The Dead Live
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, April 19, 2026
Reading: Genesis 15:1-6: Romans 4:13-25
I got to interview a leading intellect once on what he would do without the resurrection. If it could be proven beyond doubt that Jesus of Nazareth’s grave had been discovered, and his bones were inside, what would you do? Become Jewish maybe, or something else? He said something that shocked me. He said, “I would want to die.” Without the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the grave, he wouldn’t want to live at all. Goodness.
It’s been a big week or two for faith. The pope and the president and vice president sparring in interviews. Those who studied the Avignon papacy or Just War theory are suddenly feeling vindicated for their life choices. And it’s enough to make you give thanks for Canadian politicians who don’t pretend to be theologians. Here’s a less noticed faith-related news item. Victor Glover from the Artemis expedition was asked if he had an Easter message. He said this:
When I read the Bible and look at all the amazing things done for us, who were created. We here have this amazing place this spaceship. You’re also on a spaceship called earth created to give us a place to live in the universe.
Being in an alien environment, he was cognizant of all the work done so he could breathe, eat, travel, and so he was appropriately thankful to the engineers and others who made it possible. So too should all of us be grateful to God for the fact that we can breathe, eat, live and love. There’s a myth afoot that science and religion are in implacable rivalry, I just don’t find it so, and one astronaut with many listening bore witness to that.
We do have this amazing creation to live in. But here’s another part of the story. We ruin it. And one another. We’re like astronauts in an expertly built ship who go around smashing the instruments, destroying the computers, trying to kill one another. And we can’t seem to stop ourselves. What’s to be done?
To read the book of Genesis, God has tried several responses to the way we harm creation and one another. First God gives us rules, simple ones, don’t eat this. Ten minutes later, we’re munching away, and exiled from paradise. Adam and Eve’s elder son Cain murders their younger son Abel, and we’ve done likewise ever since. The same technology that blasts people around the moon blasts cities and children to rubble. And no one has yet figured out how we stop ourselves. So, God figures he’ll start over. Wipe out these bad people and bank earth’s future on the one good family. Noah’s. An ark is built, animals line up, that family is saved, the bad people removed. A hard reset for creation. And ten minutes after the ark lands, Noah, the supposedly one righteous person, is drunk, naked, and cursing his own children. Well, that didn’t work out. So, God tries again to repair humanity. This time by summoning a family. An unlikely family. Abraham’s and Sarah’s. They’re 100 years old and couldn’t have children when they were young. And God says, perfect, I’m going to make a family from you that will heal everything. That experiment is still ongoing in the Jewish people. I love that when God wants to repair his beautiful but marred creation, he doesn’t send an army or empire, a plague, or some race of superhumans. God sends a family. A rambunctious, fractious, difficult family. Like yours and mine.
Finally, God comes in person. God figures, I’ve tried rules, I’ve tried using the “best” people, I’ve chosen a family, now I’m coming myself to make things right. As a member of that family and of the entire human family. That’s Jesus of Nazareth, whose death and resurrection repair creation. That work is incomplete. If you look at the headlines, or out the window, or into your own heart, you’ll see we still ruin creation. Abraham’s family and Jesus’ death and resurrection must still be working themselves out to undo human sin and destruction. That’s what the book of Romans is about.
If you visit our elder siblings at Holy Blossom Temple, you’ll recognize that the same person made their stained-glass windows and ours. I love this word: a stained-glass maker is called a glazier. Their windows tell a much longer story than ours. Our windows go from Jesus’ birth to his ascension. Theirs go from Abraham to Albert Einstein. We concentrate on the life of one Jew. Theirs tell the stories of all Jews from Father Abraham to today. Their first two windows are of Abraham and of Moses. The father of faith and the receiver of the law. Both towering figures in biblical faith. What Paul does in Romans is elevate Abraham’s importance even higher. Abraham is older than the law by some centuries. His response to God’s promise is to believe. Even though the evidence is all stacked against him: his old body, Sarah’s just as old. Yet he trusts. That’s the model for Christian belief. Moses’ laws are for Jewish people, including Paul. The Ten Commandments blossom out into hundreds of laws that shelter the Jewish people. But Paul doesn’t want us gentiles, non-Jews, to think we have to follow those to be Abraham’s people. He wants the church to be a union of all peoples, Jew, and gentile alike, summoned by faith in the God who raises the dead.
God originally calls out Abraham and his descendants to save the world through them. Now Jesus’ coming means the world—that is, all other nations in addition to Israel—is being saved. God is stitching all people together in a community of love called church. And when that’s done, Jesus Christ will return and all will be well, as God intends.
You’ll remember last week I spoke of how we non-Jews know we’re not righteous. Our own consciences show we fail to do the good even that we think we should. Jews have the law to see they fall short. So, all of humanity is in a jam we can’t get out of. It’s as if the Artemis astronauts were sabotaging their own ship, breaking things, and each other. NASA sends up other astronauts with more rules: hey, quit, behave, your lives depend on it. Then they start beating those guys up too. So, God comes in person to set us right. Is this analogy still working? Have I worn it out yet?
I asked some of you in Bible study what you think of when you think of Abraham. For some, he’s the father of three monotheist faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks used to ask audiences who the most influential person in history is. They’d guess wrong. And Sacks would finally say ... Abraham. And it’s not even close.
How probable is it that one man, Abraham, who commanded no empire, ordered no army, performed no miracle, delivered no prophecy, should today without doubt be the most influential man who ever lived, who's claimed as the spiritual ancestor by 2.5 billion Christians and two billion Muslims?
Abram was born in Mesopotamia, he’s there minding his own business, when God says you, go, get you from your land, and your father’s house, and go, I will make of you a great nation. I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who curse you, and through you all nations of the earth will be blessed. And Abram goes. This is unusual, even astonishing. For traditional people, their land and family are all they have. To leave where your ancestors are buried is to be a tree uprooted, it’s to die. God cuts Abram off from his past, and so from life.
Later, Sarah gives birth to their miraculous child, Isaac. The centenarian is in the maternity ward. Sarah laughs when she hears God’s plan to save the world through her aged body, and so Isaac’s name means child of laughter. And God tells Abraham to go and sacrifice Isaac. You, go, get you to a mountain I will show you, and sacrifice the child there. And Abraham goes. In other stories, Abraham argues with God. When God wants to wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham says, you sure about that? What if there are a few good people there? But when asked to wipe out his own child, Abraham goes without objection. If the first call to Abraham was to cut him off from his past, this calling to sacrifice Isaac is cutting Abraham off from his future.[1] God is asking, do you trust the evidence, the child Isaac, or me? At the last moment God stops Abraham, don’t do it, sacrifice this ram instead. The ram caught in a thicket by his horns is a sign of Jesus for us, caught on his own tree. Our Jewish elder siblings blow a ram’s horn as a sign of God’s deliverance.
Abraham is about a lot of things in biblical faith. God promises him countless descendants, like the stars in the sky or the sand on the shore. God also initiates a covenant with Abraham, to bless the nations through him. He is the first one circumcised. Jewish males ever since have the covenant cut into their flesh. They are peculiarly marked. You can imagine Abraham, 90 odd years old, when he hears about circumcision, saying, uh, God, sorry, I don’t hear so well anymore, you said you want to cut my what? When I see people today who want ever more painful tattoos and piercings I think hmm, our culture actually misses painful rites of passage. Almost instantly circumcision is a metaphor for cutting away doubt, injustice, sin. Abraham is also promised the land. The very same bit of land in the Mediterranean that’s controversial today. US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee got in trouble for saying Israel could lay claim to all the land in the middle east. Paul says Abraham is entitled to more than that even: “The promise that he would inherit the world ... came to Abraham through the righteousness of faith.” The world, not just the promised land. Not that Israel would dominate the world. That’s what empires do, that’s what got the ambassador into geo-political trouble. But that all the world will be blessed, and healed, through Abraham’s people.
Paul adds here a novel interpretation of Abraham. He is also the father of resurrection.
Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So shall your descendants be.” 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), and the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.
The Greek is even more bleak. Abraham’s body is dead. Sarah’s womb is dead. There is no life in him or in her. But God loves summoning up life where there should be none. This might be my favourite verse in the whole Bible, and it’s just something Paul says in passing here: God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist”. That’s all God does. That’s all God is: the life-giving One. God loves giving life where there shouldn’t be any.
And this is what we have to say in any hopeless situation. There is a hope that is beyond hope, against hope. That is far beyond what’s strictly reasonable. We believe in a God who gives babies to 100-year-olds and who gets born himself. A God who ought to be dead in the tomb and instead is alive and loose and sowing life in every place of death. I can’t help but offer this hubristic thought: this is not how I would have saved the world! I would do it by removing my enemies, promoting my friends, and forbidding any act of harm as defined by me. The way God does it is to summon an impossible family, then get born as a child of that family, to suffer and rise for that family and every family. That’s unexpected.
Now there’s a wonderful, old-fashioned English word in our text that I hope you noticed: “reckoned.” We southerners use that word a lot: is it springtime yet? I reckon so. Means, sort of looks like it, but I could be wrong, I reckon. In Genesis, Abram believes God, and it’s reckoned to him as righteousness. Doesn’t mean maybe, maybe not. Means certainly, count on it. Remember I said Noah is the best person, his, the best family on earth? That doesn’t last long, but for a minute it’s true. Well Abram is not particularly good. He falls in and out of trust with God’s promises. Tries to hustle up his own family when God doesn’t do as he expects. Abram isn’t chosen because he’s good. He’s chosen because God is good. And God makes covenant with him. Promises to him. Abram’s is not like the covenant with Moses: the covenant with Moses requires Jewish people to behave. The covenant with Abraham does not. It’s not conditional. It’s a promise. God is going to bless Abraham and all his descendants, including those who believe in Jesus and so become part of Abraham’s family. That’s available to us here this morning.
So “reckon” might not quite get at it. Other English translations are like this: Abraham believed God, and it was imputed to him as righteousness. Credited to him. The Greek is logizomai, logicked. A word we don’t have in English. Abraham believes God makes life from death, calls everything into existence, and will raise new life yet again. So, in any impossible-seeming situation, we Christians can’t say it’s impossible. We believe in the God who gives life to the dead. The godmother of living preachers today, Fleming Rutledge, points to big, geo-political events that show this. No one thought Apartheid would end in South Africa peacefully. Until it did. Or that the Berlin Wall would fall peacefully. Until it did. Or that non-violence would work against Jim Crow racism in the south. Until it did. Faith looked impossible beforehand. Afterwards, it looks obvious: of course, those things happened. But in the middle of it? Hard to see.
Fleming also gives the example of the White Rose, a Catholic student resistance movement to Hitler. Fleming attended a screening of a movie about Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friends in the White Rose, whom the Nazis rounded up and executed. And one viewer denounced the film and stormed out: the White Rose didn’t shorten the war by one day, didn’t save a single life. Bah humbug. But today members of the White Rose, a Christian student group, are some of the most admired people in all of Germany. More importantly, in Christian terms, they’re saints, martyrs. And even if we had never learned of them, it wouldn’t be for nothing. God gathers up the ashes we make of one another and ourselves, and blows life into them, the way God once did in creation. Paul says that’s all God is, that’s all God does.
How about today? What impossible thing will one day look natural, normal, because of the resurrection?
It’s Earth day this week. Fitting when we’ve just had some of the best images of earth ever produced to love the blue dot we live on. To hate that place is to hate God. God makes it, sustains it, and makes a home there with us. In a reflection on a previous shot of Earth from the moon someone wise said the photographers were the only persons who ever lived who were not in the shot. Who were behind it. All the rest of humanity, living or dead, is on the blue dot that God loves. We should be proud of efforts to care for the Earth and should do more. Because it’s all going to be resurrected.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that an astronaut offered thoughts of God in space. William Shatner, the Canadian actor and now astronaut apparently, offered reflections on this. Captain Kirk went up in orbit as a 90-year-old, saw space, and felt miserable. Shatner was overwhelmed with sadness, with the cold of space, “when I looked ... into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold ... all I saw was death.”
A friend of mine suggests all our talk about space is really disguised and unawares talk about God. Notice how many sci-fi movies turn religious by the end. They’re about what humanity is. If we ever meet intelligent life besides ourselves, you know what one of our first questions will be? You guys got any kind of religion? When we ask: “are we alone in the universe,” it’s a question about God, not the Martians. And if we meet Martians, we’ll just be alone together with them, wondering if there’s a God behind all this.
Here’s why we Christians think we’re not alone in the universe. There is life at all. And given that startling reality, we also think Sarah had a baby at 100. That Jesus’ tomb was empty and ours will one day be. That if you look at earth, or space, or in another’s face, with the eyes of faith, all you see is life, life, and more life. Amen.
[1] This is all straight from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks