Revelation, the Rapture, and What's Most Important

Revelation 21:1-6

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.

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Do you teach them about the rapture? That’s the question a woman asked me as I sat at Starbucks trying to write a sermon. On Thursdays before I preach, I usually head to a coffee shop or the library to write. It’s not uncommon for someone to strike up a conversation—I guess it’s not every day you see someone sitting in public with a Bible open.

On this day, a woman and her husband sat at the same large table as me. I could feel her eyes on me. I knew what was coming. I made the mistake of looking up from my screen—and she got me.

“So, are you a Bible student?”

No, I’m a pastor here in New Pal.

“Well, you’re awfully young to be a pastor…” (Like I haven’t heard that one before.)

“What’s your church?”

When I said, “Cross of Grace Lutheran Church,” the back-and-forth stopped, and she proceeded to tell me how great her church and her pastor are.

Then, either noticing my intentional body language—literally leaning away—or the way I kept glancing back at my half-written sermon, she ended the conversation with one last question:

“Do you teach them about the rapture?”

The rapture? I thought. I tried to come up with a kind response instead of simply saying, “Uh… no.”

“Well, in my tradition, that’s not something we focus on…” I said.

And goodness, was she disappointed in that answer.

“Well, you gotta teach them about the rapture. It’s the most important thing.”

The most important thing? There’s so much I could have—should have—asked:

• What do you mean by rapture?

• Why is it the most important thing?

• What does your pastor say when preaching about it?

• Who do you think gets left behind—and why?

  But I had a sermon to finish, after all.

I’ve never preached on “the rapture.” I don’t think I’ve ever even preached on a passage from Revelation. So, wherever you are, lady, this one’s for you. Because you’re partially right—it is important for us to understand what the rapture is, the bad and harmful theology behind it, and what we might imagine in its place when we talk about life after death.

Some of you know all about the rapture. Maybe you grew up in a more fundamentalist church or were terrified by the Left Behind series in the mid 90s. Others of you, good Lutherans that you are, may only have a vague idea of what it means. But all of us have been exposed to some version of this belief.

Usually, when people talk about the rapture, it’s part of a theology called dispensationalism. You may have never heard that word, but you’ve definitely seen signs of it—like every time you pass a billboard like this, now how’d that pan out?

Or this…

Or when you notice our culture’s fascination with the apocalypse and end time predictions.

Not to bore you too much, but the idea of the rapture was invented by a British preacher named John Nelson Darby in the 1830s. He took the traditional understanding of Jesus’ return and split it into two parts. First comes the rapture: Jesus appears in the sky, snatches up born-again Christians, and whisks them off to heaven for seven years. During that time, God inflicts wrath on the earth and Christians watch safely from above. Then, after those seven years, comes the final return of Jesus to fight the battle of Armageddon (mentioned in Revelation) and establish an earthly kingdom.

This whole timeline is a patchwork—stitched together from one verse in 1 Thessalonians, three from Daniel, and a single verse from Revelation. Behind all that is a bad theology and a harmful hermeneutic—a way of reading and understanding the Bible.

First, this approach takes the Bible literally, as if Revelation were some sort of roadmap to the end times. But, as you’ve heard us say before, we mustn't read the Bible literally—we’re called to read it literate-ly and seriously, taking into account the many voices and genres that make up Scripture. Revelation is apocalyptic literature, a kind of writing well known to the seven first-century churches it was written for. It’s not a crystal ball—it’s a prophetic vision full of metaphor and symbolic imagery, not a literal forecast of future events.

Second, this theology takes a few out-of-context verses to offer false certainty about what’s to come, rather than wrestling with the mystery of faith. The Bible gives us many different images of Jesus’ return: a banquet in Luke, a wedding feast in Matthew, paradise, green pastures, even a return to Eden. But none of these say when this will happen. In fact, Jesus says clearly: “About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24:36) Jesus doesn’t want us trying to piece together a divine timeline. He wants us to live in hope and with trust.

And perhaps the biggest thing the rapture gets wrong is this: the idea that we’ll float off to heaven and away from all this; that our souls get to finally escape the pain of this world and just be with Jesus. But here’s the thing: the Bible never says we’re just souls that happen to have bodies. We are both—body and soul—and they will not be separated. Resurrection always includes the beautiful body God gave you.

And what if—just hear me out—what if at the end of all things, we don’t go to heaven… What if heaven comes to us?

Which is exactly what Revelation says. God establishes a new heaven and a new earth here, in our midst, and God takes up residence with us. Doesn’t that sound more like the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ? The God who entered into our suffering? The God who heals what is hurt? The God who accomplishes the divine plan through seemingly insignificant people, places, and things.

It should be no surprise, then, that God would come down to this broken world—full of broken people—and heal it until there are no more tears, no more mourning or pain or death, and make a home here with us. That sounds like the God we know in Jesus.

Lutheran theologian Barbara Rossing, an expert on the rapture and end-times thinking, says people are drawn to rapture theology because they want to see the Bible come to life. They want to connect Scripture with their own lives. They want to experience God—and think that can only happen if they leave this place.

But the truth is: the Bible is coming to life and we do experience God—in this world, in our lives.

The Bible comes to life everytime we feed someone who is hungry, give water to someone who is thirsty, wipe the tears trickling down one’s cheek, visit the imprisoned and detained, relieve someone’s pain, or welcome the immigrant.

We are in the presence of God here on earth every time we come to the table, when we share meals with our friends and our enemies, or as Jesus says, when we love others as he loves us.

Those acts—those holy, small, grace-filled acts—create little pockets of heaven on earth. They allow us to experience God right here and now, until that great day when God comes to live among us forever, making God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

So no—the rapture isn’t the most important thing.

But trusting that God will come down, give us new life, and dwell with us in a world made new, free of pain and suffering and death?

Now that sounds more like it.

Amen.

Belonging and Believing

John 10:22-30

At that time, the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and asked him, “How long will you keep us in the suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us, plainly.”

Jesus answered them, “I have told you and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me, but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they will never perish. No one will snatch them from my hand. What the Father has given me is greater than all else and no one can snatch it from the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”

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“You do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep.”

“You do not believe because you do not belong.” What if that’s the whole tweet, as they say? What if that’s all we need to hear this morning? And what if you and I are supposed to be convicted by that – as followers of Jesus – rather than use it as some kind of judgement against those who consider themselves not to be followers of the Jesus we claim?

“You do not believe because you do not belong.”

Jesus is talking to the Jews who weren’t on board yet with what he was up to. And, with a little pastoral imagination, I like to think his disciples were within earshot of this conversation; that they were following him around, as usual, and that Jesus knew he was being heard by both at the same time; that he was speaking to both crowds at once – those who belonged and those who didn’t believe.

There are plenty of people in the world who don’t believe in Jesus – or God – or have a Christian faith for all sorts of rational, considered, thoughtful, theological reasons. Maybe they’re deliberately, purposefully atheists. Maybe they’re people of another faith – Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, pagans. I’m not talking about them, necessarily.

Instead, I found myself wondering this week about those who don’t believe, but who would, could, might believe, if only we – as followers of Jesus – would do better at finding ways for them to BELONG, first. (“You don’t believe because you don’t belong…”)

I heard two stories just this week, in two very different, settings, from two very different sources, about two sets of parents who were struggling with the fact that their gay or lesbian children weren’t people of faith; didn’t go to church; didn’t believe or worship or practice a faith that their parents wished that they would. In one case, the child had been raised in the Church, but had fallen away from an active, practicing life of faith. In the other case, the family wasn’t one who had ever practiced a faith, but the father came to believe in mid-life, and wanted to bring his wife and grown children along with him for the journey. (For what it’s worth, one of these stories came by way of a colleague, here in Indianapolis. The other was from a completely unrelated story I heard on “This American Life.”)

Anyway, what these two sets of parents have in common, is their outspoken disapproval of their children’s sexuality, which is evident to the adult children they want to love, by either the theology they adhere to (“Love the sinner. Hate the Sin.” sort of stuff.), their political persuasion (the politicians and policies they support that do harm to their gay children), or both.

In other words, the children of these parents know that they don’t – and will never – BELONG to their parents’ faith communities or fit into their misguided view of the world, so how could they and why would they ever want to believe in the things their parents professed about a loving, gracious, merciful God?

“…you don’t believe because you don’t belong.”

In my opinion, so many people in so many walks of life are falling away from the faith or throwing it all out with the bath water, because they see Christianity connected with exclusion, judgment, hypocrisy, greed, violence, and more. People don’t believe because they don’t belong – or because they don’t want to belong – to a body that embodies any of those things. And, as hard and as sad and as frustrating as that is, it makes perfect sense to me. And it’s why we have so much work to do.

And I think that work starts with belonging. They don’t believe because they don’t belong.

People long to feel and to experience welcome, love, and affirmation. And when they do, they might begin to wonder about believing and embracing the God who promises it.

If we want people to feel like part of God’s family… If we want people to learn about the grace we proclaim… If we want people to believe in the wideness of God’s mercy, in the amazing love of our creator, in the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and in life everlasting…

I’m convinced that they need to know, trust, and feel like they BELONG, first. And I think our call is to show and to shout and to share the good news of that belonging as loudly and as clearly, as often and in as many ways as we can manage.

I heard another, beautiful story this week – perfect for Mother’s Day – about a different family altogether who proved what belonging can do.

Many years ago, this set of American parents adopted a 7 year-old boy from Romania, who had lived the first 7-and-a-half years of his life in an orphanage where he shared a crib with another boy his age that entire time. As they grew, they stayed in that crib, to the point that they had to sleep sitting up. They didn’t go to school. They didn’t go outside. They only left their crib to eat and to use the bathroom. Daniel, the boy who was adopted by the Americans in South Euclid, Ohio, never even knew the names of the adults who took care of him in that orphanage.

The short of the long is that Daniel came to the states utterly unprepared for the life with which his adoptive parents hoped to give him – he simply wasn’t ready socially, emotionally, or intellectually for a life with people who loved him. After 7 years in a crib, how could he be? And after a six-month honeymoon period with his new family in the states, things went downhill fast and furiously.

Daniel developed an anger and rage over all that he couldn’t process or understand about his experience in the orphanage, his having been put there in the first place by his birth parents, and his place in the world and with his new mom and dad. He threw tantrums they described as “tornadoes of rage … eight hour marathons where he would throw anything he could get his hands on.” There were thousands of holes in his bedroom walls from his violent outbursts.

He abused social workers and specialists. He choked a puppy. He gave his mom, Heidi, a black eye, once. He held a knife to her neck, another time. It got so bad they hired the equivalent of a bodyguard to be in the house, so that Heidi was never alone with her new son.

Finally – and I’m leaving out a lot of the story, mind you – they embarked on a fascinating, controversial treatment for Daniel’s diagnosed Attachment Disorder where they pulled him out of school, Heidi quit her job, and they spent several months side-by-side, literally no farther than three feet apart. If one of them went to the bathroom, the other waited outside the door. They only time they were not next to each other, was when they were sleeping.

They worked to establish the bond that’s supposed to be created between mothers and infants, under normal circumstances, by being very deliberate about eye-contact, for instance, and proximity. Daniel wasn’t allowed to ask for anything – he had to learn, from experience, that Heidi would provide basic needs for him, like food and drink. Daniel’s punishment for not playing along, or for doing something wrong, was called a “Time In,” where he would be subjected to time on the couch, being hugged by his mother.

Ultimately, it worked. After eight weeks of this and a year of “holding therapy” where the family of three cradled each other – holding 13 year-old Daniel like a newborn – for 20 minutes, every night for a year, Daniel began to transform, slowly, but surely, almost imperceptibly, into a boy who believed that he would be and could be and was LOVED by his parents.

Another way to say this, if you ask me, is that Daniel came to believe in that love, because he was finally convinced that he belonged to his new family. He believed because he belonged.

And I think this is our call as people of God in the world. People need to see and to know that they already belong to the good news and grace and eternal life we claim. And I think it’s our job and it should be our joy – even when it’s hard – to show that kind of love and belonging to them.

I think they need to see us marching at PRIDE parades.

I think they need to see us teaching about and practicing anti-racism.

I think they need to see our kids walking against homelessness and they need to see us giving money to their cause.

I think politicians need to receive our letters, our phone calls, and our votes – in the name of Jesus – that speak out on behalf of people who are hungry and homeless and criminalized for that. (Join us for that next Sunday, between services.)

I think the women who are served by our Agape ministry to sex workers need to experience the proximity and generosity of that ministry.

And the list goes on. But I’ve said enough. And, just because it couldn’t be more timely, I’ll close with something from the new Pope Leo that makes me think he’d agree with me. Apparently, he said this once:

“We are often worried about teaching doctrine, but we risk forgetting that our first duty is to communicate the beauty and joy of knowing Jesus.”

They don’t believe, because they don’t belong.

I think those who don’t believe what we claim to know about the grace of God need to experience it, first; they need to see us making room for them, for their doubts, and for their unbelief – whoever “they” may be. And that needs to happen, not because it’s our job to convince them of God’s love, but because we – and the world – will be blessed and better for having shared this love humbly, hopefully, and with a warm welcome of belonging, in Jesus’ name.

Amen

[To hear the full story of Daniel and his family, listen to Episode 317 of This American Life, “Unconditional Love.”]