The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, 2014 – Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25; Psalm 78:1-7; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13
It’s somewhat ironic that Nathan Cirillo, killed two weeks ago, was standing as an honour guard at the WWI monument in Ottawa – as if another young life cut short was needed for the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I.
I am always shocked by the extent of the bloodbath that was WWI. Hearing that very long list just read out of those who died, just from this parish, opens the book on the counting of lives in every country lost. The final tally for WWI was twenty million soldiers and civilians killed. It’s hard to grasp the sheer enormity of it. I am always drawn to the stats about France. It provides a human scale to the carnage. A quarter of French men between the ages of 18 and 30 died in the war—a quarter—over 1.3 million out of a pre-war population of 40 million.
We must count the dead and grieve for young lives finished off without a chance to fulfill their potential as human beings; without a chance to flourish and create, to build homes and families. Those are the young dead. But it is the wounded survivors that lived out the interminable horror of the war long after the guns were silent in 1918. They faced a worse fate. Think just of those who suffered shell shock – post traumatic syndrome we call it now. The first war left us with actual footage of victims treated in English hospital; some walking sideways at a 45 degree tilt, some diving under a bed at the slightest handclap, some left speechless. The wounds were, of course, inside. So great were these wounds that their bodies simply shut down. They were encouraged to talk about their experiences as part of their therapy. One man regained his speech only after he was able to tell about the horror of seeing British tanks mowing down British soldiers. One Scottish nurse who worked in such a ward was still fighting back tears 60 years later during an interview. They were too young for a life of suffering she said in her quiet Scottish brogue.
On Remembrance Sunday it is good to remember these terrible wounds of war and to grieve over such injustice and such human failure. God, after all, intended something else for people and Christians are called to grieve with hope, as we shall see when we turn to Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians.
Christians have to learn the proper stance for mourning, says Nicholas Wolterstoff in his book, Lament for a Son. After reminding his readers that when Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn”, he suggested that being had something to do with grieving with hope. “The mourners are those who have caught a glimpse of God’s new day, who ache with all their being for the day’s coming, and who break out into tears when confronted with its absence. The mourners are indeed, aching visionaries. Jesus calls us, says Wolterstorff, to be open to the wounds of the world, to weep over humanity’s weeping, be wounded by humanity’s wounds and be in agony over humanity’s agony. But to do so in the good cheer that a day of peace is coming.”
This same approach to Christian grieving is what lies at the heart of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. This is not a vague yearning, writes Paul, but a hope with substance, that is to say, it is based on the specific promise that the resurrected Jesus would come again.
You may wish to follow Paul’s argument in 4:13-18. First, in verse 13 he writes that it is OK for Christians to grieve. But they are ‘called’ to grieve with the kind of hope that others do not have. This hope says Paul, in the next verse is grounded on this simple fact – that Jesus died and rose again. It’s both an intersection of the living God with human history and a transcending of the same. This is the absolute root of the Christian faith – something that distinguishes Christian belief from all others. God in raising Jesus has changed our history forever. From this root, writes Paul, springs the flower of our hope that God will bring with Jesus all those who have died into life and fellowship. Paul embellishes the picture of the age to come and of Jesus’ return with images of archangels and the sound of heavenly trumpets.
One way of grasping the sweep of these verses is to notice that fellowship with loved ones broken by death is to be restored in Jesus. Those who were separated from those they loved will be restored together in Christ. Those left behind, so to speak, will also be caught up with those who have gone before and all together they will meet the Lord. The most beautiful words about the new age to come and about brokenness restored is found in verse 17 – “and so we will be with the Lord forever”. There is a clear statement of the difference between the old and the new ages – the old age gripped by death and shattered communities and the new age of things restored in the rising of Jesus.
This then is the hope we taste here on earth, and can bring to a Remembrance Day service. Lives cut short will be restored in the fellowship with Christ. The glow of home and family and fellowship for which every human yearns will be restored. That’s God’s promise, says Paul and it is entirely rooted in the event of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
I came across some poetry by soldiers in WWI. Over and over, as they wrote fearlessly about the horrors of trench life, they were able to grasp the hope that we know is hidden in the resurrection of Jesus.
One promising Irish poet, Lance Corporal Francis Lewidge, killed at the age of 29, wrote this in Belgium in 1917 during a lull in the bombardment at Ypres. He entitled it “Home”
A burst of sudden wings at dawn
Faint voices in a dreamy noon
Evenings of mist and murmurings
And nights with rainbows of the moon./
And through these things a wood-way dim
And waters dim, and slow sheep seen
On uphill paths that wind away
Through summer sounds and harvest green./
This is a song a robin sang
This morning on a broken tree
It was about the little fields
That call across the world to me.
In the midst of wartime destruction, perhaps daily grieving for those he kept losing from his batallion, Francis Lewidge could hope for the pastoral beauty of his home and the restoration and peace it represented. Is this not hoping in the midst of death.
Saint Paul would say to Francis Lewidge that his hope was not a vain hope. And we 100 years later can grieve such loss in certain hope that in the resurrection of Jesus all such loss will be restored and the fellowship and beauty of his home will be restored.
The one important question out of this passage in 1 Thessalonians, must be addressed to us the living. How shall we, as we grieve, do so in Christian hope? How do we grieve? Yes, how do we live with the age to come before us? It’s worth recalling Wolterstoff’s restatement of St. Paul in Thessalonians. “The mourners are those who have caught a glimpse of God’s new day, who ache with all their being for the day’s coming and who break into tears when confronted with its absence”.
Jesus is in the business of restoring this world. Where do we see the risen Lord bringing together broken communities, restoring shattered families, yes and even nations? We have a chance to see it firsthand in the refugees from the war in Syria that we hope to sponsor.
Can we look at the celebrations planned to commemorate the ending of the Berlin Wall and give thanks that a people divided by a long can restored? Can we catch the promise of the coming age in simple things, like the voices of children singing together? Or the irrepressible energy and creativity of young people not given to cynicism despite unemployment. Can we perhaps like the Vicar of Baghdad, Andrew White, give our lives to the arduous behind-the-scenes work of talking to sectarian leaders, cajoling them into talking together, even while he grieves for his parishioners being slaughtered on his doorstep?
Hope goes beyond the grave, not because we decide, “Hey come on, let’s have a happy rather than a gloomy ending”, but because our hope has a concrete foundation – the resurrection of Jesus. Without this we cannot know the God of hope, we cannot work as peacemakers or join groups to bring education to the poor or healthcare to the neglected. We have faith in God who has intervened in Jesus. Yes, we have a God who in Jesus who climbs into the rat-infested trenches and helps a whole nation get out. That’s living hope. That’s a hope with reality built into it.
Let’s leave the last word to St. Paul: Do not grieve as others do who have no hope. Since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died…and so we will be with the Lord forever. Encourage one another with these words.
