By request the sermon Waiting.....

“Waiting”
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Rev. Debbie Blane
Malakal, 11/2011

In Malakal we know all about waiting, don’t we? Waiting for the roads to be improved. Waiting for the prices of food to go down. Waiting for the rainy season to finish.

This sermon is about the most important wait of all. The wait for Jesus’ return.

After Jesus death and resurrection the first Christians knew about waiting too. When Jesus ascended into heaven the early Christians thought that his return was going to happen very quickly. They thought that he would be coming back to them in their lifetimes. After all, Jesus had preached that the Kingdom of God is at hand! They thought this meant that he was coming right back to them.

They waited with impatience and anticipation. They waited and waited. And then some of them died as they waited.

The Apostle Paul wrote the Epistle of 1st Thessalonians to the grieving community in Thessalonica. They were concerned that some of the Saints, some of their Christian sisters and brothers, had died before the Lord returned. Perhaps they did not have a full understanding of the resurrection and the fact that the living AND the dead would see Jesus again. And that they, the living, would see the Christians who had already died, again.

This is why Paul wrote this letter. He wrote it to comfort the community at Thessalonica and to explain the resurrection to them in more detail.

The belief that Jesus would come again soon was so strong that the Gospels were not written until many years after Jesus death and resurrection. They were finally written because the last witnesses to his earthly life were getting quite old. It was decided it was better to write down what they remembered than to have the first hand witness of those who had lived and walked with Jesus when he was alive on earth lost with their deaths.


Paul wrote his epistles long before the Gospels were written. They were written to the churches as a way to communicate with them, they were probably not originally intended to become a part of Scripture. That would have happened when people began to think about a New Testament. When the church was no longer considered a part of the Jewish community and it was considered important to put together the Gospels with the letters of Paul and the other epistle writers.

Let’s move on to yet another understanding of waiting. The Presbyterian Church (USA), my denomination in the United States, observes a church year calendar in our preaching and in ordering our year from January through December. TODAY, four Sundays before Christmas Day, a season in the church called Advent begins. Advent means “WAITING”. What are we waiting for? The celebration of Christ’s birth!

We Christians are used to waiting and waiting and waiting! It is nothing new to us! We will wait for the celebration of Christ’s birth during Advent.

The first Christians waited for Jesus to return after his death and resurrection. They waited to be reunited with him.

We still wait, two thousand plus years later, for Jesus to return. We wait with great anticipation and joy in the knowledge that Scripture tells us that indeed Jesus will return “with a commanding shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God!”

We are comforted by the First letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, just as the original community would have been comforted.

WE have the 20/20 vision of hindsight to know that Jesus will indeed return. We don’t know when. We aren’t supposed to know when. We are supposed to live our lives while we wait. With great anticipation and joy, looking and longing for the time when we will see God face to face. Looking and longing for the time when we will be reunited with the Saints who have already died.

Whether we are already dead or we are still living when Jesus’ returns, we will see him. And seeing Jesus will be worth the wait! Seeing Jesus will be even better than the end of the rainy season!
Alleluia?
Alleluia!