Year C: Proper 27 | Haggai 1:15b-2:9; II Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
November 9, 2025
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“[God] is God not of the dead but of the living…to [God] all of them are alive.” – Luke 20:38[1]
To get a grasp on any of our readings this week, we’re going to need some background information.
Starting with the Hebrew Bible, Haggai lived in Judea shortly after the people’s return from exile. With the information our text gives, this is one of the few prophetic passages for which we know an exact date: October 17, 520 BCE. Roughly 70 years earlier, Jerusalem had been destroyed, the Temple leveled, and most of the surviving population forcibly displaced to the Babylonian empire’s distant provinces. But now that the Persians had defeated the Babylonians, the new emperor, Darius, allowed the scattered Jewish people to return to their homeland with orders to rebuild the Temple of the Lord Most High.
Their construction skills apparently weren’t too great, however. The book of Ezra notes that those old enough to remember Solomon’s Temple wept with discouragement at the dedication of this second, far less impressive effort. Haggai is speaking around that time, trying to remind the people that God had been with the ancestors who built the original Temple; God was with them when the Temple was destroyed; God remained with them throughout their exile; and God still stood with them in their current attempts to honor the Lord. Bemoaning an idealized past and attempting to recreate it in the different circumstances of the present would be futile. What they needed was to remain faithful and to continue working to honor God in a way that the prophets had been calling for for centuries: by truly respecting human life, by caring for and uplifting everyone in their society.
Regarding the Thessalonians, then, Paul is addressing a situation where some visionary convinced the people either that Jesus had already returned and they all missed the resurrection or, more likely given other contextual clues, that the person had sold them on an exact—and looming—date for the Second Coming. I find the second option more probable for a couple reasons, including the fact that shortly after our reading Paul warns perfectly capable people who think the world’s about to end to get back to work and stop sponging off the rest of the community. The part of the passage the Lectionary didn’t include indicates that this “lawless one” our text mentions is something that’s going to arise again and again over the course of time. He basically tells them not to worry about apocalyptic nonsense, whenever it shows up and wherever they might think it comes from. Then, like Haggai, he encourages them to remain faithful to Jesus’ example and to honor God, working not for selfish gain but to provide for and uplift everyone around them.
Moving to the Gospel, then, the Sadducees were essentially Judea’s priestly caste. They tended to align themselves with Roman policies so long as those didn’t interfere with their freedom of religious. They were also quite pragmatic, understanding that once you’re dead, you’re dead. For them, “resurrection” was a metaphor for how a person’s legacy continued through the lives and efforts of their progeny.
Being religious leaders, their question involves religious matters. Moses had codified ancient Hebrew practices, including the custom that if a man were to die childless, his brother (closest living male relative, really) would be responsible to take in the first man’s wife and sire descendants that can carry on the name and legacy of the dead man.[2] While their question may have been legitimate, it’s more likely one of those nonsensical propositions Christian scholars liked to debate in the Middle Ages, like “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” or “Can God make a rock so heavy they can’t lift it?”—the kinds of questions we don’t actually want anyone to answer. They’re just paradoxes we come up with to make ourselves seem clever, philosophical distractions that trick us into ignoring our ongoing call to honor God by remaining faithful in love and service to those around us.
Recognizing the foolishness of the question, Jesus simply responds that their idea of resurrection is sorely lacking. Resurrection isn’t just resuscitation to similar, though improved, circumstances of the present. It isn’t simply life after life. To Jesus, resurrection is a completely different understanding of existence—one in which the concept of marriage, Mosaic or not, is irrelevant. Most of how we understand life to work would appear to be irrelevant. He even tells us that, in the face of resurrection, death itself—the most certain of human experiences—is utterly irrelevant! Then turning the Sadducees’ own interpretation methods against them, he points out that the Lord presents themself as inherently present-tense. God never announces Godself by saying, “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” God speaks as existing in those patriarchs’ present as well as Moses’ as well as Jesus’ as well as our own.[3]
The three passages might not seem to have much in common with one another, but there is one consistent theme: the significance and reality of what is. In Haggai, the crowd is bewildered by nostalgia, deceitful dreams about the past which have caused the people to lose their joy in what God has been and is doing among them in the present. In Thessalonica, the Christians are distracted by fables, convincing lies about an imminent future that have lead them to neglect their responsibility of love and service toward one another. The Sadducees, then, have deluded themselves inside their own imaginations, embracing a theology that allows them to ignore the fact that the apparent eternality of their religious institutions is simply a façade propped up by the oppression and cruelty an Empire was actively inflicting on their own neighbors and relatives.
However, “[God] is God not of the dead.” I’d add that neither is God the God of impending doom. Nor is God the God of magical thinking. God is the God of the present: “of the living.”
This coming year, our Bishop is hoping for parishes throughout the Diocese of the Rio Grande to emphasize the reality of Resurrection—not simply visualizations of what it might or could or even will be, but what it actively is. He wants us to take a square look at death and, rather than simply letting it blindly consume us, respond with planning and intention instead.
But I wonder if we shouldn’t push ourselves a step further.
Jesus tells us that God is the God of the living and that to[4] God, figures we would think of as lost to history are actively alive to God’s presence. If that’s the case, rather than simply planning for what resurrection might be, for what the future could look like based on active decisions and focused intention, how does it look for us to engage in resurrection right now?
As Jesus describes it today, resurrection appears to have at least two primary elements. First, resurrection is, in and of itself, Life—Life within, beyond, and above life as we presently encounter it; Life so concentrated and piercing and exuberant that, in its company, death not only loses relevance or can’t occur but simply doesn’t even exist. Secondly, then, resurrection appears to hold an emphasis on presence—presence with God, presence with reality as it stands, presence with and in the present itself.
So, then, how do we live that way, present to, with, and amidst this resurrection Life?
A lot of this wondering is new to me, so, I’m afraid I don’t have any solid answers at this point, and I can’t say I ever will. I do have questions, however, which I’m hoping we might explore together in the coming Church Year. So for now, I’ll leave us with a few of those: What does it mean for us to engage our present world via this resurrection? How does resurrection change our motivations and actions and understanding? In what ways can it alter our perceptions and hopes and dreams? What do our interactions with one another look like under this kind of resurrection? How do we embrace the power and immediacy of God’s resurrection presence? And finally, what does it mean for us to fully embody this reality, that
“[God] is God not of the dead but of the living, for to [God] all…are alive”?
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] One of the major plot points of the Hebrew Bible’s book of Ruth revolves around this tradition. Can Boaz find a way to marry Ruth when there’s a living relative more closely related to Mahlon, her dead husband?
[3] There’s a subtle yet interesting detail in how Jesus speaks to the Sadducees about resurrection. All his verbs are present tense. He doesn’t speak about what “children of the resurrection” will do. He speaks of their actions (or lack thereof, in this case) as current realities. It isn’t that they won’t marry or give themselves in marriage. They simply don’t. Neither will they die; they simply and objectively—and as they presently exist!—can’t.
[4] Or with or in or through or amidst—the preposition is implied and therefore especially muddy.