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The Monty Python Flying Circus has a very famous sketch about a “Norwegian Blue” parrot. “It’s dead,” says a customer returning the parrot to the pet store. “No, it’s just sleeping,” replies the pet store owner. Banging the obviously stone cold parrot on the counter, the customer accelerates, “I tell you it’s dead.” This goes on for 5 minutes.
I got to this example musing on our texts for this week. It’s all Jesus’ fault. In his answer to a trick question from the Sadducees about resurrection, he brings up the living and dead categories. And I was off and running. 1) What does it mean to be living or dead? 2) Does this have anything to do with what we believe about God? 3) What might it mean about how we are to live in this world?
If I were to ask you, “Is something living or dead?” how would you tell? Maybe you would check for a heart beating, or breathing, or eating, or growing, or reproducing. Usually it has something to do with movement. Living things are not static. As Paul put it in another context, “we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)
That led me to the next question, Do we believe in a living God? Of course, we do, I know many of us would exclaim. We believe in a living God. But sometimes, I think we have a monolithic God in our heads. We know who God is; we know what God looks like; we know what God wants. It’s very convenient to have a God like that. I imagine that God being very comfortable on my mantle. Whenever I need God, God is right there. But is that a living God?
And then I thought about Psalm 145 and the words the psalmist uses for God. Words like…
--just, --kind, --near --fulfills, --hears, --saves
--watches and –destroys
Obviously the psalmist does not imagine God as one on a shelf, or even far away in the sky. This God is involved in creation, involved with us. This God is alive. And this God requires us to be alive—to be active in return: to praise, to extol God’s acts from one generation to another, to meditate on God’s works.
This living God is not static. And this living God is not under our control. This living God adds to our workload—we have to pay attention, we have to watch for God’s actions in our world, we have to be “living and moving and being” as well!
And thus we arrive at my third question: What does living and dead have to do with us? At first, it seems a stupid question—if we’re here, we’re living. But how are we living? Are we alive in God?
I think this has something to do with how we act in our world, with whether we are static and unchanging in our attitudes to others, with our ability to be filled with the glory of God and God’s creation—with our willingness to share it in any way we can—with our dedication to think about it day and night.
Let me share with you a story about Eboo Patel. He was a young man, an angry young man, who was looking for the “right way” in the world. Someone suggested he read Dorothy Day. And in her, he said he found a “simple cosmic language of justice.” He heard Day to say, “If you are a Christian, you ought to live the way Christ lived. And if you do that, you shouldn’t be particularly impressed with yourself.” Patel says, this was a first step on kind of a larger interfaith spiritual journey which led, finally, to his own religion, Islam. Listen to Patel.
“I go to India four years after I’ve heard of Dorothy Day and wake up one day and there is a woman in my grandmother’s home who doesn’t look like she’s part of the family, extended family, or part of the household help, and I say to my grandmother, “Mama, who is this woman?”
And my grandmother says, “Well, we don’t know her real name, her father and uncle are abusing her so we’ve taken her in. The leader of the local Muslim prayer house has brought her here.” And my grandmother padded over to the cupboard and she brought out a shoe box and she opened it up and there were dozens and dozens of polaroids, pictures of all of these women, over the swath of India, over the course of 50 years that she had brought into her home.
And I’m going through these polaroids and she had written on the back, “Helped this one get her teeth fixed,” “Helped this one go to beauty school,” “Helped this one get a marriage,” “This one owns a cake shop in Hierba.” I’m looking through all of these and I’m like “Mama, why do you do this?” And she said, “I’m a Muslim. This is what we do.”
Patel concludes, “And it was this same Dorothy Day sense, You see the light on the path, and you walk the path, and you’re not especially impressed with yourself. And I still, to this day, understand that as the heart of the religious ethic.” (from On Being with Krista Tippett podcast, 10/27/16)
I think that is what it is like to be alive in God. Not just not dead. Not just breathing, or having a heart beat, or making random movements, or any of the other categories that get us to the living side of the equation.
For it is not enough to be living. It is not enough to ask convoluted questions of Jesus or one another. Being alive means more than that.
We are made in the image of the living God.
We are called into relationship, even partnership, with this Living One.
No wonder the psalmist is overwhelmed. “I will extoll you, my God and King; and bless your name forever and ever…On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.”
As Jesus says, “God is God not of the dead, but of the living.”
May we have life in this Living God,
And may we have it abundantly.
Alleluia, Amen.
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