The Twenty-Sixth Sunday After Pentecost Joshua 24: 1 – 3a, 14 – 25
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 25: 1 – 13
“Therefore encourage one another with these words.”
I Thessalonians 4: 18
“In the moments leading up to the Rapture, nobody knows it is coming as the clock silently ticks down,” reads the promotional advertising for the book The Rapture, published in 2006. “In the twinkling of an eye, loved ones disappear without a goodbye” and “the darkest days may lie ahead for those who have been left behind.” The Rapture is one of a number of books in the Left Behind series, a popular and wildly imaginative interpretation of our reading this morning from Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians.
In our reading, Paul writes: “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. 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 for ever.” In the hands of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the authors of the Left Behind series, our text becomes a frightening caricature of our Christian hope, hope that, for Paul, was meant to encourage us not scare us. “Therefore,” Paul ends, “encourage one another with these words.”
We can be encouraged because what we look forward to is new creation, a world no longer besieged by evil and death, a world that will be finally and eternally “very good.”
Paul’s First Letter to the
Thessalonians is the oldest New Testament document we have, written less than a
generation after the death and resurrection of Jesus, around 50 A.D. Thessalonia was a
large port city on the coast of the
Our passage this morning is Paul’s response to the grief this congregation is experiencing because some of their members have died. Those who have died died without seeing God’s final triumphant reign of justice and peace and those who remain wish they had. And they are worried that those who have died will never see God’s final triumph. And Paul assures them when God acts on that last day, when God re-creates heaven and earth, death will be no more and the living and the dead will be as one.
Paul’s assurance, Paul’s hope, is grounded in the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection is the “first fruits” of a future final glorious divine triumph. In the resurrection, the power of death was defeated and Paul looks forward eagerly to the day when the whole world will know the power and glory of resurrection life.
For now, Paul has a message to preach: “God raised Jesus from the dead.” This good news Paul passed on to the church in Thessalonia so that they could tell others. Everything for Paul depends upon the resurrection, for, as Paul says in First Corinthians: “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain.” Our hope lives or dies, on the truth of the resurrection.
Accordingly, Paul writes, we do “not grieve as others do who have no hope.” We live in the hope of the resurrection and new creation. We live anticipating a new heaven and a new earth. We live with the confidence God will finish what God began in Christ. And for Paul, our hope seeds both great joy and great grief – joy that a new day is coming and grief that that new day is not here yet. Our hope opens our eyes to the pain and suffering of this world, a world struggling under the burden of death and decay, yearning to be freed. Our hope does not blind us to the injustice and angst of the world but rather makes us see ever more clearly the incompleteness of the world, the absence of love and the despair that threatens to suffocate many. Our hope sends us out into the world in compassion for all those who like us, long for a new day.
“Therefore encourage one another with these words.”
We will be called one day to “give an account of the hope that is within you” in the words of the First Letter of Peter. On that day we will know fully and completely God’s hope for us in the person of Christ. On that day, the day Christ comes again, we will know what God hopes for us and will need to account for the hope or lack of hope by which we lived.
“Therefore encourage one another with these words.” Christian hope is a bold and daring hope that is convinced that the power of God is greater than all other powers on earth. Our hope anticipates the day when the love of God will rule the world. And our hope is not just for ourselves alone but for the whole world. Our hope is for a new heaven and a new earth, a transformed world where no one dies of starvation or lives under the threat of violence or dies from the ravages of cancer. Our hope is for a new and very physical world – a re-created and transformed world.
The hope of the New Testament is grounded in the appearance to the disciples of the crucified Christ, not as a ghostly apparition, but as a person, recognizable, able to be touched and bearing the scars of the crucifixion. Nowhere in the New Testament do we find a hope in a heaven to which our souls will go after the death of our bodies. The New Testament bears witness to a hope in a transformed material world, a re-created world where children will laugh and old men will dream dreams and the lame will dance. The hope of the New Testament is beyond our wildest imaginings.
You and I are called to bear this hope into a hopeless world. Many despair that God can and will make all things new. Others hope only in their power to transform the world, pridefully ignoring their own imperfections. Christian hope is grounded in God, in what God has done and what God will do. Christian hope is confidence in God’s power not ours. Christian hope remembers what God has done – God raised Jesus from the dead – and anticipates eagerly and with great joy the day God comes again.
“Therefore encourage one another with these words.” I fear, even as you and I come together Sunday after Sunday to celebrate the resurrection, that what we hope for each week is little more than the strength to navigate the turbulent waters of the week to come. We keep our expectations and our prayers reasonable – we do not ask God to do the impossible, because, well, the impossible cannot happen and we are only setting ourselves up for disappointment. In light of the resurrection, are we not a people who hope for the impossible? In light of the resurrection, are we not a people who know God can do the impossible? In light of the resurrection, why do we not encourage one another to hope for all the goodness and all the wonder and all the joy God desires for God’s very good creation? Are we afraid God cannot deliver?
Paul went to his death in the hope that the God who raised Jesus from the dead would on the last day, raise us to new life as well. Paul went to his death before that glorious day. Paul lived and died in the sure and certain hope that the resurrection of Christ was God’s decree for the whole world. Paul lived in the hope of that new day and all that Paul did was grounded in that conviction. The resurrection of Christ was, for Paul, the source of all faith and all love and all hope. May the resurrection be for us what the resurrection was for Paul. And in the words of Paul: “May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing through the power of the Holy Spirit.”