What’s important
This week, we’re finishing up our Episcopal 101 class. We’ve talked about liturgy—why the altar is green this week but was white last week. We’ve talked about how the church works—about bishops and conventions. And we’ve talked about doctrine—about the Trinity and the Nicene Creed.
Those topics are important. And I can dig into minutia with the best of them. I once spent twenty minutes explaining why I prefer red vestments on Maundy Thursday. Another time, someone asked about fonts in the bulletin, and—well, let’s just say, if you overheard that conversation, you might be forgiven for concluding that salvation itself depends upon the choice between Garamond and Baskerville.
Sometimes, though, we need to remember that Jesus pretty regularly cautioned those who focused on minutia while “neglect[ing] the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.”
That’s a quotation from Matthew, but today’s Gospel reading from Luke is another example of the same sort of warning. A group of Jesus’s opponents come to him with a “gotcha” question. “If a woman is widowed and remarries seven times, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?”
Jesus’s opponents aren’t motivated by curiosity. They don’t believe in the resurrection anyway. They’re just hoping to ensnare Jesus in a logical trap. But the trap fails because Jesus rejects the premise of their question. “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… They are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”
The men debating Jesus focus on rules and logic. But Jesus answers with relationship and with mystery.
Yesterday, I watched an old movie that I’ve seen many times before. You may know it: Inherit the Wind. It’s a fictionalized account of the Scopes Monkey Trial—a court case 100 years ago this year that put a science teacher on trial for teaching evolution instead of creationism.
When I first saw the movie, and later read the script of the stage play, I loved the legal and theological debates, and even the gotcha questions. The Bible says that God created light on the first day, but didn’t create the sun until the fourth day. And so the lawyer for the defense asks if that first day could have lasted for twenty-five hours. Or for thirty hours. Or for a month. Or a year. Or for ten thousand years – long enough to fit in at least a bit of evolution.
It’s a clever argument. But the point of the movie isn’t about winning an argument. It’s about how we arrive at truth. And, in the end, that same defense attorney leaves the courtroom with Darwin and a Bible side by side in his briefcase. Because what he actually stands for isn’t a tidy answer to all the riddles of existence. He’s not fighting for certainty. He’s fighting for the freedom to keep searching, for the courage to hold both faith and doubt together, for the right, as he puts it, to be wrong.
I see Jesus doing something similar in today’s Gospel: zooming out, widening the lens, reminding us what’s important. When I hear his response to the Sadducees, I can imagine him giving a similar nonanswer to us when we ourselves get too deep in the weeds of theological minutia.
Faith can be a bit like an Impressionist painting. If you stand too close, all you’ll see are meaningless dots. But if you take a step back, light and water and sky come into focus, and suddenly the whole picture makes sense.
Faith works like that sometimes. Up close, it’s all details: the color of vestments, the order of the service, the debates over language and rules and protocol. But take a step back, and you’ll begin to see something larger—a story about grace, forgiveness, and the stubborn persistence of love.
It’s not that doctrine doesn’t matter. But doctrine isn’t the thing itself. And I think Jesus’s words give us permission to embrace mystery, to become comfortable with ambiguity, to adopt at times the language of poetry—to talk of being “children of the resurrection” without knowing precisely what that will look like for each of us.
Understanding scripture this way is an important skill when we’re trying to understand God intellectually. But it’s even more important in harder times, in those moments of desperate longing when we come to understand our need for God. And those harder times come for all of us.
You can see an example of holding on to mystery in the passage we heard from the Book of Job. After everything in his life has fallen apart, after he’s lost everything he loved and valued, Job still manages to say, “I know that my Redeemer lives.”
He doesn’t say it with joy and confidence. He says it through tears. He’s not standing in the sunlight of certainty. He’s sitting in ashes. But somehow still hope rises in him. He doesn’t know how his Redeemer lives, or when he’ll see God. He just knows that the relationship isn’t over.
And our faith is sometimes like that too. Sometimes we notice only brushstrokes. Sometimes we see the big picture. And sometimes we sit in the dark and try to remember an image we last saw clearly years ago. In those moments, we need to trust that the same God who created all that is can still bring light from darkness—even when that new day seems slow to dawn.
So the next time you find yourself caught up in details, or in questions, or in despair, remember that it’s ok to zoom out a bit. Remember that our redeemer lives. Remember that we, too, are children of the resurrection.