Things to Come
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
As you may remember, we celebrated All Saint’s Sunday and Laity Sunday together last week. The suggested date for Laity Sunday in the United Methodist Church is the middle of October, which didn’t fit our schedule this year so we looked ahead and saw that All Saint’s Sunday was coming and thought that would be a neat time to also observe Laity Sunday.
All Christians, both clergy and laity are saints. All Christians, both clergy and laity, are ministers. So it just made sense to observe All Saint’s Sunday and Laity Sunday on the same day.
Rebecca Little helped us look back as we celebrated the lives of our members and others close to us who have died this past year. We celebrated our history as we gave thanks for those who have come before us and have made it possible for us to be here and to be a part of this great congregation. It was a wonderful day.
It is important to look back and to honor our tradition. We have been a church for 175 years. I think there are some things we can learn from those early Methodists. There are some things we can learn from the apostles and the martyrs, from the desert fathers and mothers, from St. Augustine, Catherine of Sienna, Susanna Wesley. It is a good thing to honor our spiritual heritage and tradition.
That said, of course, today’s text focuses very clearly on the future ….on things that are going to happen….It is also important to be future oriented.
Here is verse 16: (I Thessalonians 4)
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet call of God and the dead in Christ will rise first.
All the verbs in that verse are future tense. They refer to what will happen, and to promises that will be fulfilled.
But here is the thing. Memory is still really important. Remembering is still important. We have to remember these promises that are going to come true in the future. We have to remember them and hold on to them, and encourage one another with them.
The Bible speaks of the importance of remembering a lot. I checked. The word “remember” is used 1,200 times in the bible. The word “forget” is used 300 times.
Many of those are in the Psalms where we are told to “forget not all of God’s benefits.” Forgive me for sounding like Captain Obvious, but if we forget God’s promises, they’re not going to do us any good. Don’t forget. If I give my daughter a thousand dollar gift card and she “forgets” to open it, it’s not going to help her much.
Memory is super important in the Bible and in life. Theologian and philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev has said forgetfulness is the essence of original sin. He has written a whole book about forgetfulness being the essence of original sin.
That is a pretty big claim, but whether or not we would agree with that position entirely, I do think most of us would agree that forgetting and losing sight of God’s promises can keep us from experiencing what God has for us.
Think back to what happened to Abraham in the Old Testament. Abraham received a revelation from God unlike anything anyone else had ever come close to receiving. Most people in his world were afraid of the gods. The gods of mythology, the gods of fertility could be pretty arbitrary. They could do nice things for you, but they could also do mean things to you, like steal your wife, or kidnap you, or make you push a big rock up the side of a mountain forever. Push it up, let it roll back down, and do it again. You just never knew about those gods.
But Abraham received his revelation, not from the gods of mythology or fertility, but from the God who created everything. And what Abraham discovered is that the God who created everything doesn’t play tricks on us. The God who created everything loves us and longs to bless us.
In Genesis 12 God makes Abraham some promises:
I will give you a land.
I will make you a great nation. I will make of you a great people.
And I will bless all other nations and all other people through you.
That is not something you would want to forget, right? That is something you would want to remember.
Things started off great. Abraham and Sarah left like God told them to and arrived in Canaan, the land God promised. It was pretty nice, more beautiful than anything they had ever seen, but then, a famine hit. When the famine hit, it was like Abraham lost his mind. When the famine hit, Abraham decided to take matters into his own hands. He decided, apparently all on his own without seeking guidance from the One who sent him to Canaan, to go down to Egypt. When he got to Egypt, he forgot some things. One of the things he forgot was that he was married. The Pharaoh of Egypt thought Sarah was beautiful and Abraham told the king, “yes she is beautiful, she is my sister (which was kind of a half-truth) but when the Pharaoh took Sarah to be his wife and then found out she was already Abraham’s wife, it led to some problems.
Abraham’s selected memory, his forgetfulness, was not healthy.
Notice the source of his forgetfulness. He forgot all about God’s promises and desire to bless him because he was afraid. It was because of fear.
Fear can cause us to act in less than productive ways. Fear can keep us from holding on to God’s promise and to forget that God really is with us and really does want to bless us.
I remember the fear I felt in seminary when I figured out some things:
--I figured out there were some students there who were a lot smarter than me
--I figured out there were students who knew a lot more about the church than me.
--I figured out there were students who were a lot more articulate, graceful and sophisticated than me.
--I figured out some of those students were related to district superintendents and other big leaders in the church and I wasn’t.
I felt fear. I began to think, there is no way in the world I can lead a church. There is no way in the church I can be pastor. I was right. There is no way in the world I can do what God is calling me to do. But with the help the world doesn’t give and the world can’t take away, the help that comes from beyond this world, I can do what God is calling me to do. Unfortunately, fear really can cloud my memory if I’m not careful.
Here is what is encouraging: God got Abraham back on track. Despite his fear, despite his forgetting some things and losing his way, despite his being human and frail, God got Abraham back on track. Abraham’s people did become a blessing to all the people of the world. And through Abraham’s people God did bring to the world the one we read about in our text today from 1 Thessalonians.
The One for whom we wait. The One who will descend from heaven with a loud command and the trumpet call of God, when all of heaven and all of earth will be made new. So we don’t have to be afraid, and we don’t want to forget God’s promises.
We don’t want to forget all of God’s benefits, that one day we will be with the Lord and all the saints forever. But we do want to encourage one another with these words.