1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
“Kept Awake By Hope”
Preached Sunday, November 12, 2023
Lately there has been a lot of talk about The End. Capital T, Capital E. And recent events are troubling - we should be troubled in the face of violence and war in all areas of our world. We should be troubled for those who face a mini-apocalypse every day. Every day, someone’s world ends. Through death or through the world as they knew it ending. Apocalypses happen, on scales large and small, every day in our world. And throughout all of time, as long as there have been times, people who are facing mini-Apocalypses have interpreted their end as The End, their times as The End Times.
And with pastoral compassion today I want to say to you: What if we stopped trying to layer the Book of Revelation (and other Apocalyptic and Prophetic literature in the Bible) on top of our world like it was some sort of road map of what is happening right now. What if we saw it not just as a book of prophecy - which might unfold in the way we expect it to - or not! - Remember how often we talk about prophecies in Isaiah and how Jesus fulfilled them in a way the people were not expecting - ways that were more peaceable, inclusive, and all-encompassing… And so, to view Revelation and other Apocalyptic and prophetic literature in the Bible as not something that needs to be played out in our times or in the future - and it still may be that - but view them also as writings that depict a mini-apocalypse that already happened for a group of people living under an oppressive rule, where they were being martyred, persecuted, and their world was ending.
Or take today’s text from 1 Thessalonians which people have taken to be a basis for the rapture. The rapture was an idea that was invented in the nineteenth-century - recently, and is not part of our United Methodist doctrine. What if instead of reading the end times into it, what if we focused instead on the hope of this passage? What if we stopped looking at these texts as a scare-tactic for conversion and instead started asking: where is the hope?
Popular Christianity has spent too much time focusing on the apocalypse - upon an end without hope - upon God’s judgment and wrath, upon rewards in Heaven or eternal punishment in Hell. And this is often at the neglect of the needs of the least of these, the outcasts and marginalized, those whose worlds are ending in the here and now. And for many Christians who take seriously God’s commands to love our neighbor as ourselves and who are honestly offended at the hateful rhetoric and fear of death and judgment that often accompanies so-called Christian teachings, well, some have chosen to abandon beliefs about the afterlife and about the end all together - saying, “you know - it’s nice if there’s a heaven and all that. But that’s not why I do what I do. It’s not why I love God or love my neighbors. So they put those beliefs about the end to the side -- and get on fine for a bit. I was once at a point where I myself put these beliefs to the side, decided whatever the afterlife or the end held, it didn’t matter - I did this for a couple of years. The problem is, what happens when we don’t believe anything about the end is that we begin to lose hope. We can begin to believe that there is nothing worth continuing for. We can begin to believe that there is no point to any of this and that the world, each other, humanity, all our brokenness - is beyond redemption. We begin to mourn, as Paul says, like those without hope.
Now, something you may not know about me, I am a big fan of superhero movies and especially Marvel movies. So has anyone here seen Endgame? It was the big finale to a phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe - it came out in 2019. …
At the end of Infinity War, the movie before Endgame, Thanos (That’s the Big Bad Guy) snapped his fingers and erased half of humanity -- and not just humans on earth, but half of creation throughout the universe. An apocalypse, world ending. 23 days after Thanos snaps his fingers, the Avengers (that’s the team of superheroes) finds Thanos and realizes they can’t undo what he’s done. They can’t just fix it. The world as they knew has ended - they can’t save it.
The movie then skips forward 5 years. 5 years of loss. 5 years of pain and grief. 5 years of helplessness and having no hope of those lost ever being restored. The world that Endgame takes place in is a world that is broken. In a world that is overwhelmed with grief and pain. In a world that the Avengers and all humanity have accepted that they just can’t fix - the problems are bigger than them and there’s not much they can do. And they begin living without hope. They let themselves go, isolate themselves, become depressed, go down dark paths, become people they don’t want to be - all because they are living without hope.
Sound familiar? Our world is kind of like this. We have disease and pain. Climate change and tyranny. Hate and violence. War in Gaza, in Ukraine, all over the world. We have violence in our own streets. And the problems are just...so big. And often, it feels like there’s not much we can do to change it or to fix anything.
We can begin living like we have no hope.
And when we live without hope, we too can become people we don’t want to be: people who have lessened themselves as anything besides the beloved children of God we are called to be. And yet - It’s hard to have hope in our world - it is. I’ve heard and even preached many things about the cynicalness or pragmatic-ness of Gen Z and Millennials. We know the earth is dying. We know our job prospects are somewhere between bad and worse. We’re worried about World War 3 and ever having a mortgage is almost laughable. Mini-apocalypses are faced every day. But what does this do to us? What does this do to our souls, our relationships, our outlook and actions? We need hope.
Hope changes everything.
So let’s talk a minute about hope.
Our hope comes from Christ and from the promise of the resurrection and the restoration of all creation. We do not mourn and we do not live as those without hope when we hold fast to a sound eschatology, to a vision of the end that includes the creation of a New Heaven and a New Earth. When we talk about Armageddon and the Apocalypse - these tend to be visions or ideas of The End without hope. With fire, brimstone, judgment, pain. When I talk about The End in terms of Christian belief, I prefer to use the term Eschatology because it has way less baggage from Hollywood and literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation. Eschatology does literally mean our theology about the last things, the end times, but I found a really good and solid eschatology doesn’t focus as much on The End but on the New Beginning.
That is: when Christ comes again in final victory. Christ will do for all of creation what he did as a first fruit when he was resurrected from the dead. He will defeat all death. All powers of evil. All forces of violence. He will also restore all that God has created. From the planet, to the birds of the air and the animals of the ground, all humanity, the heavens -- all will be redeemed, recreated: restored to that before sin and evil entered this world. Including relationships that have been broken by misunderstanding, by pain, by violence, by death - ALL will be restored.
Sometimes I wonder what our world would look like if Christians talked a lot more about this rather than the violence of apocalypses. If we focused on the Hope, on the New Beginning, the New Creation,
We hear about the New Creation many times in Scripture. One of the most famous passages comes from the 21st Chapter of Revelation, offered as a hope to those that John wrote to who were facing their own apocalypse:
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’
And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.’”
We also hear of the new creation in the Book of Isaiah, a vision of the wolf and the lamb feeding together, the lion eating straw, swords being beaten into plowshares, all nations being gathered together on one mountain, and there being no violence or destruction.
Our hope is found in the promise of the End, the promise of resurrection, and the promise of a New Creation.
This hope is how we stay awake. We have focused on Paul’s encouragement to us to not live as those who mourn without hope. I’d now like to turn our attention to the parable of the bridegrooms and especially on Jesus’s explanation of the parable and his admonition at the end to “keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”
We do not know the day or hour our world will end. It could be the Big End. Nuclear War, the sun going out, a meteor - or any of our worlds could end at any time - a loved one dying, a diagnosis, a car crash - there are apocalypses, big and small, that happen every day. Every day someone’s world ends - either through death or the world as they knew it ending. And we are not called to try and figure out the day or hour, we are not called to interpret prophetic Scriptures like a road map. We ARE called to care for the last, the lost, and the least - to be there when worlds end, offering the survivors hope, showing them love. We are called to keep awake! To be ready for The End, big or small, and we keep awake by having hope that even at The End, Christ has a New Beginning for us.
Living with hope is a million times better than the alternative. Living with hope for the future gives us strength and courage now.
Living with hope now is like having enough oil in our lamps to carry us through this life and these days where people are so desperate for hope.
Living with hope is that we are prepared to move through our days with hope and anticipation for the eventual New Beginning.
Hope helps us carry on.
Hope helps us to live into the vision of the future - of restored creation. Restored relationships. Wholeness. Hope helps us to live into this vision in the here and now.
In the wise words of Tony Stark, Iron Man:
"Part of the journey is the end...everything's going to work out exactly the way it's supposed to."
Or, more conventionally for Christian circles, in the words of Julian of Norwich, when we believe in The New Creation, when we hold on to hope for the redemption of all things, when that hope keeps us awake and that hope helps us live in the here and now…She says,
“All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Have hope.
Amen.
Have hope.
Amen.
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