Writing about things that matter (to me)
I had the privilege of speaking at my church's midweek service this week, and I shared about the importance of treating other people the way Jesus did. Public speaking is not my strength by a long shot. I'm much more comfortable behind a keyboard than behind a pulpit. But I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak into this moment, and if you'd like to take the time to give it a watch, I would be honored.
Last Wednesday night, I was ordained into the ministry by my church. Surrounded by my friends, family, and mentors, I was able to share and confirm my calling with those I love. It was an incredible night, and I am so thankful for everyone who played a part in it.
For my blog post this week, I'd like to share the sermon I wrote and delivered for this service. It's something that I've been thinking through for the past couple of years, and I think it represents my hopes for my ministry going forward. I've embedded the video below, but I've also included my manuscript in case you'd rather read it. As many of you know firsthand, I'm a much more natural writer than speaker.
Either way, I hope you enjoy it.
One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” —Luke 23:39-43
If you ever attend a Passover seder, you might notice something a little peculiar. Sure, you’ll see the expected Passover lamb and unleavened bread. We know all about that. But then you’ll also see the cups. As part of the meal, everyone gets a cup of… well, Free Will Baptists call it “grape juice.” There’s one for mom, one for dad, maybe one for grandma and grandpa, and one for every aunt and uncle, too. But once all the cups have been passed out, you might notice that there’s still one more. There’s an extra cup just sitting there, full, ready for someone to drink it. And you might wonder, “Who could that be for?”
And if you get up the courage to ask, the family members will be happy to tell you exactly who that extra cup is for. It’s for the prophet Elijah. As you probably remember from the book of 2 Kings, Elijah’s life didn’t end the way human lives normally do. Whereas most people throughout history have died, had funerals, and been buried, Elijah took a different, more theatrical, route. You see, when Elijah’s time had come, he did not go gentle into that good night. Instead, he rode off into the sky in a chariot made of fire, leaving nothing but his cloak and his stupefied apprentice behind.
And it only makes sense that if Elijah went riding off into the sunset, he’s got to come back down eventually. He never actually died, after all. And good Jewish families want to be sure that if the prophet shows up for dinner, they’ll be ready for him. And so, every Passover seder, they set out an extra cup just for Elijah in case he decides to grace them with his presence that evening.
Now, I’m not telling you this to make fun of this practice. In fact, I think it’s beautiful. It highlights a truth that these Passover celebrants are often better at recognizing than we often are. It celebrates the fact that we worship a God who loves to make exceptions to the rules.
And don’t you just love it when you get to be the exception to the rule? It makes you feel special, right? I remember when my family and I went to Disney World, we had the best time. My brother had just had knee surgery, so he was in wheelchair, which meant that we got to go the front of all the lines! We didn’t have to wait 45 minutes to get on the Tower of Terror like all of those able-bodied suckers in the back. No, we got to march right up to the front and hop on in no time as everyone else gave us death stares and we just smiled.
We like to be the exception to the rule. It’s fun when you get that free refill at your favorite restaurant. Or when you get to use that coupon that expired yesterday. And I think most of us have experienced the relief that comes when you get caught driving just a little faster than you should be and the officer lets you off with a warning. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have rules. Rules are in place for a reason. But we all have times when we enjoy the benefit of being the exception.
And in our text from Luke, we see another example of someone who benefitted from being the exception to the rule. The man being crucified next to Jesus wasn’t a saint by any means. We know that at the very least, he was a thief, and who knows what else he did to get himself up on there on that cross? Whatever it was, he clearly felt like he deserved what he was getting. Little did he know that he was about to get so much more than he deserved.
Can you imagine what it must have felt like for that thief when Jesus looked him in the eyes and said, “Today, you will be with me in paradise”? If I were him, I would be dumbstruck: “Wait a second. I’m being killed for my crimes, and here the savior of the world is telling me that I’m going to go hang out with him when this is all over? How did we get here?”
You see, that thief was mere hours away from a terrible fate. He’d lived his life, he’d made his choices, and now, he was about to suffer the consequences of what he had done. When Jesus turned and looked at that man, he saw someone headed for hell. But when he looked away just a few moments later, everything had changed. With one sentence, Jesus reversed the trajectory of that man’s eternity.
It wasn’t anything that that man had done. He hadn’t made any sacrifice or prayed any special prayer. He just… hung there as Jesus declared that he was saved. This thief was the first person to receive eternal life through Jesus Christ, and he received it for no other reason than that Jesus chose to give it to him.
That, my friends, is the greatest exception to any rule in all of history. A human soul on its way to hell suddenly changed course by the grace of God, and now, that thief will spend eternity in heaven. The importance, the innovation, the incredible nature of this event cannot be understated. In this moment, God made an exception to the rule, and it changed everything.
God made an exception for Elijah. He made an exception for the thief on the cross. And he continues to make exceptions to this day.
The truth is that each of us in this room who are Christians have benefitted from being made exceptions to the rules. The rules say that anyone who commits sin, who turns away from God, who participates in the brokenness of this world, is deserving of separation from God, spiritual death, and eternal punishment. That’s what the rules state, clear as day. But praise God, he made an exception out of each and every one of us. God broke his own rules. He broke into history, overcame sin and death, and gave each of us an opportunity to be an exception to the rule. To know him. To be reconciled to him. And to live forever with him. Aren’t you thankful for that?
And as I read this story and reflect on what it means for God to make exceptions to the rules for us, it makes me wonder about ways that we can share in that, ways that we can make exceptions to the rules for others.
The rules say, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” Except, Jesus taught us to forgive others rather than to seek revenge.
The rules say, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” Except, my church has a food bank every Monday from 1:00 to 3:00. Won’t you come?
The rules say, “A preacher can’t have a haircut like that!” Except, here I am. Sure, my church family likes to poke fun at me for my (admittedly unorthodox) hairstyle, but they don’t mean it negatively. Many of the people at my church are as old-school as they come. And yet, they accept me with all of my quirks. As trivial as it may sound, they’ve made an exception out of me in this, and I can’t thank them enough.
The rules say that our society is divided on social, racial, economic, and political lines that cannot be crossed and cannot be reconciled. Except, the Bible tells us that, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus“ (Galatians 3.28). And may I add that in Christ, there is no black or white, no rich or poor, no liberal or conservative. We are called to be the exception to the rules that try to divide us.
The rules say that this world is a broken place full of fallen people and that nothing good can come of any of it. The rules say that we are selfish, sinful people who aren’t interested in anything except our own well-being. The rules say that we are helpless in the face of the evil that surrounds us and that all that’s left for us to do is to give in. Except, we worship a God who sets us free from all of that. Who breaks the rules for us and invites us to do the same for others.
We serve a God of order. A God who made the rules that we adhere to. But we also serve a God of grace. A God who makes exceptions to the rules, who performs miracles, who lets us off the hook when we clearly don’t deserve it.
Here’s the thing about grace. In the words of one of my favorite musicians, “The beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair.” It’s not fair when an exception is made to the rules, and some people may not like that. But we serve a God who has a habit of making expectations to the rules, and my hope for my ministry is that I can share the grace that’s been given to me, that I will alway seek ways to share that exception-making with as many people as possible. And I invite you to do the same.
I’ve recently been reading Shane Claiborne’s book “Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us,” and it’s left me feeling very unsettled and convicted. It also reminded me of a sermon I wrote a couple of years ago from Jonah 4 on the value of human life, so I decided to adapt it into a blog post and share it with you. This isn’t my last word on this issue; it’s honestly more of a starting point. So expect to hear more, and, of course, I’d love to hear your thoughts as well. I hope you find this to be valuable.
Kelly Gissendaner is dead. I'm sure many of you are aware of her story. In 1997, Kelly convinced her boyfriend to murder her husband on her behalf. She was put on trial and convicted of murder. And now, Kelly Gissendaner is dead. While on death row, Kelly become a completely new person. She found Christ, studied theology, became a spiritual leader to other imprisoned women, and even fostered a penpal relationship with famed theologian Jürgen Moltmann. Kelly's transformation showed countless people the power of Christ's love, grace, and mercy. And yet, despite pleas from Kelly's children, from Moltmann, and from thousands of people who have been affected by Kelly's story, the state of Georgia executed her on September 29, 2015. Kelly Gissendaner is dead.
Kelly's story illustrates an unfortunate truth. We as a society and as individuals pick and choose which human lives we consider valuable and which we don't. Because Kelly was a criminal and specifically a murderer, our society decided that her life no longer had any value—that she had nothing more to contribute to the world—and thus, we killed her. But this isn't the only case where we’ve done something like this. We look at different groups within our world and say, "These lives have value, and these don't." This isn't something we do consciously, and it certainly isn't something we would admit to doing, but we participate in it without even thinking about it. This isn't a new problem.
We see this problem in the story of Jonah. Everybody loves this story. It’s one we hear over and over as children. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and warn them of their impending destruction. Instead, Jonah gets on a boat going the opposite way. Jonah gets swallowed by the fish, has a change of heart, gets thrown up, and fulfills his call to preach to Nineveh. The Ninevites repent and are saved. Happy ending, right?
But there’s one little problem with that cut-and-dry, cute, little children’s story. You see, most tellings of the story of Jonah end with chapter three, but there’s this little section called Jonah 4 tacked to the end, and it’s nowhere close to the happy ending we’ve come to expect from the story of Jonah. Here’s Jonah 4 from the NRSV:
But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.
The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”
But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”
In this chapter, we have to face an unsettling truth about our hero: He isn’t really a hero at all. Despite everything that he’s been through and all of the amazing things he’s seen God do in his life, Jonah still has a serious heart problem. At the beginning of chapter four, Jonah is displeased, and it doesn't take us long to find out why. He says to the Lord, “See, God! I knew this would happen! I knew you’d save those good-for-nothing Ninevites. That’s why I didn’t want to go speak to them in the first place. I knew you were just so kind and gracious and loving, and you just couldn’t resist sparing them. I knew. I knew, I knew it, I knew it!”
Have you ever heard the phrase, “No good deed goes unpunished”? I’m sure that’s kind of how Jonah felt in this moment. After a bit of persuasion, he decided to do what God had told him to do, and now he feels like he's suffering for it. But the truth is that Jonah isn’t suffering at all, unless you count self-inflicted pain as suffering. Jonah has just done something incredible. He’s taken Nineveh, the capital city of the most horrendous nation in the world at his time, and converted it entirely to the worship of Yahweh. This is absolutely amazing, a miracle of epic proportions that Jonah is allowed to be a part of!
And yet, as we see in Jonah 4, he’s displeased with this situation. Why? Because Jonah allows his own bias to blind him from seeing the truth. Jonah makes it clear that he never wanted God to save the Ninevites. His bias against the Ninevites led him to believe that they were unworthy of being alive. He wanted God’s judgment to reign down on them and for them to be killed. And so, when they respond to his message and are saved, Jonah is displeased. He’s so displeased, in fact, that he asks the Lord to end his life right then and there.
Psychology tells us that biases like Jonah’s are rarely (if ever) completely unfounded. In fact, stereotypes usually start as nuggets of truth that are then either misconstrued, misapplied, or both. Jonah’s disdain for Nineveh was based on the reality that the Assyrians were Israel’s harsh and demanding overlords. They were the imperial power of the day, and they had no problem showing it. They demanded tribute from the nations they had conquered, and when Israel eventually decided to stop paying that tribute, they burned Samaria to the ground and dispersed the people of the northern kingdom of Israel among the nations, never to be heard from again.
So yeah, Jonah had a very good reason to dislike Nineveh. The problem came when he allowed his totally legitimate feelings about the nation of Assyria to alter the way he thought about the people of Nineveh and the value of their lives.
Jonah decided that because the Assyrian government and military had caused him and his nation great harm, the entire nation was worthless and deserving of death. No need to take into account the fact that most of the people in Nineveh weren’t soldiers killing Israelites, but simply civilians going about their lives trying to take care of themselves and their families. No need to think about the fact that the Ninevite soldiers were simply following orders and that, given the opportunity, any nation, including Israel, could have been just as ruthless as Assyria. No need to recognize that even the Assyrian king, the man personally responsible for the atrocities committed against Jonah’s nation, was still a person just as much as Jonah was. Jonah dismissed them all as worthless, evil, and unfit to live. “Let them all die,” Jonah thought. “The world will be better off without them.” We even see in Jonah 4 that Jonah goes outside the city to wait and see if maybe God will change his mind and destroy Nineveh after all. But instead, God has a very important lesson in store for him.
As Jonah is waiting to see if the city will be destroyed, God works through nature rather than speaking with Jonah directly. He appoints a plant, a worm, and a scorching wind to help him get through Jonah’s thick skull. First, he has the plant grow up nice and tall so that it can offer Jonah shade from the sun. Jonah likes this. There’s nothing like sitting back in the shade, sipping on some lemonade, and waiting for God to strike down your enemies. At least if Jonah can’t get what he wants, God is providing him with the nice consolation prize of this plant.
But the plant has a very short life-span. That night, God appoints his second agent, a worm, to kill the plant. Some scholars waste a lot of time debating about what kind of plant it was and how exactly a little worm could bring down a whole plant overnight, but for the sake of the story, we’re just going to take it at face value. When Jonah wakes up, the plant is dead, and now there’s a hot wind blowing against him. What was at first a comfortable, casual stakeout has now become not only uncomfortable, but potentially harmful. Jonah begins feeling faint, and once again, he expresses his wish to die.
And now, God is ready to talk again. And not only is he ready to talk, but he’s ready to make his case. Just like Jonah made an argument to God at the beginning of Jonah 4, now God is preparing to make his own argument. He asks Jonah if he’s in the right for being upset about the plant. Jonah says yes. This plant has become a life-or-death matter for him. And then God replies, “You think you’re justified in being upset over this simple plant that you didn’t even grow. It grew up and died in just one day. How much more do I have a right to be concerned for the thousands of people in the city of Nineveh?”
God is making it very clear here: He cares for the people of Nineveh. Even though many of them were responsible for atrocities against God’s people and humanity as a whole. Even though they worshipped idols instead of the one true God. Even though they had become so wicked that they were on the brink of destruction, God still cared for them. Their lives still had value to God. He cared about them so much that he sent Jonah to them in order to change their hearts and save their lives. God is telling Jonah that he cares for all human life, even though Jonah had decided the Ninevites’ lives were invaluable. God values all human life.
God’s statement about his care for the Ninevites, and ultimately for all people, points out the hypocrisy of Jonah’s bias. In the midst of his anger and mixed-up priorities, Jonah has come to consider a plant more valuable than the lives of 120,000 people. 120,000 people created by the hands of God in his image, whose lives God considers important, and Jonah considers them to be of no value. How could Jonah have gotten to this point? It seems unfathomable.
And yet, aren’t we in the same boat as he was? We’re obviously not biased against the Assyrians because they’re long gone by now, but we do have our own sets of biases, and we do allow those biases to affect how we value the lives of other people. They lead us to conclude that some lives simply aren’t of value. We look at criminals and say, “Your actions have rendered you undeserving of life.” We read in the newspaper about homeless people dying of dehydration on the street, and we say, “If only they had made better decisions, maybe they’d be worth something.” We hear about innocent people in Syria being slaughtered by civil war and we say, “That’s not my problem.” Because just like Jonah, we pick and choose which lives we consider to have value and which we don’t, and we do so based on which groups we consider important, most of which are simply the groups that are most like us.
But like Jonah, God is calling us to something more. Because the truth is that God cares for the lives of all people, not just those that we consider important. And when we look past our biases and our topsy-turvy priorities, we see that if every human life is valuable to God, then every human life should be valuable to us as well, not just in a hypothetical way but in a concrete, real-world way. When we walk past people on the street, when we see people on our TV screens, when we read about people on news sites, we must remember that every single person matters to God, and thus, they should matter to us.
The book of Jonah ends with an unanswered question. After his object lesson, God asks Jonah, “Should I not be concerned for the people of Nineveh?” God is challenging Jonah to see the people of Nineveh as valuable to him and thus as having inherent value. God is giving Jonah an opportunity to put his bias and anger aside and accept the people of Nineveh for who they are: people who are beloved and valued by God. God is giving Jonah an opportunity to join him in caring for and valuing each and every human life, because each and every human life has value.
And God is extending that same invitation to us. “Should I not be concerned for the people of Syria?” “Should I not be concerned for the unemployed and impoverished?” “Should I not be concerned for those who have lost their way to the point that they have to be locked away from society?” The answer is yes, God is concerned for those people, and we are called to be, too.
In this day and age, we are constantly bombarded with the issue of how we’re going to value human life. Every day, we have to decide what life is worth to us and which lives are worth something. As we try to navigate these complex issues like abortion, the death penalty, war, prison reform, and even emigration, may we remember the story of Jonah. May we remember God's love for all people. May we remember that every human life has value to God, and may we seek to value each human life in the same way.
The following is adapted from a sermon I wrote from 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18 for my Preaching II class. In a recent meeting, my professor helpfully pointed out to me—and I agree with him—that my skills lie more in writing than in public speaking, and he encouraged me to give exegetical blogging a try. So instead of a twenty-minute video of me trying to seem confident behind a pulpit, I present an abridged version of my manuscript. If you’re interested in reading the full sermon text, it’s available here. And if you just really want to hear the sermon preached, there is a video of me preaching it available here.
No theologian throughout history has reached a broader audience than Charles Schulz. Schulz was the author of Peanuts, arguably the greatest comic strip of all time. And between the panels of Snoopy’s great adventures and Charlie Brown’s failed attempts to kick that ever-elusive football, he inserted some theological musings that were quite insightful. On April 13, 1965, Schulz published this strip portraying a conversation between Lucy and her brother Linus:
Charles Schulz understood the assuring power of sound theology, and so did the apostle Paul. Much of his life, ministry, and writing were dedicated to it, and that included his first letter to the Thessalonians (the oldest preserved Christian writing, by the way). The letter is chock full of deep theological reflections on various issues. And this is understandable given the circumstances surrounding the writing of the letter. Paul had recently founded the church at Thessalonica but had almost immediately been forced to flee the city, and despite his best efforts, he was unable to return to his beloved young church start.
And so he did the next best thing: He got out a pen, wrote a letter to the church, and sent his right-hand man Timothy to deliver the letter and to check on them. And in 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18, Paul had this to say to the new believers at Thessalonica:
But 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. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. 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. 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. 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. Therefore encourage one another with these words.
Based on what we read in the text and what we know from the historical context, it seems that that the Thessalonian church was facing three main problems. The most salient issue was that members of the community were dying, some possibly as a result of persecution. The Thessalonians also seemed confused about the return of Christ, knowing that Paul had taught them it would come soon and wondering why it hadn’t happened yet. And finally, the church was facing the problem of resocialization, learning to live out their newly-found Christian faith in a culture that was radically different from—and even hostile to—Christianity. This problem was made even more difficult by the fact that they had lost their spiritual mentor, Paul, so quickly after coming to the faith.
And so all of this confusion, about theological issues, the loss of members within their community, and trying to live out their newfound faith in a pagan context, had a drastic result: The Thessalonian Christians lost their hope.
Does any of this sound familiar? Because it should. We have a lot in common with those Thessalonians. We face loss in our own lives and communities; death is a reality in all times and places. We certainly don’t know what to think of the return of Christ, if we even bother to think about it at all. And we live in a secular culture that is constantly in conflict with the faith that we’re seeking to live out.
Like the Thessalonians, we face the temptation to lose our hope in the face of the reality around us. But Paul wrote to the church to renew their hope, and his letter persists until today in order to offer us hope as well. In this passage, Paul highlights three main sources of hope that Christians at all times and in all places can claim.
The first source of hope is one that Paul’s original audience was all too aware of and that we all too often ignore, but one that is far too often misunderstood in either case. That is the return of Christ. It is clear from this text and from the New Testament witness as a whole that the return of Jesus is a basic tenant of the Christian faith.
This belief in Jesus’ return is rooted in the words of Jesus himself. In John 14.3, Jesus tells his disciples, “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” And Christians have claimed that promise ever since. From 1 Thessalonians, the earliest extant Christian writing, to Revelation, the last book in our canon, we see the return of Christ come up again and again. Different texts use different metaphors, of course, and they all ultimately fall short of the reality. But regardless of which metaphor one might prefer, we can say without a shadow of a doubt that the return of Christ is coming.
And how could this not give us hope? Jesus, the God who chose to take on the form of a man and live among us, the God who died an innocent death and then overcame death by rising back up from it, the God who ascended into heaven and now sits at the right hand of the Father, is coming back to earth one day, and he’s coming back for us. When he returns, he will make all things new and set everything right. Nothing we will experience in this life, no matter how disappointing or hurtful, can overshadow the fact that we are awaiting the greatest homecoming of all time, and that is something worth hoping in.
For two thousand years, followers of Jesus have been saying that Jesus is coming soon. And of course, this has required us to sort of redefine what we mean when we say “soon.” By “soon,” we don’t mean that Jesus is definitely coming within the next year. We don’t mean that we can pinpoint on a calendar when exactly he’s coming. We don’t even necessarily mean that he’s coming within our lifetimes. What we mean is that Jesus could come at any moment, and this fact has a deep impact on our lives. And so we live with Jesus’ return as a reality in our lives even though we know it hasn’t quite happened yet.
And isn’t that what hope is, really? It’s choosing to live into the reality of something that hasn’t happened yet because one believes that it will. Theologians call this living in a place of “already and not yet.” It’s choosing to believe that your loved one will be healed even before the doctor confirms that the treatment has had its effect. It’s choosing to believe that you’ll be able to make ends meet while the bills are piling up and the paychecks just aren’t coming. It’s choosing to believe that things can and will one day be better than they are now, not because of anything that we do, but because God is working in and through history, and one day, he is going to break into history in a new way and make everything right. That’s the hope that the return of Christ offers us, and we can each live into that hope today.
But Paul didn’t stop there. He had more hope to offer the Thessalonians, and his letter has more hope to offer us today. You see, the Thessalonians were really worried about the fact that some of their church members had passed away after becoming Christians. These deaths shook the church to its core. The Thessalonians were waiting for Jesus to return, and they had been taught that he was coming soon. This led them to fear that their fellow believers who had passed away would somehow miss out on Jesus’ return because they had already died.
And so Paul offered them a second source of hope: the resurrection of the saints. The Bible teaches us that every person who puts their faith in Christ will one day be bodily resurrected in order to meet with him. And Paul especially was adamant that those he taught understand that their resurrection was coming because he knew how important it was for living the Christian life, especially when it comes to maintaining Christian hope.
If we want to know what our resurrection will be like, we need only look to Jesus. He’s our example and precursor. 1 Corinthians 15 goes so far as to call him “the first fruits of those who have died.” And in the final chapters of the book of John, we get some really interesting details about what Jesus’ resurrection body was like. It’s clearly different from his pre-resurrection body in some ways, as we can gather from the fact that Mary Magdalene, one of his most devoted followers, doesn’t recognize him at first. But there’s also some continuity between Jesus’ bodies because he shows Thomas his pierced hands and side. And we know that Jesus’ body was physical because John portrays him eating food. All of this indicates that we aren’t trying to escape these physical bodies that we’re in; we’re simply waiting for God to transform them.
Now these are just tidbits of insight, and they’re really not the primary concern of John or Paul. And they shouldn’t be our main concern, either. Ultimately, we can’t know how it’s all going to work. We can simply let the mysteries of God be mysteries. And we can just trust in the fact that the resurrection is promised, and that one day, God will fulfill his promise of bringing back to life every person who has followed him and then died.
This had to be reassuring to the Thessalonians, who no longer had to worry about their loved ones missing out on Christ’s return, and it should be reassuring to us as well. We don’t have to fret about our loved ones who have gone on before us. God’s got them taken care of. And we don’t have to worry about what happens to our bodies either, whether they’re threatened by disease or some external power or just the natural wear and tear that comes with time. The resurrection makes all of these things ultimately irrelevant, and it gives us hope for the new life that we’ll experience after the resurrection.
And that brings us to the final source of hope we see in this passage: our eternal end. It’s pretty great that Jesus is going to come back and resurrect all of his followers into new life, but it’s even better to know that he won’t be done with us even then. Jesus won’t return and resurrect his followers for no reason. There’s a purpose behind it. Jesus is coming back and bringing his followers back to life so that we can share in eternal life with him.
I’ve found that Christians like to spend a lot of time thinking about what heaven will be like. The Bible offers us some metaphors, some attempts by our feeble human minds to describe this amazing place that’s so far beyond our comprehension. We like to talk about the streets of gold, the pearly gates, and the layers of precious stones. We like to think about the rows and rows of mansions that we’re promised. I once had a conversation with a friend who mused about what the food would be like. They claimed that it would taste just as good as it does here, but it wouldn’t have any calories.
To be honest, I don’t know what our eternal home is going to be like. I don’t think we have any way of knowing the details. And really, I don’t think they’re all that important. Because I know who’s going to be there, and to me, that’s what matters.
I know that Jesus is going to be there. I’ll get an opportunity to meet the one who gave his life for me, the one died and rose again, the one who saved me from my the eternal punishment I so deserve. I’ll get to sit with him and thank him for all that he’s done for me, not just for salvation, but for my calling, for my family, for this amazing life that he’s given me. I’ll have time to list it all.
And the Father and the Holy Spirit, too. They’ll be there. Maybe I’ll get a chance to get them together with Jesus and we can finally hash out this whole trinity thing. But then again, once I get into their presence, I doubt those sorts of questions will really matter to me all that much.
And Paul. He’ll be there. And all the other great minds of the Christian faith, like Augustine, Luther, Brunner, and Lewis. And Charles Schulz. I’d love to get a few minutes to chat with him about some things.
And my great-grandmother. She’ll be there. She passed away last month at the age of 93 after living an incredible life. She lived long enough to meet her great-great-grandchildren. Well, some of them, at least. My sister had a baby last week, and my great-grandmother didn’t live quite long enough to meet little Trenton. It’s a shame. But I know that one day, I’ll have the honor of introducing Trenton to his great-great-grandmother, and he’ll get to hear all of the stories that I got to hear from her growing up, and we’ll all get to share in that together.
Yeah, I know who’ll be there.
And I think that’s our greatest source of hope. As followers of Jesus, we get to spend eternity in the most amazing company that there ever was or ever will be. We’ll get to spend eternity with our savior. That would be enough, but there’s more. We’ll get to spend eternity with our brothers and sisters in Christ. And we’ll get to spend eternity with our loved ones who have gone on before us. What more could those Thessalonians have wanted to hear from Paul? What more could we possibly ask for?
I don’t know a lot of things. I don’t know what this life has in store for me or for you. I don’t know when Jesus is coming back or how exactly the resurrection is going to work. But I know that he’s coming back. I know that he’ll resurrect his followers when he does. And I know what my eternal end is. And that gives me hope. I pray that today, you’ll allow it to give you hope as well, and that together, we’ll follow Paul’s command to the Thessalonians at the end of our passage: Let us encourage one another with these words. Amen.
