The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27), November 9, 2025

Doctrinal traps abound for many preachers today. Such traps are typically set by those whose intentions appear, at least on the surface, to be well-meaning, even harmless. They are often thinly disguised in the form of a question that begins with a phrase like, “What do you believe about _______?”

 Rarely are such traps easily dismantled or dismissed by the preacher in the moment. And when they eventually spring, someone—usually the preacher—invariably gets hurt.

What do you believe about… the Virgin birth? Gay marriage? Bodily resurrection? Miracles? The atonement? Evolution? Heaven and hell?

Preachers who reject certain aspects of classical theism in favor of process, or open and relational, theology are especially predisposed to such traps. And what makes them so problematic is that our metaphysics and cosmology seem completely foreign to the unquestioned classical theism, and its commitments to modernism, so prevalent in our congregations. In our conversations about orthodoxy and doctrine, we find that we are often talking about an entirely different kind of God, and altogether different conceptions of love and power, and contrasting assumptions about the foundations of reality and how the world works.

The Sadducees’ Trap and Our Modern Predicament

Which leads us to this odd pericope from Luke 20:27-38 about the trap the Sadducees set for Jesus on the matter of the resurrection of the dead. In the scene immediately preceding this passage, after his authority has been openly questioned, Jesus evades a rhetorical trap about paying taxes (20:20-26). Here, he is drawn into another potential trap with a question about the resurrection.

The Sadducees recognized only the Pentateuch as authoritative. Since resurrection is not mentioned there explicitly, they reject the idea of life after death. They have come to discredit Jesus, who had previously predicted his own resurrection (see Luke 9:22). They reference a specific law — called levirate marriage from the Latin levir (“brother in law”) — from Deuteronomy 25:5-10, which sought to preserve one’s family name by stipulating that a man should marry the childless widow of his brother.

Their question is purely hypothetical and applies levirate marriage to its most extreme circumstance: seven brothers, each marrying the same woman after the previous brother dies, all die childless. In the resurrection, they ask, whose wife will she be?

The Sadducees’ materialist skepticism mirrors our own modern academic dismissal of afterlife possibilities. The Sadducees, like many today, cannot conceive of life beyond the physical, mechanical categories they know.

Jesus’ Vision of Transformed Life

Jesus evades their trap by demonstrating their failure to understand the true nature of resurrection. For Jesus, resurrection life is qualitatively different from life in “this age.” In the resurrection, the dead “neither marry nor are given in marriage… Indeed, they cannot die anymore.”

This is not simply about unmarried existence, but about a fundamental transformation in the nature of being and relationship. Jesus points to a reality that transcends the possessive, institutional arrangements of earthly life. The question “whose wife will she be?” becomes meaningless because the entire framework of ownership and exclusive possession dissolves in resurrection life.

Process Theology and the Continuing Journey

For the preacher, here is an opportunity to explore a process understanding of life after death that transcends doctrinal traps while honoring both mystery and hope. In process theology, death is not the end of relationship but its transformation.

In Whitehead’s vision, each occasion of human experience is retained by and in God. Everything we do and say in this life is prehended by God and influences God immediately and eternally. Nothing is lost. At death, our lived experience is fully received into the consequent nature of God—that deep Memory who always and forever memorializes those who have died.

Two Views of Continuing Experience

Some process thinkers, including Whitehead, suggest that after death we no longer enjoy new experiences subjectively but exist as an objective reality in God’s eternal memory. Others suggest that God continues relating to us after death in the same way God related to us in this earthly life—offering possibilities for transformation and becoming, allowing each occasion continued experience and agency even beyond earthly life.

Either understanding affirms Jesus’ claim that God is not “God of the dead, but of the living, for to God all of them are alive.” One lifetime isn’t enough for most of us to find the wholeness for which we yearn. In God’s experience, all continue their journey toward wholeness. 

When faced with doctrinal traps about resurrection, the process preacher can invite listeners beyond the materialist assumptions of the Sadducees and the supernatural interventions of classical theism. We can point to the deeper reality Jesus glimpsed—a transformation so profound that our current categories of possession, institution, individual identity, and being itself are transcended.

The resurrection is not about restored bodies returning to earthly relationships or institutions like marriage, but about participating in the divine life where love is no longer possessive but free, where relationships are no longer guided by earthly law, where the experience and deep memory of God forever embraces all souls in their journey toward wholeness, affirming Whitehead’s assertion that God is one who acts with “a tender care that nothing be lost” (Process and Reality).

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Mark Feldmeir is Sr. Pastor at St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Highlands Ranch, CO, and the author of five books, including A House Divided: Engaging the Issues through the Politics of Compassion (Chalice Press, 2020) and his latest, Life After God: Finding Faith When You Can’t Believe Anymore (Westminster John Knox, 2023). Learn more about Mark at www.markfeldmeir.com.