Rev. Dr. David D. M. King
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27A
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
In the section of the first letter to the Thessalonians that Janet read for us this morning, the three authors—the apostle Paul and his associates, Silas and Timothy—respond directly to a specific concern of the Christians in Thessalonica. And it has to do with the second coming of Jesus. Jesus had promised that he would return to set the world in order, and it seems that most of his followers thought that that was going to happen very soon. Paul seems to have thought that it was going to happen imminently, and certainly before he had died.
And so the Thessalonians have a very legitimate concern. You see, the problem is that some of their members have died, but Jesus still hasn’t come back. What’s going to happen to those people who didn’t live long enough to see the return of the Lord? Are they going to miss out on whatever it is that Jesus as in store for his faithful followers?
Remember, this is the oldest book in the New Testament. It gives us our earliest glimpse into the life of the early church. And at this very early point, only about two decades after Jesus death and resurrection, there was some concern about why Jesus had not yet returned in glory and what was going to happen to anyone who died before the promised return.
And of course, that points to a broader question, a more universal question. What happens after we die? It’s one of the key questions that religious thought is supposed to address. What happens after we die?
According to karmic traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism, after death all living things are reincarnated, and based on how you have lived in this life, you’ll either get an upgrade or a downgrade in the next. Everyone is stuck in an endless cycle of reincarnation. The goal of religion in Buddhism, then, is to break that cycle of never-ending reincarnation through enlightenment and escape into the state of Nirvana. So that’s one answer to the question of happens after we die.
In the Western world, our concept of the afterlife doesn’t mainly come from the Bible, but from ancient Greek philosophy, in particular, the philosophy of Plato and his followers. According to this view, everything in the world is made up of matter, but it is all a set of imperfect copies of what exists in the spiritual world. Spirit is superior to matter, to flesh and blood. Matter is impure, dirty. God—sometimes referred to as “The One”—exist completely outside of the material world. God is purely spiritual. The goal, then, for human beings is to transcend the shabbiness of our material, fleshy selves and become pure spirit, eventually reuniting with the One. So what happens after you die? Well, ideally, your soul would separate from your body. Your body would be left behind as an empty shell, and your spirit, or your soul, would ascend to heaven without it and live forever in the spiritual realm. By leaving your sinful body behind, you would be made perfect.
Our modern, Western view of the afterlife owes a lot to those Platonic ideas. Think about the old Warner Brothers cartoons. What happens when one of the characters dies? Their soul leaves their body, right? A kind of ghost peels away from the body and starts to ascend toward heaven. Usually that ghost is portrayed as dressed in a white robe, wearing a halo, sprouting wings, and playing a harp. So the basic idea is that when someone dies, their soul or spirit separates from their body, and it ascends to heaven. Also, it seems that people who have died become angels. That is the destination for human beings. They become angels in God’s heavenly choir.
And if you polled the average person on the street, they might say that that seems basically consistent with a Christian understanding of the afterlife. When someone dies their soul leaves their body and is transported immediately into heaven. Right now in heaven there are all the people we know who have died, looking down on us, sometimes even guiding, aiding, and protecting us, like angels. That’s a fairly standard viewpoint.
It is not, however, a biblical viewpoint. To the best of my knowledge—and I will admit that my knowledge is not perfect—but to the best of my knowledge, there is no place in the Bible that tells that when people die, their souls leave their body and go directly to heaven. There are a few scattered passages that could be interpreted as consistent with that view, like Jesus parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in which we see the rich man calling out from Hades to Abraham, who is in heaven, asking him for mercy. But remember, that story is a parable. And even so, it’s not very consistent with the rest of the Bible.
So what is the biblical view of what happens after death? What does the Bible say about what happens after we die? If our souls don’t ascend like angels, then what happens?
Well, that is a difficult question to answer. And one of the main reasons that it’s difficult is because the Bible does not agree with itself about what happens after death. Remember, the Bible is not one book, but many books, written by different people, in different places, in at least three different languages, and over the course of at least a thousand years. So is not a book, it’s a library. The Bible is a conversation. Sometimes, the Bible is even an argument. And among the several disagreements in the Bible is the question of what happens after death.
For example, many of the writings in the Hebrew Bible seem to suggest that humans have no existence after death. After death, the only place we go is to the grave, to Sheol, an empty abyss. Psalm 6 says, “Turn, O Lord, save my life; deliver me for the sake of your steadfast love. For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?” Death seems to be the end. At least there is no memory, will, or consciousness after death. Isaiah 38 speaks a similar understanding: “You have held back my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back. For Sheol cannot thank you, death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness. The living, the living, they thank you, as I do this day.” Notice that Isaiah isn’t comparing the saved with the damned. He isn’t comparing heaven with hell. He’s comparing the living with the dead. Only the living can praise God, but once they die, they cease having the ability to perceive God or to praise God. Essentially, the dead evaporate into nothingness.
Of course, that is certainly not the only perspective on death in the Bible. And certainly, every writing in the New Testament would reject this position. Every New Testament writing assumes that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is proof positive that human life does not end at the point of death. New life comes afterward. However, even though they agree that there is life after death, they don’t agree about what that life looks like.
One of the most famous places Christians go to learn about life after death can be found at the very back of your Bible: the Book of Revelation. And what do you find there. You find the city with twelve gates made of pearl. You find the streets paved with gold and buildings built out of jewels. That’s the heaven we’re looking forward to, right? If we have faith in Jesus, then that’s where we get transported as soon as we die, right? Unfortunately no. Revelation actually describes things a little bit differently. For one thing, nothing happens to people immediately after they die. They just die. It’s not until Jesus returns in glory that all of the dead are raised bodily from the tomb before facing judgement. And all of those people who are raised from the dead and found acceptable in the eyes of God, they don’t go to heaven. Instead, God makes a new heaven and a new earth. The saints of God spend eternity not in heaven, but on the new earth, an earth that has been transformed into something that we might think of as heavenly.
There are other views, as well. Matthew talks about separating sheep from goats, some destined for eternal life and others for eternal punishment. John tells us that Jesus goes ahead to prepare a place for us, that there are many mansions in God’s dwelling place. The truth is, though, that most of Bible just does not have a lot of detail about what the afterlife might be like. It’s much more poetry than prose.
So what does Paul have to say in First Thessalonians? He outlines a few simple steps. First, “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.” Step One: Jesus returns. Then, “those who are dead in Christ will rise.” Paul has nothing to say about what might happen to the dead who are not in Christ. That’s just not a question that he is interested in here, nor does he say how to determine whether any particular dead person is in Christ or not. All he says is Step Two: the dead in Christ are raised. Next, “we who are living and still around will be taken up together with them in the clouds to meet with the Lord in the air.” Note that Paul seems quite confident that he and most of his readers are still going to be alive when Jesus returns, but be that as it may. When the dead Christ are raised, Jesus will take them, along with any faithful people who happen to be alive at that moment, and snatch them up in the clouds to meet with the Lord in the air. Not a lot of detail there. I’m not sure what it means to live with the Lord in the air. Being snatched up into the clouds doesn’t make things a whole lot clearer for me, either. Like I said before, it’s much more poetry than prose.
But that’s kind of the point. Those details aren’t the most important part. What’s most important is what Paul says immediately before and after his fanciful description of the last day. What he says just before is one of my favorite passages in the whole bible. It is a regular part of the funeral liturgy. “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.” So that you may not grieve as those who have no hope. Yes, we will grieve. We will be sad. We will miss those whom we love who have died. But we will not grieve as those who have no hope.
Why? Because “Jesus died and rose again, and through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. Jesus’s death and resurrection break the power of death. Jesus’s death and resurrection give us hope, because they are the promise of life eternal with God.
And that’s what Paul emphasizes again just after his description of the last day. He says, “We will be with the Lord forever.” We will be with the Lord forever. That is the important part. That is the hope. That is the grace, we will be forever with God.
So am I trying to tell you that you need to change your conception of what life after death looks like? No. In truth, it is still full of mystery. Whether we are looking for an earthly city made of gold and jewels with pearly gates, or whether we are looking for many mansions in God’s house, or whether we are looking to be snatched up through the clouds and into the air with God—those sorts of details are not the main point, and they are ultimately beyond our understanding.
The main point is this. We do not grieve as those who have no hope. No, when we grieve, we grieve with the assurance of eternal live with Christ. We grieve with the assurance that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ have broken the power of sin and death. We grieve with the assurance that through Jesus Christ we will spend eternity with God. We do not grieve as those who have not hope; we grieve as those who have assurance of eternal life with Christ. Alleluia, and Amen.