Hope
I Thessalonians 4:13-18
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You may, or may not have heard, but the world was supposed to end back in September; September 23, to be specific. According to David Meade, a man describing himself as a Christian numerologist, a particular configuration of celestial events on that day would herald the arrival of the rogue planet, Nibiru, long-rumored to be on a collision course with our planet. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Although September was a rough month for North America with a relentless string of hurricanes that lashed Florida, the Caribbean, and created catastrophic flooding in Texas. Meanwhile Mexico was shaken by several destructive earthquakes. Still, no rapture. That’s probably because like the non-existent planet Nibiru, there is no rapture either. But that hasn’t stopped people in every generation from predicting the end of the world and the return of Jesus. Before David Meade, it was Christian radio pioneer Harold Camping who first predicted that an end times rapture would take place in 1994. Although to be fair he did place a question mark after the year on the cover of the book that made that prediction. When that didn’t happen, he revised his math and said that it would take place on May 11, of 2011. And when that day came and went with nary a hint of worldwide cataclysm, he again revised his calculation to October of that same year. It would be funnier if people hadn’t sold their homes in anticipation, liquidated their life savings and donated it to Camping’s Family Radio program which spent millions spreading the prediction. And before Camping it was someone else, and before them someone else. Texas evangelist John Hagee peddling his blood moons. Harold Miller, who predicted the end in 1843 and 1844. John Nelson Darby, who popularized rapture theology about a decade earlier. On and on it goes, all the way back to the Montanists of the 2nd century in what is modern-day Turkey, who under the influence of the Spirit claimed Jesus’ return to be imminent.
You see that’s just it, people have been anticipating Jesus’ return and what it will mean for the world for some time. But while such a return is suggested by scripture, the details of when, where and how aren’t all that clear. From the letters like the one before us this morning, it sounds as though Paul himself expected the event to take place in his lifetime. An expectation that he no doubt shared with the people in Thessalonica when he came and shared with them the good news of Jesus. Then he left, and as they talked about what he had said, they began to panic. Friends of mine who were raised in churches that teach rapture theology have a common story that they tell about being somewhere with their family, somehow getting separated, and then panicking at the prospect that the rapture had taken place, their family had been taken, and they had been left behind. Only to breathe a sigh of relief when they finally caught sight of them and knew they were okay. The Thessalonians felt that same panic at the prospect that their friends and family who had already died would somehow miss out when Jesus finally did show up to wrap things up. They had already had to let go of them once, they couldn’t bear the thought of having to let go of them a second time. They didn’t want to spend eternity separated from them.
“We don’t want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died,” writes Paul, “so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” The problem with this scripture is that we can get so preoccupied with the apocalyptic language that follows about a cry of command, the archangel’s call, the trumpet’s sound and all the rest that we miss the grief that is at the heart of what Paul is trying to address here; the grief that is a part of every life. Grief is the inevitable result of being alive and making connections. We grieve what we have lost, or what we feel we have lost. Maybe it’s a certain time of our life, maybe it’s a particular person, maybe it’s just the way we once felt about the world that we no longer feel. Grief is the name we give to the feeling of what has gone missing in our lives. Sometimes it feels like the end of the world.
Only we are a people who do not know what to do with that feeling. We don’t like it and know what to do with it. So, we try to bury grief, or ignore it, or attempt get rid of it by eating, or drinking our way out of it. It makes us feel powerless, because whatever is missing is gone and we don’t know how to get it back. So, in an effort to feel powerful again we often express our grief through anger. As frightening as it has been to watch white nationalism gain a foothold once more in this country, to listen to the hateful rhetoric directed at immigrants, people of color, and religious minorities, to watch as flags celebrating confederate slavery, or the German Reich are proudly paraded at rallies, the anger on display is just the misplaced form of grief for those who have no hope. From all accounts the man who opened fire on that church last week in Sutherland Springs, Texas was in the grip of a grief that had no hope. And grief that has no hope can be a dangerous thing.
When danger like that erupts, when news breaks of yet another mass shooting, when hurricanes rage and devastation reigns, when each passing day brings more evidence that the safety of the world as we thought it was has gone missing, you begin to understand why people might start looking at the sky and hoping for some kind of evacuation plan. Beam me up, Jesus.
Only that isn’t what Jesus promises. That is decidedly not the good news. The good news of Jesus is about the fact that God has not abandoned us, and will not abandon us, or this world, to our own devices. God isn’t about to write the world off as a lost cause. This world is God’s good creation and Jesus is God come to us in person to show us just that, to point to the realm of a greater power than the powers of this world at work all around us, something he called the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven. That isn’t someplace else, somewhere else. It’s right here. It is the steadfast love of God that is always ready to do a new thing, to make a way where there is no way, to make deserts bloom, blind eyes see, captives go free, and all that is left for dead rise to new life. To trust in the good news of Jesus Christ and to follow in his way is not to scout the exits and wait to be evacuated. To trust in the good news of Jesus Christ is to believe in the one who is making all things new.
If you ask me the mistake Christians have been making in reading this and other texts has been the same mistake we always make. We keep craning our necks to the sky for some grand cataclysmic act of God and in so doing miss looking for him in the one place where he has always met us- right here on earth. In other words, we don’t just put our hope in the wrong things, we put our hope in the wrong place when it’s often right in front of us.
Kate Braestrup, chaplain to the Game Warden Service in the state of Maine, tells the story of a little five-year-old girl named Nina who told her mother that she wanted to go see her four-year-old cousin, Andy, who was her best friend. The only problem was that Andy was dead. He had been killed instantly when a neighbor’s ATV had rolled over on him. Nina wanted to go to the funeral parlor where his body had been taken, to see him. Her parents wanted to protect her from the grief, but the chaplain thought it would be okay. It wouldn’t hurt her more than she already hurt to see him.
Three days after her conversation with Nina’s parents, the chaplain returned to town to preside at Andy’s funeral and she asked Nina’s mom if they had taken her to see her cousin. Nina’s mom said, “let me tell you. We got in the car, drove over to the funeral parlor. As soon as we were in the parking lot, Nina’s out of the car striding across the parking lot. We scrambled to keep up with her. We stopped her at the door of the room where Andy’s body lay. And we said, ‘Nina, we want you to understand that Andy’s not going to be able to talk to you.’ ‘Yep,’ said Nina. ‘Well, and you understand that he’s not going to move and get up.’ ‘Yeah, yeah,” and she opened the door and in she went, and she walked right up to the dais where his body lay, covered by a quilt that his mom had made for him when he was a baby. She walked all around the dais, putting her hands on him, making sure he was all there. And then she put her head on her chest and began to talk to him. After about ten minutes her parents asked if she was ready to leave, and she said, “No, I’ll tell you when I am.” And she sang him a song, and she put his plastic Fisher-Price telescope in his hand so that he could see anyone he wanted to see from heaven. And then she was okay, she was done. But, she said, “he’s not going to be getting up again, so I’m going to have to tuck him in. So she went all the way around the dais again tucking him in. And then she put her hand on him again and said, “I love you Andy Dandy. Goodbye.” Braestrup observes, you can trust a human being with grief. The hope that allows us to walk fearlessly into the house of mourning is this, that grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy. And after all these years, love is up to the challenge.
That is how Jesus returns. That is where Jesus returns, in those moments when love squares up to its oldest enemy, when the world as we’ve known it comes to an end. He is, after all, our crucified savior. And our risen one too. Which means that the end is just the beginning of what God is making new. God’s love is more than up to the challenge. That is our hope, even as we grieve. That is what gives us all the courage we’ll ever need.