November 9, 2025

I spend a fair amount of time, as you all know, reflecting on my identity as a lifelong Southerner. I've lived culturally in the South for the entirety of my life and for a good portion of it in the geographical South. Illinois, Southern Illinois in particular, is a little bit of a fuzzy, ambiguous place. And in that kind of myriad place of identity, that milieu, there's a part of me that also identifies as being a Midwesterner. That's very much the ethos of Illinois, of Missouri, of St. Louis. And so it is that I come to this time of year very frequently reflective of that particular part of my identity.

Just this past week that was brought to mind when I saw an observation online that we have this kind of strange period of time in November where October has ended. All of the music around Halloween, which we have a plethora and diversity of, has kind of come to a close. But we haven't yet had Thanksgiving. And we're not ready yet, no matter what all the corporate box store entities try to do to us, we're not quite ready yet for Christmas and for that season of Christmas music. So what do we do in this liminal space, in this lull and lack of music? And the suggestion was that one should just play Gordon Lightfoot's "The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald" on repeat for the entirety of November.

For those of you who don't know, the Edmund Fitzgerald was an incredibly large coal ship that operated on the Great Lakes, running coal from the Iron Range up in Minnesota down to the industrial centers in Detroit and places back east. And 50 years ago today, on the 9th of November, it departed from Superior, Wisconsin, loaded down with iron ore. And on the following day, tomorrow, November 10th, about 7 p.m., it got stuck in the midst of an early November gale and sank. To this day, we don't quite know why it sank, what exactly caused its destruction. And to be fair, it was one of numerous Great Lakes shipping tragedies throughout the ages. And it might have very easily passed into the faded recesses of our corporate memory. except for that 1976 ballad by the Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, "The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald." And ever since the publication of that song, it's kind of retained a staying power in our corporate and social memory when we get to this time of year. There's this beautiful line in the song. It's the third or fourth stanza: "Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours? The searchers all say they'd made Whitefish Bay if they'd put 15 more miles behind her. They might have split up or they might have capsized. They may have broke deep and took water. And all that remains is the faces and the names. of the wives and the sons and the daughters." It's an incredibly powerful image, is it not? I think it's fitting to sort of hear that with the reverberation of All Saints and All Souls, which we celebrated this past week. But it's fitting, too, in a strange way, with the gospel passage we have from St. Luke.

I'm going to explore that a little bit more fully in just a minute. But it's fitting because these are working men from working families. Folks nameless in many respects in the long history and arc of shipping not only in the Great Lakes but around the world. The many dead who lay beneath the waves who have gone to their grave without much of any kind of fanfare. And only through a kind of pure happenstance of history do we remember these particular men on this particular day. I say it has a connection to our gospel passage because we have this kind of strange, or I shouldn't say strange, but provocative set of admonitions and teachings by Jesus in this particular part of St. Luke's Gospel. And I have to admit a frustration with our lectionary. If you look back at last week, and admittedly we didn't hear this lesson because we were celebrating All Saints, but if you look back at last week, we were in the beginning of chapter 19. And then all of a sudden, we jump forward today into this section from chapter 20. But we miss so much between then and now, and then actually where it jumps next week to the middle of chapter 21. Because this particular arc, beginning in the middle of chapter 19 through all of chapter 20 and the beginning of chapter 1, is Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. It's this major transitional arc in the gospel from St. Luke, and it goes completely unacknowledged. We simply jump from one parable saying to another teaching today, kind of isolated and removed from the context.

But I want us to focus on the whole arc of what we hear today. Going back in chapter 19 beginning in verse 28 we have Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem—that great passage that we hear every Palm Sunday with the waving of the palm fronds, the elevating of Jesus and all of his deserved worldly power and influence, the things of the world that really are reflective of Jesus being who he is. But then very quickly things turn south. In verse 41, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem. He decries the places of corruption, the places of fallenness and brokenness that Jerusalem has come into. In verse 45, we have the cleansing of the temple. Jesus raising up in ire and angst towards the corruption of the temple practice itself. And then beginning in verse 1 of chapter 20, we have the kind of back and forth dialoguing that is part of what we hear today. We have the temple powers, the chief priests, and the scribes questioning Jesus' authority. In verse 9, he replies with a parable of the wicked tenants. Maybe many of you will remember this: the landowner who has these kind of removed, detached tenants whom he increasingly sends more and more important emissaries to to try to receive payment, ultimately sending his own son. And at each level, they kill the emissary, including the son. As the chief priests and the scribes receive that, they hear in that a condemnation of their own wayward leadership of the temple of the Jewish community. And then they try to entrap Jesus with this question about taxes. Jesus famously holds up the coin and asks whose image is on it, and to render to Caesar what is Caesar's.

All of these are very prominent teachings that we're familiar with in a general way over the course of Jesus' ministry. And then today we have this lesson, this question about the resurrection. And then jumping forward just briefly, we have in verse 41, Jesus kind of playing their game back onto them with a question about the son of David, and what it means to be the son of David. And then he has this powerful denouncement of the scribes in verse 45. And then he ends all of this with the observation of the widow giving her one lonely small mite in the temple coffers, against the grandeur and decadence of all of these very overt offerings by people who are giving much more in a worldly sense, but a very minimal modicum of what they are capable of giving. So we have this arc of all of these really prominent and important stories. And I think today's question about this widow is a good example of a thread, a thematic thread that we see through all of it. And I promise it will come back around to the Edmund Fitzgerald.

So, let's set the stage for a second. Who are the Sadducees and the Scribes? These are two communities that we don't often hear a whole lot about. But throughout the Gospels, they are one of three primary groups that Jesus typically interacts with and antagonizes, condemns, offers admonitions against. The prominent one that we hear a lot about are the Pharisees. And scholars actually think that we hear about them so frequently throughout the gospel tradition because Jesus' own teaching was probably most closely aligned with the Pharisees or most closely resembled the Pharisees. So the gospel authors are repeatedly setting Jesus against them to clarify or distinguish how his teachings were different from the Pharisees. But the Pharisees were a kind of decentralized power structure. In a way, and I don't want to hold this example or this analogy too tightly, but in a way, we can think about them sort of like the state functionaries here in the United States. They are people of power. They are people of influence. They are people that have a level of control. They have a level of authority. But it's not centered in Jerusalem. It's not the D.C. Beltway crowd. They're out in their provincial locations exercising their authority and power within the synagogue system. And then you have the Sadducees who are also religious leaders, religious functionaries, but they are centered in the temple. They are the chief priests. They are the high priests. They are the ones who exercise that kind of internal beltway D.C. politic. They are the ones at the center of the center of power.

And then the Scribes. The Scribes are the intellectual authorities in Jerusalem. To this day, I believe this is true, all Torah that is used liturgically and ritually in the Jewish tradition is handwritten. So you see the Torah scrolls that are processed out during Shabbat services. Those are handwritten, and the Scribes were responsible for literally inscribing the new Torah, transmitting the law verbatim over and over again. And because that was their role in society, because that was their vocation, they were considered experts in the law. They were considered the intellectual powerhouses of the Jewish faith. And because of that, they also have this kind of role in the power dynamic and keeping things just the way they are and maintaining the status quo in order to elevate their own level of prominence and authority.

And so Jesus, in all of these teachings, we have this continued continuity of Jesus teaching pressing against these places of power and authority, elevating and lifting up the people and the communities who are being marginalized and oppressed. And over and over again, even in this section that I just named, the teachings are centered on elevating the people on the margins. The people who go without. The people of least significance in that power and intellectual structure. And yet for Jesus, those are the most important voices. Those are the people of greatest consequence in the kingdom of God.

This strange question that we have by the Sadducees today speaks to this. Now, aside from maybe a dateline focus that might question this woman's propriety, having seven husbands who all die, this is an impossible situation. It's not realistic. It's simply not a valid or a likely possibility that there would be these seven brothers who all die in the same way. And so what they're doing is they're creating essentially, I mean not precisely, but essentially this kind of straw man argument against this belief in the resurrection. To say look how weak this position is. Ha ha ha we've caught you. We've tripped you up. And Jesus turns the whole paradigm, the whole question on its head. He shows the weakness of their position by emphasizing the transformational and otherworldly reality of the kingdom. They are so focused, they are so singularly positioned and driven by the things of this world, the things of their kind of structured way of interacting with the law, that they're unable to see the breaking through of the spirit of the law, the place of compassion, the place of love, the place of kindness.

And we really see this coming into the most significant focus when we hear Jesus' condemnation of the scribes at the very end of this chapter. Verse 45 begins, "In the hearing of all the people, he said to the disciples, Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets. They devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation." I suspect that many of us hear that and can immediately template that same kind of condemnation on the power structures that we have in this world, in this society, in this country today. How many of us look at the chaos and insanity of this present moment and see not true concern and compassion for the least and left out, but a perpetual drivenness towards self-aggrandizement, empowerment, the accumulation and centralizing of authority, wealth, and power? We are similarly in a position to call out and to witness to an alternative power structure that goes beyond all of these worldly ambitions that so drive our society and the people at the top of our society today. We similarly find ourselves in a position where the least and left out are getting even further left out and left behind. Just now, this month, we are hitting crisis levels in terms of need, in terms of struggle. And what are we doing about it?

How are we responding to it? And granted, we as a congregation do a lot. I don't want to dismiss or discount that. But overarchingly, we as Christians, what are we doing to speak truth to power in this present moment? To call to account those who are playing games with people's lives, who are similarly posturing with these silly kinds of straw man arguments, bickering with one another, while things get worse and worse, and the status and situation of those who are least in worldly possessions get further and further left behind.

Again I bring us back to that story of those men lost on the Edmund Fitzgerald. Because, as I mentioned, for so many centuries, those in heavy labor industry, like seafarers, were very often the least and left out. It was a hard, scrabble life to make it just enough to support your family, to have enough food for the table, to get by. And very thankfully, it is the poet, the songwriter, who helps keep the living memory of those long dead alive. But we too have a call. We have a call to lift up the voices on the margins, to be the people who offer that witness to the great need, who call out the times when our own leaders want to play word games, and instead of focusing on the things of real substance and matter and power.

I began this sermon today with a reflection on a song. But there's one other that's less significant here in our own context in the United States. But is known around the Commonwealth of Nations, those places deeply rooted in and influenced by the experience of the United Kingdom. A song that is brought to mind every time this year as well. Because two days from now, on November 11th, our Veterans Day, it was originally, and this is why we have a Veterans Day here in the United States since the 1950s, it was originally Remembrance Day in the commonwealth. It is the memorializing of the cessation of conflict in the First World War. And since at least the 1930s a song titled "I Vow to Thee, My Country" has been intimately and deeply associated with Remembrance Day. It was written as a poem by Cecil Spring Rice in the early 20th century and eventually set to music by a man called Gustav Holst. But there are only two stanzas in the song, and I think that they are powerfully instructive of where we are and how we often find ourselves pulled in these many complex ways in the material social world around us.

"I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above, entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love, the love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test, that lays upon the altar the dearest and the best, the love that never falters, the love that pays the price, the love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice." This kind of blustery, boastful, nationalistic attitude in this first verse. Admittedly, if it stopped there, I probably would give no further thought to this song, dismiss it as so much jingoism.

And yet, the second stanza: "And there's another country. I've heard of long ago. Most dear to them that love her. Most great to them that know. We may not count her armies. We may not see her king. Her fortress is a faithful heart. Her pride is suffering. And soul by soul and silently. Her shining bounds increase. And her ways are ways of gentleness. And all her paths are peace." Even in the most strident, the most singularly nationalistic places, we so very often find this inbreaking of the Spirit. This remembrance, this recalling. That there is another country. There is another reality. There is another way. And today, today that's the truth that comes through. Even when these kind of piddly, silly, but not inconsequential games are played by those in power. We are reminded that there are real lives at stake. That there are real people hurt. That there are those on the margins who suffer when that is the focus of our attentions.

And so today we are invited to turn again. From those kinds of worldly experiences. To push against the powers and the authorities. To raise up anew with a loud voice. The concerns of those least and left out. And may we in hearing that call. Renew our own sense of commitment. To being the people of transformation. The people of good news. The people of true and lasting substance that Jesus calls us to be. That even in the times of great insanity and chaos. The times when our leaders abandoned their responsibilities to us. We may not give up hope. We may not falter. But ever more focus our work, our hearts, the whole of our beings, on the things of the kingdom. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.