Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
8th of November 2026
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Recently I read a book by religious sociologist Philip Hughes titled What is happening to religion in Australia? What is happening, as we in this congregation know, is increasing secularisation and declining churchgoing. As I have said here before, this is not because we are doing anything wrong. You all know my argument that religions in Australia grow through immigration, an argument with which Hughes agrees.[1] But this book makes another argument I have not thought much about. Hughes quotes American sociologist Ronald Inglehart as arguing that, for most of human history, humanity has survived by having lots of children so that at least some would live long enough to have children themselves. The expectation that every child born would survive to adulthood is a recent one, within the last century in nations like ours. Women in Australia no longer need to put all their energy into childbearing and childrearing for the nation to continue. The other development of the twentieth century in countries like ours was the welfare system. People today feel that, if something goes wrong, safety nets are there. I remember how concerned some of the African students I studied with in Switzerland were when they discovered that I had neither a husband nor children. I reassured them that in Australia, being childless and single did not mean I was facing an impoverished old age.
Philip Hughes argues that these changes have left churches out of step with society. Churches, except for the Uniting Church and the Quakers, are still reinforcing the duties that used to be necessary for survival: heterosexual couples staying together to raise children and children caring for their elderly parents. The new set of values that began to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s in Australia and other Western countries replaced duty to family and nation with a focus on personal fulfilment.[2] Hughes argues that this new conflict between the moral systems of the world and the moral systems of the churches has left the churches irrelevant.
I wonder whether the end of childhood mortality has contributed to the decline of churches in another way. At last year’s carol service, I talked about the carol ‘Once in royal David’s city,’ written in nineteenth-century Britain, where one in every three deaths was of a child under the age of five and, until 1877, babies who died before they were a year old were not included in government statistics because there were so many of them. With that in mind, the comfort of a carol that speaks of Jesus leading children to heaven, where they will ‘gather round / bright like stars, with glory crowned,’ makes sense. I also imagine that the parents, grandparents, and siblings who were mourning those children would have found the traditional doctrines of the church around life after death deeply reassuring, and would have come to church to be reminded of them.
In today’s reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, we see another community needing that reassurance. Scholars do not agree on exactly what concerned the Thessalonians. Some suggest Paul had not spoken to them about life after death, because early Christians expected Jesus to return soon to fully inaugurate God’s kingdom of love and peace. This left them worried that death marked the end for those they loved. After all, life after death was not a given in the Thessalonians’ world. There are Latin inscriptions on tombs throughout the Roman Empire that testify to a belief that there was no life beyond this life: ‘If you want to know who I am, the answer is ash and embers,’ and ‘We are nothing. See, reader, how quickly we mortals return from nothing to nothing.’
Maybe Paul taught the Thessalonians that there is a life beyond this life, but they believed they needed to be alive to experience it. Were they worried that only those still alive could be taken up to be with the Lord forever, as Jewish tradition said Moses, Enoch, and Elijah had been? Were they worried that those who died could not participate in this raising up to enter paradise?
Or maybe the question was less about life after death and more about the relationship between the living and the dead. Maybe Paul taught the Thessalonians that they could no longer participate in pagan celebrations of their beloved dead but did not give them an alternative. This last suggestion makes sense to me because something like it happened during the Reformation. Some Protestants were so determined to wipe out the old idea of Purgatory and the belief that the living could do anything for the dead that they held burials without services or ministers and often by night. Cemeteries were moved outside the city walls to separate the living and the dead; John Calvin insisted on being buried in an unmarked grave in Geneva; Scotland prohibited ministers from going to the grave; in the New England colony, ministers were excluded completely from funerals.[3]
Reformers soon found that the need people have to accompany their dead to their burial and to remember them was too strong for good Reformed theology. As Diarmaid MacCulloch writes:
Even the Church of Scotland lost the battle against the monuments. It started out in 1581 confidently forbidding the building of tombs inside churches, through which papists had turned God’s house of prayer into a ‘cairn of dead men’s skulls,’ but its proclamations grew ever more shrill and are patently contradicted by the majestic monuments which survive in many of Scotland’s old church buildings. Eventually canny Scottish church officials saw that principle could be combined with profit by levying supposedly punitive fines on offending tomb-builders, which were effectively a tax on burial in church. And outside, all around in Scottish kirkyards, four centuries of monuments both humble and grand now afford the serious-minded tourist much varied visual delight.[4]
Maybe the Thessalonians had the same concern as new Protestants; they wanted assurance that their dead were still part of their community. As I said last week, the Thessalonians had been rejected by their families of origin and their community, and so Paul reassures them that they have gained a new family. I believe that in today’s reading, Paul further reassures them that those who have died are still part of that family. He assures them that Jesus’ resurrection was not a unique event, but a sign of what will happen to everyone: ‘For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.’ When Jesus comes again, the living will not even take precedence over the dead. All will be raised together, caught up into the clouds to meet with Jesus in the air and be with him forever, one family, united.
A reminder that Paul is using metaphors. When Paul writes that ‘God will bring with him those who have died,’ we are reminded of the other times God has brought people with him: out of Egypt in the Exodus and from Babylon in the Exile. For the third time God will bring God’s people from slavery to freedom, from Exile to home, from life to death. Paul’s description of Jesus returning ‘with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet’ is meant to remind us of the arrival of a king or an emperor. The word parousia, used to describe Jesus’ coming, is the Greek word for the welcome of a king with honour and acclaim. When Paul predicts that we will be ‘caught up in the clouds together,’ he is reminding us of the clouds in which God’s glory had previously been seen: the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites through the desert; the cloud in which God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai; the cloud that descended on the mountain when Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James and John. As I said three years ago when we last heard this passage, it is not to be read literally, as though Paul is giving us map directions. Paul comforts those who mourn loved ones: those they love have not been lost forever. They are still part of their family and community.
‘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.’ Paul does not mean that we should not grieve. There is nothing I dislike more than the suggestion that Christians should not mourn someone’s death because they are now ‘with the Lord.’ Paul is saying we can grieve with hope. You may be tired of hearing me say this at funerals, but one of the things the church offers those who mourn is the sure and certain hope of the resurrection, the faith that death is not the end. This is the hope Paul offers the Thessalonians: that in the resurrection of Jesus, we have seen that life does not end in meaninglessness and oblivion. I am not going to suggest how that happens or what it looks like; I am not the Apostle Paul. But I do have faith that in death, as in life, we will all be with God.
For most of us, Australia seems to be a country in which Isaiah’s promise has come true: ‘No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days or an old person who does not live out a lifetime, for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.’ (Isaiah 65:20) I am not the only minister who has noticed that we can still be shocked by the deaths of people in their eighties and nineties, even though for most of human history life expectancy was in the thirties and forties and even now global life expectancy is around 71 years. It is as though we have forgotten that even the healthiest and wealthiest lives will end in death (and I do know that some tech billionaires are currently spending millions chasing immortality). I hope that you will not be shocked if I mention that we are all, one day, going to die. More challengingly, all those we love are going to die. So, as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, ‘encourage one another with these words.’ ‘If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.’ (Romans 14:8-9) Amen.
[1] Philip Hughes, What is happening to religion in Australia? (2025), p. 15.
[2] What is happening to religion in Australia? pp. 38-45.
[3] Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (2003), p. 577.
[4] Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, p. 579.
