I know someone who, from a young age, understood very clearly what his vocation was. God was calling him to serve as a church musician. As a child, he stated unequivocally to his family that his vocation was to serve God from the organ console and through directing choirs. Now, his grandfather, as a financial planner, was a practical man. That was not a bad thing in and of itself, for he instructed his family in the important habits of using money wisely, saving for retirement, and giving to the church. But as a practical man, he was a bit concerned about his grandson’s presumed vocation. And so, one day he pulled the child’s mother aside. He said to her, “I notice that your son likes the finer things in life, but he also wants to be a church musician. I’m concerned about how those two loves will work together.” Later, when the boy heard about his grandfather’s words of concern, his response was clear and simple. “Mama, don’t you think that if God wants me to serve him in the church, he’ll take care of me?” After that, no one dared to ask him another question.
After Jesus responds to the Sadducees in today’s Gospel, no one dared to ask him another question either. The Sadducees question the reality of the resurrection and hope to demonstrate that such belief is utterly foolish. But Jesus, looking to Scripture, says that to God, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive, for God is God not of the dead but of the living. And this response silences the scribes and presumably the Sadducees, too.
We may well rejoice in Jesus’s vindication of resurrection life in the face of rational skepticism. As usual, Jesus dispels the arguments of his opponents. But if we dig deeper, I suspect that in each of us there’s more of the skeptical Sadducee than we might like to admit. We may have found the story of the boy vigorously defending his vocation as a church musician to be charming, but in the same breath, we might also be inclined to write it off as youthful, naïve sensibility. Is there not some part of us that has a very real fear of handing our practical well-being and financial security over to God?
The questions and cynicism of the Sadducees reflect the concerns of their age, but those concerns manifest themselves in different ways in our own day. The practice of levirate marriage commanded by ancient law was a means of ensuring the security of biological lineage and the family name. It was a way of controlling something that we can’t always cddontrol. In such an arrangement the widow was no more than a piece of property used to secure that genealogical future. For those who didn’t believe in a resurrection from the dead, the only way to preserve one’s memory and legacy was through biological kin. Hence, the Sadducees grill Jesus with a preposterous question about which of the seven brothers will be the husband of the widow in the resurrection.
But Jesus counters stone cold reason with the irrational belief in a resurrection life. Jesus contrasts this rational age where humans must control their legacy and where death is the end of the story with an irrational age in which all are alive in God, where death is not the end of the story, and where we ultimately can’t control gifts from God.
Jesus asks for us to believe and live in a way that seems excessive to our logical, rational world. In such a world, it’s excessive to ask us to put our hope in a life that we can’t see or have certainty about. It’s excessive to live in this age as if we’re in the next age. It’s excessive not to reject this world but, instead, live in it with a transformed understanding of what God can do. It’s excessive to believe that death isn’t the end of the story. It’s excessive to put God at the center of our lives, when that means not being anxious about all the practical considerations of this age. It’s all simply too much according to the rationality of this age.
We inhabit an age of reason, which is a tiresome legacy of the Enlightenment period. And this legacy of rationalizing has become our excuse to quietly ignore the demands that Jesus makes on us. It’s too difficult, we say. Indeed, it does exceed anything we are prepared to do and believe. But that’s only because God always surpasses our expectations. God always loves more than we can imagine he would love. God always forgives people we ourselves are not prepared to forgive. God always provides for us even when we seem to lack basic necessities. God always makes things new that have grown old. And that’s too much for our finite brains to comprehend.
The questions of the Sadducees aren’t bad questions, nor are our own practical questions bad. They’re just simply the wrong questions to ask of God. They’re wrong because, thankfully, God doesn’t operate in our paradigm of finite resources and scarcity. They’re the wrong questions because God always transcends even our grandest hopes and does far more than we can ask or imagine.
Every week in the Nicene Creed, we profess belief in the resurrection of the dead, but then we sometimes proceed to live as if we don’t. To us, an innocent, childlike belief that God will take care of us if we follow his call seems like a nice idea but highly impractical. To us, it’s irrational to believe that our present day’s searing injustice isn’t actually evidence for God’s lack of concern for humanity. To us, to give of ourselves, our time, and our money to God and neighbor is an exorbitant ask when there are so many other competing demands. To our age of reason, to persist hopefully in the face of so much anxiety and fear is as foolish as imagining whose wife the widow will be in resurrection life.
But amid the very real atrocities of our cold, rational age and amid the convincing voices of scarcity that assail us every day, we can easily forget that Jesus came so that we might have life and have it abundantly. We can even become so obsessed with resurrection life that we forget how to live in this life. When Jesus says that God is God not of the dead but of the living, he means that to God all are alive, those who have physically died and those of us who still breathe on this earth. And if that’s the case, then resurrection life impinges even on this frail earthly existence. If Jesus came to give us abundant life, then we must live as if it were so. Even in this life, the Christian struggle is to embrace irrational hope in the face of rational despair.
Yes, Jesus asks for too much, because in this frail existence, all we try to give will fall short of what we’re capable of giving. And yet, we try. Jesus asks us to integrate our lives so that in all we do, sacred and secular, we’re alive to God. Jesus asks us to give of ourselves, our souls and bodies, not as if it’s excessive but as if it’s not enough. And in doing so, we begin to learn something of the God who gives perfectly of himself in love.
In days of old, Christians lived irrationally every day of their lives, facing literal death to follow Christ. In our own day, we may not face literal death to follow Jesus, but we face a challenge that might seem as insurmountable as martyrdom. If we live as if we’re truly and fully alive in God, then we will live deeply against the grain of this world. If we believe in resurrection life, then we will live and breathe an irrational hope that others will scorn with rational skepticism.
Jesus does ask a lot of us, for he asks us to be fully alive in a world that’s dead and lifeless. He asks us to trust that even when the tired, old enemies of fear and anxiety assault us, God is stronger than they are. Jesus asks us to have faith that when our resources seem too finite God is granting us infinite abundance. Jesus asks us to have the innocent, pure hope of a child who is convinced that if God is calling us to do something, he will always take care of us. Yes, in our rational world, Jesus is asking quite a lot of us. But in the irrationality of the age to come, whatever our hopes and dreams may be, God will always exceed them.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
November 9, 2025