Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

Resurrection as Transformation: Living into the Eternal Pulse of God
​Rev. Jennifer Masada - St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church - Kapa’au, Hawai'i
November 9, 2025 - Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, Year C
Haggai 1:15b-2:9, Psalm 145:1-5, 18-22,  2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17, Luke 20:27-38

The stories we’ve heard this morning start with the prophet Haggai. The people to whom he speaks are a small band who had been driven into exile and slavery by the Babylonians. Their homes were taken, their temple destroyed. 

Just 60 years later, they are allowed to return. After such trauma, their focus is self-preservation. They work to restore their own homes and livelihoods, while plans to rebuild the temple fall aside. 

Some of them might have been old enough to remember the splendor of the temple that had been the hub of their spiritual lives. They probably told stories about it, mingled with grief and pain over what was lost. It feels too overwhelming to rebuild. How do you construct a life that has been demolished — destroyed by violence, conflict, and the loss of everything you’ve known? 

Our human tendency is to cling to what we’ve known. You know the saying: life was better in the good old days. When will things get back to normal when normal is no longer possible? How do we cope when we realize life won’t look like it did? 

To make sense of where we are now, we try to use formulas that used to work yesterday to calculate the way forward. We try to fit a square peg in a round hole.

Let's fast-forward from the story of Haggai to this week’s gospel almost 500 years later, which takes us into a conversation between Jesus and the Sadducees. The Sadducees also cling to the past, but in a different way. They acknowledged only the oldest parts of Hebrew scripture, following only those of the first five books of the Torah. Rising to power after the people in Haggai’s time rebuilt the temple, their political status and wealth came from a religious focus centered on the temple and its rituals — all based on a narrow view of legal instructions they used to oppress the masses and maintain their status as an elite group of high priests, aristocrats, and merchants in collaboration with Roman rulers. Unlike the Pharisees, they did not believe in life after death. 

So in today’s story, the Sadducees come with a trick question meant to trap Jesus. Their question is built on human logic and legal formulas: “If a woman marries seven brothers, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?” 

According to their laws, a woman would be reassigned to a brother of her dead husband in order to keep wealth in the family. In the fictional case the Sadducees propose, the deceased man has six brothers. The woman is passed from one brother to the next as they die one by one, resulting in a very complex legal situation. 

The Sadducees don’t really care about Jesus’ response to the legal details. They don’t care about the woman or her status. Their end game is to prove resurrection is absurd. Yet Jesus beats them at their own game. Referring to the very scriptures they cite, Jesus says, “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. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

Retelling this story about Moses, Jesus lifts the conversation out of their argument and into Divine mystery. 

Then Jesus gives us a tiny glimpse into that mystery: those in God’s realm “cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God.” In other words, life after death is not about returning to the life we know. Life after death is not about going back to the good old days. It’s not a continuation of earthly systems — marriage, hierarchy, identity. Life after death is a transformation into something beyond our comprehension. 

Remember the trick question the Sadducees asked? “In the afterlife whose wife will the woman be?” What a silly question! They ask about ownership; Jesus answers with freedom.

In God’s realm, ownership and oppression of people do not exist. Women are not bonded in servitude. People are not enslaved or controlled. In divine reality, each soul stands in the full dignity of being a child of God, a creation of God’s divine cosmos. 

When Jesus declares that God is “not the God of the dead, but of the living,” he’s revealing something about the nature of Divine reality itself. The Creator holds all life — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the saints, and us — in one great continuum of aliveness. In God, there is no “before” or “after,” no “then” or “now.” We have been holding this truth every time we've said our prayers of the people this season, which starts with these words we say together:  “In the beginning, God was. Here and now, God is. In the future, God will be.” 

In truth, there is only the eternal pulse of Divine being that moves through all creation. This means that those we love who have died are not gone; they are alive in God. The veil is thin. The communion of saints is not a distant hope but a present reality — a shimmering thread that connects heaven and earth, past and future, seen and unseen.

Yet fear of the unknown often keeps us from embracing our place in God’s creation. We don’t like to talk about death. We push away our unease; we replace questions with false certainties. Last week, we talked about how our blessings and our woes are all part of the human experience. So it is with life and death: two parts of the circle of life. Creation teaches us this. Cycles go on year after year, season after season, showing us that in death there is life. 

So perhaps the question for us this week is not “what happens when we die?” but “how might we live now in the awareness that life never ends?” What if resurrection isn’t something to wait for, but something already unfolding in and around us?

The people of ancient Israel did rebuild the temple. But in the centuries that followed, people may have missed the point of Haggai’s message: What matters is relationship. What matters is relationship with God, with or without a “temple.” No matter where we are — in a beautiful church or in the wilds of nature — in the comforts of a privileged life or in the throes of chaotic change — we are not alone. God is with us, and we have each other. 
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To be children of the resurrection is to participate in the ever-living presence of God — to live in love so expansive that death cannot contain it. In this, we find hope. In this, we find comfort. And in this, we remember that we, too, are part of God’s great circle of the living.

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