Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the abyss and a huge chain. 2 He seized the dragon, the old snake, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. 3 He threw him into the abyss, then locked and sealed it over him. This was to keep him from continuing to deceive the nations until the thousand years were over. After this he must be released for a little while.
4 Then I saw thrones, and people took their seats on them, and judgment was given in their favor. They were the ones who had been beheaded for their witness to Jesus and God’s word, and those who hadn’t worshipped the beast or its image, who hadn’t received the mark on their forehead or hand. They came to life and ruled with Christ for one thousand years. 5 The rest of the dead didn’t come to life until the thousand years were over. This is the first resurrection. 6 Favored and holy are those who have a share in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will rule with him for one thousand years.
7 When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison. 8 He will go out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog. He will gather them for battle. Their number is like the sand of the sea. 9 They came up across the whole earth and surrounded the saints’ camp, the city that God loves. But fire came down from heaven and consumed them. 10 Then the devil, who had deceived them, was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet also were. There painful suffering will be inflicted upon them day and night, forever and always. (Common English Bible)
“Reconnecting with a
Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Seven
I
love both my grandfathers, but they could not possibly be more different. My
paternal grandfather, who lives out on the coast with my step-grandmother, is an
outdoorsman and college professor-turned-professional chef, a thoughtful and
taciturn agnostic who is far more comfortable in the seclusion of fishing or
crabbing than in the collective effervescence of an apocalyptic revival.
My
maternal grandfather is a nomad who nominally has a home address in Michigan,
but for years happily lived out of his series of Ford F-150s and a string of
Red Roof Inns and Super 8 motels. He has no use for luggage, hauling everything
in banana boxes, and is highly versed in apocalyptic theology thanks to the
fire-breathing televangelists he follows assiduously. Despite my own deep
faith, he began to worry, I think, that college was going to corrupt me, and he
began sending me brochures and pamphlets from one such televangelist, mostly
hawking useless goods for either preparing for the Rapture or for rubbing it in
the faces of your left behind friends and relatives after the fact. Most of
those pamphlets and brochures ended up in the bathroom of the apartment I
shared with two of my college friends because, well, we enjoyed shocking our
houseguests.
It’s
sometimes disconcerting to have two relatives so close to me, who I both love
so dearly, think me wrong in so wildly different ways—especially my maternal
grampy. Even as we would good-naturedly argue theology with each other over
sushi and beer, I could never quite shake the worry that there was some part of
him that believed I was destined for hell despite my faith and good works. And that
can create all sorts of difficulties in claiming Christianity as a religion of
hope.
This
is a sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes us
all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor
and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it
from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or
otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers
permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church
hurts.
If
that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a
sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the
truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a
better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet
so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to
us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can
actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have
before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on
being better and doing church together.
We
began this series with a passage from Carol’s first chapter, “A Tree Grows in
My Bedroom,” and then we heard passages from the following chapters: “Finding
Shalom,” “Healing Our Image of God,” “Recovering Our Emotions,” and “Redeeming
Our Broken Selves.” Last week, we came to the sixth chapter of the book,
“Reclaiming Our Bodies,” and today, to the seventh chapter, “Reclaiming Our
Hope,” in which Carol writes about the fear instilled in her and a Christian
she pastored named Shawna that threatened, rather than strengthened, their
relationships with God:
(A)s I served as a pastor
and Shawna stood in my office, I heard how the idea of the Rapture frightened
her as well. She had been told so many times that humanity was going to hell
and that the truly faithful would be raptured that when she was a child and she
would find herself suddenly alone, the first thing she would imagine was that
she had been “left behind.”
…
(D)ecades later, that
sense of abandonment stuck with Shawna. As Shawna raised her own daughters, she
wanted a more life-giving idea of God and the future than the one she had been
taught.
“What’s the point of
religion if it doesn’t give us hope?” I wondered. “We don’t need all of that
destruction to be satisfied, do we? If we don’t need it, I’m sure God doesn’t
need it.” We began to focus on the prayer that Jesus taught us. What did it say
about the future? “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in
heaven.” Surely, it was not just a prayer but also a commission. It was a
daring to dream and work for a world that might be like heaven.
Given
Carol’s story here, it would be easy—and it certainly was tempting—to base this
sermon off of the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a critical
link between it and our future hope that Carol draws in this passage.
But
I also think that a critical part of reclaiming our hope—and, by extension,
Christianity as a fundamentally hopeful religion—is to demonstrate that it is
not only possible, but right, for us to preach and teach Revelation in a way
that is understandable and accessible rather than threatening.
We
did that pretty extensively five years ago, when I spent my first summer here
with you solely on preaching through some of the most famous images of
Revelation, and why they often meant something different than what popular
belief tells us they are about. But, like most vaccinations, we can always use
a booster for understanding what this confounding and confusing book really
says.
John
of Patmos—not the same John as John the evangelist, who wrote the Gospel and
three letters bearing his name—composes Revelation during a time of extreme
danger for the early church. The Roman emperor Domitian has changed the
practices of the imperial religious cult from deifying the emperor—making him a
god—upon death to demanding worship of the living emperor, which is something
that Christians refused to do on spec because of the belief that only Jesus
Christ incarnates God. Domitian responded in turn with violent persecutions of
the early Christians.
Revelation,
then, is largely a diatribe against Domitian. From the famous Number of the
Beast (the Bible verse, not the awesome Iron Maiden song) to the Whore of Babylon, Domitian and Rome feature prominently as the
antagonists to God in Revelation. Yet, when you read a passage like this in
Revelation 20, the assumption we make is that this is a predictive text—that is,
a text that makes predictions of the future, such as the prediction of the
thousand-year reign of Christ—instead of a descriptive text, which is to say, a
text describing and interpreting events that have already happened or were
taking place at the time of composition.
The
notion that what Revelation depicts is descriptive of already taking place
rather than proscriptive of events to take place in the future is called
preterism, and it has been by far the easiest way I have found to keep the
Bible a book of hope rather than of dread and despair.
Preterism
is far from perfect—some schools of it maintain that the church supersedes
ancient Israel at the point of Revelation, which is harmful and painful to the
Jewish witness within Scripture—but the stories of Shawna and Carol of being
terrified children because of Christianity is not an option.
Can
we see Revelation in a way that describes the persecution of both the early
church and ancient Israel in that time and place, then, without demanding that
it describe our own futures, or that it describe the replacement of ancient
Israel with the church?
And
as a part of reclaiming the hope that is so fundamental to the coming of Jesus
Christ that the first Sunday of the church season of Advent—which begins in a
little over a month—is themed “Hope,” can we proclaim the value that we each
have, not to be left behind or raptured, but simply to live?
Especially
today, where hatred and nihilism seems to reign, a religion that is built upon,
and communicates, hope is as important and as relevant as ever. A hopeful
Christianity should still be a Christianity that has something to say to the
world. And that something should not be, “We hope to leave you behind to fend
for your unsaved selves as soon as possible.”
The
rapture theology we have created for ourselves, then, is fundamentally
anti-hopeful. Oh, it might be hopeful if you view yourself as one of the select
chosen (and in truth, we probably all do), but I would submit based on my own
understanding of Jesus and His teachings, that hope only for the bare handful
is no hope at all.
An interpretation of Christianity that makes my grandfather concerned for my ultimate fate—as a Christian pastor who has dedicated his life to the teachings of Jesus Christ—that is not a hopeful interpretation. An interpretation of Christianity that makes young children terrified for the rapture because they cannot countenance growing up without their parents and siblings and friends—that is not a hopeful interpretation. The hope of a rapture is a hope too selective for Christianity.
In
fact, any hope from the notion of the rapture is hope that comes from us, not
from God. If you recall this passage in Revelation about the thousand years
that many Christians claim accompanies the rapture, there is no actual rapture!
The basis for that comes from one solitary verse in 1 Thessalonians 4, plucked
out of its context and mashed up in here with Revelation—something I have to
imagine neither Paul or John of Patmos would be thrilled about.
Hope
enough to build a faith upon can only come from God, not from ourselves. So let
our hope come from God rather than entirely from us. And in so doing, may we
begin to reclaim it, and our faith, for a world that sorely needs both.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
October
29, 2017
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