God Is In the Details

Scriptures:

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-40

I was talking with someone awhile back about a proposal, and I happened to mention that depending on whether you are the kind of a person who sees a glass as half-empty or as half-full there is a saying that can go either way:  either “the devil is in the details” or “God is in the details”.  The point of this kind of a bifurcation is that either the details can trip you up or you can discover the significance – even the beauty – of a plan by focusing on the details of it.

Here’s an example of how the devil can get into the details.  Donald Schmidt, a UCC minister in Washington, DC, tells this story:

“Many years ago I was on the board of directors of a seminary, and we had just moved toward a new consolidated Master of Divinity program.  The board was holding a meeting, and part of the point was to discuss the students who might be receiving the degree, and to determine their qualifications to receive the degree.

“This conversation, however, got rather sidetracked by a discussion of the new academic hood that would accompany the degree.  One of the board members went into a rather lengthy description of the hood, including expounding on the specific shade of the inside.  Finally one of the other board members could not stand it.

“’The darned thing is blue!  Now, can we talk about the students?’

That was the real issue, wasn’t it?  The students, not the hood they might be wearing.  It is easy to get bogged down in details and forget the larger picture of what truly matters.”

How many of us could replicate this story in some meeting or other that we’ve attended?  Indeed, those of you who have been on one of the Boards or Church Council here probably had a wry smile as you thought about some of the discussions that have gone on during those meetings.  It is not always easy to focus on what is truly important, and when we do lose that focus there is that tendency to get bogged down and to discover that “the devil is in the details.”

What is happening in each of our scriptural texts today has to do with paying attention to details.  This story in Luke is sort of a strange one.  It has to do with a rather obscure Jewish custom called Levirate Marriage which says that if a woman married a man, and he died before they had a child, she was to marry his brother and have a child in the first man’s name.  Now these scheming Sadducees really want to trick Jesus by posing this hypothetical question:  if a woman has married seven brothers after each has died, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?  Of course, the real reason they are asking this is to get Jesus to deny that there is any such thing as a resurrection, as indicated in the first line of our text:  “Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection…..”  In other words, they want to conscript him for their own purposes.

Remember that wonderful old musical motion picture from the 1950s “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” with Howard Keel and Jane Powell?  Well, here’s a story that if it were being made into a movie could be titled “One Bride for Seven Brothers”.  And, of course, besides the theological matter at issue here, this view of the woman offers a somewhat salacious slant to the story.  Here’s an example of what in modern times we’ve come to call “serial monogamy”.  Who wouldn’t be just a bit titillated by thinking about what this woman’s life must be like with one husband after another?  For those of us of [ahem] a “certain age” think Zsa Zsa Gabor or Elizabeth Taylor.  More recently, perhaps, we might reflect on, oh say, a Pamela Anderson, although with contemporary mores being what they are celebrities, to say nothing of ordinary people, seem less concerned to worry about the “marriage” part of “serial monogamy”.

What’s happening in this part of the gospel of Luke is an effort to discredit Jesus – to get people to stop paying attention to him.  It’s something like the political attack ads we’re now thankfully no longer being bombarded with after last Tuesday.  Just before the text we’re dealing with in chapter 20 Jesus tells the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, which ends with the comment:  “When the scribes and chief priests realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people.”  So, first they ask him, in order to try to trap him, the question about paying taxes to the emperor, and, of course, Jesus turns the tables on them by saying, “’Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’”  Now, they are back at him again with another trick question.  They don’t really want an answer.  They just want to trip him up.  They are trying a form of mis-direction, just like a magician uses mis-direction when he or she wants you to focus somewhere else rather than on what is really happening.

But Jesus uses the occasion for what we like to call “a teachable moment”.  He is saying, in essence, to these Sadducees:  you are focusing too much on the details of what is involved in a Levirate Marriage.  Change your focus to the woman’s and the brothers’ relationship to God.  What happens in heaven has nothing to do with who has been married to whom and everything to do with how we walk with our God.  The Sadducees had no intention of walking with Jesus.  Therefore, they were simply not “getting” what he was telling them about the resurrection.

Those who did “get” him were those who were walking with him – like Mary and Martha who had some first-hand knowledge of the resurrection after what Jesus had done with their brother, Lazarus.  Jesus was able to give Martha a much more direct answer than he did the Sadducees:  “I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who believes in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)  As Baptist minister Kyle Childress notes:  “Martha got a different answer because she was ready to receive the kingdom that Jesus was incarnating and proclaiming.  In her grief for Lazarus, the news of the resurrection was good and not simply a Glenn Beck kind of debate question.”  I rather imagine that nearly everyone here has had experience with that kind of grief and thus knows in our guts what it is that Martha was receiving from Jesus.

What Jesus wants these Sadducees to know is that God is in charge – not just of the here and now but of the resurrection.  Here’s a Yogi Berra-ism that may not be as familiar as some of his others.  When asked as a young player about his future prospects, he said, “The future is like the present, only longer.”  That’s the kind of thinking Jesus is trying to lead the Sadducees away from.  The resurrection is not just like the present only longer.  To believe in the resurrection is to believe in a whole new world – a whole new way of doing things.

In the second letter that Paul writes to the young church at Thessalonica he is likewise concerned that they understand this whole new world that Christ’s resurrection has opened up, but he is also concerned that they not get bogged down in details about another matter that occupied the attention of the early church – namely, the Second Coming of Christ.  Many in the church there were speculating about when that day might be, and such speculation has led them to become distracted from the mission at hand.  You simply can’t know when that day will come, Paul is telling them, so get your minds back on what is truly important.  Rather than getting caught up worrying about the details, we need to look at the larger picture.

In order to help them do this, Paul offers encouraging words, thanking God for these brothers and sisters who have been chosen by God as “the first fruits for salvation.”  Indeed, the believers in the church at Thessalonica were among the very first people in the world outside of the Holy Land to embrace and live out the Christian faith.  It was crucial that they not become discouraged and give up.  So, Paul continues his encouraging words, “…stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us…”   And then these wonderful words that transcend time and place:  “Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope…..”  “Eternal comfort and good hope” – now that’s focusing on the big picture and not on the details.

Nevertheless, if it is true, as the title of this sermon says, that God is in the details, then we need to be more aware of those details that are important in order to savor all the more that “eternal comfort and good hope” which come from God.

Here is an old story that many of you have probably heard before.  There once was a man who had worked in a factory for twenty years.  Every night when he left the plant he would push a wheelbarrow full of straw past the guard at the gate.  The guard would carefully go through the straw looking for some kind of contraband, but he never found anything.  Finally, the man was about to retire, and as he passed through the gate without a wheelbarrow this time, the guard, who had become friends with him over the years, said, “Charlie, I’ve seen you walk out of here every night for twenty years.  I know you’ve been stealing something, but I don’t know what it is.  Now that you’re retired, tell me.  It’s driving me crazy.”  And with an impish smile Charlie said, “I’ve been stealing wheelbarrows.”

In his preoccupation with discovering a wrong he felt sure was being committed, the guard was blind to the most obvious detail which was right there in front of him.  It is a matter of paying attention – of being alert and sensitive and ultimately responsive to God’s presence in the details of our lives.  Where have you found God’s presence lately?  What is the detail that you have been overlooking that will make God come alive for you?

The communion service that we participate in once a month is full of small details.  We say that God comes to us in this cup and in these small pieces of bread, but is this simply lip service (pun somewhat intended) or do we really mean it?  Do we – each one of us – discover God here, as we eat and drink and celebrate that “eternal comfort and good hope” which are part of the promises God has given us?  Come to the table – with all of the details that abound here – and enjoy the presence of God.

Amen

Dave Pomeroy