Grieving Well - 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

The expected, though still profoundly shocking death of Ruth Radcliffe from leukaemia this week is the first death in our church family since Christ Church Liverpool was started back in 2003. The death of a child is now such a rare thing in our country – only one child in 200 dies before their fifth birthday compared to over 40 in 200 in many parts of Africa – that, for many people in our congregation, Ruth may be the only child you have ever known who has died.

Her death this week is the first in our church. But if there is one prediction about the future of Christ Church Liverpool I can make without much fear of contradiction or need of prophetic gifting it’s that it will not be the last.

We might, as a culture, have utilised wonderful, God-given medical technologies and insights about diet, exercise and all the rest of it to delay death, for most people, until we’ve been around 8 decades or thereabouts.  But all the wonderful research those of you completing PhDs are doing, the great care our doctors, nurses and physios provide in hospitals, has, ultimately, a 100% failure rate. There is a lot of death in Christ Church’s future.

So this is a particularly appropriate time to think about what we are going to do with all that death and all that grieving.

The advice of the world varies massively. In 21^st century British culture we are massively confused about it. We stand uncomfortably, somewhere between very public tears for celebrities we don’t know in any meaningful way at all and stoic silence at the graveside of family members we have spent our lives with.

But such conflicting approaches are not new. Back in the 18^th century the diarist and dictionary writer Samuel Johnson was definitely of the stiff upper lip school. “Grief,” he said “is a species of idleness.” By contrast his contemporary, the poet William Cowper (who gave us the phrase “God works in mysterious ways” through one of his many hymns), said that “grief is itself a medicine.”

In first century Greece the popular sentiment of ordinary people encouraged great and noisy grief. On the other hand, stoics and other philosophers urged rationality and reason so that one writer summarises the typical ancient letter to a grieving relative as usually containing six teachings:

 1 Death is inevitable.

2 Death is the fate of all, king and beggars, rich band poor.

3 The person's memory and honour will live on in spite of death.

4 Death releases one from the evils of life.

5 The funeral and tomb are a great honour to the deceased.

6 Either death is nonexistence and does not matter to the dead or it leads to some happier state of existence.

In this confusing maelstrom of varying advice it wasn’t surprising that the Thessalonian Christians, introduced to a new way of thinking about the whole of their lives by the apostle Paul with his good news about Jesus Christ, weren’t quite sure how to react when Christians died.

And it’s not surprising that, with so much bad advice around, many of us here have little idea what a Christian response to death is.

Should we, as W H Auden said, “pack up the moon and dismantle the sun” because everything is worthless now, or take Henry Scott-Holland’s view that just a “negligible accident,” and act as if our loved one is just in the next room?

Into this whirlpool of emotion and confusion steps the apostle Paul with some wise and timely advice about death and grieving.

1          What good grief is: grief with hope

During the three weeks or so that he spent with the Thessalonian Christians, Paul would have explained his understanding of what happens when Christians die. So what he’s doing here isn’t teaching them something new. He’s just reminding them of things that it’s hard to keep in mind when you are going through the mill and feeling pierced by grief. What does Paul want the Thessalonians, and is, to know? Well it’s simple. Here’s John Calvin’s brilliant summary of this whole passage: “we must not grieve for the dead beyond certain bounds, for all God’s children are going to be raised again.”

How should we face death? Well when you read v13 it’s actually quite oddly constructed. I wonder if you noticed the double negative? We do not want you to grieve like men who have no hope. You could rearrange that positively. How should we grieve for Christians who have died? We should grieve like those with hope.

There are, I think, lots of traditional churches and Christians in them, that give the impression that we shouldn’t grieve. Things are better for them now, people say. They might even quote some Bible verses for you – the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. There is nothing wrong with us offering each other truths from the Scriptures that are, indeed, here to give us comfort and hope in the face of death.

But can I say to you that when you are confronted with a tearful relative or friend of someone who has died you must not offer Bible verses as if they were an antidote to grief. Because they aren’t. Sometimes people have described Christian funerals to me as “not being sad at all.” Which I think is just weird. Because death should rightly produce grief.

Yes of course God is good, no truth is clearer in the Bible. Yes of course the Lord has the right to take life because he is the one who gives it. But that does not mean that I cannot grieve.

That’s what Jesus did when confronted with the death of his friend Lazarus. Death should make you angry. It should make you feel the wrongness of a world that is not how it was meant to be.

Death should shout to you about a universe that, as Paul writes elsewhere, is crying out for liberation from its slavery to decay and destruction. Death, though it is God’s just judgment on all sinners, is not how things are meant to be. Death is unnatural.

My gran, a Christian believer I think, though in a rather confused way, died peacefully at the age of 95 after just a few short weeks in a nursing home. She had kept her own home for over 60 years, led an active life until she was about 94, had a wide circle of friends and a loving family. She lived till the kind of age of some Old Testament character. Did it feel like a right time for her to die? Not at all. There is no good time to die. Death is unnatural.

Which means that it is not wrong to grieve death, however old, sick or senile the person who has died. If you have some Christian brother and sister in your life who has fallen asleep and you have not shed tears for them because of some fear that would be less than godly, let me say to you that it is OK to grieve that loss.

Death, which we brought into the world with our sin, robs us of relationships which are precious to us. It is not wrong to grieve. Fortunately very few of us need bereavement counselling. Such counselling is indeed very helpful to those whose grief has exceeded normal bounds and become a real mental health issue. But the danger of a culture of counselling is that it gives the impression that heart rending grief in the face of death is not normal.. But it is normal. It is how we may well feel when confronted with the last enemy.

And mostly to come through that valley of darkness when we need is simply to know that God says grief is legitimate.

Secondly, we should grieve like those with hope.

When another Christian dies they have gone to be with the Lord Jesus and we too, will be with him soon. That does not change the fact that we have lost something. But it does change what we have lost.

When a Christian dies there is no need to grieve for them. Not because, as the cliché puts it, they have gone to a better place (though that’s true), but because they are with a better person. Dead Christians are with Christ. They are with the person they love most in all the world. They are happier with him than they would be with you.

It is vital that we remember that. Christian parents: you are, I hope, bringing up your children to trust God and to love Jesus more than they love you. Christian students: your parents, if you have been brought you up in a Christian home, love Jesus more than they love you and more than they love each other. Christian couples: your wife or husband does not love you as much as they love Jesus.

What that means is that if they die, when they die, they will be with someone they love more than you. Someone you will be with too, very soon.

So when you grieve you are grieving for a world where death reigns. You are grieving for yourself and your loss of relationship with someone you love. But you are not grieving for them.

There is nothing wrong with grieving for your loss. If someone you love dies your loss is real and your tears are legitimate. When you lose a son or daughter, a parent, a spouse or a sibling you will never be the same again. That scar of loss will remain until you too go to glory. But you need to realise that the loss is yours not theirs.

2          Why good grief is possible: because Christ is risen

For me, looking at v15-17 of this passage always makes me think: “man, this is a bit weird.” Calvin describes these verses as talking about things that are “incredible to the human mind.”

So it’s really important that Paul introduces us to these teachings on what will happen to Christians at Christ’s return, which we might feel are impossible, by pointing us to something that seems equally impossible but which has definitely already happened:

V14: We believed that Jesus died and rose again and SO we be believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.

The Christian hope for the future of those who have died, and our hope in the face of our imminent death, is based on faith. But faith isn’t, as Mark Twain suggested “believing what you know ain’t so.” It isn’t something that Christians make up when they are confronted with death to make ourselves feel better.

It’s something we believe all the time, even when death isn’t on our horizon at that moment. Christian faith is having a settled conviction about facts based on evidence. We believe that Jesus died and rose again. And there is as much reason today as ever there was to believe that Jesus Christ didn’t just die; he also rose bodily and physically from the dead.

If you are a Christian here this morning then, by definition, you already believe in the resurrection of Jesus. You already believe that he is the glorious Son of God who died for our sins and was raised to new life from the tomb before ascending to his position of reigning power in heaven.

You might, like me, find it difficult, almost impossible, to comprehend how, at the end of time, God will give all his people resurrection bodies and house us in a new earth. It’s fine not to be able to imagine the process or the scale of that! But you don’t need to feel sceptical about it. You don’t need to doubt in your mind that God can raise you, raise us, from the dead. Because God is not asking you to believe something for which there is no evidence. He is asking you to believe something that follows entirely naturally from the historical fact that Jesus has already been raised from the dead.

What God is proposing for the human race is not something new. It is not something he has never done before. What God is going to do for his people is what he has already done for his Son. He is going to repeat something that hundreds witnessed. He is going to do again the resurrection miracle, a miracle that those who saw it were so convinced was real that they were willing to put their lives on it.

It is possible for us to grieve with hope, not because Christians have some “faith” gene that enables us to believe three impossible things before breakfast, but because Jesus died and rose again.

3          What good grief recognises: that dead Christians will be honoured.

It seems that the Thessalonians were particularly concerned that those Christians who died before Christ returned would miss out in some way.

Many Jewish teachers in the first century taught that the blessings of the kingdom of God would only be for those who were living at the time it came. That would have been fine when the Thessalonians had first become Christians because if Christ had returned at that point all those who had believed in him would still be alive to share in the kingdom. But once some of them started to die it raised some difficult questions.

Paul wants to reassure them. Far from missing out on the blessings of the kingdom of God, the remade perfect world that Christ will bring on his return, those Christians who have died before Christ comes will be right at the front of the queue.

At the time when Paul wrote this letter it was common for visiting dignitaries to a city to be greeted some way outside the city gates by important people of the town and escorted back to the city. Ambassadors and others would send riders ahead to let people know they were coming and announce their progress with instruments and heralds so that the appropriate crowd could be gathered.

This kind of honour was even accorded to the apostle Paul on one occasion – you can read about it Acts chapter 28 later if you like. Paul was a prisoner being taken to Rome, and the Christians in that city travelled some 30 miles down the Appian way to greet him at the Forum of Appius and escort him to the world’s capital city.

When Jesus returns, Paul says, there will be a much more impressive escort than that.

When Jesus returns there will be lot of noise. There will be a loud command from heaven, archangels will shout and the call of God will sound like a trumpet. The volume of the announcement will make the coming of a Caesar seem like some school children blowing a kazoo. It will be such a noise, he implies, that it will awaken the dead.

And those deceased Christians, now clothed in their resurrection bodies, will go, with those who are alive when he comes, to meet the coming Lord Jesus. Where could you go to meet someone who is coming to be the king of the whole earth? Only into the sky to greet and escort the coming ruler of the world to his realm.

There is not going to be some sort of “rapture” of Christians to be with Jesus after which things will carry on in the world. On the last day Christians will be resurrected to meet Jesus in the air only to immediately escort him to the earth where is will remake everything and reign as king forever and ever.

At the head of that great procession of joy and triumph celebrating Jesus’ victory will be brothers and sisters who have died. If he waits a long time before he comes we will be in that group. But if Jesus comes tomorrow we will be there as well; applauding and cheering the king as he comes as we are caught up and transformed into our eternal form.

When Jesus comes we will all be there. Dead Christians will be alive. Living Christians will be more alive than we have ever been. And we, together, all of us, will be with the Lord forever.

There is a lot of death in life. But Christians face death, both our own death and that of our fellow believers, knowing that there is eternal life after death.

Not all tears are an evil. We should weep as we face the temporary parting of our fellowship with those in our church, those of our family and friends, who depart ahead of us to be with Christ.

Indeed we should weep so that, as people did who saw Jesus by the grave of is friend Lazarus, the watching world says of us “see how he loved him.” If our grief for Christians who die is shallow it may also reflect that our love for them was shallow and that should not be.

But our grief must always be infused with hope and with the conviction that the best thing in the universe is to be with Christ whom we love. It is tragic when children or young people die? Yes, for those who are left it is. Such deaths are gutting. Those funerals are massively painful. But for the child, for the student, for the graduate professional, the young parent and the middle aged amongst us, if we die today, we have not lost out; the dead in Christ will rise first. There is nothing any amongst us can look forward to in this life that will not be infinitely surpassed by the perfections of what awaits us.

So when your Christian brother or sister dies, grieve as those who loved them, but with hope. Such grief is good grief. Not just good for you, setting your world in its right perspective, but also good for the gospel; commending the love of Christ and our hope in Christ to a watching world.

When you Christian brother or sister dies, whoever they were to you, you must not believe the lie that their loss is the end of the world, or even the end of your world, even if it may well feel like that.

And if you are grieving do not despise those who encourage you with the hope of glory. That does not mean glibly telling every grieving Christian you meet that it’ll all be OK. But it does mean that as we weep together, as we seek to share in the pain of loss, we must constantly return, in the church, and in our conversations to the reality of the resurrection of Christ, even as we expect people still to grieve.

He is risen. He will come again. And when he does his people, every one of us, will be caught up with him in the air and form his cheering, joyful escort as he comes to reign our new and perfect world.