Listen or watch this service here.
Scripture
John 13:31-35
Revelations 21:1-6
I have news for you today…
Everything I am going to preach has already been said by the Simpsons. And so… Here is Left Below – by the Simpsons.
(https://youtu.be/tueIUr3B1vU ) Description: Homer Simpson and daughter go to a theatre and see a film called ‘Left Below.’ It opens with a man reading a newspaper that says the Bible is mocked, and permissive lifestyles are on the rise. His wife asks him to come to church. He says he’d rather play golf on “this most holiest of days.” His wife counters that unrest in the middle East “and other ominous signs” means the Rapture is upon us. He belittles her. Next he is scene in a cab kissing a woman who worries his wife will find out. He tells her it is modern times and fine. Suddenly there is a flash of light and the driver is gone – leaving only his clothes. The man asks, “Where did my Christian driver go?” the cab crashes. An elderly woman near the crash says, “My pious husband is missing.” A woman pushing a twin stroller with only one baby in it says, “The baby I chose to have baptized is gone!” Lighting strikes from above. The man proclaims, “This is the rapture! The virtuous have gone to heaven and the rest of us have been left below! We were fools! Because we rejected God, tacitly accepting Satan, we must suffer through the apocalypse.” There are massive floods and storms. A Buddhist monk proclaims, “I thought all religions were a path to God. I was wrong!” A woman cries, “Why did I put my faith in science and technology?” A man asks, “Oh why did I choose to be gay?” In the theatre, Homer whimpers, “This movie will haunt me the rest of my life!”
This is how I feel when I approach Revelations! I think about the Left Behind Series and the Simpson’s Left Below. I think about the cartoons offering houses with Rapture Escape Hatches so you don’t get stuck in your house when floating up to heaven.
I laugh. I don’t believe in The Rapture.
In the Left Behind Series, people who are pure and innocent are instantly taken to heaven – raptured. Everyone with some sin is left behind on Earth. Then the tribulation begins where all of Earth is tortured and burned, nuked and murdered, taken over by a new world order led by the anti-Christ and an epic battle of heaven and hell happens. Only the good miss hell on earth who are taken before it all begins. Only the repentant have the hope of some restoration when, after 7 years of hell, Jesus’ second coming defeats Satan.
I cry. I don’t believe in The Rapture.
And after 6 million people have gone missing during 2 years of Covid… I don’t think we’re going to notice if 144,000 people suddenly disappear. Likely that many go missing every day.
The likelihood several of them would be in the same plane at one time, as in the Left Behind movie, seems ridiculous.
I fume. But I don’t believe in The Rapture.
Yet millions of Christians believe in the Rapture.
The author of the Left Behind series, Tim LaHaye, declares in Rapture Under Attack, that “virtually all Christians who take the Bible literally expect to be raptured before the Lord comes in power to this earth.” Catholic theological Carl Orlson replies, “This would have been news to Christians—both Catholic and Protestant—living prior to the eighteenth century, since the concept of a pretribulation Rapture was unheard of prior to that time. Vague notions had been considered by the Puritan preachers Increase (1639-1723) and Cotton Mather (1663-1728), and the late eighteenth century Baptist minister Morgan Edwards, but it was John Nelson Darby who solidified the belief in the 1830s and placed it into a larger theological framework.”
Rev. Darby took a relatively obscure and undeveloped understanding of Revelations and made it one of the most popular Anglo-European understandings of revelations. Before the 1800s, most of Christianity was ambivalent at best about Revelations.
Martin Luther called the Book of Revelation “neither apostolic nor prophetic.” So, neither a word about Jesus in the past nor a word about Jesus in the future. Later in life he liked the book. But at the first… he wanted it moved into what he called The Apocrypha – the hidden books. The not used and not authoritative books. Huldrych Zwingli, another one of our Protestant Church fathers, labelled it “not a book of the Bible”, and it was the only New Testament book on which John Calvin, the third major Protestant Church father, did not write a commentary.
Before the Protestant Revolution, there were church meetings and synods and debates about which books to include in scripture. Bible means “collection of books.” There were a lot of books and letters being passed around. Which ones ought to be given authority? These ancient church mothers and fathers were split on the book of Revelations. Sometimes it was included, and sometimes excluded. Back and forth it went all the way back to about 200 AD there were questions on whether or not to give Revelations any authority.
Today, some see it as a very tongue-in-cheek critique of Rome in about 90 AD. Rome is not named, but identified as Babylon. Emperor Nero’s foibles are referenced as Satan’s foibles. It’s possible to assign in Revelations all kinds of critiques of Rome and hope for oppressed Christians under Roman rule.
But it’s… very obscure. A bit like Nostradamus’ prophecies, you can read into Revelations just about anything you want. What is the mark of the beast? Well, it’s MAGA hats! Or Covid Vaccines! Or odd birth marks. Or third nipples. Or maybe its monk tonsures… or Jewish hats… or dark skin… or… … Each generation, each person seeking a reason to hate, can assign the ‘mark’ to whatever they want and claim others bear that mark.
Revelation remains the only New Testament book not read in the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Dina Nayeri was a child in Iran in the 1980s. Her mother converted to Christianity which was a death sentence in the country at that time. So they went to church secretly, and they learned of the Rapture. She writes, “When Saddam Hussein bombed our city, or a political dissident disappeared into Evin, or rumour of more deaths and tortures reached us, our pastor told us to take heart – we were living through the last pangs of a glorious birth. Our congregation whispered about the signs of the end, how it all fit so well into end-times prophecy. We talked of rescue, and the heady notion that we might avoid death altogether, though it was always nearby. In that way, we made terrifying news tolerable – tortures and arrests weren’t so bad when compared with the fate of the un-raptured on Earth.”
She eventually became a refugee, moving from country to country, and ended up in Oklahoma in the USA. There she joined a church where the Rapture was the main conversation. She writes, “here, the Rapture talk wasn’t so much about finding escape from frightening politics, as it had been in Iran. Here, the talk was a way of engaging with politics. The most ardent in the church carried out a side-by-side exegesis of newspapers and scripture with a certain thrill, as if fitting a puzzle piece into place. This habit often led to a rejection of any programme or policy that would contradict the end-times narrative. There was no need to slow climate change, protect against scarcity or pursue global peace – because wars, famines and natural disasters are foretold and therefore unavoidable…
Though we yearned for otherworldly love and beauty, and to be removed from an ugly world, we were soon lost in a voyeuristic fascination with its fate. I began to notice that all the anticipation was focused on what would happen to the Earth, to the unbelieving hordes left behind, and not on what awaited the righteous in heaven. Perhaps, too, it was a contempt for the unbelieving, who lived as if they had every option. Our rapturous longings had morphed from rescue to reckoning, our image of the future from a better Earth to a scorched one.”
A scorched earth.
When we think AIDS is proper punishment for sin; and climate change is just Satan preparing the Earth for those Left Behind… why would good Christians interfere?
When we hear of war and rumors of war… why would we not encourage it? The more war, the more hell on earth, the more evil there is means the sooner Jesus will come and save us. Rapture us. Take us to Planet B – Plan B – Heaven.
And all these awful people not like ourselves will get what is deserving to them.
Zionism fuels this. There is the belief that if Jewish people have a Jewish state, with a Jewish temple reborn, Jesus shall return. This is called Zionism. And so, many Christians support destroying Palestinians to help Jesus come sooner. I’ve heard from Christian mouths arguments to destroy the Mosques where the temple stood to make room for the new Jewish temple. Not because they care about Jews… but for their own aims of forcing Jesus’ hand.
If that causes war in the middle east? Good. It forces Jesus’ hand more. The End Times Are Now and any moment, things will be bad enough the righteous will be whisked away from Earth to live with God in heaven.
I’m here to tell you today there is no Planet B. There is no escaping this earth. There is no Jesus to whisk in and save us from ourselves. There is no angels coming to take the innocent out of the hell we cause.
This is it.
This is the world God made.
We are God’s people.
God works through and with us.
Jesus didn’t say destroy the Earth and I’ll be back in the nick of time.
He said love one another.
Care for each other.
And where you love, and care, and live in my name – there I am among you.
God didn’t say ruin the Earth and I’ll make you a new one.
God said this is my garden, tend for it. Be good stewards. Help it propagate, thrive, and fill the earth with life.
So why does the Rapture story arrest the minds of so many Christians? Nayeri argues, “The Rapture story offers a known future that you don’t have to build yourself. It happens in an instant: before you’re done with one life, you’re whisked into another. And that is everything – skipping that in-between space, the country of purgatory where the refugee lingers…. I began to notice evidence of rapturous thinking elsewhere – and not only among evangelical Christians. Sometimes I saw the signs in those wishing for a return to the past: the elderly, social conservatives. The more the rest of society seemed to reject their identity, the more they craved a reckoning, something decisive and game-changing to stop the creep into the unfamiliar.
I suspect that no eschatological thinker of any faith has ever said: “We have another hundred years to go.” Every war is the most terrible. Every natural disaster the most epic. Every generation thinks the world is ending.
And for the oldest among us, it is true – their world is ending. Social, economic and technological change has engulfed them so slowly that they didn’t even notice it happening. Suddenly home looks like a foreign place. It’s messy and threatening, and, as the underground Christians in Iran believed, it’s not their mess.
At one time or another we all stop recognising the landscape around us. It feels like a long con: to build a way of life, a legacy, only to have the next generation reject it. It seems apocalyptic: the end of goodness, of comfort, of peace. And what is to be done when it seems that history has no direction but the grave? All you can hope for is a sudden removal from the narrative, a sharp left turn, a deus ex machina. What you desire most is a violent disruption…. But revolution without a stake in the future is apocalyptic, and revolution for the sake of the past is anathema to life – because progress is the business of the young. …
But I suspect that, consciously or not, end-times believers crave apocalypse. They want a leader who will return them to the past, or barring that, hurry it along to its end. Someone who will fulfil a narrative in which they play a role. To my ears, their impatient groans are a prayer for the fall of civilisation.
The universe must be explainable, and God must be in control of its fate.
… who cares if there are honeybees? This world is coming to an end anyway. We’ll all be raptured…
Is there a more attractive notion than to be spirited away and freed of responsibility? The fate of the Earth may be unknowable, or catastrophic – you don’t have to care.”
I won’t let you off the hook that way.
You must care.
You must care so much you weep tears of blood.
You must love.
You must love so much you are willing to die for others to live.
You must consider the generations after us.
You must consider them so much you plant trees, you keep the waters fresh, you demand companies stop polluting, you raise children and grandchildren.
You must care and love and considers others so much that you hope.
Hope.
Hope for our world. Hope for our people. Hope for descendants. Hope for peace. Hope for goodness. Hope.
Jesus comes when we hope, when we love, when we forgive. When we live in harmony with one another and with this glorious garden God makes with us. Jesus comes, daily, hourly, minutely, connecting heaven and earth.
We pray all the time ‘your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ We’ll pray this today.
It means…. let earth be like heaven. Let us live like angels. Let us be holy. Let this very good earth be aligned with your very good plans and goals and desires for us.
It means optimism. It means work! It means rapture… which before the 1800s meant ‘being caught up.’ Caught up in the work of God. Caught up in the love of God. Being carried away by the wonder of God. Able to withstand the worst of what humans can inflict on one another because we have hope in humanity.
All is not lost.
God is not distant in heaven waiting to strike us down.
God is not light years away.
God is Immanuel. God is with us. God is already here.
God is as near as your breath and as constant as your shadow and is within and among us at all times. Where can we go where God is not?
No where.
No when.
This is our life. This is our world. This is our commission – to love one another.
This is Planet A. This is God’s Plan A. This is the world Jesus came to. This is the world Jesus is within. This is the world that we work together with the Spirit to make it like it is in heaven.
Amen.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/25/yearning-for-the-end-of-the-world
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2014/09/29/five-myths-about-the-rapture-and-the-left-behind-industry
Pastor Whitney Bruno Sermons 