Sail in deep waters and you do not run aground. And in deep waters take frequent soundings into the deeps. So will you fare well.

Deep waters are favored by the faithful. We thrive on mystery, on the incomprehensible and the outrageous. No one claims or can claim that our faith violates reason. But no one denies either that it passes beyond reason into realms of another kind.

And it is the realms of faith that are deep. And we need them far more than any mariner.

We talk easily of immortal life, of life forever with God, profundities we grasp only in a very modest way. Yet the probing and the pondering do not just fascinate; they nurture our being. For we are immortal, and immortality is nourished by deep mystery. Echoes resound through our souls when we are exposed to heavenly music.

The Sadducees today pose a problem that they were sure had no answer. They had no answer, and were just as certain that Christ could not provide one. One woman was married to seven husbands in succession. Whose wife is she in the life to come?

"She does not have a husband in the life to come," is His answer. "They do not marry in Heaven. They are like the angels."

In just a handful of words He ruins their case. We are not husbands and wives in Heaven, nor singles, virgins, divorced, divorced and remarried, widows, widowers. Life on earth is not life in Heaven. For in Heaven there is no death. It is eternal. The whole, the integral, the complete lack nothing. Want nothing. Never die.

All of which we understand. We know the meaning of the words. But as far as grasping the significance of what we talk about, we are at a loss.

Yet we need to return to such deeps and probe them. Doing so enhances, enriches life. For we deal with verities, with mystery to be sure, the incomprehensible. But with the real and the true.

"They are like angels." In what way? In having no bodies? No. Being pure spirit? No. What then? In wholeness of being, fullness of person.

Now on earth we build koinonia, we create community, family, brotherhood. In the Kingdom we need no longer build so. In wholeness we do not need one another. The love we have for one another will move from mutual need to mutual wholeness.

And in that wholeness of being, embrace all being in God. The faith that we have in that Kingdom to come now already gives glory to God, gives Him praise. And more than that, gives glory to life, praises it.

For our entering into the world of faith is no escape into delusion and fantasy. It is no abandonment of responsibility. Just the opposite. It is a plunge into deeps that sustain us. We are constantly tempted by the Evil One to deny our significance and take comfort in a shallow life, a life without depth.

For even in the face of total loss, and loss in a devastating manner, as we heard in the First Lesson, we still keep faith. With the Maccabees it was no trifling matter of eating pork or not. It was rather witness to eternal truth that is at stake: even when the mother of seven sons had perforce to lay down life in the cause of life with her own offspring.

Thus our faith, far from being some cowardly escape, is a plunge into profound reality that will come home to us in shattering fulfillment beyond our wildest dreams.

No baby in the womb can have but the slimmest notion of what lies beyond the enclosure of its little world. And however painful be the leaving of it, it is the only way to life. It is fulfillment.

So our faith -- however absurd it may seem to those who do not venture into deeps -- gives the sort of meaning and purpose to existence that resounds in our depths and gives a meaning and significance to that existence that absolutely nothing on earth can shake, or weaken, or destroy. And in the midst of whatever comes, it is pure joy.