Daniel 7:9-10
9 As I was watching,
thrones were raised up.
The ancient one took his seat.
His clothes were white like snow;
his hair was like a lamb’s wool.
His throne was made of flame;
its wheels were blazing fire.
10 A river of fire flowed out
from his presence;
thousands upon thousands served him;
ten thousand times ten thousand stood ready to serve him!
The court sat in session;
the scrolls were opened. (CEB)
“Tales of the Five People You Meet in (the) Heaven(s): Stories of Fellow Travelers,” Week Four
(Author’s note: To protect the confidential nature of many of these conversations, I’ve refrained from using personal names, and names of some airlines and destinations were changed. –E.A.)
A United flight from San Francisco to Denver in the spring of 2009. I was almost finished with my first year of seminary and was en route to home in Kansas for a week to spend my spring break. Seated next to me on this leg of the flight was an off-duty airline pilot, who quickly saw me reading my Bible. Not long after sitting down and exchanging the usual pleasantries, he began a very specific cross-examination of the nature of my spirituality:
“You’re a Christian?”
“Yep.”
“So, you’ve been baptized?”
“Yep, when I was 10 years old.”
“I mean, have you ever been baptized by fire?”
“Well…I’m olive-skinned, so maybe I got a little crispy on the way out?”
“Well, have you ever spoken in tongues?”
“Um…I took French in high school.”
“So you say you’re a Christian, but you’ve never received the gift of the Holy Spirit?”
By this point, I’m just sitting there incredulously, stunned, as though someone had whacked me upside the head with a blunt object. Which, in a spiritual manner, this man had. The only cogent thought I had left was, “Man, I sure hope his airplane, wherever it is, has a bumper sticker on it like the ones I have seen on cars that says, ‘In case of rapture, this plane will be unpiloted.’”
It was not my finest moment as a Christian witness.
This Sunday marks the fourth week of this sermon series that we are exploring together during the church season of Lent, which is traditionally meant to be a time of repentance, prayer, and confession for Christians the world over. It is, then, a journey of inner discovery, and of understanding anew the amazing power of God’s grace. But unlike Christ in the wilderness, it is not a journey of discovery that we are required to make alone. Indeed, many of us thrive on journeys only when we have a companion to travel with—and so I’ve created this sermon series, “Tales of the Five People You Meet in (the) Heaven(s),” a play on the title of Mitch Albom’s 2003 book “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.” Based on my own experiences of travel when the person sitting next to me suddenly learns that I am a Christian cleric, the first week’s story, of the mothers who prevented their college-bound daughters from sitting in the same row as the shady, sketchy fellow (that’s me!), was a story where my vocation was not revealed, but in the stories of weeks two and three it was, to a Seattle-area schoolteacher and to an aging Eugene beatnik. This week, it is revealed to an off-duty airline pilot and devout Pentecostal Christian.
If I were completely honest, I was only half-kidding myself when deciding that I wanted this pilot to have such a bumper sticker, because I am not sure I can come up with a situation in the flow of ordinary, day-to-day life in which you have to so completely surrender your autonomy to the will and skill of another person. If you are hospitalized, sure, or imprisoned, but for more run-of-the-mill experiences, I think flying is it. And for the cranks out there, yes, there is a reason I compared flying on a plane to being imprisoned. But that is neither here nor there—it is not simply the lack of autonomy that comes with either situation, it is the complete surrender that I want to talk about for a minute.
Complete surrender is something that was demanded out of the Israelite people not once, or twice, but many, many times, by God and man alike. The kings and men of power of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome all demanded religious concessions from Israel, all the while on the other side of the ledger, God was demanding religious faithfulness. And the demands of their conquerors ended up galling not only the prophets, but the rank-and-file Israelites themselves. When a Greek ruler demanded that a statue of him be put in the Jerusalem temple, the Israelites had had enough. Under the Hasmonaeans, better known as the Maccabees, they temporarily won independence, and from this context, the latter half of Daniel was born.
You see, Daniel is a book of two halves. The first half contains all of the famous stories we know and love: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the writing on the wall, and Daniel in the lions’ den. The second half, beginning with chapter 7, is a series of vivid, apocalyptic visions of the coming resurrection and judgment of the dead. And the scene of judgment begins here, at the end of verse 10: “The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened.”
I know that judgment has been used like a cudgel by Christians because that is exactly how I felt in my conversation with the pilot—I felt judged by him, and I felt like I had been clubbed by something dense and heavy. Being judged is a terrible feeling, but the anticipation that you will be judged is just plain stressful. But as intense as the imagery here is, it would have been the preferable scenario for Daniel—lest he and his family and friends be judged by yet another foreign despot, he’ll take his chances with the Ancient of Days, surrounded by fire as He holds court. As bizarre as it might sound to us, Daniel is preferring to be judged by his fire-wielding God, because he and his people have already been judged by his fellow men, and they have paid a heavy, heavy, price for their military losses. It brings a brand-new dimension to the Biblical dictum that I spoke of last week—to judge not by appearances, but by right judgment.
To his credit, this off-duty airline pilot was probably trying to judge me by what he thought was right judgment. But no matter how great his faith, no matter how deep his convictions, he had no right to judge my faith. And that is exactly true for me, as well, in my relationship to you. I have no right to judge your faith. Indeed, in search and call, they always caution us, the pastors, to remember that God has been alive and at work at the parishes we are joining long before we were ever there.
Make no mistake, there is a judgment that we await. But it is one by God, and not by humanity. It is not something many mainliners like ourselves talk about, because the thought of judgment might conflict with our image of God as absolute love. But what if divine judgment is preferable to human judgment? Because for Daniel, it absolutely was—it was the far better option. Maybe that is the case for you as well. If the hardships of your life, the crises and battles you have had with others, or the things you see in the news about our own short-sightedness, greed, and prejudice have caused you to doubt your own faith in humanity, then it absolutely is the case for you as well. Divine judgment is not a threat, or a death sentence—it is an escape. We will try, and try, and try, to bring God’s kingdom to earth, to continue Christ’s ministry of love and healing and wholeness, because that is who we are as Christians, as Disciples of Christ—we cannot separate the two! But when we fail at that—and we will—it should be comforting, rather than fear-inducing, to know that the ministry we have done will be judged not by the fundamentalist who looks at us and shouts that we are not true Christians, or by the atheist who reads the Bible and declares that we are living a lie, or by the cynic who asks why we are even trying to make the world a better place, but by the God who created us, redeemed us, loves us, and has faith in us still today. Surrendering your fear to your faith is something that I think you cannot do just once, in a born-again experience—it is something that you must experience continuously, from getting on an airplane to visiting the doctor to coming to church. And in those experiences, may you see, and hear, and feel, God’s grace all about you, and know that the promise of that grace exists not just now, in this world, but always.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
March 18, 2012
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