1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

A Sermon for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost

The end is near. It’s coming soon.

How do you know when? Not the end for you and me personally, but the end of the world, the end of history.

Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas, is a huge school with over 2,000 students and over 100 faculty. The school teaches justification by faith, inerrancy, and that the end times will be like Paul describes in 1 Thessalonians 4: Jesus will meet believers in the sky.

They teach that after that there will be a period of tribulation and then the second coming of Christ. For pastors trained in this tradition, the Bible gives us a way of knowing, a way of figuring out the end times. They teach that if you understand the scriptures rightly, you can be “in the know” about the end.

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1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

We’re quickly coming to the end times, at least, the end of the church year. This is the first of three end-of-the-year Sundays. This year Christ the King Sunday is November 22th, the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

Our text today comes again from 1 Thessalonians, the earliest of Paul’s letters. It was written about 50-51 A.D., shortly after he had become a Christian and only twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

It is important to realize that in those twenty years some Christians had died. Those who were still alive couldn’t quite understand this. After all, there was the resurrection and then the Lord was coming again, wasn’t he? That’s what they had been told, what they expected.

In fact, even Paul thought the end was coming in his lifetime. He was convinced of it. We can see his thinking in his letters.

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1 Thessalonians 2:9-13

A Sermon for the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Do you know any magic words? To be sure, we know of magic words in fairy tales. Like “Abracadabra” and “Open Sesame.” In the Middle Eastern folktale, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, at the command, “Open Sesame!” a door hidden in a rock wall opens to reveal a cave filled with treasure. In Cinderella, magic words turn pumpkins into royal coaches, and mice into coachmen.

In short, in fairy tales there are words that can make things happen. What about real life? What about our life as Christians?

The name of God is like a magic word. In the Old Testament there’s idea that when you have somebody’s name, you have access to them, to their power and protection. We think of the story of the burning bush in Exodus 3:14. The Lord gives them his name, Yahweh, and from then on, they can call on him. Even more than that, he has power over them, power to protect them and guide their destiny. He is their Lord; they are his people.

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A Sermon for Reformation Sunday

Today is the Festival of the Reformation, the day we celebrate that medieval monk named Martin Luther, who nailed 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, back in 1517. That paper he nailed to the door was a list of points for debate about indulgences, purgatory, power, and the pope. He wrote, of course, in Latin and his theses were intended for a select audience, for his fellow monks and scholars.

He didn’t intend to start a ruckus. Most of the people couldn’t even read Latin. But what he had written in Latin was quickly translated into German by others who shared his concerns.

Another problem. Most of the people couldn’t read German either. Only about 10%. But even that didn’t matter because enterprising colleagues and sympathizers took his points and made them into cartoons and drawings, the memes of the time, and soon everybody was talking about them.

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A Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

1 Thessalonians 1:1-10

Our text today comes from the earliest, the oldest letter of Paul: 1 Thessalonians. This little letter is like other letters of Paul. In fact, there is a scholarly book on Paul which has put all the letters of Paul in parallel to each other, and then it takes each letter individually and shows where there are parallels in Paul’s other letters.

This helps us see that Paul’s letters have a certain structure that has a lot in common with each other as well as other letters of the day. We have thousands of papyri that are letters from that time. From that we can see that Paul follows a standard form for letters, and he adapts that form for his own use.

For example, he often starts out: “Grace and peace.” “Grace” is the way a Greek letter would begin, and “Peace” (Shalom) is the way a Hebrew letter would begin. Paul puts them together. There is nothing particularly significant about this. It’s like saying: “Dear So-and-so.”

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