Picture of Sadducees from www.LumoProject.com
Hi! Did everybody have a fun Halloween?
( I give the children opportunities to discuss what they did for Halloween.)
But that’s not the only thing we celebrate this week. Do you know what All Soul’s Day is? It comes two days after Halloween, and that’s the day that we pray for everybody who has died and is now with Jesus. Our Gospel story today talks about what it’s like to be in Heaven with Jesus.
As Jesus preached the Good News to more and more people around Israel, He became very well-known to all the religious teachers. Some of them did not agree with His teachings, and they were always looking for ways to prove him wrong.
One group of teachers like that was called the Sadducees.
I show them a picture of the Sadducees as displayed above.
They were experts on the Torah, which is the first five books of the Jewish Bible. Those books are in our Bible, too. They read Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, but they didn’t believe in some of the other books.
Jesus preached that all the people who loved Him and His father would go to heaven when they die, but the Sadducees did not believe in heaven. One day, they decided to trick Jesus with a story. They wanted to ask Him a question He couldn’t answer.
While telling this story, I bring out a little family of paper puppets to act as the woman and her husbands. In the first part, all eight pieces are standing in a row.
“Rabbi,” they said to him. “You say that after we die, everybody will come back to life in Heaven. We know of a lady who married a man with six brothers. Soon after the wedding, her husband died. Oh, no!”
I place the woman and the man together. Then, I have the man fall over on his side.
“The man’s brothers said, ‘That’s not good. She needs to have a husband to take care of her and give our family sons, so one of us needs to marry her!’ So, the lady married one of her dead husband’s brothers.”
“Oh, no! A year later, he caught the plague and died! The lady still didn’t have any children, so the next brother married her!”
I place the woman next to another little man. He also falls over. I repeat this with each additional brother.
“And then, he died. So she married the fourth brother. And he died.
So she married the fifth brother. And he died.
So she married the sixth brother. Oh, brother! And HE died! Man, what is it with all the men in this family?!”
“But they didn’t give up. She married the seventh brother. And do you know what happened next? Do you think they had lots of kids and were happy?
Nope! He died, too. Oh, this is such a sad story! Sniffle.
Finally, one very sad day, the lady died as well. The woman falls over.
But then something good came. They all woke up in Heaven. I set all eight characters back up again. But wait! Uh Oh! Who is her husband now? She married all seven of them! We need to solve this, or there’s gonna be a fight!”
So, Rabbi, what are these people in Heaven gonna do now, huh?”
Jesus shook His head because He knew what the Sadducees were doing. He also knew how silly they were.
“That’s not how Heaven works. There is no death in Heaven, so nobody has to be married to anybody anymore. The people in Heaven are just like the angels.
I give the Little People Lady some little wings.
Every there gets to live forever.
But this is even more important. When you die on Earth, you aren’t on Earth anymore, but you are still alive in God’s presence. All these people we know from the Bible - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and even the Disciples, are just as alive in God’s presence as they were when they were living on this earth. And if you’ve ever lost a loved one, you can be sure that they are alive in Jesus and someday you will see them again.”
The Sadducees didn’t have any more questions for him after that. He was smarter than they were!
Does anybody here have anybody they know who now lives in Heaven? My mother is there, and so are all my grandparents. What about you?
On All Soul's Day, people all over the world remember the people they love who are now alive in Heaven with Jesus. This picture shows a cemetery in San Salvador on All Soul's Day. People have left gifts of flowers for the people who have gone home to be with God.
Lameiro, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Let’s thank God for bringing our loved ones to heaven.
Dear Lord God,
Thank you for bringing us the words of Jesus, so that we can know we will live with you in Heaven when we die. Thank you for helping us remember that all these dear people we are praying for now are alive with you, and let us be happy to know that someday we will see them again.
All Soul's Day Craft
In Mexico, they celebrate Dia De Los Muertos, which is the Day of the Dead. This is their day to remember the people they love who are now in Heaven. One of the things they do is take spooky paper skull masks like this one and make them into something beautiful. This is called a Calaveras mask.
Instructions: For each child, I cut a blank Calaveras mask like this one out of a paper plate. On the plate, the ridges of the plate will serve as the skull's teeth.
As you decorate your mask, remember that God makes all things happy and beautiful in Heaven, and someday you will see the people you love again. Let's celebrate their lives!
To show the children what to do, I presented them with examples of decorated skulls so they would be excited by the possibilities. The children then have the option to decorate the skull masks with markers and stickers.
Here is my performance of this sermon in Children's Chapel on 11/6/2022
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