The Creed - The Communion of Saints

13 But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. 14 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. 15 For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. 16 For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.

A couple of weeks back, we looked at the line from the Apostles’ Creed that says, “I believe in the holy, catholic church.” We were reminded that our tradition is a part of a great eternal stream, a wide river of God’s people, moving in God’s way, through the world and through history. We were reminded of our diversity of traditions, our uniquenesses and our similarities as followers of the way of Jesus. We celebrate this catholicity, this diversity and unity. In times like this, when our world can feel to stretched, so pulled apart, it is important that we remember all that we share with our siblings in the faith around the globe.

As we approach the statement of “I believe in the communion of saints,” I am tempted to continue on in this line of thought. We immediately think of those who have gone before and who hold the St. in their titles now. St. Teresa of Avila, St. Augustine, St. Franics, St. Hildegaard of Bingen, St. Francis, St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. Oscar Romero. Added to those officially canonized by the catholic church, we could also certainly think of Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Fred Rogers, or even simply refer back to the Apostolic Saints, Peter, James, John, and the rest of Jesus’ first followers.

But, especially as we encounter a world where we continue to let go and say goodbye of common saints among us, the people we love, we have to draw a wider definition for this statement. And we also are drawn to wonder at that eternal question of “what happens when some die and others of us are left here on earth to remember them?”

This is the question the church of Thessolonica is wrestling with which Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy seek to address. When we speak of believing in the communion of saints, it is also implied in our statement of belief that we are growing in our understanding and sense of the communion with all those living and those who have died.

Here we find a mature community of early Christian followers who are wrestling with what it means for them to say goodbye to members of their community before the return of Christ. As you may remember, multiple times in Jesus’ ministry, he spoke of how believers of this generation would not see death before Christ returned. So this is confusing, to say the least, about what is happening to these believers who are dying before the miraculous return of Christ. Was Jesus wrong? Did they misunderstand him? What’s going on here?

We know that death is inevitable as we age and that no one has a guarantee of long or eternal life in the bodies we inhabit. There is a sense of urgency, then, in this text, as the apostles are wrestling with how to comfort a community of believers and invite them into grief, while also encouraging them to not lose hope.

Here is where I find the language of “the communion of saints” demands for something much more expansive than a particular set of people who the church says are saintly. Rather, as I understand it, the saints are all who have been welcomed into the love of Christ in death. The saints are the ones who have gone before us, on into Christ’s glory, and who await Christ’s coming again just as much as we do, for when this happens, it is the promised gathering up of ALL the saints, together, in common unity, or, perhaps…communion.

A quick Google search this morning reveals that the United States is currently hovering around 974,000 cumulative deaths from COVID-19 over these past two years. That, my friends, is a sobering number. Expanded out to worldwide statistics, that number jumps to approximately 6.12 million people. Lord, have mercy.

We have become intimately acquainted with death and loss these last couple of years.

But it also extends beyond that, or, perhaps, we zoom back into our community and feel our losses together. A few months back, I had a heartbreakingly powerful interaction with one of our members who was just returning back to in-person church for the first time. They were lamenting at all of the people who will not be back in our community. All the people we have lost — we could make a list of them, those who have been members of our church, those who we call family, along with the extended grief of simply not seeing familiar faces for so long and saying goodbye over the phone or by simply reading a tribute. Grief is in the air, my friends.

And so, we say, I believe in the communion of saints. Does this adequately address our grief? Of course it doesn’t.

The Thessalonian church believed in the communion of saints, but that wasn’t enough, or at least that belief was not mature enough to hold their longing and wondering at what it all meant as they said goodbye to specific people they loved and were left concerned about how they would meet again.

Let’s pull apart the text a little bit to flesh out some of how we “believe in the communion of saints” and live in hope.

I find this opening part of the text to be such a comfort when speaking with families of those who have died and sharing at services of celebration of life. “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.”

The Apostle is saying, hey, I know this is difficult and there is a lot in our world that says despair is the only option as we consider those who have died. Despair and confusion. But please, they remind us, do not lose hope.

Going on, we hear that first and foremost, Christ’s life, death, and resurrection show us what it looks like for a life that is fully restored and redeemed becomes — Jesus is seated with God and, as those who are now in Christ, we and those who go before us, are also brought to God. Again, remember communion — common unity, a gathering up together as one, in God’s loving arms.

We move on, “For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died.”

This verse always strikes me, as it perhaps betrays some line of questioning about who has precedence in the Kingdom of God. Is it the believers who have stuck it out and not died before Christ’s coming? Or is there a long waiting line to get into the kingdom, with all our saints and precedessors waiting ahead of us?

I hear this passage differently than that line of thinking — rather, it seems that order is not important, but rather, we are all gathered up into the loving arms of God together in the moment of God’s return.

This is where we can easily split off into all kinds of intricate descriptions of God’s time and what it means for those who have died to wait ahead of us, and the how and when of it all. These lines of thought can be interesting, but I believe they often simply serve to deflect our grief from truly accepting the lose of ones we love, AND they complicate what seems like a beautiful and simple statement about how God welcomes us ALL into God’s loving arms.

I’ll get to that in a moment. But the passage continues on to describe how the Lord will cry a command and the archangels and trumpet will sound and descend from the heavens and the dead will rise first and then…meet with those who are living “in the air.”

You may be sitting there, skeptically, thinking all of this imagery is well and good, but does not account for what we know about death and the body and does not adequately address our concerns about being separated from the ones we love.

I get it. I’m skeptical too.

This is where we have to think differently about what our shared living and dying existences mean.

On our stairwell, as you walk up from the lower parking lot, there are a number of registers of saints who have gone on to glory. There are lists of charter members of the congregation, elders counted to the rolls of honor, and memorials to those who died in World Wars. These names might not mean much to us who did not know those people, but if we pause to consider this text and their names, we realize that they at once have gone on to glory and at the same time, they are still with us.

I think more personally about the specific people we have lost in recent weeks and months. I think of my Grandmother, Shirley Thomas. Or recent St. James members, Irene Rome and Gale Pfueller, who have gone on to glory. They are no longer here with us…and yet, they are.

Look around you — see the faces of those who you love and who are here with you today. Celebrate the beauty and goodness of that.

And also, look around you — notice the empty spaces where your dear friends used to sit. Notice their absence, physically, from this space.

Are we not too far from where this Thessalonian church was? Aren’t we wondering what happens and how we will be reunited again with the ones we love? Don’t we all wrestle with that as we say, “I believe in the communion of saints”?

The passage goes on to speak of how those who have died will meet with those who are yet still alive, meeting with the Lord “in the air.” And this is to be our encouragement, something we share with others to give them hope amidst a despairing world.

I’m gonna say this: I don’t know what it means for us to meet together with the Lord in the air. I don’t know what it means for all of this to be tied up nicely in a bow, with a simple answer of where our beloved forebears are right now and what it will mean to be with them.

But what I do know is this: the veil between our longing, not-yet ready world and the grandeur of God’s new creation is very, very thin.

For us to be caught up together, with the Lord, in the air, that feels like a great deal of hope to me. That there is an intimate reconnection with our loved ones and with the Lord to be anticipated.

Are these people not still with us? Do their stories not live on in us? Do they not inspire us to live and grow in Christ as they once did? And won’t they be the ones we celebrate the journey with upon our own end? This encourages me. I does not give me certainty of some clean solution, but rather, it gives me the inkling of the beauty and mystery of God’s way.

The Apostles are trying to address this question in order to give people hope and assurance. When we, then, speak the creed and speak of believing in the communion of saints, we too are living into this mysterious hope that God is, in fact, making all things new and we can anticipate a renewed reunion with the ones who have gone on before us.

In a couple of weeks, we will celebrate easter. And the main thrust of the easter story is this: in Christ, we find that death does not have the final word. Death happens, certainly. For Christ it is a gruesome, torturous death. But in Christ, in the resurrection, death does not triumph. Death is only the next step, the beginning of our coming into common unity with one another and with Christ — our communion of saints.

Today’s text does not draw up the way and the how of the resurrection into a neat bow for us. It does not fully address our pain or our loss. But what it does do is compel us to endure in hope at God’s goodness and resurrection grace.

First and foremost, it is the resurrection of Jesus that we lean on. Jesus is the first of a new creation, the hope of glory manifested and seen by us as the resurrected, made new one. And we, in Christ, are caught up into this together, as well.

Our hope, is therefore, built on Christ alone. When we lose those we love, when we feel alone, when we are grappling with our own mortality, our hope is founded, built, stood upon Christ alone. And friends, this is sufficient. This is enough. This is our starting point, our rock, our courage, and our strength.