Sermon: God of the Living

Church of the Nativity Fayetteville, GA

November 9, 2025

22nd Sunday After Pentecost

Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17;Luke 20:27-38

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One of my favorite poems begins:

"My God my bright abyss 

into which all my longing will not go

once more I come to the edge of all I know

and believing nothing believe in this:”

And the poem ends there, with a colon, so you expect a second stanza, a description of what the poet believes. You are left hanging. It seems unfinished. But is it?

The poem My Bright Abyss is the beginning of the memoir by the same title, in which poet Christian Wiman grapples with faith, art, and mortality in the face of an incurable and rare form of cancer. He rejects dogmatic or "easy" Christianity, emphasizing that faith is less about certain belief and more about an active motion of the soul toward God, one that can coexist with doubt and an acknowledgment of life's painful contradictions. He is comfortable with the "bright abyss,” a place of uncertainty and mystery that can be both terrifying and a source of profound spiritual engagement.

But it’s not so easy to be comfortable with uncertainty. How many of us can say, as Wiman does, I’m okay with the unknown—especially when it comes to questions of mortality, death, and what lies beyond it?

Today, the week after All Saints’ Sunday, these questions remain on our minds. All Saints’ is a beautiful day that invites us to remember the loved ones who have gone before us, to give thanks for their lives — and, at the same time, to face our own questions about what it means to live and die in God. It’s a tender kind of remembering, one that brings both gratitude and ache.

The beauty of the readings we hear today: from Job’s lament to Paul’s encouragement, to Jesus’ conversation with the Sadducees, is that they don’t turn away from those questions. Together they invite us to stand, as Wiman says, at “the edge of all we know,” and to look out into the mystery of life and death, trusting that even there, we are held by God.

We all have questions about what happens when we die, where our loved ones are, and what it means to live forever in God. Every generation has wrestled with those questions and today is no different.

Some of you may know the concept of the rapture well — others, perhaps only in have heard it in passing. In certain strands of American evangelical Christianity, “the rapture” refers to a future moment when believers in Christ will be suddenly “caught up” or taken from the earth to meet the Lord in the air — an idea drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:16 and 17.

Some of you, like me, might have grown up in a branch of the church that taught the rapture as an absolute certainty. This interpretation became popular in the 1800s through a movement called dispensationalism, which divided history into distinct eras of God’s activity. It entered mainstream culture through study Bibles, revival preaching, and eventually through novels and films like the Left Behind series.

These books, which depict people vanishing in cars and airplanes and other people being left behind, uncertain what is happening, sparked a huge wave of interest in the rapture in American evangelical churches and pop culture in the 90s. I was a teenager at the time and, honestly, I was terrified of the idea that Jesus was going to come back and people I loved might be “left behind” because they weren’t Christians. Even those who’ve never been part of a church that teaches it have likely encountered this idea somewhere. It has become part of America’s broader religious imagination about “the end times.”

In our Episcopal tradition, we don’t teach the rapture as a literal event. The Bible does not describe a secret escape from this world, but rather God’s renewal of all creation—resurrection, not evacuation. Our creeds speak instead of Christ’s coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and of God’s promise to make all things new. Our hope isn’t in being whisked away from the world, but in God’s redemption of the world, the joining of heaven and earth, the restoration of creation in love.

Earlier this year, though, this rapture imagery made an unexpected return — not in pulpits or prophecy conferences, but on TikTok. It started when a South African preacher named Joshua Mhlakela announced that Jesus had told him the rapture would take place on September 24, 2025. Within weeks, his message swept through TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, generating more than 300,000 posts under hashtags like # (hashtag)RaptureTok.

What followed was a mix of earnest preparation, fear, mockery, and curiosity. Some posted videos of themselves “ready to go,” dressed in white, praying and singing hymns. Others shared confession videos, tearful and sincere. Still others turned it into comedy, pets waiting by empty shoes, people pretending to rise up in clouds of digital smoke. Reporters called it “TikTok’s first ‘world-is-ending’ moment.”

And then September 24th came and went. The sun rose. The world remained. For many, that was the end of it, another viral prediction proven false. But it was fascinating to read the commentary and stories that came out, asking why so many people got caught up in this prediction. The deeper question lingers: Why are so many people still drawn to these visions of endings and escape?

I think it’s easy to look at the culture of fear and uncertainty we’re swimming in right now as a nation and around the world and to understand why people would want to have certainty that there must be something more than this, and quickly. There has to be a way out of this mess we’re in.

Even amid the noise of #RaptureTok, there is a whisper of something holy: a yearning for God to break through, to set things right, to lift us out of despair. That longing isn’t foolish. It’s deeply human. The challenge is to stay awake not to a date on the calendar, but to the presence of Christ already here, interrupting our ordinary days, calling us to faithfulness in this moment, not escape from it.

In the language of Scripture, apocalyptic imagination isn’t really about prediction; it’s about perception. It invites us to see the world differently, to wake up, to be alert to what God is doing in the present. The word apokalypsis doesn’t mean catastrophe; it means revelation, the unveiling of what’s truly real. But I understand the longing behind wanting to know what is coming next. We want to make sense of our grief and want to be sure our loved ones are safe. We want to know that there is a time when justice wins and the evil in this world will be judged. We want control or at least comfort.

And that longing, that need for certainty, brings us right to our Gospel reading today. Because the people who come to Jesus with their own questions about life after death aren’t so different from us or from the ones watching the sky on RaptureTok, hoping for an answer.

That’s where the Sadducees come in. They weren’t asking Jesus their question because they wanted faith; they wanted control. The Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection at all, and they came to test Jesus, to trap him in a theological riddle. They ask, “If a woman had seven husbands, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?” It’s a ridiculous scenario, but we’ve all asked our own versions of it, haven’t we?

“Will I know my mother in heaven?” “Will my body be the same?” “What happens to the ones who didn’t believe in Jesus?” “Will my pet be in heaven?”

We want answers because death feels like the place where everything slips beyond our control. But Jesus doesn’t give us the neat, tidy answers we long for. And that’s not a failure of God; it’s a reminder that faith is not about control; it’s about trust. The need for certainty is the shadow side of fear. Jesus doesn’t offer certainty. He offers himself. Instead of the answers we crave, he gives us his presence, his life, and his promise, the sure ground on which we can stand even in the midst of mystery.

“Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage,” Jesus says, “but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead… they cannot die anymore. They are like angels, and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”

Jesus doesn’t describe heaven’s seating chart or what kind of bodies we’ll have. He simply says: You will live. You belong to God. You will be changed. And then he roots that promise in the deepest truth of all: “The Lord is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob — not the God of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

What a powerful word. To him all of them are alive. That means the ones you’ve loved and lost are alive to God. It means you, when you breathe your last, will still be held in the life of God. It means that God’s love is stronger than the grave. And that, friends, is the revelation, the apocalypse, not of an escape from this world, but of the God who fills it with resurrection life even now.

That’s the hope that rises in Job’s words today, too. Job has lost nearly everything — his children, his wealth, and his health. He sits in the depths of grief, mourning a life that has been utterly upended. In the middle of his pain, he cries out:

“I know that my Redeemer lives,

and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;

and after my skin has been destroyed,

then in my flesh I shall see God.”

Even when life has stripped him to nothing, even when he cannot see a way forward, Job affirms a trust that transcends understanding, a trust in the God who redeems and restores.

It’s not a calm, intellectual statement. It’s a cry from the depths, from a place of absolute uncertainty. He’s still in the depths of grief for the loved ones he has lost and the drastic way his life has changed. He doesn’t know when or if his suffering will end. He doesn’t know much. And yet, “I know,” he declares. He doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know when, but he knows who. “I know that my Redeemer lives.”

That’s our confession, too. Not “I know how resurrection works” or “I know what life after this bodily existence will look like,” not “I know all the answers,” but “I know the One who holds me — and everyone I love — in life and in death.”

I remember when that hope became real for me. My grandma, my mom’s mom, lived with us for sixteen years after my granddad died when I was nine. She was more like a second mom to me, always right downstairs when I needed her. She was a funny, stubborn woman I loved to pick playful fights with. “Okay, Leon,” she’d say when we argued, because I was so much like my granddad, who loved to tease her, too.

She never went to church, even after I began to as a teenager or when my mom did, shortly before my grandmother fell ill. The daughter of a preacher, and someone undoubtedly marked by some church hurt, she would always say, “I don’t have to go to church to believe in God.” She kept her distance from the faith that had become so important to me.

When I was a young adult, she had overcome breast and liver cancer—ever a spitfire, she fought through them both. But when a fall landed her in rehab, her weakened body couldn’t fight off the infection she got there. I sat beside her bed in hospice, reading the Bible aloud—mostly to comfort myself with the hope that I’d see this woman I loved so dearly again after she died. I didn’t expect it to be for her at all.

But she started asking me to read the Bible to her in those last days. She began talking about Jesus nonstop, and about being reunited with my granddad. I was amazed; I’d never heard her speak like that in all my life, neither about faith nor with that kind of tenderness. I knew, like Job knew. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that something had happened in that thin space between life and death, that she had encountered Christ in a real and mysterious way. Somehow, it had awakened in her a knowing that she was moving into a fuller life with God than she had ever known in this one.

And that, I think, is the real promise of resurrection. At the heart of the resurrection is not a promise of more life. It’s the promise of the presence of God. The theologians call it deification—our union with Christ. It means that our destiny isn’t to float away into the clouds, but to be fully alive in God, as Christ is. Right now, we taste that union in glimpses—in prayer, in love, in communion. But one day, we will know it completely.

As 1 John says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” That’s not something to fear. That’s something to hope for. So how do we live in that hope? How do we practice resurrection before we see it? By trusting God—now. By loosening our grip on control, just a little bit. By remembering that our hope is not in what we know, but in who we know. The best way to prepare for death, the best way to prepare for eternal life, is not to learn the details, it’s to practice letting go. Letting go of fear. Letting go of control. Letting go into the arms of God.

That’s why the Church gathers every week to say the Creed, to break bread, to pray for the dead and the living alike. We rehearse trust. We practice resurrection.

So, when the questions come —and they will —When you wonder what heaven is like, or where your loved one is, or how it all ends, remember this:

You may not know the details. You don’t have to. You only need to know this: Your Redeemer lives. And the God who raised Jesus from the dead is the God of the living. And to him, all of them are alive.

So come to the edge of all you know and trust instead—even in what you cannot see. Amen.