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1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 (NRSV) The Coming of the Lord

13 ... 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. 14 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. 15 For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. 16 For 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, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 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. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Expressing his own beliefs to ἐκκλησίᾳ Θεσσαλονικέων the church he had founded at Thessalonica, Paul could not have been aware that in ages to come the greater church at large would look to him as its founder, that what he wrote would be reverenced as the word of God, and that he was establishing Christian doctrine about death and dying and resurrection. For us today as we read this, or at least speaking for myself, it is of the essence to recognize what we have. 

Paul was an apocalypticist. He believed that the Eschaton, the end of time, was imminent, when Jesus, whom Paul says “we believe died and rose again,” would return to earth to rule a new world order of the kingdom of God. Paul early believed that this Event would take place immediately, in the lifetimes of himself and those around him. But as time went on, and the Event did not happen, and people died, Paul had to rethink his expectations. This part of his letter to his church at Thessalonica is an expression of his thinking.  

The paragraph 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, which is our Second Reading for this Sunday, November 9, is fairly clear and doesn’t need some goofy preacher like me to restate it. I will take it on though. As a one-time sometime amateur astronomer who enjoyed untold hours with my eye to a telescope gazing out at magnificent Saturn with its rings, Jupiter with the nightly changing pattern of its moons, green Neptune, and beyond our solar system at spiral galaxies, and studied the Big Bang along with cosmologists‘ theories about how our universe will end, not with a bang but a whimper untold billions upon billions of earth-years hence -- I find Paul’s beliefs correct for his age in which the earth was the center of all that is, with the sun moving round it to give us night and day. In this day and age, though, Paul’s expectations are bizarre. He sees not a heavenly kingdom as we may, but all this happening right here on earth and Christians who have died recalled to earthly life to share it.

What do I believe? It doesn’t matter. If for no other reason than that “just because I believe it, that don’t make it so” it doesn’t matter what I believe. I who am certain of nothing and who appreciate Paul’s word πιστεύομεν which means literally “we believe.” Paul does not say “we know” he says “we believe.” Wir glauben. The word is πίστις which is faith, which is not knowledge but conviction about things hoped for. I can go that far, even to the extent of saying the Nicene Creed on Sunday mornings. But Paul’s vision of the living and the dead-now-raised being caught up in the clouds -- 

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T+