When Paul wrote to the home church in Thessaloniki, this was the truth he explained for them. As we heard in the passage read this morning, Paul was responding to the believers’ concern for people in their small congregation who had died or “fallen asleep” as Paul puts it. Those believers felt the same kind of grief, the same kind of loss we feel. In their tight-knit fellowship, they met constant reminders of those who were no longer with them: a mother or a son, a dear friend, perhaps a deacon or the kind older woman who prayed so diligently for the overtaxed young mothers. Whenever they gathered in one another’s homes, surely they saw the empty chair or space on the floor that sickness or accident or violence had left.
Paul had come to Thessaloniki in obedience to the command to go and make disciples of the crucified and risen Messiah. His message was one of resurrection. He preached that sickness and death were defeated when God came and gave his own life for ours. The believers took his message to heart, even in the face of persecution from Jewish and pagan neighbors. They would follow the King of Life.
But now, when death still broke in and terrorized them, abducting brothers or sister from their midst, what were they to make of it? Had the King of Life failed them? Was the resurrection a joke? Had Jesus changed anything?
Maybe we feel the same way. Maybe we should feel the same way. Our Savior lived and died to bring us life. It’s an outrage when death still afflicts us. It’s not right; it’s not what God wants for us. Something in our hearts or our heads should cry out, “God, this doesn’t make sense! Your Son came to bring us life, life abundantly. Why do we still get sick or get hurt or get old and die?”
So, just like it’s New Year’s Eve, we take stock this morning. I think taking stock is very important. It’s good for us to pause for a bit and pay attention to what’s happened to us in the last year. Some of you have had me ask you to reflect on the high points and the low points of your month or week. At Family Potlucks on 2nd and 4th Sundays, we often ask those questions of one another at some point during our meal. I find that we only see God at work if stop and look.
This morning we’ve remembered some of the hard and sad parts of this last year. Many friends, many family members have died. Many left us in pain or only after long sickness. Many left us before we were ready to say goodbye. Many of us are still grieving. Death is surely part of life as we know it, but it is never a part we cherish. And death was never a part of life as God intended it.
So we light candles, candles that remind us of our grief, the courage we need, the memories we have, and of our love. Today we observe Memorial Sunday. The lit candles remind us of our grief and, hopefully, also of our hope.
On Thursday I was drinking coffee with someone at Tim Horton’s, and in the background of our conversation I heard my first Christmas song of the season on the radio. For a moment I tensed; I’m the kind of guy who likes to save Christmas music for the Christmas season. But then I remembered that that very Thursday morning was American Thanksgiving. I usually think of American Thanksgiving as the official kick-off day of the holiday season. So I relaxed and took another drink of my coffee.
The holiday season is really upon us. The holidays can be a bitter time for grief. I think they’re double-edged when it comes to dealing with sorrow and loss; they get us coming and going. From one direction, we feel the absence of loved ones who aren’t with us. We arrive at Christmas dinner and we remember the salad or the dessert that Grandma would have brought. We see the gap in the Christmas cards on the mantel or the missing face on the family Christmas photo. The work Christmas social feels empty without the antics or good humor of our friend. And just when our heads tell us we should be feeling happiest and most content, our hearts well up with this aching sorrow and our eyes begin to leak tears.
But coming from the other direction, the holidays keep us busy enough that we never have a moment long enough to name the sorrow the keeps creeping up on us. If I take a look at my own calendar, I see I have weeks in December where already nearly every night is filled with one social gathering or another. Add to those events the pressure of holiday shopping, Christmas baking, and a family tradition to watch the holiday movies Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and A Christmas Story. I don’t have space to examine my heart, to diagnose this pressure in my chest or the lump in my throat. I’m too busy buying stocking-stuffers to recognize my grief for what it is.
This is why our family here at Warman Mennonite Church observes Memorial Sunday. We need time to pause and reflect. We need to remember why we grieve and why also we hope.
But it’s not only our little fellowship that pauses on this Sunday to take stock. Churches around the globe pause today, at the end of the old year and on the verge of the new one, to celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. On Christ the King Sunday, we affirm once more our confession of faith. Whatever the year has brought us--joy or grief--we say that we believe that Jesus is Lord. No matter how much it might appear that unpredictable financial markets and shifting weather patterns, cancers and infections, addictions and hate have lorded it over us during the past year, we say with a strong voice, “Jesus is Lord and there is no other.”
This is how the Feast of Christ the King started. The year was 1925. Not even ten years after the bloodiest war that Europe had ever seen, militaristic nationalism was again on the rise. Men were still walking around disfigured by the artillery shells and chlorine gas of World War I, but nations were already building up their armies once more. The current pope, Pius XI, saw that the church, too, was forgetting its true king. Its members were dreaming right along with their separate nations’ fantasies of empire; their loyalty had been won over by economic progress and national pride.
So Pope Pius called for a party, a feast, to remind believers with songs and decorations, with prayers and commemorative speeches, that no gun-wielding government, no money-making industry or financial sector can rightfully claim Christians’ allegiance. Pope Pius said all believers should get together on this Sunday to celebrate that, although Satan, selfishness, and death act like they can set the rules we live by, only Jesus truly has the authority to call the shots. Only Jesus lived a life truly free from fear of these destructive powers; only Jesus triumphed over them all by laying down his life and then taking it back again on Easter morning. Pius told believers to take a little time on this Sunday to live out and live up the truth that Jesus is our true and only king. Sometimes it takes something good, a feast or a party (perhaps even a potluck?) to remind us of this, especially when times are hard.
This is what I want you to take with you in your heart when I’m done speaking this morning: The fact that Jesus is our king is both our reason to grieve the way things are and our one reason to hope that things will not always stay this way, to hope that they will be made right.
When Paul wrote to the home church in Thessaloniki, this was the truth he explained for them. As we heard in the passage read for us this morning, Paul was responding to the believers’ concern for people in their small congregation who had died or “fallen asleep” as Paul puts it. Those believers felt the same kind of grief, the same kind of loss we feel. In their tight-knit fellowship, they met constant reminders of those who were no longer with them: a mother or a son, a dear friend, perhaps a deacon or the kind older woman who prayed so diligently for the overtaxed young mothers. Whenever they gathered in one another’s homes, surely they saw the empty chair or space on the floor that sickness or accident or violence had left.
Paul had come to Thessaloniki in obedience to the command to go and make disciples of the crucified and risen Messiah. His message was one of resurrection. He preached that sickness and death were defeated when God came and gave his own life for ours. The believers took his message to heart, even in the face of persecution from Jewish and pagan neighbors. They would follow the King of Life.
But now, when death still broke in and terrorized them, abducting brothers or sister from their midst, what were they to make of it? Had the King of Life failed them? Was the resurrection a joke? Had Jesus changed anything?
Maybe we feel the same way. Maybe we should feel the same way. Our Savior lived and died to bring us life. It’s an outrage when death still afflicts us. It’s not right; it’s not what God wants for us. Something in our hearts or our heads should cry out, “God, this doesn’t make sense! Your Son came to bring us life, life abundantly. Why do we still get sick or get hurt or get old and die?”
Listen again to how Paul responded to what’s really a legitimate outcry in 1 Thes 4.13-18. He begins,
Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.Paul admits the loss of dear brothers and sisters from the Thessalonian church family. Believers have “fallen asleep in death.” Sometimes we have difficulty admitting the loss the we feel, the pain a loved one’s absence brings us. I had a good friend who followed the teachings of Christian Science. Christian Science is a religion that denies evil and pain in the world; they say it’s all only an illusion. Paul does not deny the pain believers experience. Evil is real. Death is real, horribly, tragically real.
But Paul says death is not the final word. We’re always ready to close the book, to say that we’ve reached the end of the story. Death is not our “happily ever after.” No, Paul says, We believe that Jesus died and rose again--Christian faith does not get any more basic than this affirmation.
But listen to what Paul says next: So in the same way, God will bring those who have fallen asleep in death with Jesus when he returns. Jesus’ story, his dying and then rising, has set the pattern for the rest of our stories. Death has taken away so many, many people. Some researchers estimate that as many as 100 billion people have lived in world history. Every one of has succumbed to death. Our bodies have broken down, slowly or suddenly, and we’ve left the realm of physical existence. Death looks undefeated, undefeatable. Every last person except those breathing today have died. Well, all but one.
But that one, Jesus, just as human as any one of us, born in a barn and raised in a small town, Jesus who spent most of his adult life around construction sites, Jesus who loved his family just like we do, who probably saw his adopted father Joseph taken away by death--that Jesus died but did not stay dead. He broke the grip of death. He wrested the authority, the power, and the glory from death’s grip. He took back the crown and the throne from that evil usurper. Death thought it had won when Jesus cried out in agony with his last breath from the cross. But what was finished was not Jesus’ life--no, it was death’s rule, sin’s rule, Satan’s rule.
Paul says that our loved ones who die in Christ go to wait in the presence of the King of Life. In God’s glorious heaven, they wait. They wait just like we wait. We often picture those who die blissfully and eternally in God’s presence, perhaps floating among the clouds or singing with angels. Paul says they are waiting, just like us. They are waiting for Jesus to come again to cast out for eternity that miserable tyrant death. This is part of what we remember during the next four weeks of Advent.
Paul uses the picture of a king returning victorious from war to describe the Jesus’ return. There is an archway in Thessaloniki that spans the ancient Egnatian Way. Cindy and I saw it when we were missionaries in Eastern Europe. Although it was built two centuries after Paul’s visit to the city, every time I remember that archway I think of Jesus’ coming triumphal entry that Paul talks about. I picture the Roman emperor riding underneath that arch surrounded by his faithful legions. The archway itself pictures Emperor Galerius conquering the armies of Persia. As the emperor and his army return to the city, the whole population runs out to meet him and welcome him back to the city he has freed from fear of the enemy.
This is what Paul says Jesus will do. He will return to the world he has freed from the fear and the power of death with all his faithful marching with him. And then we who are still living will run out to meet him and join the parade as he returns to earth to rule and renew it eternally. Paul says in vv 15 through 17,
According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.The King of Life indeed rules. He has ruled ever since that day when he cried it is finished from the cross. Those we love who have died know better than us that he rules. They stand in his presence, waiting to join him in chasing out every last hint of death’s long regime, for the great victory parade when they come again with him. They will be like him, Paul says in 1 Cor 15, given new and glorious resurrection bodies. Those who we remember as sick and hurting, tired and brokenhearted will be every bit as healthy as us--even healthier. They will be full of the joy and the vigor of youth, yet with the wisdom of those who have sat long at Jesus’ feet around his throne.
We will rush out to meet him when we hear his command, his trumpet call. We run out, right up into the clouds, to join his parade as he descends to rule on earth. If the lingering tyranny of sin, sickness, and death and the seeming absence of our King of Life give us reason to grieve, then the return of our King gives us reason to hope, even to rejoice.
The Feast of Christ the King celebrates this great hope. We pledge our allegiance to Jesus, own him as our Lord, even when it seems that other forces rule over us. We trust that the cross and the empty grave tell the truth about the world. We trust that death is not the last word.
In another way, our Memorial Sunday today celebrates Jesus as King of Life. As we light our candles, we admit our grief, our sense that this is not how things should be. I think this sense that something isn’t right, that even the most peaceful death always contains elements of tragedy, is common to most people in our world. Funerals always mean tears. But this morning we bring those tears to church. We light our candles in this space where week after week we sing and pray and hear Scripture promise that there is another way, another king, a compassionate king who hates death just as much as we do. When we gather as church, our sorrow is both affirmed as true sorrow--death really is something to mourn--but our sorrow is also met with a promise of life.
I want to end this morning by reading two passages that testify to Jesus as King and Lord. The first is from centuries before Jesus’ first advent. Long before Jesus was born, God’s people faced terrible persecution. The rule of death was strong and clear. The seer Daniel received visions from God in which God is revealed as the true king. All the forces of Satan, sin, death, which appear as wild beasts with horrible horns in the vision, will be slain, destroyed, and punished by “one like a son of man” who receives authority from God. This is a picture of our Savior Jesus, conquering our enemies as King of Life. Listen to this ancient vision from Dan 7.11-14
Then I continued to watch because of the boastful words the horn was speaking. I kept looking until the beast was slain and its body destroyed and thrown into the blazing fire. . .
In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory, and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.Daniel foresaw one like a son of man defeating death and then coming on the clouds to reign eternally. Now listen to how John of Patmos echoes that vision fifty years after Jesus’ resurrection in Rev 1.5-7
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father--to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.Some might think that every promise, every prophecy should have been fulfilled when Jesus first came, when God came to live, suffer, die, and then live again. It may seem death should have lost its sting when Jesus’ conquered the grave on Easter morning. But we know at the price of painful experience that death still wounds us, still steals from us those we love.
“Look, he is coming with the clouds,” and “every eye shall see him,
even those who pierced him”;
and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.” So shall it be! Amen.
John joins Paul in telling us that there is more to come. He says that he who was born in manger will yet come on the clouds. And all those opposed to his reign of life, all those too familiar and friendly with the strategies of death, will mourn when death itself is slain. But we, who today are familiar with tears, who know death far too well, we will rejoice.
Jesus is King. Jesus is coming as King. We have reason to hope.
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