Sermon for Sunday, November 9, 2025 || Proper 27C || Luke 20:27-38

Jesus’ words to the Sadducees in today’s Gospel are words that speak of the sublime mystery and majesty of God. I’m so excited that we got to hear this story today because Jesus’ words light my theological imagination on fire. We’re going to spend all of today’s sermon in my theological imagination as we envision as best we can our way into God’s point of view. None of us is really qualified to talk about God’s point of view, so you’ll have to take everything I say today with a grain of salt – or as a professor of mine used to say, “with salt mine.” In the next few minutes I might say something that is true, but if I do, it will have been by accident because what I’m really going to talk about is Adam’s point of view about God’s point of view. But maybe the Holy Spirit will help us glimpse the corner of the edge of the majesty of how God sees things.

So with that caveat aside, let’s listen to the end of Jesus’ conversation with those wily Sadducees. Jesus deftly sidesteps the Gotcha! moment they’ve constructed for him, and then  finishes his response with these words: “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 [God] is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive.”

Here Jesus references the third chapter of the book of Exodus, in which God says, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham…Isaac, and…Jacob.” Jesus notices that God doesn’t say, “I was the God of your father…” From our limited point of view, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are long dead – somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand years ago, or about a thousand years in Jesus’ day. But God, Jesus says, sees things differently, as his emphatic end to the conversation demonstrates: “Now [God] is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive.”

This is our first glimpse into God’s point of view: “to God all of them are alive.” Can you imagine what that must be like for God? All of creation from the moment that moments began alive all at once. Every star that died billions of years ago, but whose light is just reaching us now; every single-celled organism gliding through the primordial ooze; every person we have ever loved and every person we have never known; all of them alive to God, all of it happening now for God.

I don’t know about you, but I get a little dizzy just trying to comprehend this thought – the riot of color and sound, the collision of what we see as the past and future, the unmeasured light years of space and uncounted eons of time all seen now by God, all spoken into being now by God, all loved and cherished now by God.

We can’t ever hope to comprehend this thought because we live our lives in linear fashion, moving moment to moment. We have memories of the past, and we have hopes for the future. Yesterday happened yesterday. It’s not still happening today. This linear model is like flipping through the pages of a magazine. Once I’ve flipped from page 35 to 36, I’m no longer looking at page 35. But from God’s point of view, the magazine is a collage of all the pages, with each picture cut out and arranged just so, like an elementary school art project.

This thought comforts me. From God’s point of view, I’m not simply Adam as I stand here before you: in his early forties, father of two middle-schoolers, managing his anxiety, glad for sweater weather, distressed by the violent trajectory of the world, grieving the loss of a parishioner and friend, preaching his seven hundred and somethingth sermon. No. From God’s point of view, I am the totality of myself: everything that has ever happened, everything that will ever happen, every joy, every regret, every word spoken in anger, every word spoken in love, every lullaby and dirty diaper and sleepless night and song sung and deathbed visited, every embrace, every relationship, every failure, every triumph – everything that makes me the person I am, God sees and God speaks into being. This totality of myself includes my death and whatever there is in what we would call “After,” but what God still sees as “Now.”

The apostle Paul understands the difficulty of speaking about God’s point of view, and he says what I’m trying to say much better than I ever could: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12).

To be fully known. This is how God’s point of view works. God knows us fully. God knows the totality of each of us, just like God sees the entirety of creation happening in the eternal moment of now.

Speaking about God’s point of view has the unfortunate byproduct of making us feel so small, even insignificant. It’s only natural in the face of the idea that all of creation is always present to God to think that we don’t matter, that in the grand cosmic scale our lives are worthless. But from God’s point of view, nothing could be farther from the truth. God couldn’t care less about the “grand cosmic scale” because the notion of a “scale” of any kind is meaningless to our eternal and infinite God. God speaks every subatomic particle into being and celebrates it as if it were the only speck in existence. Each speck has God’s full attention; if it didn’t, it would cease to be.

We may look up at the night sky and see ourselves as small, insignificant specks on a small, insignificant planet orbiting a small, insignificant star. But to do so is to deny the truth not just about ourselves, but about all of creation. All of creation is present to all of God. This includes you and me. If God weren’t constantly and continuously speaking each of us into existence, we would cease to be.

So if we are anywhere in the ballpark of the truth of God’s point of view, what does this all mean for us? Let’s quickly look at three things: what we call past, present, and future, but each of which is always now to God.

First, the past and our grief over people dying: From our perspective, the sun sets below the horizon. But in reality, we are spinning away from the sun. Likewise, we grieve when someone dies because, from our perspective, that loved one is gone. But we know in a place deeper than normal knowing that, in reality, our loved one is still alive to God. Ultimately, grief is a way to express our frustration that we have a severely limited ability to perceive reality. At the same time we know from experience that every now and again, we catch glimpses of true reality when we feel the presence of a dead loved one alive in a different way.

Second, the present: Since God is fully present to every particle of creation, which includes each of us, we have no business thinking of ourselves or anybody else as insignificant. Everyone and everything God made matters, so we must affirm this in our actions.

Third, the future: Those we perceive as future generations are as alive to God as we are. Therefore, it is our duty to honor their significance in the same way we are called to honor those we meet today. This means making choices in our personal and communal lives that sustain our world, which is another piece of creation fully present to God and therefore worthy of our honor.

Okay, I’ve just talked for nearly fifteen minutes about a topic that I have no credentials to talk about besides my theological imagination. However, being unqualified does not mean that we shouldn’t strive to see creation through the eyes of God. This week, I invite you to take such striving on as a spiritual practice and see how your vision changes. Prayerfully imagine your way into God’s point of view, and see yourself, this community, and this creation as God sees everything: as generative and beautiful and cherished, fully known and fully loved.

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Photo by Heather Green on Unsplash.