If you are a believer, the minute you leave this body, you’re going home. And the body is put to sleep. That’s the way the early Christians spoke of their own who died. In fact, they called the place of burial, the graveyard, the koimeterion, and that really means a rest house for strangers. It was the word for the inn that was closed to Mary and Joseph.
Such places were all through the Roman Empire, and we get from it our word cemetery today. A cemetery is a resting place, a sleeping place. What do we call sleeping places today? We call them motels and hotels. You don’t weep, do you, when your loved ones write, “We’re going to spend a week at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco?” We congratulate them and think it’s wonderful. We miss them if they’re close to us and are going to be away from us, but they’re asleep up in the Hilton Hotel.
Well, that was the feeling of the early church. They took their loved ones and put them out in the cemetery, in the ground, when they were asleep in death, and called it the koimeterion.
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J. Vernon McGee