God gives us windows to holiness, and will open them fully – Luke 20:27-38, 2 Thess 2:16-3:5

32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I don’t know how many of you have ever been to the Broadhead Center at Duke. Formerly known as West Union, it’s the central campus dining location, and it’s a really beautiful building (as well as having reasonably priced good food!). One face of the building is glass, or at least some other transparent material, and because of a kind of cut away in the first floor, from the garden level up, you have two stories of continuous glass-like wall, letting in natural light and opening the space up. One day, I was sitting in that lower, garden, level, facing towards that wall that is a window, but reasonably far back from it, and I saw a student, one of the brightest and best that we pride ourselves on attracting at Duke, walk towards the glass wall, and walk straight into it and get knocked back. Once a few people had verified that this student was entirely uninjured, apart from with respect to his pride, someone shouted out, “That is the best compliment you could pay to the cleaning staff.” The student had failed to notice the window was a window, and thought it was just the outside.

We associate that mistake a little more closely, I think, with birds or bugs, who fly into windows, not realizing there’s anything there. We can imagine the opposite mistake too. Think of someone unable to see, but perfectly able to detect solid boundaries. Maybe a bat who had echo location but couldn’t see (most bats can see perfectly well, by the way, but we can imagine one who can’t). For that bat, there’s no danger of forgetting the window’s there, of thinking it’s just entirely open to the outside; rather, what they can’t experience is how the window reveals in a real way the outside. They might be able to feel that it’s different from the other walls, they could learn by being told that it reveals the outside to seeing batd, but they can no longer (at least) experience this personally.

On earth, we have so many windows to the sacred, created things through which we encounter God’s goodness. And like a good window, like the big window wall in the Broadhead Center, on a sunny late fall day sitting next to them feels good. We get light through them, we feel warmth through them, we see beauty through them, especially when we and/or others work to keep them clean. But, they’re not the fullness of what God has in store for us. And there would be two mistakes we could make with these windows to the sacred. One would be to treat them as walls rather than windows, to not encounter God’s goodness through them. The other would be to walk into them, because we forget that we’re inside, looking out a window, and not actually out enjoying the sun. In theological terms, we call that first mistake “iconoclasm,” not seeing God’s goodness through things that reveal it; the second, we call “idolatry,” thinking that things that reveal God’s goodness and gods themselves.

Marriage is an icon, a window to the sacred. It reveals God’s goodness, God’s love. It’s a sign, in an often alienated world, of commitment, fidelity, mutual sacrifice for the sake of mutual sanctification. In some marriages, that love spills over into the creation and raising of new life. Marriage can reveal God’s love, but it’s not God’s love. We all know that no marriage fully reveals God’s commitment and fidelity to us, God’s sacrifice for our sanctification, God’s creative and nurturing acts that bring forth new life. And some marriages, we know, can be painfully far away from any of that. Marriage is a window, and it’s a better window when we work to clean it up when it gets smudged, but it’s not the outside, it’s not the fullness of God’s love.

So, Jesus teaches, there will be a time when there won’t be marriage any more. Because when you’re outside, you don’t need a window to see the sun. After the final consummation of all things, we will see God as He is. And then sacraments will cease, because you don’t need a window when you’re already outside.

Paul prayed for the Thessalonians, and Paul, in heaven, prays the same for us now, that God would direct our hearts towards His love, and towards Christ’s endurance. That second half of the prayer is really a means to the first. Paul prays that we would be endure to difficulties of our current life, to keep on choosing virtue and choosing love even when that’s hard, and seeking forgiveness when we haven’t, so that we can come to the first half of the prayer, come to the fullness of God’s love. A love that we foretaste in real ways on earth, but will only know in its fullness in heaven. God will share the fullness of His love with us in Heaven. And God gives us windows onto that now.

The Sadducees don’t get that. They didn’t believe in the resurrection and they had this arsenal of “gotcha” questions that they used to trip up anyone who, like Jesus, did. We have records of other questions they asked to try to trip the Pharisees up, as the Pharisees, like Jesus, did believe there would be a resurrection. The Sadducees couldn’t see that this life points to fuller life. They saw that marriage was good, so they thought that if it’s so good, it must be around in the world to come. Jesus (and, here, he’s giving what would become the standard Pharisaic / rabbinic answer) sees that something can be good precisely because it reveals a fullness, we’re not ready for yet. But God is getting us ready. The rabbis listed three foretastes of the world to come: the Sabbath, a sunny day, marital intimacy. That list was never meant to be exhaustive, and I’m sure we can think of so many more. Let’s rejoice in them, feel warmth through them, clean them up when they get smudged, and long all the more for the day when we walk through them, with gratitude, but no regret.