Wednesday Reflection: Your Un-Hypothetical God

The same day some Sadducees came to him, saying there is no resurrection;^* and they asked him a question, saying, ²⁴‘Teacher, Moses said, “If a man dies childless, his brother shall marry the widow, and raise up children for his brother.” ²⁵Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married, and died childless, leaving the widow to his brother. ²⁶The second did the same, so also the third, down to the seventh. ²⁷Last of all, the woman herself died. ²⁸In the resurrection, then, whose wife of the seven will she be? For all of them had married her.’

29 Jesus answered them, ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. ³⁰For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels^* in heaven. ³¹And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ³²“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.’ ³³And when the crowd heard it, they were astounded at his teaching. – Matthew 22.23-33

I did my seminary internship in Titusville, Florida during the 2001-2002 academic year. While I was in Titusville, I started doing my first pastoral visits, and I started to notice a trend that I didn’t much care for. Folks would call their children or spouses by their title: The Wife, The Daughter, etc, with not an ounce of good-natured teasing in their voice. One retired couple had only one daughter, and in a year’s worth of monthly visits I never learned her name – she was always The Daughter, and she was never home to visit. That’s when I started to realize that there were some issues going on, that the reason I felt so uncomfortable was because these folks were avoiding the problems in that relationship. Apparently it’s easier to handle separation and rejection if you choose not to remember that The Daughter has a name.

Here’s the thing: we’re really good at talking about God and not so good and listening for a word from God. So were the church people in Jesus’ time, too. One of the primary dangers of being a person of faith who seeks understanding is trading the first for too much of the second. In our pursuit of knowledge and understanding we can lose our way and trade a relationship with the living God for knowledge and theories about a God who is only a problem to be solved, nothing more. God doesn’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. God doesn’t care about our beloved rituals and our favorite theological questions. I’d even go so far to say that God doesn’t really care whether the cross is divine child-abuse, substitutionary atonement or just plain bad luck. What God does care about is you. God cares about your faith and how it makes a difference in your daily life. God cares about your sin and how your bondage to sin will keep you separated from God and from your neighbor. God wants to forgive your sins, give you salvation by grace, through faith, and set you free in the world to serve your neighbor in thanks for what God has done for you. That’s it – nothing more. Anything past faith, forgiveness and eternal life is our contribution to the conversation, not God’s, and it’s usually an intrusion into things we didn’t need to worry about in the first place, like why praise bands play such crappy music or whether Christopher Hitchens is really angry or just a little bit nutty.

I started this little reflection like I often do: I typed the title in the header. The first title I grabbed was “The Un-Hypothetical God.” Concise, to the point, almost exactly what I wanted to say. But one word wasn’t right: “The.” I didn’t want to talk “about” God – my old seminary professor would have called that “Secondary Discourse,” words about God instead of the Word of God. So I retyped the title: “Our Un-Hypothetical God.” But again, it wasn’t quite right. What does that say to the person who’s not sure they belong in a church or not? So, third time’s the charm here: “Your Un-Hypothetical God” it is. No beating around the bush here: you have a God, and your God is most decidedly Un-Hypothetical. You are not “The Child” to God: you are “my beloved child, adopted through baptism and claimed for eternal life.” Nothing at all hypothetical about that, is there?

One day some Sadducees came to Jesus and asked him a question. “Rabbi,” they said, “suppose there’s this woman who married seven brothers. If there really is going to be a resurrection from the dead, whose wife will The Woman be?” Jesus responded, “You’re wrong to even ask the question. The dead have names: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Don’t come to me with hypotheticals – God is the God of the living, all of us who have names and faces and are made in God’s image. When you pursue these hypothetical questions, you deny your relationship with the living God and choose death instead of life. But I have come to forgive those sins, to call you back to life from your death and to be God’s Word to the world. When you know The Woman’s name, then you’ll be on the right track: then you can come o me, truly hear my voice, and follow me.” Listen close, folks: your un-hypothetical God is calling you. Amen.