In all four gospels, Jesus says that he will, one day, physically return to earth. And the earliest Christians believed that that return was going to happen soon, within the next generation. This particular letter of Paul is all about the fact that time had passed and Jesus still hadn’t come back. The Thessalonians wrote to Paul wanting to know why there was a delay, and wondering if those who had died waiting were going to miss out. And Paul replies, first, don’t worry about the when—it’s going to happen; and, second, that Christ’s return matters to and is good news for both the living and the dead.

OK, that was then, but this is now. Many generations have passed and Christ still has not returned—at least not in that bodily, dramatic form that Scripture describes. And that’s probably a big part of why we don’t talk much about the Second Coming. In fact, the delay seems to have made it sort of a pie-in-the-sky idea to joke about: haven’t you seen those bumper stickers that say “Jesus is coming—look busy!”? The Second Coming, if it happens, we say, is so far in the future we don’t have to worry about it. And not only that, the Second Coming of Christ has become associated, over the generations, with the end of the world, with the apocalypse, with final judgment and all that horrific imagery from the Book of Revelation. Christians have built a whole mythology around Christ’s return, and made it into something to be dreaded, sometimes using it to scare people into obedient discipleship.

So, to put it bluntly, maybe we feel as if we don’t need the Second Coming. We have Christ’s teachings and example; we have the good news of Easter, which means our death is not our end; and this wrathful, angry, catastrophic imagery of the Second Coming seems quite at odds with the Jesus we know and love and genuinely want to follow.

But here’s another view. We know God sent Jesus Christ to make a flesh and blood connection with humanity. God’s aim, as Jesus says in the gospel of John, was and is “that all may be one.” God took a huge step toward that goal by coming to us in the Christ child; Jesus carried on that work with his dramatic, completely faithful life and ministry; and God transformed it even further by raising Jesus from the dead, overcoming that huge barrier between us and God. And after Easter, when Jesus ascended to heaven and the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, the church—the disciples and apostles and now you and me—became the ones to carry on the work toward God’s goal.

But, no matter what we do or don’t do, what God wants will in the end be done, and that faith is expressed in this belief in the Second Coming. The work of peacemaking and justice and wholeness is carried on by us now, but one day it will be finished, as promised, by Jesus. How that happens, when that happens, what it will look like is mysterious, completely beyond us. But I believe that in some way, it will happen, there will be a Second Coming—something even more than the presence of Christ in Holy Communion, more than that sense of Jesus beside us in hard moments, more than powerful feelings of incarnation that flow during Advent and Christmas.

Let’s go back to Paul’s words this morning. The Thessalonians want to know if the dead will miss out, and Paul’s answer is no, when Jesus comes again, everyone will be affected. Part of the reason we need to pay attention to the Second Coming is that even if it happens after you and I are dead, it is still going to matter to us. Now that raises a whole other set of questions. For the most part, I think we believe that when we die, we are reunited with God; we have images of heaven, which we hope for, and, for some of us, images of hell, which we’re hoping to avoid. But the biblical witness is that while the dead are safely in the presence of God, they too are waiting for the return of Jesus, when all will be resurrected together. Over in Center Cemetery you will find epitaphs on gravestones that say things like, “Asleep in Jesus,” meaning that the dead are waiting until the final trumpet blast—one of those Second Coming images—that will waken them from sleep, and they will join the living for that awesome and mysterious encounter with Christ.

And, of course, the old fear is that there will be a final judgment and some will get into heaven and be happy for eternity, and others will go to hell and be unhappy for eternity—another reason why we tend to shy away from pondering the biblical witness to the Second Coming. But, again, we need to remember that, despite so many interpretations to the contrary, fear and anxiety is not how God chooses to work with us.

Jurgen Moltmann is a German theologian who spent three years as a prisoner of war during World War II before finding his calling as a teacher. And through his writings Moltmann has become my teacher about these very difficult issues, and helped me overcome some long-seated confusion that went unanswered through my Christian education. First of all, Moltmann says that the image of a wrathful God who will one day judge us has done a great deal of spiritual damage, and Paul would agree: Paul says in our passage, “God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” God wants the creation reconciled, made one, made whole, not further divided into the saved and the damned. In that mysterious moment when Christ returns, and the dead are resurrected, Moltmann believes that will be when all things are made as they should be, when God brings justice to victims and puts perpetrators right. The experience of that judgment in the light of Christ’s presence may be very different depending on who we have been and how we have lived, but the end is wholeness and unity.

Moltmann says, “The purpose of his judgment is not reward or punishment, but the victory of the divine creative righteousness and justice, and this victory does not lead to heaven or hell but to God’s great day of reconciliation on earth.” Doesn’t that sound more like the Jesus Christ you know? The one who loves all and has words of comfort for some and words of challenge and redirection for others? God says in the Book of Revelation that in the end, “Behold, I make all things new,” not just some people, but all people; and not just all people but all things.”

I know this is heady and imaginative stuff. Let’s bring it back to today and what all this could possibly mean for the living of this coming week. As disciples, the Second Coming of Christ needs our attention, needs to become part of our vocabulary of faith. It might seem something too far in the future to be concerned about, but the Bible says it will involve us, living or dead. It needs our attention, not because if we ignore it we will be on the wrong side when the time comes. The Second Coming of Christ deserves our faith because it expresses our ultimate confidence—experienced each day in all our particular and unique situations—that our loving God is in charge, and everything that God wants to have happen in this creation will come to pass. The Second Coming means we don’t have to get wound up about whether or not people who do wrong—wrong to us, wrong to people we love, wrong like Hitler and Stalin and bin Laden do wrong—we don’t have to worry that those people won’t get what’s coming to them or, conversely, that so many innocents won’t know justice and relief. God will make all things new.

This week, you and I will probably have a moment when we do wrong, or a wrong will be done to us. This week, we will probably have a moment of fear that God is somehow upset with us. How much of our precious energy will those moments continue to eat up? As mysterious as it is, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is the corrective to the burden of all that hurt and worry; it is a reminder that God will make all wrongs—regardless of which end of them we’re on—one day right; that God’s will for us and for all creation is not wrath, not reward and punishment, but reconciliation and wholeness. In the meantime, rather than worry, we are simply to do wholeheartedly as Paul instructs: “encourage one another and build each other up, as indeed you are doing.” The faithful way forward for you and me is not with anxiety over death and judgment, but with continued energy and desire and commitment to one another’s well being, whatever our weeks may hold, and whenever our Christ comes again.