Scripture: Psalm 16:9-10; 1 Peter 3:18-19; Matthew 24:42; Matthew 12:40; Acts 2:31; John 3:16; 2 Corinthians 12:2; Luke 16:19-31; Revelation 21:1; Romans 8:38-39 Series: 2022
A first-Sunday-of-Advent sermon in a series on the Apostles’ Creed, expounding the clause ‘He descended to the dead.’ Using mountaintop versus cave/rock-bottom imagery, Pruitt argues that discipleship is more about the pit than the summit, and that Christ descends to the lowest depths to redeem the dead. He surveys the biblical evidence (Sheol, Matthew 12, Acts 2, 1 Peter 3), the Bible’s evasiveness about the afterlife, Gregory the Great’s image of the abyss made a road, and the Wesleyan history of the clause being cut in 1792 and restored in the 20th century. The descent affirms that no death, pain, or happenstance separates us from God’s love (Romans 8), and that we live in a Holy Saturday world where Christ is present even in suffering, calling us to stay awake and give ourselves to those in need.
Illustrations: false-summit-mountain-top, fifteen-miles-to-go-hike, rock-bottom-cave-not-valley, addiction-last-straw, dog-treat-wine-advent-calendars, staph-infection-bandage-surface, wesley-39-to-25-articles
November 27
He descended into the dead
That’s why my heart celebrates and my mood is joyous; yes, my whole body will rest in safety, because you won’t abandon my life to the grave; you won’t let your faithful follower see the pit. Psalm 16:9-10
One of my favorite things about climbing a mountain is that you always know when you’re at the top because you get to a point where you cannot go up anymore. If you can go up anymore, you are no longer at the top of a mountain. A lot of times, if you’re climbing larger mountains, there are a lot of false summits. You look up and there’s a high point and it looks like you’re almost there. You get a little thrill. And then you get to the point and you see, nope, there’s actually four miles to go.
When I’m hiking with my kids, i always try to instill in them a stoic philosophy of mountain climbing. Oh, just 15 miles to go. Even if we’re going on a two mile hike, I want them to not be thinking about the end, but to be thinking, Oh, it’s 15 miles to go. The more you think that we’re almost there, the more unbearable the last bit of a hike is. So climbing mountain’s great because you know when you’re at the end, you know when you’re there.
Rock bottom is horrible because you do not know when you’re there. When I visualize the metaphor of rock bottom that’s often used in addiction response services, is not a valley, but a cave. If you’re in a valley, you know when you’ve hit the bottom. In a cave, you do not because you cannot see. You cannot tell if you are at the bottom. You can only tell when you’re at rock bottom after you’ve hit it and started coming back up. If you could tell you are there, it wouldn’t be rock bottom.
In the language of addiction, many of us have friends and family who have suffered and sometimes outside of it it seems like, “Oh, this surely must be it. This surely must be rock bottom. This surely must be the last straw.” And you know, unfortunately, it is not. What seems like the bottom for you is not the bottom for them: they can always go lower. But how deep does Jesus go for us?
Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on the apostles creed, the historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.
Today, he descended to the dead.
It may feel strange, on this first Sunday of Advent, to hear about Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. Advent has always had two meanings. The first is the most common today. It is the coming of the baby Jesus at Christmas. It is easy to sell. Many brands sell advent calendars. You can find dog treat advent calendars, wine advent calendars, all sorts of things. They don’t mark the Christian calendar but the month of December. You can market a baby and gifts and a mother in blue and animals making funny noises. The second meaning of advent is harder to sell. It is the coming again of Jesus Christ to judge the living and the dead. The historical lectionary reading for the first Sunday in Advent comes from Matthew 24: Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
Or as an early church father wrote, We do not preach only one coming of Christ, but a second as well, much more glorious than the first. The first coming was marked by patience; the second will bring the crown of a divine kingdom.
Advent is a looking back and a looking forward. The looking forward is harder because we don’t know when it will be. We must stay awake, and this is why we have the church, the body of Christ, to encourage and remind and uplift each other in this season. Advent isn’t about nostalgia but discipleship. And discipleship is not just about the mountaintop. It is more often about the pit, the hole, the rock bottom.
He descended to the dead. What does that mean? It is confusing. In Greek, the phrase is to the depths. In Latin, the phrase is to those below.
It functions in large part as a holding area. The Hebrew word, Sheol, also functions in this manner. It refers to some kind of holding area for dead souls after they pass. Hell is a word that comes from pagan and Norse mythology. It’s not an historically Christian word.
Many Scriptures speak of this descent, even if it has not spread in popular Christian consciousness. Matthew 121 and Acts 22 are two such examples.
So we have these scriptures that refer to what Jesus does after he is buried, but this leads to the larger question of what happens after anyone dies.
This is one of the essential questions of the faith. Death is not the end of us. There are a lot of wonderful scripture around salvation. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have.” Eternal life. Life everlasting. Our hope and our faith is in God’s love. The object of our faith is not a place or time but Jesus Christ, God for us.
The Bible is actually fairly evasive concerning what life after death will look like. Instead of rules and declarative statements, Scripture has images, images of life with God. Sometimes there’s language of heaven, sometime Abraham’s bosom, sometimes language of paradise. Ouranus, the Greek word for heaven is the same word for sky. Only in English do we differentiate heaven from the sky.
Paul speaks of the Third Heaven in a confusing passage from 2 Corinthians 12, but that is for another sermon.
Genesis and Deuteronomy speak of a heaven of heavens where angels and Patriarchs are located. We see this partially in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man with the bosom of Abraham.
Some things are clear from the Bible: the afterlife is not simply a continuation of life here on earth. In the story of Lazarus and the rich man, Lazarus was poor and week and he is lifted up to the highest place. The rich man was rich and he is sent to the lowest place.
In Scripture, there is also this distinction between life after death and the new creation, which is what happens and is described at the end of the book of Revelation 21. Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.
Now we are back to Jesus and the creed and the descent to the dead.
What happened to people who died before Jesus? Are the forsaken because of chance and timing?
Gregory the Great writes of this beautifully.
Christ went down into the deepest abysses of the sea, when he went into the Lowest Hell, to fetch forth the souls of his elect. Before the redemption, the depth of the sea was a prison, not a way…But God made of this abyss a road…”3
What humanity made into a prison through sin, Christ made into a road. Where we have said no, Christ has said yes. The hardest no imaginable was not impenetrable to the God who created everything and loved us so much to seek even the depths.
Peter, in the strongest Scriptural evidence for the descent to the dead, speaks of a proclamation, an evangelism to the dead The heart of the matter is 1 Peter 3 “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.” Or as a theologian I like put it, The proclamation…should be understood as an action which plants within eternal death a manifesto of eternal life.
The descent to the dead, like the second meaning of advent, is rarely emphasized. Many Christians go through their lives with little thought to the descent to the dead. I certainly didn’t think about it until seminary. Some versions of the Apostles Creed don’t even have it.
This is a phrase in the creed that early Methodists in the United States debated heavily. It was included in the first Sunday Service from 1784. In 1784, at the first general conference of the Methodist Church, John Wesley sends over an edit of the book of Common Prayer. He’s a significant editor. John Wesley liked to cut and shift things a lot. The Church of England had 39 articles. John Wesley sends over 25, We don’t need 39 articles. 25 is good.
It was cut out of the creed in 1792. Those early conferences were used to the quick pen of Wesley making lots of changes, so they cut the phrase out of the prayer service and baptismal service.
In the 20th century, with renewed interest in the early church, the phrase was returned.
The creed is truer because of this phrase.
If you have a Staph infection, you can bandage the open wound. You can clean it ten times a day, but the infection will not go away. To believe in Christ without the descent is to literally stay on the surface. We stay on the surface of the world and on the surface of sin.
On the contrary, to affirm the descent is to believe that there is no depth of death or pain or suffering to which Christ has not gone down. It is to believe that those chosen and loved by God are not limited to timing or happenstance it is to believe and affirm boldly the words of St. Paul from Romans 8.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
What was a prison is now a road. What was eternal death is now eternal life. Our hope in Christ is not limited by our imagination. Christ offers himself fully for us.
Even more, the descent shows us what we see every day. The total victory of Easter is in the future. We still live in a Holy Saturday world of brokenness and pain and suffering and doubt and longing for Jesus. Easter is not an instant triumph over death but a total one. Saturday is where we are until then, and Christ is here with us even in the darkness. Christ will come but Christ is already present in the faces of those who suffer and hunger.
In this season of Advent, if we seek Christ, we cannot stay in the safety of our status quo lives but break forth in giving ourselves to others. Stay awake! Do the things of God. Love those in need. Hold firm in faith. You are not alone. At rock bottom, Christ is there. Even when we deny it, God has come to us in Jesus.
Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your love, that reaches to the depths of sorrow and pain, because through Jesus, you have already proclaimed life in the midst of death. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Footnotes
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“For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” ↩
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“Foreseeing this, David spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying, ‘He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh experience corruption’” ↩
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Gregory the Great ↩