Twenty-sixth Sunday After Pentecost Year A

26 Pentecost A 08

November 9, 2008

1 Thess 4:13-18 (NRSV)
13 But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. 14 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. 15 For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. 16 For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.

The Power of Hope

Willis Wilson used to say that when he was younger and he thought about Jesus coming again, he’d imagine Jesus coming up in the clouds over Stingray Point and setting down somewhere a little west of Zoar. As he got older, in his imagination, Jesus would fly over the state of Virginia. Late in his life, he finally began to see Jesus in China and Africa and Iceland.

This is a lovely picture of the kind of growth disciples of Jesus experience as they practice the faith of the church. Our hearts grow bigger, our vision expands, we hear things we once could not hear, and see as we once could not.

The Thessalonians were becoming worried. The years were passing, and the arrangements they had made in their lives to ready themselves for the Lord’s coming had been dramatic. They had completely changed their way of relating to the rest of the world. Many had sold most of their possessions. Many had decided not to marry or start families. Many had lost business because of the unpopularity of the Christian way. Many had been rejected by their own families and religious communities. Some had been arrested and tortured. Some had been put to death. All of these things they had done gladly, because they had believed Paul’s proclamation about Jesus, who was called the Christ, who had risen from the dead and would soon return to lead them again. They had worshipped and ministered with a sense of great urgency, because they thought the time was short.

Now it had been thirty years. Some of their original members had already died. When Timothy had come among them to see how things were going and to take back a report to Paul, who was in jail in another city, they shared their disturbance with him.
“When is the Lord coming? What will happen to those who have died? Will they be left out of the fulfillment? And if they will be, what of us who still wait? What if we die before he comes? Has this all been for nothing?”

Of course, this question had come up again and again in the history of God’s people, whenever persecution or disaster befell the Jewish people, they would cry out to God “How long?”

It may seem strange to us that a congregation that had been meeting for thirty years would be unaware of the possibility of resurrection. Many scholars have scratched their heads about this. It actually seems that early churches operated under the assumption that Jesus would return in their lifetimes and that they would then be transformed into eternal beings, perhaps without having to die. The idea, now common among us, that one might be raised from the dead as Christ himself had been raised, was apparently almost unknown among them.

Now it seems we have the opposite problem. We have become so accustomed to thinking that the resurrection will occur after our deaths that many of us do not seriously think that Jesus might return in our lifetimes.

Paul uses a language we call “apocalyptic.” This is most common in the book of Revelations and also appears in the thirteenth chapter of Mark. Also sometimes in Acts, apostles and elders speak of seeing the Lord coming on the clouds of glory. This is cosmic imagery, a way of talking about something spiritual in human terms. It seems that the language deliberately leaves open many possibilities.

Some want to interpret this language literally. They imagine that when Jesus comes there will really be clouds in the sky and he will really be physically visible among them, that graves will literally open and newly formed resurrection bodies will rise out of them for all to see, and that everyone will literally fly into the air. There’s the famous bumper sticker many of us have seen, “When the rapture comes, this car will be without a driver.”

Others think this imagery is just that: imagery describing the indescribable. Perhaps this image is to describe a long process unfolding spiritually underneath the visible reality in which we all live. Perhaps the coming of Jesus in glory is a way of talking about the undeniable integrity of his church, the people of God doing such wonderful and amazing things that witnesses will easily confess, “God is with them,” much the way the centurion rather inexplicable confesses, “Truly this man was the son of God” or that Peter, by the Holy Spirit alone, confesses, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God,” or that Stephen as he dies under the hail of stones crying out “I see the Lord coming on the clouds of glory.”

In whatever way we describe it and however we understand it, the coming of the Lord in glory is a real hope of the church. It is a real vision toward which we are called to orient ourselves, like Noah as he prepares for the flood. It is a future we look to which lives now with us as we expect it. If we expect the Lord to come, if we expect to be in his presence, if we expect to enter into a new kind of life with him, then what we do now must by necessity change from what we would do if we did not expect him, as Paul says, “as those who have no hope.”

Let’s dream together, shall we? Let’s hope together in all things.

I was just reading a book called Simply Christian by N.T. Wright, and he begins his book by reflecting on the natural sense of justice all human beings seem to possess, the internal vision we have of things going right, the evil are punished, the good are rewarded, that good things happen to good people and bad things only to bad. He suggests that this internal sense might actually be the still, small voice of God. And he asks the question, if millions of people over many centuries have dreamed of and worked for justice, why is it that we have failed to attain it?

The resurrection of Jesus was for early Christians the launching of a new creation. Something profoundly wrong, the execution of the Son of God, had been set wonderfully and miraculously right in the resurrection. His resurrection message to those who had followed him was that he would come back, and when he did, everything, everything would be set right.

And here we are, two thousand years later, still waiting. Millions of people have been born and raised and shaped into disciples, have worshipped and prayed and worked, and then have died. To our knowledge, not a single one has come back in the same way Jesus did.

Or have they? Paul may be telling us that just as he himself continues to speak to us in the form of this very passage of scripture, so those millions may also be speaking. Perhaps they worship with us even now, in some spiritual and invisible way, cheering us on, as Lew said so eloquently at our All Saints service. Perhaps the coming of the Lord in glory is always right now, whenever the community gathers and remembers the hope in which we live, perhaps our singing of hymn is accompanied by the heavenly trumpets and perhaps the lifting up we feel in our hearts is our rising into the air to be with Christ and all his saints, our mothers and fathers and ancestors in faith.

This week, we’ll give thanks to those who fought in the wars of our country. How well they knew all that has been wrong with the world, and they were willing to risk their lives to put it right. Of all people, veterans of war know what it is to dream of a better world.

A few of us were reflecting the other night about the widespread practice of charity among many people who don’t believe in Christ. In looking back through history, we can see that this was not always so. Could it be that the growing community of saints throughout the world has indeed salted the earth with mercy and kindness? Could it be that the victories of justice in recent centuries may in some way be thanks to the presence of the witnessing holy ones of God, the church?

I don’t know. The church has certainly and famously failed at many junctures, but it is also true that hospitals, public schools, big effective charity organizations and many movements that have righted terrible wrongs began among us and among those who came before us.

And all these things, these marvelous good things, these surprising moments when justice is really done, might just be rooted in this simple hope, that Jesus might come again, that all things finally will be all right.

Amen.