The Dead In Christ Get Up First

Somebody has turned the chairs so they face each other instead of the front, which changes a room more than people expect.

Twelve of them. Coffee in the good cups because it is that sort of evening. Somebody's coat still on.

Two funerals in fourteen months. One was expected for two years and one took four days.

She is fifty-eight and she has been to both of them and she has made sandwiches for both of them, and there is a thing sitting in her that came out of the second one and that she has not been able to say in a room like this.

It is not doubt about the resurrection. She would want that understood. She has believed it since she was nine.

It is smaller and meaner than doubt and it goes like this. Every line she has stood in for the last three years, she has been at the back of. The waiting list. The seat by the door. The last one down the stairs at the end of a service. The one they collect afterward. The one who is worked around, kindly, by people organizing something. And somewhere in the middle of the second funeral, standing at the back of the church because standing at the back is easier, the thought arrived fully formed: I expect it will be the same then. Whatever the order is, I expect I am near the end of it.

If a thought like that has arrived in a church, you know you did not choose it, and you know it did not feel like unbelief. It felt like experience.

There is an order and it is published

Weigh it first and at its own size, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the funerals. It is what three years of being worked around has taught you to expect everywhere, including there. It costs you the front of rooms. It costs the ordinary experience of arriving with everybody else instead of before or after. It costs the second funeral, which you spent at the back thinking about the order of things. And it costs you a thought you cannot say in a circle of twelve people who love you, because saying it out loud would sound like a complaint about being helped.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your three years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if two funerals in fourteen months have taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking the people making the arrangements would have less to arrange without you, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the twelve in that circle, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who turn the chairs around.

Now, Thessalonians. Paul writing to people who were frightened about exactly this, about whether the ones who had died were going to miss something.

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them.1 Thessalonians 4:16-17

The dead in Christ shall rise first.

That is an order and Paul publishes it. He does not say everybody at once and he does not say the strong and then the weak. He gives a sequence, and the ones at the front of it are the ones who by every human measure are furthest gone.

You are in the only sequence God ever published, and the front of it is not where anybody would have put it. First Thessalonians 4:16 puts the word first on the people a room would have listed last, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that ordering off a page and sets it down in a circle of chairs.

Now, why Paul is writing it at all. Read the verses before. That church was grieving and specifically worried that their dead had been left behind, that being gone meant missing it. Paul writes to fix a fear about order.

Which means the question you had at the back of the church, standing where standing is easier, is a question the New Testament already treats as worth answering carefully. Not indulgently. Carefully, with a sequence.

You have a fear that Scripture took seriously enough to answer with an order rather than a reassurance. That is written into 1 Thessalonians 4, and His Spirit in you is the guarantee that the ordering is about you and not about a category.

Now let me be honest about what this does not say, because fourteen months of true things have already been said at two gravesides.

It says nothing about your health. Not a word about this year, or the waiting list, or the stairs at the end of a service. It makes no prediction about your body and I will not make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and anybody who is confident about somebody else's next year is being confident about themselves.

And it is not a promise that you will be at the front of anything in this life. You may well be worked around, kindly, at every event you attend between now and the end of it. Paul is not describing a change in seating arrangements at church.

You were placed in an order that no room on earth has ever been asked to follow. Scripture says the dead in Christ rise first, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who makes a published sequence land on a woman who has been at the back of every line for three years.