goes Wilco’s song “Theologians.”

To speak theologically means to speak of God. Theo means God and ology means the study of. Theology means to study God, and to speak theologically means to speak out of our study, out of our knowledge, of God. It’s God-talk, and there’s no form of speaking more important, more vital to being human, more life-changing than God-talk. In talking about God we talk about the ultimate Good, the Beautiful, the True. In talking about God, we speak also of ourselves, because we can’t know ourselves apart from God, which is what we talked about last week. God is all encompassing, eternal, infinite. In the words of the psalmist, God hems us in behind and before. God is our beginning and our end, and not just our beginning and end, but the entire cosmos’ beginning and end, the Alpha and the Omega. When we speak theologically, we try, in some sense, to get at the core of things, to touch on that which is eternal. Put most simply, we try to understand who God is, and out of that we seek to better understand who we are in God.

Unfortunately, much of what passes for theology today is important only to a few intellectuals in ivory towers. It’s not vital to most of humankind. To be honest, it’s not even interesting to most people. And it often fails to change anyone’s life. This is what Jeff Tweedy, the singer of Wilco, it talking about in the song “Theologians.” All that empty God-talk has failed to plumb the depths of his soul – an ocean, an abyss in motion. Instead of filling him with understanding, with meaning, with love, it “thins” his heart with little, unimportant things. It’s superfluous and exhausting in it’s irrelevance.

There’s an apocryphal story of Eastern theologians in Constantinople debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin inside their cathedral while the Turks sack the city outside. Theology has the reputation of being confusing, abstract and irrelevant, especially to the down-and-out. Theology seems, to many, to be a leisure activity reserved only for those with the time – the wealthy and educated. And sometimes it is.

Take, for example, the theology of the Sadducees who approach Jesus in our reading from Luke this morning. The Sadducees were an elite group of religious leaders from the priestly class. They were aristocratic and smug, the Jewish historian Josephus observed that they “had the confidence only of the wealthy.”[2]They were the bitter rivals of the Pharisees.

Jesus’ theology was actually quite close to the Pharisees’, which might surprise us, since they hated him so much. But they argued with one another so much because they were from the same camp. The theology of both Jesus and the Pharisees sprung from the same soil, but produced very different fruit, which is why they were so passionate in their disagreements. The Sadducees on the other hand, were on the opposite end of the theological spectrum from Jesus and the Pharisees.

The Sadducees said that only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – the books of Moses, were authoritative, while Jesus and the Pharisees believed the whole Hebrew Bible, what we often call the Old Testament, and the oral traditions that accompanied it, were authoritative. In the Sadducees’ understanding, there was no clear reference to resurrection in the Torah, so they didn’t believe in the resurrection.

When they approach Jesus, they aren’t actually interested in what he thinks, they don’t want to learn more about resurrection. They want to stump him, to defeat him through logic. On one hand, their question is about what it appears to be about, resurrection, but more importantly, they’re testing Jesus’ understanding of the Torah. They begin, “Moses wrote for us…” and in doing so they’re setting the boundaries of the debate. Jesus has to answer their question from the books of Moses, from the Torah, and not from outside it. He can’t reference the Psalms or the prophets or the oral tradition. He can only reference the written Torah.

The Sadducees give him a scenario – almost certainly a hypothetical scenario – about a woman who marries a man and then the man dies, and per Jewish law, she marries his brother, but then the brother dies, and on down the line until all 7 brothers die until only she is left and then she dies. Whose wife is she in the resurrection? they ask. Who will she belong to then? they want to know.

They aren’t actually concerned with the content of their question. They don’t care about widows. Certainly there were widows there, in the temple, listening to this debate. But I doubt the Sadducees ever looked at them, ever gave them a second thought. The widows who this debate most impacts are unimportant to them. Because they don’t care about the lived realities of the poor and marginalized. They just care about being right. How much theology (and politics for that matter) is just about being right? How many debates and arguments in churches are about winning arguments or colonizing truth, making it out to be something we own, something we possess?

These Sadducees don’t care what happens to widows, even though the law they’re citing was put in place in large part to protect widows, so that they wouldn’t be left to fend for themselves in a society where they had no power, but would be taken care of by the family of their deceased husband.

The Sadducees’ theology doesn’t touch the ground, it’s up high, it’s abstract. They don’t care about this widow, they care about winning a theological argument with Jesus. They want to prove their superiority and Jesus’ inferiority (which never goes well for Jesus’ opponents).

Jesus, on the other hand, cannot comprehend theology in the abstract. His theology was born with him in the dirt and manure of the stable where his poor, unwed, teenage mother gave birth to him. It was built with the planks and boards he nailed together as he learned his earthly father Joseph’s working-class trade as a carpenter. It was blessed and consecrated in the muddy waters of the Jordan River as Jesus rose from his own baptism. And it found it’s home in the hearts of the lepers, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the destitute who Jesus ate with, preached to, healed, and identified with.

His theology wasn’t the theology of the Sadducees, but of the widow from their question, the one they manipulate and maneuver like a pawn in their theological game of chess.

In our book study on The God Who Sees by Karen Gonzalez, we learned about Abuelita theology. Abuelita means grandmother in Spanish. Gonzalez says…(excerpt from The God Who Sees, page 89). According to Gonzalez, the most faithful of theologians are those who speak of God out of their experience, who’s God-talk can’t be separate from their self-talk. They have found God in their life story, and as they look back through the stories of God related in Scripture, they have found themselves in God’s story – in Hagar and Sarah and Joseph and Ruth (to name some characters Gonzalez talks about in her book).

Jesus isn’t a grandmother, but his theology is very much akin to abuelita theology. His theology is lived theology. It’s born in the muddy streets of the world where the lives of the created meet and mingle with the life of the Creator, where the Spirit of God touches our spirits, where the stamp of the Divine on us becomes animated by Christ within us.

The Sadducees’ question, while it appears theological, having to do with resurrection and Scripture, doesn’t actually mention God. Their theology is void of the Theo. It also fails to have any real significance to the earthly lives of those who listen to this debate. It isn’t abuelita theology, it’s ivory tower theology, armchair theology. But Jesus’ theology, born of dirt and poverty and displacement starts and ends always with the living God. Even Jeff Tweedy of Wilco understands what the Sadducees do not. In the midst of criticizing empty theology, there’s a verse in the song “Theologians” that sums up what is most important: “God is with us every day / That illiterate light / Is with us every night.”

Resurrection is absurd without God – the life we know now stretching on into eternity, with people continuing to be married as they were on earth? The pain, suffering, and brokenness of today stretching on into eternity? The Sadducees are right, if that’s what resurrection is, that is ridiculous.

But if God is God, if God enters the picture (and how could God not?), if God is eternal, and if, as Genesis says, we’re made in the image of God, how could death be the end? How could anything be stronger than the life of God? How could death win, if God is the God of the living? That would be absurd.

This may seem obvious, but theology only makes sense in light of who God is. Somehow the Sadducees have lost sight of this.

But Jesus hasn’t. He never forgets God. To answer the Sadducees question, Jesus points to who God is. He looks to the story of God revealing Godself to Moses in the book of Exodus as the eternal One, the great I AM – that is, the One who always has been and always will be and never was not – in the burning bush. And in that story, which is from the Torah, so it falls within the Sadducees criteria, God says to Moses that God is “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob…” God doesn’t say God was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who all had died at that point, but God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so, Jesus concludes, God is not the God of the dead but of the living. And then he ends with this powerful statement, “For in [God] all are alive.” (Our translation says, “all of them are alive,” but others simply says, “all are alive.” I like that better so I’m going with that).

Theology is important. God-talk is important. And it’s difficult. And yet we’re all called to do it. All of us, not just pastors and priests. This is especially true for us Baptists and Free Church folk who stress the priesthood of all believers. We are all called to speak of God, to share the Good News of the Gospel, but in ways that grow out of our lived experiences, “kitchen theology,” that brings together divine and human, the created world and the Creator God who formed it, the transcendent and the concrete. Theology that doesn’t bring the two together falls flat. It’s empty. It’s the theology of the Sadducees.

But in true theology, in good theology, in proper God-talk, the possibility of another world takes shape, a world characterized by the very life of God.

In the eternal God, our identities find their homes. The widow is no longer the property of multiple husbands, no longer a vessel valued only for her ability to produce children, no longer reduced to a pawn in a theological argument. She is a child of God. That’s what Jesus says in this passage. This poor, unnamed widow has infinite value and dignity to the God who created her. The Sadducees want to know which husband she belongs to, but Jesus says she belongs only to God.

To be clear, I think conceptual theology has its place. I think it’s important that we know what we believe, that we meditate on who God is, that we ask difficult questions and try to work out the answers. Inevitably, from time to time, these kinds of topics will take us up high into abstract and existential thoughts. But good theology doesn’t stay there. It asks “So what?” If we believe this or that about God, if the world works in this way or that way, if being human means this or that, then what does that mean for the world, and for the people, plants, and animals who call it home? What does it mean for you and me? What does it mean for the widow and the orphan? What does it mean for the down-and-out in every culture?

Good theology speaks to all these things, because God is the God of the living, and in God, all are alive.

Amen.

[1] https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858491342/

[2] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, 718.