Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,
Remembrance Sunday
10th November 2013 11.00am
Luke 20.27-38 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no
resurrection, came to him 28 ¶
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. 29
Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; 30 then the second 31 and the third married her, and
so in the same way all seven died childless.
32 Finally the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore,
whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her." 34 ¶ Jesus said to them,
"Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; 35 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. 36
Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children
of God, being children of the resurrection.
37 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. 38 Now he is God not of the dead,
but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."
Genesis 4.8-10 Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go
out to the field." And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against
his brother Abel, and killed him. 9
Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He said,
"I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?" 10 And the LORD said, "What
have you done? Listen; your brother's blood is crying out to me from the
ground!
Job 19.23-27 "O that my words were written down! O
that they were inscribed in a book! 24
O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock
forever! 25 For I know that
my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; 26 and after my skin has been thus
destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God,
27 whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and
not another.
The Soldier
If
I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That
is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A
dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to
roam,
A
body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And
think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by
England given;
Her
sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and
gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English
heaven.
Rupert Brooke. 1887–1915
What
will they think of me when I’m gone?
Who will remember me?
They
say ‘life goes on’,
but the reality, for all of us
eventually,
is that it doesn’t.
It
comes to an end, sooner or later,
and then what’s left?
Some
ashes to scatter, or a body to bury;
some possessions to distribute;
a reputation, perhaps, or some achievements
of note;
conceivably children or
grandchildren
or maybe just stories, so many
stories,
to be told with tears and
laughter
by those who have known
and loved us
saying to one another, ‘do
you remember when…?’
Do
you remember?
Do
you remember?
We’re
in the season of remembrance at the moment,
from ‘Remember, Remember the 5th
of November’
to today’s and tomorrow’s
Remembrance services
and two minutes
silences.
And
at such times,
we particularly remember those who
have been killed in war,
those whose lives came to a
premature and violent end,
leaving loved ones to
grieve and cope.
Last
week, I paid a visit to the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede
and there, amongst the thousands
upon thousands of names
which have been carved
into the stone walls,
I found the memorial to my maternal
grandfather,
Sgt Frederick David
King, DFM,
a young man killed just a few weeks
after his wedding day,
leaving a widow,
yet to
discover that she was pregnant with my mother,
and a few medals that
now sit in a case at my parents’ house,
speaking to
us from beyond the grave
of his
bravery and valour in the face of danger.
And
it matters to us that we remember the names, doesn’t it?
It matters that the stories and the
people are not lost to us.
This
is one of the reasons why we have books of remembrance,
keeping the person’s name and memory
alive.
And
it’s the reason we often mark a person’s grave with a stone,
with their name carved as a
permanent record
of the fact that they
were once alive.
But,
as anyone who has wandered through an old graveyard will know,
eventually the stones weather, and the
names and dates fade.
And
books can be lost or destroyed,
and even revered war memorials won’t
last eternally.
Eventually,
Sgt Fred King’s name and memory will be lost,
as so many others, both before him and
since,
have also passed into obscurity.
And
what then?
Who remembers?
Who keeps the memory alive?
What becomes of what was once a
person?
Such
things were obviously preying on Job’s mind,
as we heard in our reading this morning,
where
Job cries out:
"O that my words were written down!
O
that they were inscribed in a book!
O that with an iron pen and with lead
they
were engraved on a rock forever!”
For
those of you who haven’t read the book of Job in a while,
a brief recap might be useful.
The
book of Job is named after it’s protagonist,
about whom we don’t know a lot
(he is, after all, a
fictional character).
But what we do know, is that he is an innocent man.
Yet,
despite his innocence,
he suffers loss and pain through no
fault of his own.
As
the dialogue of the book develops,
with Job and his friends discussing
what he has done to
deserve such torment,
Job starts to imagine a way in which
he might go to trial with God,
seeking to vindicate his
righteousness,
and perhaps also to obtain an
acknowledgment
of God’s mistreatment of
Job.
In
our passage for this morning,
we meet Job in characteristically depressive
mood,
clearly not expecting to
see the desired vindication
before his
death,
and
concerned that he will go to the grave unjustified.
In
chapter 16, he calls on the earth to not let
his murder at God’s hand, as he sees
it, go unavenged.
He
wants his innocent blood to continue crying out,
arguing his vindication for all
eternity.
In an echo of God’s words to Cain after his
murder of his brother Abel,
Job
expresses hope that that the blood of his death
will
continue to cry out from the ground:
“O earth, do not cover my blood;
let
my outcry find no resting place.” (Job
16:18)
This idea of shed blood crying out from the
ground,
attesting
to the righteousness of those
who
have been un-righteously killed
is
one which continues to have great resonance today.
From Rupert Brooke’s heart-rending assertion
that
in
the event of his death in war
there
will be
‘some corner of
a foreign field
that is for ever England’,
to
the poppy fields of Flanders,
to
the mass graves of the 2nd world war concentration camps,
to more recent discoveries in
Bosnia, Iraq and Syria…
the
blood of the slain cries out from the ground,
and it shouts and screams to the
world
that those who lie here did not
deserve to die in this way.
And so Job contemplates his death;
a
righteous and innocent man
who
doesn’t deserve to die like this.
Job’s anxious desire is that he should ‘see’
God judge his case while he is alive,
but
he doesn’t, frankly, expect to be vindicated before his death,
so, despite his conviction that ‘in the end’ he
will be judged innocent (v.25),
he
wants his case committed to permanent writing,
because he knows that whilst his life may be
fleeting and soon-ended,
the
fact of his righteousness is an eternal truth,
and
his hope is that one day,
the
record of his blamelessness will be attested before God
and
will be proven to be true.
And so Job utters possibly the most famous
words in the entire book,
and
possibly also the most misunderstood:
‘For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and
that at the last he will stand upon the earth’ (19.25).
Despite it’s usage within the Christian
tradition…
(and
who, on hearing this verse,
doesn’t
also hear the strains of Handel’s Messiah?)
But despite this,
Job’s
redeemer is not Jesus,
and
it isn’t God either.
Rather, Job’s ‘redeemer’ is his protestation of
his innocence,
it
is his righteousness itself that pleads his cause
and
will secure his redemption.
Job’s ‘redeemer’ isn’t some heavenly being,
rather,
it is his own declaration of innocence.
To understand why this is the case,
we
need to understand a little bit
about
the Old Testament concept of redemption.
The world translated here as ‘redeemer’
can
also be translated as ‘vindicator’ or ‘champion’
and in the Levitical law,
a
person’s redeemer, or vindicator, or champion,
was
their nearest relative.
So, when a person died,
their
next of kin would be expected
to
redeem their property for the family,
by
buying it back to secure the family’s inheritance.
(Lev
25.25-34).
Or if a person was taken into slavery,
their
next of kin would be expected
to
redeem them by paying the price for their release.
(Lev
25.47-54).
Or if a man died childless,
their
next of kin would be expected to marry their widow
and
father a child with her on behalf of the dead husband.
(Deut
25.5-10; Ruth 3.12; 4.1-6).
Or if a person was murdered,
their
next of kin would be expected to vindicate them
by
avenging their shed blood. (Num 35.12, 19-27).
So when Job states his belief
that
his redeemer, his vindicator, his champion, lives,
he
is objectifying his protestation of his innocence
into
an entity that has something of an existence of its own.
His blood that will cry out from the ground for
all eternity,
his
deeds that are written in writing that never fades,
take
on the character of an eternal affidavit of innocence.
The legal language continues,
as
Job states that his redeemer
will,
at the last, stand upon the earth.
In an ancient lawsuit trial,
the
last to rise was the winner of the dispute,
the final speaker won the day,
the
successful voice was granted the last word,
and Job believes that his blood crying out from
the ground,
will,
at the last, rise up to affirm his innocence,
and
attest that his death was neither deserved nor sought.
So, what remains of a person when they are
gone?
What
is remembered?
Job’s answer is that it is righteousness that
endures eternally.
Bodies die, possessions are redistributed,
children
go their own way,
and
reputations and mighty deeds are easily sullied or forgotten.
But a person’s righteousness? That’s a
different story.
Innocence
from guilt is eternal
and
blameless deeds endure.
And so we come to the woman with her seven
husbands.
And
once again we find ourselves in the murky world
of
the kinsman-redeemer laws of the ancient Jews,
And
once again we find ourselves grappling with the question
of
what remains of a person when they die.
There was a view that the value of a person’s
life
could
be judged on whether they had managed
to
bring children into the world,
with
a childless man’s life considered incomplete.
So, if a man died leaving a widow still of
childbearing age,
that
man’s life could be redeemed
if
he had a brother who would take his widow,
and
father a child with her on behalf of the dead brother,
so
that the dead brother could live on through his descendants.
Clearly, this system is intensely problematic
from a contemporary perspective,
and
it raises huge issues for us surrounding the rights of the woman,
and
her existence as a person in her own right,
rather
than as part of the estate of her husband.
But within the worldview of the ancient near
east,
it
had a certain logical consistency,
and it is this logic that the Sadducees are
seeking to exploit,
by
making their argument Reductio ad
absurdum
about
the one bride for seven brothers,
as
they sought to demonstrate the irrationality
of
a belief in the afterlife.
It all hinges around this question
of
what happens when a person dies.
What remains of them?
How
do they live on beyond the grave?
Is it through children, as the levirate law
implied?
Or
is it through reputation and good deeds,
as
the Sadducees believed,
Or
is it through some future resurrection to an afterlife,
as
the Sadducees very definitely did not
believe?
Jesus’ reply to the challenge of the Sadducees,
takes
us to an eternal truth of being,
which
is that nothing good is ever lost.
I’ll say that again:
nothing good is ever lost.
In answer to the question of what remains of a
person when they are dead,
Jesus
replies:
“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the
living;
for
to him all are alive.” (Luke 20:38)
Descendants may die out,
reputations
and good deeds may be forgotten,
grave stones may weather to illegibility,
and
the writing in books may fade to nothing.
But God remembers…
each
moment is held safe by God,
each
instant of life finds eternity within the love of God,
Because God ‘is God not of the dead, but of the
living;
for
to him all are alive.’
It may well be that the greatest service we can
pay to the dead
is
to remember their righteous needs,
and
to ensure that they are not forgotten.
This, after all, is why we have remembrance
Sunday,
to
remember the dead in war,
and
to ensure that the precious gift of their lives
doesn’t
pass into obscurity.
We remember their deaths,
but
we also hear their voices:
their
blood crying out to us from the ground.
And what do the voices of the dead say to us
today?
Tales
of valour, stories of bravery, honour, and loyalty, yes.
But
also, because we are remembering those dead in war,
stories
of mercy, compassion,
betrayal,
suffering, terror,
and of so many lives
lost.
And the voice of Jesus, echoing to us down the
millennia,
assures
us that each of these lives, remembered or not,
was
a life that has eternal value.
Each
soldier has worth:
named
or unknown,
decorated
officer or cannon-fodder Tommy;
and
in our remembrance of them
their
voices are heard once again,
crying
out from the ground for vindication, for redemption.
And they live still,
they
live among us through our act of remembrance,
and
in our memories as we keep their memory alive.
Their stories matter to us because they keep us
all human,
and
their blood cries out to us from the ground,
protesting
that they didn’t deserve to die like this.
But they live still, not just because we
remember them,
but
because God remembers them.
Each life matters eternally to God,
and
nothing good is ever lost.
And this is true for them,
and
it is true for us also.
Whether we die a valiant death in the theatre
of war,
or
in one of a million more ordinary ways,
Whether we die alone at home, or cared for in
hospital,
or
suddenly early, or peacefully at the end of along life,
However and whenever we die,
we
too are remembered by God.
All the good life that we have lived
is
not lost at the moment of our passing,
but is held safe for all eternity
in
the loving embrace of the God of love,
who will not see even a flickering spark of
life extinguished.
This is life eternal,
this
is the hope of resurrection.
And it begins today,
eternity
in each present moment.
For God ‘is God not of the dead, but of the
living;
for
to him all are alive.’
