Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "Grieving With Hope "
Date: November 6, 2005
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

Our congregation—among many others—has a long tradition on All Saints’ Sunday of reading the names of those from our church family who have died in the past year, as well as the names of your family and friends.  That’s a good practice, because someone is always grieving on any given Sunday, and reading the names of those who have died gives us all an opportunity to deal with grief, as well as to offer God our thanksgiving for the lives lived by our loved ones.

No matter how long you’ve been a Christian or how devout you may be, the life of faith is not without anxiety.  Perhaps that is where many of our questions come from…our anxiety, our fear, especially of the unknown.  And in all times and places, death has provoked any number of questions bearing on faith.  So Paul is being a pastor in a very real sense in his letter to the Christians in Thessalonica, answering the questions, and perhaps the anxieties, that have reasonably arisen in the minds and hearts of the earliest Christians who expected the imminent return of Jesus within their own lifetime.  It was between twenty and thirty years since the death and resurrection of Jesus when Paul wrote this letter, the earliest of his existing correspondence.  When the Thessalonians witnessed the deaths of believers, faithful folk who were awaiting the Parousia, the “day of the Lord,” they asked Paul for some kind of explanation.  How would all of this work, they asked; what will happen to those who have died?  Christ hasn’t come back yet.  Will they be saved?

Paul, of course, responds with assurances of what God is doing, of what God is about, in that very moment and in every moment of history.  With the resurrection of Jesus, God has set resurrection into motion, so to speak; God has put into motion a transformation that will not only overcome death but will bring believers into the very presence of God (“and so we will be with the Lord forever”).

I somewhat doubt that when a loved one of yours dies, you think about the second coming of Christ and wonder will they be raised at that time.  You are, first, overcome with your grief.  Second, there are a myriad of details and arrangements to be handled.  But you may take some comfort in believing, as I do, that they are already at rest in the presence of the Lord.  How many times have we said, especially of someone who has suffered a painful or lingering death, “they are now in a better place”?  In fact, those were the very words Tom Light used when he called me Friday afternoon from Pennsylvania to tell me that his mother had died as a result of a stroke suffered following surgery.  After waiting by her bedside for a week while she remained in a coma, he, his father and sister, both United Church of Christ ministers, agreed that she is in a “better place.”

I received an e-mail last week from my college roommate’s wife, a director of Christian education at a large parish in Atlanta, with whom we had dinner in July when we were there.  Her mother was in failing health in a Pennsylvania nursing home at the time.  She wrote to tell us that her mother had died a week after we had visited with them.  She goes on to write, “I miss her terribly but really know that she is in a better place.  I felt so sorry for her this past year not being able to walk or to see.  One of my friends reminded me that she is probably in heaven with Dad and [my late sister Jayne] having a cigarette.  I sure hope so.”

Personally, I was hoping that heaven was going to be non-smoking, but everyone has their own perception of what makes “a better place”!

Whatever and wherever we perceive heaven to be, Jesus himself told us very little about it.  In the forty days of his appearances to his disciples after his resurrection, he did not describe it.  Yet, before his death, he promised the disciples in John chapter 14:3:  “…I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

Jesus does not tell us when he will come again, but I certainly believe his words that he has gone ahead to prepare a place for us, and for all who die in the Lord.  I have quoted those words at scores of funerals and memorial services for Christians as a word of hope and promise to their grieving families and friends.

A dozen years ago, I read them at the service here for a long-time and faithful church member, Doc Champeny, who died at the age of 90.  His wife Fanny sat right there in the front pew, with her sister next to her.  As I read that scripture passage, Fanny’s sister sat there nodding her head up and down.  She had heard it before, and believed it too.

Yesterday, I heard a minister who was a hospice chaplain say that “grieving is what we must go through to get to a better place.”  Her statement drew my immediate attention because I knew I was going to preach on grieving and a better place today.  Now the “better place” she was speaking of was the eventual acceptance and peace we come to after a loved one has died.  Yet I believe, as Paul wrote, that we do not “grieve as others do who have no hope.” 

David Buttrick, emeritus preaching professor at the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, attempts to bring some understanding of the resurrection of the living and the dead at the second coming to contemporary Christian people—we who have lived through the two thousand years since Christ’s resurrection:  “The hope of a general resurrection is connected with God’s ultimate purpose for humanity—namely, a whole world reconciled and in communion with God…Christ is risen, and now, as Paul exclaims, now is the day of salvation.  We live in a time when God is at work to bring about the redemption of the world, a work begun in Christ, a work that will be done.  The resurrection proposes not merely an end to death, our last enemy, but to sin and law and demonic powers that be.”  (The Mystery and the Passion, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1992, pp. 65-66)

Our hope is that the love of God is stronger than the devastation of death; that ultimately, nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ, as Paul later wrote to the Romans.  God, having gone to such great lengths to save us and have us in life, will continue to demand us even in death.  That is why we do not grieve as those who have no hope.

This is the hope that we experience on Sunday in church.  If we have ever experienced Jesus coming to us, being really present to us in word and sacrament, we hope for and count on his presence with us forever.  Our hope is not that we are immortal, not that some eternal spark lives on in us, surviving death.  Our hope is not that we will be reincarnated and join Shirley MacLaine in living many different lives through the centuries on the face of Earth.  Our hope is—simply and ultimately—that we will, by the work and will of God, be with Jesus forever.  Death, the final enemy, will have been defeated.

“Because I live, you shall live,” Jesus tells his followers in the Gospel of John.  And that’s why we have hope.  I leave you with the closing words of the text from Paul today:  “Encourage one another with these words.”  (1 Thessalonians 4:18)