"What Happens When We Die?"
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

OK.  So the lectionary reading for today out of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is about death.  So let’s look at it square in the eyes.  Let’s take on the “big fear” this morning, shall we.

There’s been an interesting cultural shift that’s taken place in the last 75 years or so.  It used to be that people were more personally acquainted with death and grief.  I don’t know if people were more comfortable with death in the past, but at least they were more in touch with it.  For the most part, especially in our rural areas, people had a hands on relationship with death.  People died at home rather than in an antiseptic hospital or nursing home.  Nursing homes were mostly non-existent 75 years ago.  When someone died, they were surrounded by friends and family, rather than being isolated and left alone.  Family didn’t wait to “get the call” from the hospital or nursing home.  They were there, in the person’s bedroom.

When death occurred, the family and community went right to work.  The men built the casket.  The women washed and prepared the body.  Food was brought in by the bushel load.  Whatever needed to get done, got done.  Everyone helped each other grieve.  Death and grieving was very visible, and most everyone participated.

But, and here’s the cultural shift, no one back then talked about sex.  Sex was was kept behind closed doors and kept under tight control through conversational taboos.  Couples didn’t know much about it, until they got married.  Parents never talked about it to or with their children.

Now, that has flip-flopped.  Sex, sex talk, and sexual imagery is everywhere.  You can’t escape it.  Junior high kids talk about it openly, without hesitation.  When I was in junior high I was scared to death to even think about holding a girls hand.  Kissing a girl was in the realm of the unthinkable, in the same league as flying to the moon.  Now, every imaginable part of the sexual is blatantly and without second thought, shoved in our faces.

Yet, in our day, death is taboo.  Our culture is one of death denial.  Every other commercial is about looking and staying young.  Even our current paranoia about killing 99.9% of all the germs in our homes has at the heart of it our fear of death, and our desire to eliminate every death threat.  Hardly anyone dies at home anymore.  Those in the throes of death are usually isolated and left alone, even by the doctors and nurses that are caring for them, because of an uncomfortableness with our own mortality.  We don’t want to be reminded of the fact that we are going to die.  Parents ask me if they should allow their children to go see a dying grandparent in the hospital, or if they should let their children go to the funeral.  Like, if we can keep kids away from this one, main reality, they won’t ever find out that they, too, are mortal, and that life ends.  But we don’t mind talking with them about their sexual awareness when they hit adolescence, nor mind when they are barraged with all the sexual imagery on television or the web.

Woody Allen, in his movies, explores this funny (not, ha ha funny) way we human beings are when it comes to death and sex.  In one movie he wrote, his character says, “I’m looking forward to death; because, unlike sex, I’m going to do it alone and no one will laugh at me.”

So, let’s bring death out of the shadows, at least for a few minutes here, and take a look at it in the context of Paul’s words in his letter to the Christians in Thessalonica.  Evidently the people had some questions about death, and what happens when we die.  No one seemed to have any good answers, so they wrote Paul a letter.  In that letter they must have asked him some questions about death, because he answers their questions in this part of his letter back to them.

The first question maybe had to do with grief.  “What are we supposed to feel when someone we love dies?” might have been their question.  As Christians, they may have been told that there should be joy that the loved one is going to heaven, but at the same time they are hurting deeply at their loss.  What are they supposed to do with the mixture of feelings in all that?  What are we supposed to do with the tangled mass of emotions that overwhelm us when either someone we love is dying, has died; or we, ourselves, are dying?

I’ve spent my whole ministry helping people deal with these kinds of grieving questions.  In the way our culture currently denies death and grief, people are mostly told to get over it as soon as possible (a year at the longest) and get on with life.  Isn’t it interesting that if you break your leg or hip, how you are cut all kinds of slack at work.  You’re allowed to heal in good time and do what you need to in order for that to happen.

But when there’s been a death, you’re supposed to buck up, and get on with it.  Broken bones are one thing.  Spirits broken by grief seem to be another.  After a certain amount of time, this conspiracy of silence is created by family, friends, and co-workers where our grief and loss are not to be brought up anymore, even though those struggling most with loss want dearly to talk about it.

As part of a trip to Israel, I also got to go to Cairo, Egypt.  One of the places we were to visit was the oldest Christian church in the world, a church that was started by the gospel writer Mark, and still going today.  When we got to the church we could hear this awful screaming and wailing coming from behind the church.  It literally sounded like someone was being tortured, and everyone around us in the streets was just going on about their business.

I asked our tour guide what on earth that awful screaming was about.  She told us that someone from the church had died, and had been buried in the cemetery behind the church.  In Egyptian culture, they are allowed 7 days to grieve.  They can cry, wail, scream, rip their clothes, throw dirt in the air, carry on however they need to to express their grief.  But after 7 days, the black clothes come off, and all the emoting is to stop, and they are expected to get on with their lives.

I tossed that around in my mind, recalling that I had told a whole lot of people I’ve dealt with that they may never get over their grief; that it may be a part of them the rest of their lives.  But in Cairo, Egypt, people were given 7 days to express their grief and get over it.  The Egyptian way called into question everything thing I’d come to believe through experience and reading.  I wondered if it was possible that how we handle grief is merely a cultural thing.  How are we to best and most faithfully handle death?

Paul’s advice to the Thessalonian Christians is somewhat unclear, and may contain a kind of both/and perspective.  He wrote, “First off, you must not carry on over them like people who have nothing to look forward to, as if the grave were the last word” (MES).  Paul doesn’t say we can’t grieve.  He doesn’t put a time limit on it (even though Jewish tradition is close to what I saw in Cairo).  Nor does he say we aren’t allowed to feel what we feel.

He mostly wants us to be people of hope.  He wants us to always remember that this life is not all there is.  He wants us to keep in mind that there is something more.

After an enjoyable meal has been served, and the dishes from the main course are being cleared, some of the best words I love to hear at that point are, “Keep your forks.”  I love to hear those words because that means there’s more to come.  And what is to come is substantial.  Not spoon food, like tapioca or some kind of flabby jello.  No; it’s fork food, like a thick piece of pie or carrot cake.  Something you get to sink those tines of the fork into and savor and enjoy.

That’s the kind of image I bring to mind when Paul says not to carry on like people who have nothing to look forward to.  What he’s saying is, “When someone dies, keep your forks.  There’s something substantial and real coming on the other side of death, and it will be worth savoring and enjoying like a great dessert.”

Paul goes on to explain what it is that we have to look forward to:  “...God will most certainly bring back to life those who died in Jesus.”  Those who believe in Jesus get to be brought back to life in some way, shape or form.  The hard part is that the main thing that has to happen in order for God to do that is that you have to die first.  That’s the unpleasant part of it all.

Do you remember the first time you realized you were going to die?  Maybe it was at a funeral of a family member or school friend that died at an early age.  Even when we lose someone to death when we are young, it still may not register in our minds that, Hey, that’s going to happen to me some day.  We still may not get it, because when we’re young we think we’re invincible.  Or that death and disaster will make an exception for me.

The stark acknowledgment of death’s reality hit me when I was in college.  I was a Sociology and Philosophy major.  I was sitting in a sociology class and we were talking about the various burial practices in other cultures.  All of a sudden this awful lightbulb went on above my head.  And these awful words were illuminated by the blinking light of that bulb: “I am going to die some day.  I am going to die.  I can’t get out of it.  I have to die.  There’s no way around it.  Some day I’m going to die and I’m going to be buried.  I’m not going to be alive anymore.”

I started hyperventilating, and thought I was going to pass out.  I quickly gathered up all my books and ran out the classroom door to get some fresh air.  I remember bending over taking in gasping breaths of air, trying to get those awful words out my head and think of something else.  In another Woody Allen movie, his character says, “I don’t mind dying; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”  That’s what I was feeling at that moment.

It all changed for me that day.  Paul wrote in another letter about how, in the blink of an eye, death changes us from this life to the next.  For me, in the blink of an eye, in a sociology class, life changed me when I realized I was going to die.  I began to pay much more attention to verses like these in 1 Thessalonians, and 1 Corinthians 15, and the end of Hebrews 2.

At first, I clung to the whole idea of heaven because I was so afraid of dying.  But slowly, as I spent more time pondering what Paul was saying, thinking about the Resurrection of Jesus, and what it means, I began to understand and have an appreciation that this has more to do with God and the way God is rather than my fear.  It has to do with God’s desire that we be with Him always:  in life, in death, and beyond death.  God wants us to be with Him forever, and He’s designed the world and life to make sure that happens.  That gave me great comfort.  And it pretty much took care of my fear.

Paul talks about heaven, here in 1 Thessalonians in terms of being taken into the clouds.  And that it will be like one huge family reunion.  I love those images as well, about what heaven is going to be, and what life is going to be like after we die.

Did any of you watch the Art Linkletter show on TV years ago.  I think it was on in the afternoon, because it seems like I’d come home from school and turn it on.  I may be wrong about that.  One of the segments of his show was called, “Kids say the darnedest things.”  Linkletter would interview kids who were about 6 to 10 years old and just ask them ordinary questions.

One time he asked them about heaven.  One little guy, Tommy, age seven, said, “I know what heaven is, but I don’t want to go there.  I want to go to North Carolina instead.”  Another seven year-old said, “Heaven is kind of big and they sit around playing harps.  I don’t know how to play a harp, but I suppose I should learn how to play that dumb thing.”

Most people believe heaven exists.  A recent poll revealed that 80% of Americans believe that heaven is a real place.  But only 67% believe there is a hell.  The same poll also revealed that 72% of us believe we are going to heaven.  But (judgmental as we are) we think only 40% of our friends, family and neighbors will qualify to enter the pearly gates.

I liked the thought that I was going to heaven, and that it was going to be like a big family reunion, with eating and laughter and celebration with Christ at the head of the table.  I began to ask myself some other questions though about the after life, that didn’t have anything to do with my death and what happened afterwards.  They were more questions about how I am living right now, before I die.  How does the fact that I’m going to die affect how I’m living right now?  Are there consequences to my actions that I need to pay attention to, because there is more than death?  How does my knowledge that I’m going to die, and that there is more after I die, change how I chose to live while I’m on this side of death?

In answer to such questions, I came across this statement in my reading, in a book by Paul Minear, who wrote:
Delete the thought of heaven from our vocabulary and we are soon reduced to a one-dimensional environment, living without any visible means of support.

To put his words in another picture, what he is saying is that living this life without any thought of an afterlife is like a suspension bridge without the suspension cables to hold it up.  Or it would be like wearing a very loose pair of pants without a belt or suspenders to hold them up.  That, like the two parts of the bridge, there are two parts to our world also.  There is the platform on which we go back and forth in our daily living, scurrying about, doing the things we have decided are so important.  And, holding up that platform are some powerful suspension wires--heaven, if you will.  Without those wires, without heaven, the world, the platform on which we live and move would fall into chaos.

In answer to their questions, Paul is trying to get the Thessalonians to similarly recognize that there is a connection between the support and the platform, between this world and the next, between this life and the next life.  Recognizing that seems to be the hardest part for most people.  Seeing the connection makes this life just as important as the next--that we don’t lose anything in death.

Without the connection, both this life and the heavenly life, our world is only one dimensional.  God and who God is, is about multi-dimensional living.  We have one foot in this life and another foot in the next.  We are moving both towards life right now, and a life to come.  We have to exist in the here-and-now, but we are also, at the same time residents of a heavenly life on the other side of death.  Knowing that makes life so rich--so much more livable.