An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Grief, Fear, and Rapturous Welcomes

A sermon on 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 & Matthew 25:1-13 by Nathan Nettleton

I’m not sure whether or not I should warn you that tonight’s sermon will touch on topics that include life after death, time travel, aliens, and the rapture, because if I do warn you, some of you may be wondering whether your usual pastor has been abducted by aliens and replaced by a hologram with a completely different message. But don’t run screaming from the room just yet. Hopefully it will all make some sort of sense within the next fifteen minutes or so.

Probably most of you have encountered Christians who have said that if you have faith in God, then you should not grieve the death of another Christian, because they’ve gone to a better place. And more than likely they quoted the opening line of the reading we heard tonight from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians: “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.” And they waggle their fingers and say “There you go: no sadness, only joy.”

Now the first thing they have got wrong is the passage of scripture itself. It doesn’t say “so that you may not grieve”, full stop. It says, “so that you may not grieve the way those who have no hope grieve.” It is saying that different people grieve differently, and that there is a big difference between hope-filled grieving and the black hole of utter despair. And the second misunderstanding is about what people grieve over. Anybody who thinks that you don’t grieve if you are sufficiently confident that the departing person is going to a better place has never observed an airport departure lounge. If you watch an extended family farewelling their son and his wife and children who are leaving forever to take up a million dollar a year job as the quality control inspector for an ice cream producer in a beautiful tropical paradise, you will know that faith in the better life they are going to does not dispel the grief of the family who are left behind. The size of our grief is primarily about the size of the hole left in our lives, no matter what we think is happening to the departed. But, says the Apostle Paul, what we think is happening to them certainly does change the flavour of our grief. We still grieve, but we grieve differently.

And so the Apostle wants to make sure that we are not uninformed about those who have died, so that our grief may be the grief of those who have genuine hope. Well, we run into a little problem when it comes to being informed. The witnesses are a little hard to make contact with, and the Bible does, it must be admitted, seem to teach two different, apparently irreconcilable, views on what happens to those who have died. The more popular one is that our bodies die and our souls go straight on to live with Jesus in heaven. The other view, which is much less popular but which actually has better biblical support is the one expressed in this passage from Paul’s letter: that the dead are simply dead, and rest in peace completely dead until the day of resurrection when “with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, … the dead in Christ will rise” to new life.

I’m not sure that it is entirely possible, or even necessary to reconcile the two, but I do think that we can at least note some possibilities. Pushed to choose, I lean pretty strongly towards the “dead until the day of resurrection” approach, but you could legitimately challenge me, especially just a few days after our All Saints service, with a question about what on earth I think we are doing calling on those who have died in Christ to “pray with us now”. Tough question. Here come the aliens!

In his great novel Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut Jr has his main character, Billy Pilgrim, abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians can see in four dimensions, and the fourth dimension is time. The Tralfamadorians describe the human perspective of time as being like travelling on a train through the Rocky Mountains while strapped immovably to flat wagon, unable to move your head, and with your only view being through a long length of fixed pipe. Thus your only view of the Rocky mountains is a continuous line seen one centimetre circle at a time, and you can never move your gaze forward or back. The Tralfamadorians on the other hand, could see the whole mountain range at once and look at any point of it, forward or back, any time they liked. So if your only view of time is through the pipe, and you pass the point where someone dies, you can never see them alive again, but the Tralfamadorians can see them dead here and alive just back there anytime they choose. A lot of great theologians have used very similar images to describe what it means to say that God lives outside of time. God can see it all at once. Now the more you think about it, the more it scrambles your brain, but if, after the day of resurrection, we will live with God outside of time, then those who have been raised on the day of resurrection will be able to see now just like choosing to look at a different bit of the mountains. And even if you can’t begin to get your head around that, just stick with the biblical metaphor of death being like sleep. When you wake from a deep sleep, you are completely unaware of the time that has passed, and so being raised from the dead after a thousand years would feel the same as just passing straight through from this life to the next. That’s the best I can do by way of reconciling the two images anyway.

But perhaps there is a more disturbing question that comes from our reading — from Paul, not from Slaughterhouse 5. Perhaps you’ve been disturbed by teachings on the so-called rapture — the idea that Jesus will return and snatch all the Christians, living and dead, into the sky and leave everybody else to be fried in apocalyptic fiery judgement. And of course, the main biblical verse on which this image is built was in this same reading: “the dead in Christ will rise first, and 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.” Now the reason that that does sound exactly like what the rapture people say it is like is that when we hear it, we have no other frame of reference to hear it through than their descriptions. But Paul’s hearers had not read the Left Behind series, and I reckon they heard a quite different image. In the Greco-Roman world, if the emperor came to visit, the citizens of the town all went out to meet him. It would have been rude to not greet him until he arrived at the gates. They went out to meet him in the open country, and then escorted him in festive procession into their city. Now if you hear Paul’s words again with that image in the background, it makes a huge difference, because instead of us meeting Jesus in the air to be whisked off to safety leaving the world to burn, we are meeting him in the air to welcome him into the world that he loves and has come to redeem. We’re not going somewhere else to be with Jesus. He’s coming here to be with us and to renew the world and make it and us new and fully alive again, no matter how dead we may have been. It makes a huge difference doesn’t it? That’s why so many of the rapture people think that you might as well cut down all the rain forests and strip mine the planet because we’re leaving and its all going to burn. You treat the planet rather differently if you think your Lord and King loves it and is preparing to move in!

This is where the image in Thessalonians tallies with the image in the parable Jesus told in our gospel reading. The maidens with the lamps who are waiting for the arrival of the bridegroom are not waiting to go off with him somewhere else. They are the welcoming party who are waiting to escort him in to the wedding feast. But both the rapture images and the image of the wise and foolish maidens tend to stir up apprehension and fear in us, don’t they? Instead of looking forward eagerly to the arrival of the bridegroom, we are anxious about whether we will be among those deemed adequately ready. Images of the Lord’s imminent arrival have becomes so bound up with fear of judgement, that we have come to equate the two. And I will concede that this is no surprise. As the race who rejected Jesus and killed him, it is no wonder we are not eager to have to look him in the face and answer for what we have done. And so much religious teaching is all bound up with separating ourselves from the condemned and somehow escaping the judgement that could otherwise have been ours. With that agenda in mind, the story of the wise and foolish maidens sounds like a warning that we had better be prepared and on the job and on our best behaviour when the Lord comes, or we’ll be shut out.

But look again. The story doesn’t actually say that only those with enough oil would be let in and that the foolish maidens were shut out because they had no oil and had fallen down on the job. They were shut out because they weren’t there. When the bridegroom arrived, instead of welcoming him and going in with him, they were off somewhere else looking for oil. Think about it. When the bridegroom arrives, he’s not counting lamps. He’s eagerly anticipating being joined to his bride and he’s happy to celebrate with everyone. I’ll concede that his mother-in-law might notice whether we’ve got exactly the right number of lamps and who’s responsible if we don’t — mother-in-laws do seem to get rather obsessive about these things at weddings — but the bridegroom couldn’t care less. He’s in love with life, the universe, and everything, and ready to party and everyone’s welcome and five lamps more or less is not going to bother him in the least.

So why do they miss out? They miss out because they are afraid to appear without oil. Whether they are embarrassed to be seen as less competent than the others, or whether they are convinced that they have to earn their entry, or whether they are fearful of being judged and convinced that their failure to shine their light will see them condemned and shut out, I don’t know. What is clear is they left the most important thing — welcoming and celebrating with the bridegroom — in a desperate attempt to get everything perfect and not be seen to have failed in any way. And by fixating on whether they themselves were doing everything right, they managed to miss out completely. If only they had swallowed their pride, joyously welcomed the bridegroom, apologised and laughed at themselves for their mistakes, and joined the festive escort into the celebration.

My friends, it does seem that the only way to miss out is to try to do it all yourself instead of trusting yourself to the generous and joyous mercy of the bridegroom. The one whose arrival we await is not a vengeful judge, looking to take out his anger on every last one of us who got caught up in the frenzied chant of the mob, “Crucify him. Crucify him.” Most certainly he is the crucified one, and his outstretched hands still bear the scars of what we did. But he comes, not for vengeance and judgement, but for a wedding, and when he looks on you he sees not a blood stained lynch mob, but the most beautiful bride. I’m not suggesting for a moment that there is no value in storing up more oil of blessing and righteousness and prayer and compassionate action. The more of that oil you have, the richer your life will be as you await the final day. But when that day comes, no one’s going to be measuring oil. The only thing that will count is his outrageously generous mercy and his joyous welcome of all who welcome him, oil or no oil. And then, shining with the joy of forgiveness, we will meet him and welcome him and usher him into our world to make it his world. For the coming of that day on this day, we work and pray. Amen!

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