Hope and History

“Christian hope means this: history matters.”

Hope and History

A Sermon by Jeffrey K. Krehbiel

32^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

November 9, 2008

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. (vs. 13)

Church of the Pilgrims

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Washington, DC 20037

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www.ChurchOfThePilgrims.org

I ’ve struggled this week with knowing exactly what to say after such an historic event Tuesday night. I don’t mind talking about politics, but I prefer not to be partisan. It’s not that I worry I will offend anyone, but that I like to do so on an equal opportunity basis. More importantly, I think it’s important to say something from the pulpit that is not simply a regurgitation of the op-ed pages. Moreover, the starting place for me is the text and not the newspaper. My job is not to comment on current events–there are others who can do that far better than I– but to help us as a community of faith to make sense of these ancient words in contemporary times, to hear the voice of God speaking to us here and now through these stories that have been passed down to us from generations past. For that reason, I am a devoted lectionary preacher, and I enjoy working to find the connection between the assigned texts for the day and what ever happens to be going on in the world around us.

Still, this week, of all weeks, is not a week to be ignored. This is not simply a changing of the guard in the White House, something that most of us have witnessed many times over, sometimes with glee and often with trepidation. This feels more like a shift of eras, a change of eons, a milestone that marks the beginning of a new chapter in our nation’s history. To say nothing about what has transpired, to not address what is perhaps foremost on our minds in these days, is to make what we do here today to an act irrelevance.

So when I turned to the assigned text for today from 1 Thessalonians, I was a bit disappointed. Paul is writing about the death of loved ones at a time of great uncertainty. He is writing to offer comfort and encouragement. His words don’t exactly seem to fit the mood of celebration and expectation that we have witnessed these past five days.

Yet when I watched President-Elect Obama’s victory speech on Tuesday night, the two most poignant moments for me were watching the tears stream down Jesse Jackson’s cheeks, and the mention of the death of his grandmother the day before. Here is the most significant moment in Barack Obama’s life, and the people most central in his upbringing– his father, his mother, his grandfather, and now his grandmother— are no longer here. And I suspect that Jackson’s tears were not just because he was witnessing a day that he perhaps thought might never come, but that so many of those who had fought so hard to make that day possible were not there to see it.

T hat is, indeed, something of the situation that Paul was addressing in his letter to the Christians in Thessalonica. In a way that contemporary Christians can scarcely imagine, the early Christians lived with the expectation that Christ would return in the very near future, certainly within their own lifetimes. When the first believers in their community began to die, it prompted not only grief but a crisis of faith. They lived expectantly that a new day was about to dawn, yet suddenly were confronted with the reality that those who had struggled alongside them would not be there to see it.

Paul writes that they should not grieve as others who have no hope. He is not saying that they should not grieve. Grief is the normal response to the death of a loved one, and Paul is not saying that their loss should not be grieved. But it should not be grieved as those who have no hope. It is this hope that Paul wants them to understand. In language rich with apocalyptic imagery, Paul assures them that just as Jesus was raised up on the day of resurrection, those who have died will be raised with the living in the last days. Those who live, and those who died, will be caught up in the clouds together, and will be with the Lord forever. Encourage one another, Paul writes, with these words.

I t is precisely at this point that so many Christians misunderstand the nature of Christian hope. Paul is not writing these words just so Christians have something comforting to say at funerals. Paul is not saying in this passage that we will all go to heaven when we die. This is not simply some Christianized version of the Greco-Roman notion of the immortality of the soul, that those who die somehow live on in our hearts. No. Paul is saying something much more profound and with far deeper meaning for how we live our lives.

Christian hope means this: history matters. And in the commonwealth of God, the labors of all those who have struggled for the kingdom will not finally be lost. Just as God vindicated the mission and ministry of Jesus on the day of resurrection, so will our labors, and the labors of those who have gone before us, be vindicated on the last day. Those who meet Jesus in the clouds are not on their way to heaven, but are meeting Jesus on his way back to earth, for the final redemption of the world in which we live, the final fulfillment of the hopes and dreams that Jesus called “the kingdom of God.” This is what it means when we pray, “thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”

New Testament scholar N. T. Wright puts it in this way:

The point of the resurrection, as Paul has been arguing through the letter, is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die. God will raise it to a new life. What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it... What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it, “Until that day when all the blest to endless rest are called away”). They are part of building God’s kingdom [on earth as it is in heaven].

This is what the church means when it says in the funeral liturgy, quoting from the Book of Revelation, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, says the Spirit. They rest from their labors, and their works follow them.”

S o as I caught my breath Tuesday night, and watched this historic moment unfold before the eyes of the nation, I thought:

Martin Luther King Jr. rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

Rev. George Lee, killed for leading a voter registration drive in Belzoni, Mississippi, May 7, 1955, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

Lamar Smith, murdered for organizing black voters in Brookhaven, Mississippi, August 13, 1955, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

Herbert Lee, voter registration worker killed by a white legislator in Liberty, Mississippi, September 25, 1961, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

William Moore, slain during a one-man march against segregation, in Attalla, Alabama, April 23, 1963, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

Medgar Evers, civil rights leader assasinated in Jackson, Mississippi, June 12, 1963, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, schoolgirls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, September 16, 1963, rests from their labors, but their works follow them.

Rev. Bruce Klunder, killed during the contruction of a segregated school in Cleveland, Ohio, April 7, 1964, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, civil rights workers abducted and slain by the Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi, June 21, 1964, rests from their labors, but their works follow them.

Jimmie Lee Jackson, civil rights marcher killed by a state trooper in Marion, Alabama, February 26, 1965, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

Rev. James Reeb, march volunteer beaten to death in Selma, Alabama, March 11, 1965, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

Viola Gregg Liuzzo, killed by the Klan while transporting marchers, Selma Highway, Alabama, March 25, 1965, rests from her labors, but her works follow her.

Samuel Younge, Jr., student civil rights activist killed in dispute over whites-only restroom in Tuskegee, Alabama, January 3, 1966, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

Vernon Dahmer, black community leader killed in the Klan bombing in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, January 10, 1966, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

Wharlest Jackson, civil rights leader killed after promotion to a so called "white" job in Natchez, Mississippi, February 27, 1967, rests from his labors, but his works follow him.

Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham, 86 years old, died November 3, 2008, after watching her grandson’s name appear on the ballot in all fifty states and the District of Columbia as the candidate of the Democratic Party for the President of the United States of America. She rests from her labors, but her works follow her.

Let us encourage one another with these words. ✞