All in the family

A sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, November 9th, 2025 for the congregation of St. Stephen, Summerland by the Very Rev. Ken Gray

The original title of Norman Lear’s 1971 TV sitcom All in the Family was Those Were the Days which ended up as the show’s theme song. I can imagine J D Vance doing a cover version: “And you knew who you were then; Girls were girls and men were men” .  — a plea for a world more of patriarchal memory than of inclusive reality; a society with clear boundaries devised by those in power, a testimony which speaks to those now who feal powerless and left behind, those who imagine a fantasy fed by the past with little sense of the future beyond doom and gloom.

All in the Family remains one of the most popular American TV shows ever. The show revolves around the life of a working-class man and his family. It broke ground by introducing challenging and complex issues into mainstream network television comedy: racism, antisemitism, infidelity, homosexuality, women’s liberation, rape, religion, miscarriage, abortion, breast cancer, the Vietnam War, menopause, divorce, and impotence. [Wiki] That’s quite a list.   

Archie is an assertively prejudiced blue-collar worker. A World War II veteran, he longs for better times when people sharing his viewpoint were in charge. Despite his bigotry, he is portrayed as loving and decent, as well as a man who is simply struggling to adapt to the constantly changing world rather than someone motivated by hateful racism or prejudice.

Every culture though its various generations can and must face the challenge of change especially in relation to the ordering and cultivation of family relationships.  Jesus’ social environment was no different. In almost all his conversations with the various strands of Jewish leadership he brings and embodies change, still connected in a real way however with tradition. Remember Tevye in “Fiddler on the roof”: Poor Tevye. Jesus’ conversations, actually controversies, push and pull at tradition already set down in the Torah, the law of Moses passed down through the lineage of Abraham. He meets both progressive and conservative voices day after day, situation after situation.

Today we meet Jesus in dialogue with the Sadducees, sometimes historically called “Zadokites” or “Tzedukim,” who may be linked to Zadok, the Priest (of G F Handel fame). The Sadducees were an aristocratic class connected with everything going on in the temple in Jerusalem. They tended to be wealthy and held powerful positions, including that of chief priests and high priest, and they held the majority of the 70 seats of the ruling council called the Sanhedrin. As our passage explains the Sadducees “say there is no resurrection”; so they had a problem when their families and succession difficulties collided.

“Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. (Can you see what the problem is here? I can). Remember “impotence” noted above?  Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”

It’s a great question, and another excellent example of how ethical quandaries emerge when one’s theology is unimaginative, rigid, and unresponsive to emerging realities. Jesus responds creatively:

“Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but 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.”

What was once a conversation about family and succession now moves in a new direction, well beyond the rules and regulations of family life laid out in the Torah, but towards the afterlife and our transition towards all that exists beyond space, time and human experience. Like the Los Angeles Dodgers, who kept pitching close to the Toronto Blue Jays through most of the recent World Series — when you always pitch close and inside, the batter gets jammed and people get hit — it’s an offensive  strategy, in some cases, offensive. In Jesus’  context then, if the Sadducees continue to disbelieve in any kind of resurrection or afterlife, all sorts of ethical problems arise. Jesus continues:

“Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And 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.” (LUKE 20:27-38)

So where are we as believers and actors now regarding the resurrection of the body and the afterlife? Let’s return for a moment to the Apostles’ Creed:

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

Our belief in, and expectation of  the resurrection of the body is a foundational commitment, a fundamental response to God’s call in Jesus. It is God’s commitment to us, a principle I often share at funerals — Christians are blessed with a future, in God, empowered by the Holy Spirit. We can’t accomplish resurrection ourselves. Leave that to the Creator. In a world which prizes tangibles, things which can be held in the hand, things which can be seen, and received through all the senses, our real estate is in that place “where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.” [BAS funeral rite; Book of Revelation]

Put another way we’re “All in the Family.”

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