[Jesus said to the Sadducees:] “And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the living.”
MATTHEW 22:31-32
Advent – Day 9
Monday, December 11
Amos 7:1–9
Rev. 1:1–8
Matt. 22:23–33
The daily readings are from the two-year daily lectionary as they are listed in the Book of Common Prayer, beginning on page 933.
The Sunday readings are from the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B.
I’ve spent parts of the last few weeks attending the calling hours of clergy colleagues who have died and presided at two other funerals.
The longer one lives, the more one is surrounded by the experience of death.
These occasions serve to drive home the point that as we wait on this side of death, we wait with the knowledge that we, too, are mortal human beings and one day we will encounter our own death.
However, we live in an age which does its best in so many ways to deny the reality of death.
The word itself is avoided at all costs. No one dies any more. We “lose” them. They “pass away.” They “go home to be with the Lord.” Or, in clinical settings, they “expire.”
We do not bury the dead or have funerals. We have a “memorial service” or a “celebration of life” at which we share fond remembrances, extended eulogies, and amusing anecdotes about the deceased that far too often replace the preaching of the Gospel.
The effect of this is to avoid not only the reality of death and legitimate grief, but also the truly comforting message of the Gospel.
There are lots of things we don’t know about life after death or how the resurrection will happen or when it will happen.
But as Christians, we do believe it will happen. I would be so bold as to say we know that it will happen because God is at the center of the resurrection.
The blessed Martin Luther put it this way, “Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books, but in every leaf in springtime.”
As people of faith, we believe that death does not have the final word. There is something beyond this life. Our purpose is more than our years here on earth.
The Resurrection is our gateway to hope.
To believe in the promise of resurrection to life eternal gets to the very heart of why the church exists.
And we don’t wait for death with sorrow or with a sense of emptiness, but rather with joy, with the assurance and the hope in the power of the resurrection that awaits us who believe in Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior.
The Gospel reading from Matthew, which we read this first Monday of the Second Week of Advent, contentious as it may be, frees our imagination to see and experience the opportunity to live now as we will in God’s future, because in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus we have the inbreaking of God’s Kingdom, God’s future come into the present.
Our second reading from Revelation also opens up a whole series of promises, full of powerful images of life beyond death.
God invites us and welcomes us into this new reality even here, even now.
As resurrection people, God calls us, then, to bear the word of hope that there is more to life than what we see.
Through the words of this gospel story Jesus invites us to open our eyes to this new world – the resurrection world – and glorify God.
Let us pray:
God of all grace, we give you thanks because by his death our Savior Jesus Christ destroyed the power of death and by his resurrection he opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. Make us certain that because he lives we shall live also. Amen.*
*Adapted from the Lutheran Book of Worship, p. 210
Walking Together in Faith 