Fallen Asleep In Christ

οι κοιμηθεντες εν χριστω

A dear old friend is dying and living into it graciously. Recently she phoned for a long conversation to bring me up to date on her family and to ask if I would officiate her funeral, in a church we both love, where our families once worshiped and served and feasted and were baptized and married, died and were buried, and celebrated together. Would I officiate her funeral and then lay her to rest by the husband we buried years ago.

Death is on her mind. As indeed it was on my mind a few months back. Every dying is different. But death itself seems to be the same for all of us: we are dead. What is death like? We wonder. In time we find out. Not in chronos but in kairos we find out what death is like.

We like to believe -- and lex orandi lex credendi our liturgy that is our theology encourages this -- that when we die we pass immediately from this life into the next life. From earth to heaven. That doesn’t seem to be what St. Paul believes. Paul in 1st Corinthians 15 uses the Greek phrase οι κοιμηθεντες εν χριστω literally “those who have fallen asleep in Christ.” Modern translations may render the phrase “those who are dead” but οι κοιμηθεντες εν χριστω is Paul’s lyrical Greek for those who die believing that because Christ was raised from the dead we also shall be raised. Paul says of those who are asleep in Christ, i.e. dead, that the trumpet will sound and the dead shall be raised imperishable (15:52b). 

A Pharisee, Paul believed in the resurrection at the Last Day and evidently expected it to happen in his lifetime.

Paul then seems to believe that when we die we are “asleep in Christ” -- that is to say, dead -- indefinitely -- until the trumpet sounds for the general resurrection. I don’t necessarily like this, but on thought it makes no difference does it.

My metaphor, simile actually, is that death is like open heart surgery. As you realize it’s going to happen you may move from Ordinary Time into Stoppage Time. At some point during Stoppage Time you are rolled into the OR clothed in the same suit you were born wearing. Someone starts an IV. You will be in the OR six hours. For all we know, it might as well be six millennia. Or ages of ages.

There is no pain, no awareness. There may or may not be dreams. Preparing for my own quarter day in the OR my life had been thought through and my dreams carefully selected to live again certain memories; but not a single one of them, nor any other dream, appeared. There was simply that quarter day of total unawareness that was neither blackness nor darkness. Simply absence. Death perhaps. Asleep in Christ.

Suddenly, with no passage of Time whatsoever, consciousness began to return. Pehaps like being born the first time. Coming awake, I struggled and fought as tubes were removed. I opened my eyes to see myself not with my beloved grandmother as I had rather expected but surrounded by living loved ones. “I’m alive!” My absence from life for that quarter day in the OR was nothing to me. The passage of Time was as nothing. It could have been six hours or six millennia for all I knew. Or six eons.

Death and resurrection may be like that. It makes no difference how long we sleep in Christ. It will be no time at all until the trumpet sounds.

And we wake up in eternal +Time.

TW+