Sermons
June 22, 2025
The Meeting in the Air
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
It was Sunday night youth group, back around 1982 or ’83. The leaders had promoted that we’d be watching a movie—and what teenager doesn’t like to see a movie?—and asked us to bring our friends. We gathered in the fellowship hall of our church, with our popcorn and pop, and the movie started.
It was called A Thief in the Night. It was about the end-times, about the Rapture of the Church, about how the Christians would be taken away and everyone else left to suffer, branded with the mark of the Beast (or facing a firing squad if they refused it), put through the Great Tribulation. There was even a brief view of a mushroom cloud, implying that nuclear war would be part of that time of tribulation. It was sort of a precursor to the Left Behind books and movie of later years.
At the end, there was an announcer or something, telling us how we could avoid all that, be taken in the Rapture, if we would accept Christ as our Savior.
I was 14 or 15 at the time, and I had been a Christian since I was really little. But I was scared at the end of the movie. What if I wasn’t really a Christian, wasn’t as good as I should be? Would I have to stay and go through the Tribulation? Would I have to make the choice between getting the mark of the Beast or execution, like the people in the movie? Would I do the wrong thing and end up in hell? I lost some sleep over it—but didn’t really want to talk to anyone about it, because I was afraid to let anyone know I wasn’t sure.
Today’s reading, this short passage from 1 Thessalonians—quite possible the earliest letter Paul wrote—combined with images from Revelation, a few parables from the Gospels, and probably the book of Daniel from the Old Testament, too, is the basis for the belief in the Rapture that A Thief in the Night and the Left Behind books are based on.
These days I have gotten over the fear I had that night after youth group, and I’m mostly fascinated now by apocalyptic images. They’re all through the Bible—in the Old Testament books of Ezekiel and Daniel, the Gospels, some of Paul’s letters, and Revelation. And there are very important reasons for their being included in the Bible. But they’ve been misinterpreted and misused, so much so that it’s hard to sort out the good and important purposes of apocalyptic writing from the nonsense that has gotten attached to it over the years. So let’s look at this one specifically, and see if we can figure out what Paul was trying to do when he wrote it, and how it became understood as it has, as the description of a future event called the “Rapture of the Church.”
All of Paul’s letters are pastoral letters.
Church leaders have often written letters to address current issues. This became a common part of the work of our General Ministers when Dick Hamm occupied that office; his successors have similarly written letters to Disciples and Disciples churches when something important needs to be discussed. I even wrote one once to my congregation in Iowa, when our county was preparing to vote on whether to allow a casino to be built on a lake in the southern part of the county.1
Like these letters, Paul wrote to address specific problems, or concerns, or anxieties in the churches he had founded. Most of his letters, unlike the one I wrote to my church or the ones our General Ministers have written, deal with several issues.
In 1 Thessalonians, one of the things Paul needs to help that church with is the problem of death. It’s hard for us, nearly two millennia after the fact, to understand the situation in the earliest churches or why the death of Christians caused such worry.
The first Christians, including Paul, expected that Jesus would return to rescue them from the difficulties of life as oppressed people within their lifetimes. So they lived with a sense of urgency—with the idea that they needed to live faithfully and spread the gospel quickly because Jesus could show up any minute. They didn’t expect to die before Jesus returned, and when people began to grow old and die and he still hadn’t come back, it caused a crisis.
Maybe they wrote to Paul and asked him, “Paul, we know that we who are living when Jesus comes will become part of his kingdom—but what about our loved ones who have died? Will they miss out? What will happen to them? They were faithful, they believed, they looked forward to Jesus’ return just like we did—are they going to be lost, just because the timing hasn’t worked out right? And what if more of us die? If Jesus doesn’t come back right away, are more of us going to miss spending eternity with him?”
Because, Paul, if it’s going to be like that, we can’t bear it. All our faith, all the trouble we’ve gone through, and then it turns out to be for nothing?
Paul’s reply wasn’t written as a disembodied statement of belief. He wasn’t writing doctrine, or systematic theology. He wrote to these churches, these brand-new communities filled with people who had come to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior of the world, as they lived day by day, trying to figure out what it meant to be Christians in the world they lived in.
He wasn’t writing this section of 1 Thessalonians to lay out the basis for a belief in the Rapture as it came to be understood by the Rev. Mr. Darby and his followers, one of whom ultimately codified Darby’s system of thought in the study notes of the Scofield Reference Bible. And contrary to what we tend to think these days, the Rapture in Darby’s dispensationalism wasn’t meant to spare Christians from being harmed by the Great Tribulation.
Darby believed that God’s purposes for the world had to be fulfilled not by the church but by the nation of Israel, and because Israel had not accepted Jesus as their awaited messiah, God had turned away from them and toward the church. Therefore, in order for God’s kingdom to be fully realized here on earth, the church needed to be taken out of the world so Israel could again do what it was supposed to be doing.
There is absolutely nothing in the Bible that supports that belief.
Paul wasn’t writing to set down doctrine we all need to subscribe to in order not to be “left behind.” He was writing it to keep folks from despair in a time of grief.
The beautiful, difficult images in the passage aren’t predictions of exactly what will happen—they actually conflict with what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 about the same event, the second coming of Christ. We don’t have to believe heaven is somewhere up in the sky, and that Jesus will literally come down like he is riding an elevator, to be able to believe the truth in the text.
The imagery of a trumpet sounding and believers, both living and dead, being caught up to meet Jesus in the air, actually reminds me more of Jesus’ parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, in which the wedding attendants go out to meet the bridegroom and escort him into the joyful celebration that has been prepared for him and his bride. It was also, as I’ve heard, a common practice in the ancient world for residents of a city to go outside the walls to meet a conquering leader, and escort him back into the city for a celebration of his victory.
My suspicion is these kinds of events are what informed Paul’s description here of how both the living and the dead would be part of Jesus’ return. We’re not to be taken away to escape persecution, or get out of the way so someone else can finish the job of fulfilling God’s purposes; we are going out to welcome the King of Kings back to earth!
A Thief in the Night had it wrong. It ended with what I remember as a threat: If you don’t want all this to happen to you, you had better accept Jesus as your Savior right now! The whole point of that movie, as I remember it, was to scare people into becoming Christians.
But what we have to offer, what we hope people will hear and accept, is called the Good News, not the Terrifying News.
Paul didn’t write this passage to scare people; he wrote it to comfort the grieving and give hope to those in despair. The truth in this text, what Paul needed to get across to the Thessalonians, is that even death won’t separate Christians from Jesus Christ. Jesus’ own resurrection showed us that our God is more powerful even than death, and our God will not let death put an end to us. Just as he rose again, so will we.
The last verse of the passage begins with what anyone who studies the Bible for very long discovers is one of the most important words you can run across in a Scripture passage, especially one from Paul’s letters: “Therefore.” Paul talks theory, sings hymns, tells stories, breaks into doxologies filled with exuberant praise of God and of Jesus Christ—and then, “therefore,” he explains how all this plays out in everyday life. Wonderful things are going to happen, Paul tells the Thessalonians, and even those of you who have already died are going to get in on them. Jesus will return, and we will all be with him forever.
And, “therefore,” encourage one another. When someone is in despair, having a crisis of faith, perhaps, because someone has died, offer them hope. When life is hard, help one another out. Bear each other’s burdens, put your arms around those who are grieving—and remind yourselves of what I’ve said: nothing separates us from Jesus Christ, and we’ll all be with him forever.
We are all waiting for Jesus to return, even though we may no longer feel the sense of urgency the earliest Christians felt. What we can do while we await that return is this: Help each other not to lose hope. Don’t waste time scaring people into belief. Instead, let the world know that we have something that keeps our grief from turning into hopeless despair: the promise of the Resurrection.
Jesus died and was raised; and because of that we know we will also be raised.