1 Thessalonians 4:13 Kindred, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who have gone to sleep, so that you do not grieve like the rest of humanity, who have no hope. 14 For 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. 15 According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 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. 17 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. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.
This is our last week talking through our statements of faith, which are our frames of reference for how we believe we’re called to tell the story of Jesus and practice that story together. We’ve talked about Jesus and God and Creation and Sin and Salvation and Politics and the Lord’s Supper and Hospitality. And this week, we’re meditating on “The End,” or Heaven.
In our Scripture this morning, Paul argues that it’s important the church is “not uninformed” about the end, and for him that’s the end of the story of Jesus and our own endings as people. These are tied together for Paul. The ending of a story is arguably what imparts meaning to the whole rest of the story. I would put to you Game of Thrones as an example of this: a major cultural event for almost 10 years with brilliant character development and world building, all of this fantastic drama that seemed to be commenting on politics and climate change—and then the last season was so incoherent it made everyone realize that the writers never really knew what story they were telling.
An Ending throws itself back on the middle and the beginning, imparting meaning to the whole story. Sometimes you’ll hear people say “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” but when you’re in the middle of things, your sense of the destination is going to shape your journey. If your imagined destination is just to get back home whenever you feel like it, that’s going to create a very different kind of journey than if your imagined destination is the emergency room because your partner is in labor. So the end matters in itself, but it also matters because we shape our lives now toward where we think we want to be, or maybe more often where we’re “supposed” to be headed.
So, at Jubilee, this is our statement of faith about “The End” of the story we’re telling:
When God raises Jesus from the dead, we glimpse the End, the goal of creation, which is its renewal and glorification, not its dissolution (1 Cor 15:20). Our ultimate hope is not a disembodied eternity where souls leave behind a burning earth, but New Creation (Rev 21).
We hope for a land of milk and honey, a place where no one has reason to weep, where God soothes every pain, where scars testify that our wounds have not ultimately defeated us. We look toward a heavenly banquet in a city where the gates are always open and the streets are made of gold because we care no more for gold than asphalt. In Jesus and the Spirit, this end has come into the middle of history, not yet in fulness but in possibility, and God calls the church to live as if this new world is possible now because we believe it is.
Reading through those words, I can’t help but remember when I first became a Christian; it was in a tradition that taught our end, if we were saved, was that our souls would go to heaven after we died. The body was a kind of prison, this world so utterly fallen, that our only hope was to deny it and leave it behind. And if that’s the end of the story you’re telling, well that shapes how you live in the middle. That teaching leads to a really strong emphasis on shame and guilt around enjoying things that feel good in the body. And it entails a great deal of anxiety about going to hell, which is like being trapped forever. And, it leads to political commitments like funding war in Palestine, because people hope a holy war will bring about the end times, the release from this existence. And in the 20th century, a Gospel of individual salvation fit seamlessly into an economy built around the freedom of the individual consumer.
I also remember how freeing it was, the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, when I read Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, which was the book that first exposed me to the idea that the point of the Gospel is not to get us into heaven, but to bring heaven to earth, just like Jesus teaches us to pray: thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In this view, which is much closer to what we teach here, we believe that we’ve already caught a glimpse of our ending in the resurrection of Jesus. In the story we tell, the material matters. The earth matters. Your flesh matters, and is good. The point of our story isn’t to leave those things behind, but to heal them. The ending we imagine is new creation, renewal and restoration, which means that that’s the kind of life we’re called to live now in the middle of things. Against shame, we’re called to delight in the pleasures the earth and our bodies offer by taking care of them. Against war, we’re called to work toward peace through justice. Against capitalism, we’re called to hold all things in common.
And if an ultimate restoration and healing are The End, hell is not a necessary feature of that story. In fact, it could be that hell is incoherent in such a story. If the end that we imagine is one of total healing and restoration, a renewal of everything because everything matters, then that means everything and everyone. And while that’s never been the dominant view in church history, universalism—the idea that in the end everyone is blessed—has always been on the table. One early Christian teacher named Origen taught that in the end even Satan would repent and be redeemed—no aspect of anything God has ever created will be outside the restoration of heaven.
If our sense of the end shapes how we are in the middle, it means that we can’t use our guesses about who’s blessed and who’s damned to dismiss people out of hand. We can dismiss arguments or opinions or practices that are harmful and wrong, but people are complicated and people change their minds and their views. That doesn’t mean you have to be in proximity to someone who’s trolling you or being cruel to you, it doesn’t mean you should just take it when your boss treats you like garbage—we can and should have boundaries—but I do think this means we can’t consign whole groups of people to the scrap heap, even the scrap heap of our minds. This consigning of others occurs in obvious ways with racism and Islamophobia and transphobia, but I think it’s also the case in more subtle ways when we hear people say things like “Hope those Trump voters get everything they voted for!” Or “The South keeps voting red so those states deserve their poverty and their bad schools.” We think we’re so sophisticated, but what are folks doing in those cases but using a sense of who’s elect and who’s damned—according to who believes all of the right things—and dismissing the damned altogether?
And God doesn’t dismiss you either. I continue to think its important to emphasize that the end is resurrection and that this end shapes how we live in the middle together. But this does mean that here, and in places like this, we don’t talk about heaven as much as we talk about earth. I’ve noticed, at times, a reticence or even an embarrassment among progressive or deconstructed Christians to allow ourselves the hope that we’ll somehow be together with loved ones or that our experiences will continue after death. Maybe we don’t know how to uncouple that kind of talk from the toxic theologies I just talked about or maybe we’d like to think that kind of need is immature, that we’ve grown beyond it.
But sometimes I wonder if this shying away from heaven can in it’s own way leave us feeling trapped in the world as it is? If a lot of American Christianity shames earth in hope of heaven, maybe some of us have shamed our own desires for a better world because of a perceived need to be pragmatic and realistic. What do we lose when we reshape our story to fit a clinical/medical frame? Maybe we risk our own version of the Protestant work either, saying there is no reward, there is no bliss, there is no ultimate rest, but you toil anyway because it’s the right thing to do? Among so many people I know, there’s a default skepticism about any kind of afterlife, disembodied or resurrected. Or really, skepticism is the wrong word, because there’s not really much question. We can’t imagine what we can’t prove, and what we can’t prove can’t exist.
But I think this sense of nothingness is also worth interrogating. Our imaginations are rooted in this world, so even our image of nothingness comes from the world, too. And maybe, this assumption of nothingness, this shying away from even the thought of heaven, is a way of projecting our experiences here in the middle onto what the end must be. Maybe that sounds backwards, because our experiences are so full of sensations and connections—how could they teach us to look toward nothingness?
But what if the standard skepticism toward an afterlife has less to do with being rational and more to do with what it means to be a self under capitalism? In our world, who you are, your sense of self, depends on your production and consumption, what you make and what you buy. We’re taught that our purpose, our vocation, is tied to our work, so that young people haven’t figured out their “calling” until they’ve landed on a career. And then we show people who we are (we show ourselves who we are) through our purchases, stylizing our bodies and our living spaces through our consumer choices. (You’d be embarrassed for me if you knew how much of my self-perception is tied up in books and sweaters.) This is impressed on us to such an extent that it’s nearly impossible for us to imagine our selves at all apart from these acts of producing and consuming, and so death, a state in which we can’t produce anything and can’t consume anything can only be the loss of existence, can only be nullity, because what are we if not our callings and our appetites? That’s a more subtle kind of dismissal than the one represented by hell, but it’s a dismissal all the same. This supposedly less superstitious, more rational, clinical approach to the end can do just as much to reinforce the status quo as theologies that see us abandoning earth for heaven.
But the picture that Paul gives us, the story that we tell, is that we are always already held by the love of God and we will be held by God even when we can’t hold ourselves up anymore, even when you lose yourself, you are still held by God’s love. Paul wants the early church to know that their loved ones who sleep are resting in the Lord and at the end of all things, God will gather up everyone together, not by our own will or productivity, not because we’ve identified ourselves as blessed rather than damned, but simply by God’s own desire for us. And so we will be with the Lord forever. That is part of The End, too. Heaven recreating Earth, yes absolutely. But also heaven holding you when you can’t imagine being a self anymore. You don’t need to be ashamed of that. You don’t need to check yourself when you want to talk of your loved ones being at peace with the Lord or when you imagine yourself being together with them again.
In the story we tell, we end up held by the love of God just as we are held by the love of God now. That’s why we pray that heaven would come to earth, why we know that our goal is not to abandon this world, this earth, these bodies…because how could we abandon what the Lord is always embracing? But that’s also why we don’t let our imaginations stop at what’s right in front of our faces, because you are not just what you produce and consume; you are not just what you can imagine your life to be; you are not the work you do, you are not the things you buy, you are not your talents or your gifts, just as you are not your fears or your worst mistakes. While all of those things are parts of our stories, a part of who we are, even if all of them were stripped away, you are not reducible to those attributes and that excess, which is who you really are, is still and always held by the love of God.
We don’t labor for a better world together now out of duty or obligation or because this is the only life we’ve got. We’re called to love as if a different world is possible now because the love of God exceeds what’s in front of our faces and that excess, that overflowing abundance, already holds us, and because that is our end, we hold each other and our neighbors as we already are and always will be held, forever and ever, alleluia. Amen.
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