Proper 27A
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
November 8, 2020
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer
Morristown, NJ
To read the New Testament, or any of the Bible for that matter, is to enter a world that is strange to our own. It’s not just that we have smartphones and regular garbage collection and they did not. It’s that we and they see the world in very different ways. They thought differently about how things work physically; they thought differently about the size and shape of the universe; they thought differently about history. They thought differently about everything.
And it’s hard for us to grasp. Learning to read the Greek in which they wrote is often easy compared to the work of learning to read what it was they were writing about. What seems easy to understand either because we’ve read it so many times it has become familiar or because we imagine that the writers lived in our imaginative world is, for both of those reasons, easy to misread and misunderstand. We have to read until the familiar becomes strange.
All the same, for all their strangeness, for all of the differences made by two thousand years of time and a continent and an ocean worth of distance, these human beings were not so unlike us. They preferred being alive to being dead. They lived together in communities. They married and raised children. They maintained households and community relations. They had a notion of what a good life would be and they struggled in that direction. They chafed under injustice and oppression and they resented unfairness.
Once we’ve read until a familiar text has become strange to us, then we turn around and read a strange text until the people become recognizably human.
This letter of Paul’s is his first surviving epistle, in fact, the oldest of any of the New Testament books, older by a generation than any of the gospels. Say whatever we will about Paul (and I’ve said plenty) he was the first known Jesus-follower to attempt any sort of written account of the Jesus movement. Like all of the New Testament books, 1 Thessalonians was written for a particular community of Christians to speak to the particular concerns that they had. We read over the shoulders of the first century readers for whom this book was written and to whom it was sent.
We surmise from reading even this short passage that there were worried and troubled followers of Jesus in Thessalonika. It was perhaps fifteen or twenty years since Jesus had died and been raised from the dead. It was a bedrock article of faith among the Christian assemblies that Jesus would return. He would return to “restore” Israel, as the Gospel of Luke puts it, to bring the definitive reign of God, to transform history so that humans, or at very least the humans who had followed the Way of Jesus, would be able to live the lives that God had always intended that they should lead. There are various images in the Bible of what this might look like, but the one from Micah that we would have heard last week had we read a little further will do nicely:
…they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more;
but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid.1
They believed that Jesus was the one through whom God would (finally) bring this to pass and that all this would happen soon. The folks at Thessalonika were not modern people. There were no anthropologists there, no sociologists, and no political scientists. They didn’t think scientifically in terms of systems that could be created, dismantled, or nudged in the direction of a just and peaceful society.
But they had nonetheless been at the work of living out an alternative vision of what human community could be. They were about the task of living into values that were at odds with the broader culture of Rome and its empire. They struggled to live non-violently, justly, lovingly, compassionately, and peacefully.
They weren’t environmentalists or ecologists, either. They certainly saw their lives as a struggle between culture and nature, a struggle that was often a matter of life and death, one that they had no assurance of winning. But they also understood that, just as human life as lived in the Empire of Rome was less than what God dreamed for them, so, too, was nature not as it should be. They believed that when Jesus returned to set things to rights, part of what would happen would be the restoration of creation to its intended splendor.
They understood themselves to be a part of God’s plan from which the natural world was not excluded and that their ultimate salvation and the creation’s salvation were wrapped up in each other. So their living out of and into God’s good news would be good news for the entire world.
Now they had been at this work for some time. But as the years drew on, members of their community died from one cause or another. This was not unusual, but it raised a problem. What would happen to those who died as Jesus’ return was delayed? Were they simply out of luck? Would they miss seeing in its completion the work that they had invested their lives in?
Paul crafted his answer to meet this pastoral need and to do that he drew from things that were a part of their lives. No, he said, those Christians who have died have not missed out, because when Jesus comes it will be like when the Emperor comes to pay an official visit, what was called a parousia. The Greek word means “presence” or “arrival.” (Its Latin translation is “adventus,” so that might help us.) The Emperor would draw near a city and heralds would be sent forward to announce the emperor’s approach. Horns would be sounded. The people of the city already knew that the emperor was coming so they would process out of the city to meet him on the road. They would wear white garments and, bowing down, they would present gifts.Now, a feature of ancient Greco-Roman cities is that there were no cemeteries inside the city walls. Instead, the roads into a city were lined on both sides with tombs. People wanted to be buried there so that travelers would see their tombs, perhaps read the epitaphs, and in this way they would be remembered, memorialized. Of course this meant that the emperor (or any other traveler) would meet the dead of the city before he met the living.
Paul re-imagines the parousia of Jesus as taking place from above. As he approached, the trumpet would sound, the heralds would announce his arrival, and the faithful would go up in this case to meet him. The dead would meet him first. The anxious Thessalonians didn’t need to worry about the dead of their community. When the time came, the dead would have a front row view.
I don’t doubt that the community at Thessalonika was able to find some comfort in the poetic image that Paul sketched in his letter to them.
The question I have is this: does it work for us who do not anticipate visits from the Emperor and who, for that matter, may or may not believe that history is laid out in the way that the Thessalonians believed it to be? I mean, do we really expect that our history will go along, fulfill certain disconnected prophecies, and then suddenly come to an end to be replaced by this supernatural interruption? We can and do imagine several scenarios for the end of human history, but none of mine at least look anything like this.
I see God’s dream for us differently, not as something outside or above history, and not as something really in history, either, but as something that bubbles up through it, erupting sometimes into a glimpse of what God wants for us.
It happened that way about four years ago in Baton Rouge during a Black Lives Matter protest. Protesters blocked a roadway without a permit and a line of heavily armored Louisiana State troopers prepared to shove the protesters off the street. A young black woman named Ieshia Evans stepped onto the street and stood facing them. Looking at the picture of her in a summer dress, I suspect that she hadn’t planned this. Still, she was there, this slender young woman, facing down a phalanx of police who looked like they were ready for combat. She described it this way:
When the police pushed everyone off the street, I felt like they were pushing us to the side to silence our voices and diminish our presence. They were once again leveraging their strength to leave us powerless. As Africans in America we’re tired of protesting that our lives matter, it’s time we stop begging for justice and take a stance for our people. It’s time for us to be fearless and take our power back.2
God’s dream lives just below the surfaces that we walk on unthinking. Sometimes it erupts. Sometimes it springs up and thrills our hearts, making us believe that the impossible dream of a peaceful justice is not only possible but inevitable.
The Thessalonians were worried about whether the dead of their community would be allowed to be a part of Jesus’ coming. And this after just a few years of delay in their expectations. What nearly two thousand years of delay have taught us is that Jesus’ coming is always already happening right now. Through Ieshia Evans, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, and through everyday acts of millions of others who never make the news,Jesus approaches, blows a trumpet, and announces the transformation of the world, not as a future event, but right now and here among us. No one alive, or dead, or yet to be born will miss out.
Therefore, as Paul said, let us encourage one another.
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1 Micah 4.3b-4b.
2 Yoni Appelbaum, “A Single Photo from Baton Rouge That’s Hard to Forget,” The Atlantic, July 10, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/07/a-single-photo-that-captures-race-and-policing-in-america/490664/
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