a different direction

I love the conversation that has been happening in the post below the insights of Candyce and Ben are superb and will no doubt help my preaching this Sunday. I've noticed this week, though, how easy it is to fall in the Sadducees' trap in the preaching of this text. It would be so simple to fall into a convoluted theological lecture on the nature of the resurrection; what life will be like in the new heaven and the new earth; isogesis out of our own need to know what our present relationships will look like in the age to come. (Thank you Candyce for your clarity in addressing the different forms "marriage" can take).

As I studied this text, I felt myself going there. I found myself back in seminary, spending hours debating nuances of language in theological discourse; the kind of stuff I complained about when this blog was called "a bored seminarian." Then I ran across these words from William Barclay:

It may well be that we find this an arid passage. It deals with burning questions of the time by means of arguments which a Rabbi would find completely convincing but which are not convincing to us today. But out of this very aridity there emerges a great truth fora nyone who teaches or who wishes to commend Christianity to others. Jesus used arguments that the people he was arguing with could understand. He talked to them in their own language; he met them on their own ground; and that is precisely why the ordinary people heard him gladly... Jesus used language and arguments which people could and did understand; he met people with their own vocabulary, on their own ground, and with their own ideas. We will be far better teachers of Christianity and far better witnesses for Christ when we learn to do the same." (emphasis his, The Gospel of Luke, p. 298).

This might be an interesting place to take this text. It might behoove us preachers to think about the language we use, the arguments we weave, and the wisdom we employ. As Tony Jones has said, "will it play at Wal*Mart?"