Sermon for Remembrance Sunday, November 9, 2025

Readings:

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

Things in this world are not as they should be. Things in this world have been messed up for a very long time. The evidence of this is in this service today. Today, the second Sunday of November, Anglicans throughout the world will remember their war dead. Soldiers, men and woman, who sacrificed their lives in the two world wars of the last century and in so many other battles since then. It is right that we should remember them, and pray for their souls and pray for their families. It is right that we should honor sacrifice. That is as it should be. What is not as it should be, what is obviously messed up, is that we live in a world where war is sometimes a necessity. We live in a world where freedoms have to be fought for, and protected. We live in a world where basic human dignity cannot be taken for granted. So it is right that we should honor bravery and self-sacrifice, but it is not right that human beings have created a world where such sacrifices are necessary. 

But that is a part of the story of our faith. I’m not saying anything new or controversial here this morning. A fundamental Christian belief is that human beings were designed in the image of God and made to live in peace and harmony with God, the earth, and each other, but from the very beginning we chose to turn away from that and to treat each other as objects or possessions and not as equal children of God. That is the very beginning of the Bible, but it is a theme that runs through the whole book and all of history. Think about our gospel reading this morning. The Sadducees ask Jesus a ridiculous question because they want to make fun of his belief in the resurrection of the dead. They ask Jesus if a woman marries seven times and all of her husbands die, and then she dies, in the resurrection whose wife will she be? Think about what is implied in what they are asking there. What is their real question? Who will she belong to? That is what they want to know. That is their understanding of marriage. That woman is a possession to them, not an equal child of God. Even in our most intimate relationships we objectify people and treat them as possessions. Is it any wonder that there is war between nations? We are broken human beings.

Scripture is so spot on about human nature, and if you need evidence of its truth, look around. Read the paper. The reason that we need to honor and remember the war dead today is because we live in a world of broken human beings, that can and will do terrible things to other human beings. We live in a fallen world and we have to deal with fallen humanity. Wars have to be fought. Maybe not every war, but some of them. Some conflicts we can avoid, but some we cannot walk away from, not if we value and respect our own lives or the lives of others. What would the world look like today if our fathers and grandfathers just walked away from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? Sure, our country is a long way from perfect, but it is still here. And you may or may not like some of the people who won elections this week, but you still got to vote. We cannot take that for granted. We owe a lot to those who fought. And one thing we owe them is to remember that humans are what they are. Humans are still not as they should be, as they were created to be, and that means that it is entirely possible that we will someday have to fight again. Things in this world are not as they should be. We are a long way from what God created us to be.

But God has not abandoned us to ourselves. We are believers in the resurrection. Unlike the Sadducees in our gospel story today, we believe that there will be a future day when God sets the world right again, and fixes all of us broken humans who cannot fix or save ourselves. No many how many wars we fight, we are never going to fix this world on our own. We cannot fix human nature, but God can. God can transform us and he can transform how we relate to each other. Think about Jesus’s answer to the Sadducees this morning. They ask who will the woman belong to? And Jesus’s answer is: she will belong to God. The Sadducees weren’t asking about love or marriage as we know it; they were asking about possession. And Jesus sets them right. In the resurrection, the only person she will belong to is God. This broken world and our twisted ways of relating to each other will be washed away and finally we will be able to see and relate to each other as God originally intended: as equal children of God. 

But that is a hoped for and devoutly believed in future day. We have been given a glimpse of that resurrection and our future glory in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but until the day we all live in that glory, we will have to deal with living in a world that is not as it should be. The world as it is. We need to honor those who help us live in the world as it is. We need to honor those who fight the wars that have to be fought, and honor those who sacrificed everything to try and make the world a little better and a little safer.