Sermon preached by Rev. Margie Quinn on Sunday, November 9, 2025
You might have heard this week that Tom Brady cloned his pit bull. That’s not something I knew—my friend had to tell me. Tom Brady had a pit bull named Lua who died in 2023, and he loved that dog so much that he decided to use a non-invasive cloning technology. Through a simple blood draw from the dog that passed away, he was able to replicate his beloved pit bull.
The new pit bull is named Juny but is a genetic match of Lua. It only cost him $50,000. When asked why he would do this, he talked about his and his family’s deep love for their former pit bull and their desire to experience that same life with Juny.
He said, “I have a really big passion for animals and this organization, which is called Colossal—that’s the organization that does this—they are trying to return extinct animals back into existence: the dodo bird, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger. And they have already resurrected the direwolf. If you’ve ever watched Game of Thrones, you know what I’m talking about. The direwolf has been extinct for 13,000 years, and they have resurrected this direwolf.”
There’s such a desire to prolong and replicate life because we are scared of the pain of losing it. I was reminded of that when I read about the Sadducees this morning—the fear that life really is finite, even extinct.
Let me put the Sadducees in context a little bit. They were a sort of philosophical school connected to temple leadership. They were the intellectual elite—the people in grad school who always have the right answer, who always raise their hands first, and who seem to have read every single word in the reading. How do people do that?
They were actually trying to trick Jesus, to set up an intellectual trap for him. One theologian says there’s no such thing as dumb questions, but this is a dumb question that they ask. They wanted this weird rabbi who scrambles and puzzles their logic to try to work his way out of this question about the afterlife.
The Sadducees only believed in the Torah—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—and in the Torah, they don’t read about resurrection. They don’t believe in angels or spirits or what Jesus is hinting at. Like many people on Jesus’s walk toward Jerusalem who question, deny, and scoff at him, they’re doing the same here. They’re not approaching him with curiosity but with absurdity and hostility.
They think death is the end. They believe we have to live this life as fully as possible—and as the youth say, YOLO: you only live once. So they’re like, “Okay, let’s see how this guy handles this dilemma, this imaginary scenario. Let’s see how he handles it, because it’s kind of meant to make fun of him.”
They ask him a question concerning levirate, or brother-in-law, marriage. They say, “If a man’s brother dies and leaves him a wife, the man will marry that widow and raise up children for his brother. But if that man dies and is left childless, then the next brother marries the widow,” and so on for seven brothers. Then the woman dies, and they say, “Okay, so in the resurrection, whose wife will the woman be? Which of the seven is she going to be married to?”
What’s interesting is that this is the only discussion about the resurrection in the Gospels other than, you know, the part where Jesus comes back to life. This is the only time you’ll hear people wrestling with this topic. We get the story in Matthew and in Mark.
In the story of Mark, Jesus is actually really annoyed at this question—he’s “snappy Jesus.” Does anybody identify with snappy Jesus? He says, “Is not this the reason that you are wrong? That you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?” Like, you dumb-dumbs.
But here in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus has a much softer tone. He takes their question and decides to turn it into a learning moment because, as you’ll remember, they started with “Teacher.”
He says, “Those who marry in this age, those who are given in marriage in this age, they’re not going to be married or given in marriage in the age of the resurrection. They can’t die anymore either because they’re like angels—they’re like children of the resurrection. They are children of God.”
He kind of says, “You’re missing the forest for the trees.” He’s saying, “You’re asking the wrong question because you’re presuming the resurrection is just a continuation of our current lives. That’s why you’re thinking about procreation or marriage or success or failure—because you don’t actually believe that when you die, something transformational happens.”
As Paul writes in First Corinthians, we will be changed—that there will actually be a new existence that’s not just a continuation of this one.
And if you’re scratching your heads, maybe like the Sadducees were, I am too. It’s hard to understand this mystery of what happens after this. It’s hard to wrap our heads around what it’s going to be like on the other side. I get why the Sadducees were skeptical. They believed in the Torah; it didn’t mention resurrection.
But then Jesus says this to them: “Remember Moses? Remember the burning bush? Remember when God speaks to Moses and doesn’t say, ‘Once upon a time, I used to be the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, but they’re dead now.’”
No—God says, “I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.” Not past tense, but present tense. “I was, I am, I will be.” Maybe just a slight hint at something beyond.
Scripture tells us that God says, “I’m not the God of the dead. I’m the God of the living.”
This answer that Jesus gives—his answers are always a little cryptic—but it gives me reassurance. It gives me hope. In a world where we are so scared of death, where we are so scared of the finality of all of this—if the afterlife is actually just an extension of what we’re experiencing and nothing more, I don’t really think I could maintain hope.
I don’t think I could show up here. I don’t think I could call myself a Christian. I don’t think I could have the faith that I claim to have.
One time my mom said, “If there’s no heaven, I’m going to be pissed.” Yeah—I’d be pissed too, especially after reading this story, in which I actually hear glimpses of a mysterious hope that we may never fully understand on this side of things.
To be called not children of your marriage, not children of your anxiety, your loss, your oppression, your confusion, or your failure—but children of God, children of the resurrection. Imagine that being our eternal identity.
It reminds me of when Paul writes, “Where is thy sting, death? Where is thy victory?” As if Paul, in so many ways, already understood it. He’d already moved past some of these dumb questions.
I would have asked dumb questions too—I still do—but he’d moved on to an understanding that, as Eberhard Busch writes, “Death is the end of many things, but it is not the end of everything.”
Our death is not the end of God. God doesn’t just release God’s creatures and say, “Thanks for the life you lived.” No. God, in compassion, puts us in God’s heart, and we are never excluded from it.
Eberhard writes, “We humans are not eternal, but God’s love for us is.” Imagine that. I can’t even wrap my head around it.
Americans might be the worst culture when it comes to dealing with death. We sterilize it. We distance ourselves from it. We ignore the topic. We avoid asking people about it. We try to clone life. We try to prolong life as much as we can with AI.
But I read about a neurosurgeon—many of you have probably heard of him—Eben Alexander. He actually talks about this experience he had with what he considers the afterlife.
In 2008, he wrote a book about his experience of heaven called Proof of Heaven. He was put in a medically induced coma, and he says that despite his skepticism as a scientist, he felt the presence of God.
Listen to what he heard God say to him: “You are loved and cherished dearly forever. There is nothing you can do wrong. You have nothing to fear.”
He said, “The physical side of this universe is just a speck of dust compared to the invisible and spiritual part.”
He said, “I realized that both Einstein and Jesus got it right. My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness—that human experience actually continues beyond the grave. More importantly, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves and cares for us, each one of us.”
And this false suspicion that we could somehow be separated from God—it’s the very root of our anxiety in this universe. The cure for it, he heard, is the knowledge that nothing can tear us from God. Ever.
Do these words remind you of Paul? Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Does it remind you of his letter to the Romans? “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”
This resurrection God who raises life from death—it’s beyond our human comprehension. It’s beyond our control. It’s beyond our limited understanding.
I think this passage invites us not to be so theologically limited like the Sadducees but to have an expansive theological imagination—a hope that welcomes us and invites us into the eternal presence of God.
It’s a hope that wants us to consider what it looks like to live without the fear of death. If death has no sting, if death has no victory, how then do we live? How do we spend our time? How do we spend our energy? How do we share our resources? How do we spend our money? How do we care for one another? How do we work toward justice and wholeness?
If death has no sting, what are we doing in this life to make it count—knowing that there is a great Love, capital L, ushering us in?
How do we give ourselves just a little more grace on this side of things? Take a few more naps on this side of things? Not try to suck the marrow out of every single day? We put so much pressure on ourselves, when we know there is something greater—something with its arms open, calling us children of the resurrection, calling us children of God.
I don’t know about all this cloning of life. I don’t know about all this extending of it. I understand why—the pain of losing his dog, the pain of growing old. It’s real. It’s scary. It’s heartbreaking. But for me, it shows an anxiety about finality that I don’t want to feel. When I read this passage, I’m released from that feeling.
Church, living in this resurrection hope requires a lot of faith in a future not yet imagined. And we may have a lot more questions after reading this passage than answers.
I don’t think Jesus wants to give us all the answers here. Unfortunately, he rarely does. I think he wants to hint at a hope that ties us to a love beyond the grave—to the very presence of God, to this loving Creator who ushers us beyond our earthly worries and concerns, the things we’ve left undone, the fear and shame we’ve carried in our lives.
This hint of hope says to us, as it did to Dr. Alexander: You are loved and cherished dearly forever. There is nothing you can do wrong. You have nothing to fear.
You have nothing to fear.
And when the Sadducees heard this—when the skeptics heard this—by the end of hearing it, they said, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” For they no longer dared ask him another question.