Every one of us knows that a question is sometimes more than just a request for information.  From the time you’re this big (hold hand low) and your parents ask you whether you brushed your teeth before bed, you learn in a hurry that questions can have an agenda behind them. 

In the grown up world of politics and law and business, we have mastered the art of questions that aren’t really questions at all, right?  “Isn’t it true, Senator, that you stole campaign money from orphans and spent it on your illegal immigrant lover?”  Not really a question, right?  It’s an accusation with a question mark at the end.  We know that a question is sometimes a loaded question, a litmus test.  “So, Mr. Candidate, what do you think about abortion, the Iraq war, and nuclear waste laws?”  Some questions are designed to trap you no matter what you answer.  “Yes or no, Mr. Timm -- have you stopped cheating on your wife?”  But I haven’t cheated—“YES OR NO?” Uhhhhhhh. 

Now we are hardly the first society to have questions like this.  Jesus faced them all the time, from many different enemies in his own society.

This story starts with a question from the Sadducees.  They were a political and religious group that was contemporary with Christ, and all we need to know for this story is that they did not believe in resurrection from the dead, and they did not like Jesus.

So when they posed this question, everybody knew they had an agenda behind it.  Here’s how the question went:  Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother.  By the way, that is really in the Bible and back then, there was good reason for this law.  One reason is that a widow with no children had no means of support, no social security check, no hope for the future other than a slow starvation.  Widows with no children were forgotten in many societies.  But they were not forgotten by God.  God cares for the widow and the orphan, and so this law about marrying a brother was God’s way of making sure that widow was not forgotten and left to die.

So a man was to marry his brother’s widow to ensure she’d be cared for.  And everyone agreed on that part, but that was just bait for the Sadducees’ trap.  Now, they said, there were seven brothers.  The first one married a woman and died childless.  The second and then the third married her, and in the same way, all seven died, leaving her no children.  Finally the woman died too.  Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be?

Quite a question.  My first thought is to tell those brothers to stay the heck away from this woman!  All seven of them died when they married her?  She’s either a serial killer or she is the worst bad luck charm ever.  What’s going through the mind of that seventh guy when six of his brothers have all died with this woman and he’s out buying her an engagement ring?

In theory, the Sadducees just want to know whose wife she will be in heaven.  But this isn’t a question.  Everyone here knows the Sadducees don’t even believe in heaven in the first place.  This is a trap.  It’s an attack question, designed to destroy the other person’s viewpoint so your own will win without having to be defended.  It’s the hallmark of American politics, slinging mud and cutting down your enemy, and unfortunately it works, or we wouldn’t keep seeing it in every election campaign, no matter how much we lament it.

Thankfully, Jesus don’t play that game.  That’s not how he does business.  And it turns out that the Sadducees are the ones demolished by their own questions when Jesus cuts through to the real issue – do they really believe in God?  Is their God big enough and powerful enough to raise the dead?  His God is.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is.  This God is a God of the living.  And people of faith, whether breathing or buried in the ground, are alive to this God.  We talked about that last Sunday with the candles of All Saints, and today reminds us again that God is still God even beyond death.

Jesus says these things outright.  The people of this age marry and are given in marriage.  But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age, and in the resurrection from the dead, will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die, for they are like the angels.  He is not God of the dead, but of the living.

There is a resurrection, he says.  There is a life beyond death and it will be very different than life on earth now.  Even if this story about the single bride for seven brothers were real, it wouldn’t be an issue in the world to come.  So the Sadducees’ question is both a trick question and a wrong question.

We need to learn, from the Sadducees’ mistake and from Jesus’ answer, to ask the right questions.  Like I said in a Uniter one time, the question about heaven isn’t “What’s going to be there?” but “Who’s going to be there?”  There’s a lot we don’t know about heaven, but in order to learn more, we need to ask the right questions. 

And we need to ask the right questions about what God is doing in this life, too.  There’s a church workshop out there by a guy who took a congregation of 29 members and helped it grow to over 2500.  His name is Bill Easum, and he says that too often, churches ask themselves the wrong questions, questions about avoiding death rather than serving the God of life.  They ask:  How can we keep ourselves strong as a congregation?  How can we keep up the numbers and increase the budget?  How can we keep doing what we’re doing?  Easum says these are the wrong questions because they’re about self-preservation, and they assume the worst thing that could happen to any church is for the congregation to close its doors and die.  That’s not the case.  It’s far worse for a church to go on preserving their life stuck in one place when God has moved ahead in a different direction. 

I think this is a timely lesson for us because we have a big anniversary coming up in a couple of months.  The big 150.  150 years that we can trace our history back to the first congregation that became United Lutheran.  I’m glad for that history and proud of that history.  I want us to honor it by asking the right questions.  How can we respect our tradition but devote ourselves to mission even more?  Tradition and mission are both important, but one is more important than the other, and it’s a sin to put tradition first.

Please don’t walk away hearing me say that tradition is bad.  I am not an iconoclast; that’s a parody of what I am saying, which is that we need to ask where God is meeting us today and where he is leading us tomorrow.  And if John Q. Public is watching our 150 year celebration, I want him to believe that we are proud of where we’ve been, but even more concerned about where we are going.

Let me tell you about a couple of groups from this church that are asking the questions right.  First of all, the leaders who make decisions about our worship.  We just got a new hymnal, we’re just learning a new setting for worship today, we’re talking about screens and multi-media.  I’m not excited about these things because they are new and novel and digital.  I’m excited because we’re at least asking what will be the most effective way to help people really worship in 2007 and beyond.  We may not arrive at the same answers, but at least I see people asking some of the right questions about worship.

And I’ve been incredibly proud of our Women of the ELCA as they talk about where God is taking them next.  Our women’s group has a strong history and a strong program for the women who are in it.  It has not been effective for women of my generation and younger.  But as I’ve talked with the women who have the most invested in the current structure, they are not asking how to preserve things the way they are.  They are asking what God is doing among women of all ages, and how they can encourage younger women to get in touch with God in a way that works for them.  I applaud them for that.

This is part of what it means that God is Lord of the living.  God is always nudging us to get out of our ruts, to take the risks of faith by growing into the future.  You know, the poet TS Eliot said that April is the cruelest month because it forces the dormant roots of trees and flowers to strain up through the mud rather than remain comfortably asleep in the frozen ground of winter.  But the sleep of the roots is a sleep of hibernation, not rest.  Trees were meant to put out green leaves, and flowers were meant to push up through the mud in order to blossom.

Human beings were also meant to grow.  Life is change and growth, so a God of life is a God who creates change and growth as well.  We are not meant to hibernate in the frozen sleep of the way things have always been.  We are meant to grow until we attain the full height of the stature of Christ, even if it means being pushed up through the mud.  If this God of the living is going to be our God, we must learn to ask not “How do we keep things the way they are?” but “What must we do to find our true life in Him?”  Amen.