Saint Luke 20:27–38
Everybody who has owned a television set since March of 1964 is familiar with the concept behind the game show "Jeopardy." The program reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given general knowledge clues in the form of answers, and they must identify the person, place, thing, or idea that the clue describes, phrasing each response in the form of a question.
The program, as all quiz shows do, challenges the viewer to pit their knowledge against that of the contestants. Sometimes the questions are easy, sometimes they are hard, and sometimes they are just unanswerable.
When the contestants are stumped, there is that pause where they all stare, looking puzzled, at the studio cameras, and wait for the dreaded buzzer to sound so that they can take their chances with another question.
Sometimes questions that we do not know the answers to puzzle all of us.
The encounters can leave us speechless, dumbfounded, and maybe a little more than frustrated.
I had a man in my old congregation whose questions were not only frustrating but mostly ill timed.
Just as the bells were ringing and the choir was about to march in, he would inevitably steam up to me and ask a question like: "Do you know how to light the oven on the stove in the kitchen?"
"No," I would reply and, either unsatisfied or unbelieving that I didn't know, he would ask the same question all over again to which the answer was always no.
This would go on for several attempts sometimes with the accent being placed on different words or syllables. This made him sound like an American tourist in some foreign land. “Do you know how to light the oven on the stove in the kitchen?” Again, I would reply “no” but since he was talking to me like I was I was from a different country I really wanted to reply with a “Nein”, or an “nyet”, or “non.” Or, if from Britain, “I’m so sorry old fellow but I haven’t the faintest idea.”
Sometimes he would change the word order and pause for effect, as if that would jog my memory, "The oven ... on the stove ... in the kitchen, do you know ... how to light it?" he would ask as if a new approach would bring about clarity. The answer was still no.
After several questioning attempts he would change the question into a declarative statement. "So, you don't know how to light the oven on the kitchen stove." The answer could have been yes, but I chose no because by this time, completely unaware of the cross examination going in the narthex the organist had launched into the first hymn.
Taking a big breath before asking the question another time in another way I had to stop him because, by now, the choir was long gone and the hymn was on its final verse, and no direct revelation had come as to how the stove could be lit.
Finally, exasperated, I said to him. "Listen Bill, you can ask me that question a million times in a million ways. You can even try asking it in English, French, and German but I'm still not going to know how to light the stove." And I hurried to the front to repaint the smile on my face and gasp out the greeting, "The grace..."
Unfortunately, I will have no such stories to tell about this congregation in the future because, clearly, there are no eccentricities here.
Difficult questions can be asked at the most difficult occasions.
Dr. Amy Jill-Levine, who may be setting a record for consecutive times being quoted in a sermon, told of the time her mother, who was on her deathbed asked her “‘What will happen to me when I die?’ I immediately answered, ‘You’ll see Daddy.’ My father had died decades earlier. She replied, ‘I look like hell.’ ‘Well, Mom, you’ve looked better, but when you see Daddy, you’ll look as beautiful as you looked the day you got married.’ ‘How do you know this?’ ‘Mom, I‘ve got a Ph.D. in religion; I know these things.’”1
One day, Jesus was asked an impossible question to put him to the test. If you had a hard time following the question you are not in jeopardy because it’s a convoluted one that boggles the imagination. It’s about marriage, death, remarriage, and who is married to who in the resurrection. It could be called instead of seven brides for seven brothers, seven husbands for one bride. Summed up, the trick question is: “Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? For all of them were married to her!”2
Now if I were Jesus I might have answered: “Huh?” because sometimes this kind of highbrow theological stuff goes way over my head. Or, if he was feeling a bit more snarky he would have been right to answer, “What difference does it make to you guys? You don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead anyway!”
Before we make the Sadducees into total bad guys I think they might have just been engaging in the kind of rabbinical rumble that the learned leaders of his day, and our day, seem to enjoy. Let’s ask each other big complicated, life and death, questions and see if anybody can figure out the answer.
“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” To which my witty, Anglican professor of ethics, Dr. Paul Elmen, said the answer was, “Not as many who would like to?”
I don’t know if this is just lore, but it was said that Billy Graham arrived in a small town to preach, and he asked a boy directions to the post office. The boy told him, and Graham thanked him. Graham said in parting, “If you come to the Baptist church tonight, I will tell you the way to get to heaven.” The boy said, “No thanks, you don’t even know your way to the post office.”3
After entering to the resurrection quibble for a bit Jesus tells us that the whole debate, they just had was irrelevant because God is God “not of the dead but of the living.”4
In my limited understanding of Jesus, I’m pretty convinced that Jesus was less concerned about where we’ll spend eternity and more interested in how we live out our lives in the here and now. Jesus is more interested in how we treat others. His question is always about the living: Do we treat them fairly? Do we treat them squarely? Are we always honest with them? Or, as they say in the south, are we so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly good?”
In the Academy every day our little ones pass a bulletin board with some words on it in big, bold, bright letters.
At their age they are probably not pondering the questions of resurrection, or where they will spend eternity. However, I bet if you asked them their answer would be with you, their parents, their grandparents, and we hope and pray, with the members of this faith community or some other faith community who will love them, and nurture them, and by their lives remind them of the bulletin board they saw even before many of them could read.
The first words: “Treat others fairly.” I think that Jesus and even the Sadducees would agree on that. That’s a pretty good way to follow Jesus who reminds us that whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sister we do to him.
So, it seems to me, that blocking food aid to families who receive – According to a US Department of Agriculture website – on “average ... a monthly benefit of $332. That’s $177 per person based on the average SNAP household size of 1.9 people.”5 seems, if not fair, a little chintzy.
Let the record show that yesterday I spent slightly less than that on a weeks worth of groceries and that was only for me, one person.
Somehow, this doesn’t seem fair when, it was announced in the same week that lines at food banks were growing longer and longer, that a billionaire would be granted a “new trillion dollar pay package” by his company.6
Perhaps the second sign should be hung on the walls of that company and not just our school for it said: “Do good without expecting a reward.” Or, as Jesus said once, “if anyone wants to ... take your shirt, give your coat as well.”7
Or, in the perfectly delightful paraphrase called The Message by Dr. Eugene Peterson: “If someone drags you into court and sues for the shirt off your back, giftwrap your best coat and make a present of it. No more tit-for-tat stuff. Live generously.”8
Finally, the sign said: “Invite someone to join you at lunch.” Jesus ate with and welcomed all kinds and conditions of people. He welcomed tax-collectors, and people of “ill-repute” – which is pretty much everybody – and he seemed to have a special affinity for foreigners. Think Samaritans who he kept making the heroes of his stories.
There didn’t seem to be any jeopardy with Jesus. He didn’t care if you got the answers right or wrong, but he did seem to care if you thought you knew all the answers.
So, I guess what Jesus might be asking us now is about “how we are going to live our lives and create our communities. Are we going to get any better?
“Are we going to get any better, or will we continue to allow politics to divide and make us self-righteous about our views?
“Are we going to get any better, or will we continue to make groups of people feel invisible and marginalized?
“Are we going to get any better, or will we continue to live in estrangement from each other and from God?”
What Jesus’ questioners forgot, and Jesus reminded them is that the resurrection reminds the world that the partnership God made with humanity, is a partnership aimed toward life.
So, it seems to me it is by how we live our lives, how we treat others, that will show how much we believe in the promise of the resurrection and the one who gave his life for that promise.
So, for me, “I’ll take resurrection for a bazillion, Alex” and only hope that I not only get the question, but the answer correct.
By the way, since we are in church, the answer is always, Jesus.
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1. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say November 9? 22nd after Pentecost,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 2025, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.
2. St. Luke 20:33. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]
3. Camille Cook Howe, Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, September 28, 2025.
4. St. Luke 20:38. (NRSVue) [NRSVue=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]
5. “Characteristics of Snap Households: Fiscal Year 2023,” Food and Nutrition Service U.S. Department of Agriculture, accessed November 7, 2025, https://www.fns.usda.gov/research/snap/characteristics-fy23.
6. Julia Shapero, “Tesla Shareholders Approve Trillion-Dollar Pay Package for Musk,” MSN, November 6, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-shareholders-approve-trillion-dollar-pay-package-for-musk/ar-AA1PXoKr?ocid=BingNewsSerp.
7. St. Matthew 5:40. (NRSVue)
8. St. Matthew 5:38–42. (Message) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004)]
9. Camille Cook-Howe, Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, October 12, 2025.
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