1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Brothers and sisters, we want you to know about people who have died so that you won’t mourn like others who don’t have any hope. 14 Since we believe that Jesus died and rose, so we also believe that God will bring with him those who have died in Jesus. 15 What we are saying is a message from the Lord: we who are alive and still around at the Lord’s coming definitely won’t go ahead of those who have died. 16 This is because the Lord himself will come down from heaven with the signal of a shout by the head angel and a blast on God’s trumpet. First, those who are dead in Christ will rise. 17 Then, we who are living and still around will be taken up together with them in the clouds to meet with the Lord in the air. That way we will always be with the Lord. 18 So encourage each other with these words. (Common English Bible)
“Contextual Chaos: How to
Stop Taking the Bible Out of Context,” Week Three
In the heart of the old city of Jerusalem stands
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Overseen jointly—and often acrimoniously—by several
different Christian denominations, it marks the traditional spot where Jesus is
said to have been crucified on Golgotha, as well as the last several stations
of the Via Dolorosa—the way of the
Cross. It is one of the holiest of sites in all of Christendom, even as its façade
looks out over a land that has for millennia been fought over—to this day—in no
small part over religion.
The quarrels take place not just between
religions, but within religions—the reason the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is
overseen so acrimoniously is that the different traditions that govern the
joint overseeing of the church simply do not get along and haven’t for
centuries, to the extent that the job of keys-and-gatekeeper is held by a
Muslim family that reverently passes the position down from generation to
generation, ever since that family was entrusted with the job by the Saracen
sultan Saladin in 1187.
That’s how deep this discord goes between the various
Christian sects that oversee the church.
Perhaps the most iconic symbol of that division
is the immovable ladder—a ladder placed against the outside of the church in
1757 by a construction worker, and which hasn’t been moved since, precisely
because the Christians could not agree on anything, not even where to put a
spare ladder. It has become a symbol of inflexible, utterly rigid ideology and
dogma that segments Christendom into chosen-and-unchosen groups—not unlike the
immovable spiritual ladder that we call the Rapture.
This is a new sermon series for a new
season—summer is at long last giving way to autumn, and after an entire summer
devoted to a verse-by-verse series (our exploration of the life and reign of
Solomon), we will be returning to three thematic sermon series, one after the
other, to get us from here to—believe it or not—Christmas! And the first of
these thematic sermon series concerns a habit that I often see, whether in
everyday conversation, or on social media, or even by other pastors that I see
in the papers or on the telly: taking verses of Scripture out of context.
(The best—and funniest instance—of this I’ve seen
is a cartoon of a fellow trying to remove the lid of a pickle jar and in
between grunts of effort, recites Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things
through Christ who strengthens me,” to which his wife says, “Twist the lid,
Tom, not Scripture.”)
It is a mightily tempting vice to engage in—after
all, you’re citing Scripture, what could be wrong about that? Well, first of
all, Satan cited Scripture to Jesus in the wilderness, so it is possible to use
Scripture for ill just as surely as we use it for good. But by taking chapter
and verse out of the remaining chapter—or chapters—that surround it, we treat
the Bible less like a book (or a collection of books, really) and more like a
collection of fortune cookie wisdom: eat a cookie, or a communion wafer for
that matter, get a verse.
And that is simply never how Scripture was
intended to be used. The original manuscripts of the New Testament do not come
with chapter and verse annotated into them—all of that came from later
compilers. So let us, if we are to remain true to the original spirit of the
authors of our sacred texts, try so far as we are able to set aside the taking
of a single verse and instead look at some of the most famous verses from
Scripture and (a) actually see from whence they came, and (b) understand how we
can move away from taking such verses out of context and start taking such
verses to heart!
We began this series two weeks ago with one of
the most famous pronouncements of the prophet Jeremiah: that God knows the
plans that God has for you, and they are plans for peace, not disaster, and of
a future filled with hope. Last week, we moved onto an equally famous
pronouncement of Jesus found in John 12: the poor you will always have with
you. This week, we move onto a verse that has been used—poorly for decades to
justify the existence of the Rapture: 1 Thessalonians 4:17.
The Rapture is one of those things that most of
us have heard of, and probably have a passing familiarity with, but don’t
really know exactly where it came from, like Sasquatch or jean shorts. The
Rapture is the basic belief that before the terrible, horrible, no-good, very
bad apocalypse, God will whisk away the chosen few to avoid the trials and
tribulations of said apocalypse by beaming them up to heaven, and its roots
come from a cadre of 19th century American preachers who cobbled
together a series of different verses from Scripture, especially this verse
from 1 Thessalonians 4: “Then we who are living and still around will be taken
up together with them in the clouds to meet with the Lord in the air.”
And taken out of context, this probably sounds an
awful lot like what you understand the Rapture to be. Which is sort of the
point. Taking 1 Thessalonians 4:17 out of context turns it into something
easily distilled and imagined when the reality is that Paul, while earnestly
expecting the return of Jesus to take place within his lifetime, is writing
about a completely different concern than whether the current crop of believers
will be saved from any sort of dystopian apocalypse. As New Testament scholar
Barbara Rossing writes:
…it is not about Rapture,
however, but about resurrection from the dead at Christ’s second coming. The
Thessalonians apparently feared that some family members who had already died
before Christ’s return would be left behind in their graves when he returned—and
they were grieving that separation. Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonika to
reassure them that those who have died will also be raised to meet Christ, “and
so we shall always be with the Lord.” He wrote the letter in order to give
comfort and encouragement, using the assurance of Jesus’ resurrection from the
dead to give assurance of resurrection also for us.
What this letter is
emphasizing is not that some will be left behind, but rather that we will all
be together
with our loved ones in our resurrection life.
No believer, whether dead or alive, will be separated from Christ or from the community
of their love ones when the Lord comes again…Paul’s pastoral concern here is to
comfort people by showing that we will all be together in Christ when he comes
again. We will not be separated from Christ or from one another.
That
is such a different expectation, such a different theology, such a different
hope than what we have come to expect from the Rapture. We see the Rapture as a
means to divvy up the living, when in reality what Paul is describing to the
Thessalonians is the means by which the living are to be reconciled with the
dead.
Which
is so much of what Jesus’s ministry is about. It’s about Jairus and his
daughter. It’s about Mary and Martha and Lazarus. And it’s about Jesus and the
rest of us.
Paul
gets that. But we, when we try to invent something that isn’t there in the
Scriptures in order to fuel our own special snowflake-iness of being a part of
God’s crew, we show just how much we don’t get it, and how much further we
really do have to go in order to truly understand God’s Word.
The
Rapture—the idea that God’s elect are taken up to be spared a divine Armageddon—is
Scripturally dubious enough, but predicting when it will happen does even more
harm than good. Even Jesus Himself, in Mark’s Gospel, states that even He does
not know when God has planned for the End Times, saying that such knowledge is
God’s and God’s alone. Peter, in his second letter, says that the day of the
Lord will come like a thief in the night—the implication being that we won’t
know when it will happen.
And
Paul himself uses that exact same language as Peter, just a couple of verses
after this passage, in 1 Thessalonians 5: for you know very well that the day
of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.
Paul
and Peter did not always see eye to eye about church matters—but if this they
can agree upon, then why must we be so intent on trying to disprove them?
Quite
simply, the Rapture has become for us our own immovable ladder—something impregnable
to outside reason or logic and immune to appeals to greater good or even to God’s
will. We cling to it, like the ladder in Jerusalem, because our faith is too
fragile not to.
Which
is never how faith was meant to be. Faith was never meant to be fragile, but
sturdy, tough enough and durable enough to generously allow room for dialogue
and discussion, even doubt.
But
the Rapture, a metaphorical ladder to heaven for God’s chosen, has become so
immovable a spiritual ladder that it is now a burden rather than a blessing—if it
even was a blessing to begin with.
So
cast aside such worry and concern about whatever the end of time might look
like. I don’t know what it will look like. Neither do you, or Paul, or Peter.
Even Jesus may not know entirely.
Instead
of worrying, then, about what you know or don’t know, concern yourselves with
what you have faith in, for that is what Paul is exhorting us to once we read
his gracious words in their entirety: faith enough in God to see us through,
and faith enough in the resurrection of Christ to know that it is a
resurrection for us as well, and for our loved ones who have predeceased us.
What
a tremendous promise that is! It is, and remains, the promise of eternal life.
Let
that promise stand, then, on its own merits, in your life and in mine.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
September
25, 2016
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