Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 12.01.13
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 24:36-44
Here we’ve come out of the great feast of Thanksgiving, and the impact of every last one of those gravy-ladled carbs can be felt as we try to cram ourselves back into those pants...that must...oof...have shrunk the last time...urgh...we did a wash.
I’m particularly sensitive to that this year, because over the last few months, I’ve been trying to push back the inexorable sprawl of my mid-forties midsection.
It was largely inspired, I think, by the pictures posted on Facebook after the water-balloon fight. I’d just gotten back from the beach and some time in Hawaii, during which I’d managed to slather on more pounds than sunscreen, and seeing those images up on social media was a wee bit difficult.
Those pictures pranged up against my internalized images of myself, to the point that it suddenly struck me that I no longer matched my concept of myself. Lord have mercy, I look like that now? It was like someone slapped an Amish beard and a t-shirt onto a lightly moistened manatee.
With the scale showing just a tick shy of my goodness I’ve never seen that number before, I was fully thirty pounds heavier than I’d been when my oldest son was born, and he’s not *that* old. I was feeling it.
I could feel it as I moved, feel it as I tried to run. It was clear that I was in a pattern that was slowly and permanently adding to my mass. I’d never paid much attention to it, honestly, but that time of inattention just needed to come to an end. I was going to have to make some changes.
And the real challenge to those changes was that those couldn’t be fleeting. Oh, but we want them to be. We want to be able to just drink a bunch of protein shakes, or buy into some product or program or pill, and then...bam...we’ll suddenly be just like we were when we were twenty. Or maybe there’s just an app.
But the reality is very different. You have to make a change, and then you have to make it stick. It has to be every day, or it isn’t going to accomplish anything. It’s meant, for me, smaller meal portions, consistently and every day. It’s meant avoiding the urge to snack. It’s meant...and this is the painful one...ratcheting waaay back on the tasty hoppy and highly caloric India Pale Ales. It has meant that longstanding habits have had to shift, and be replaced by habits that involve more exercise and fewer calories.
That sustained, day-in, day-out pattern is the nature of intentional change, and the only way we really transition ourselves. It’s not one day, or one moment, or one instant. It takes work and focus and sustained effort. If we want anything truly new to happen for us, it happens only when we make the difficult choice that comes from choosing differently every single day.
But we really don’t want to hear that. We want it right now.
Which I think is why for over two thousand years, Christians have struggled to interpret and engage with the passage that launches our season this Advent. It’s kind of a funny way to start out the Advent season, actually. We’re prepping ourselves for a season of celebration, as our neighborhoods begin to fill with lights and wreaths, and what we hear from the lectionary is this? Talk about the flood, and then end of things? I mean, shoot, things can’t end yet. There’s still shopping to do!
This section from Matthew’s Gospel is one that is echoed in Luke 21, with both Matthew and Luke drawing from the original text of Mark in Mark 13. It’s Mark’s Little Apocalypse, which was picked up by and expanded upon by Matthew. In that expansion, we have a text that has been used in some rather interesting ways over the last coupla thousand years.
This text and its mirror in Luke, perhaps more than any others, have been used to justify a Christian teaching called the Rapture. If you’re not familiar with this peculiar doctrine, it’s the idea that at some point before the end of all things, everyone who’s gotten themselves in right with God will be suddenly whisked off into heaven. When things get rough, folks will just vanish into thin air, because, you know, that’s what Jesus says. Two men in a field, one gets left. Two women grinding at the mill, one gets left. It’s become something of a “get out of jail free” theological card for the faithful, promising that when God finally gets into that smiting mood, no faithful person will actually have to suffer.
That premise was the entire point of those Left Behind books, which sold like hotcakes just a decade ago, and which were made into some of the most marginally watchable films ever to arrive on a screen back in the year 2000. For cinephiles, take note: they’re trying a reboot of the franchise, with the Kirk Cameron role now played by Nicolas Cage.
The idea of the Rapture feeds into a peculiar fascination that so many people have about how things will end, and that they come from this passage seems the deepest of ironies. What people hear is that one is taken and another is left, and somehow suddenly we’ve got Jesus standing next to Scottie in the transporter room beaming up the righteous while leaving the unrighteous stranded on Ceti Alpha Five.
It’s what leads so many folks to make wild predictions about when things will end, to be tragically consumed by an obsession with the end times. That, as evidenced by the fate of Family Radio broadcaster Harold Camping this last year, only ends in sorrow.
In fact, the point Jesus is making in these stories is precisely and diametrically opposed to the idea of the Rapture. As a doctrine the Rapture, does three things. First, it distracts us. It becomes an object over which Christians speculate and debate, even though the very passages that supposedly justify this teaching tell us that we shouldn’t. It’s been predicted countless times over human history, most recently and famously by Harold Camping. Camping was a Christian radio broadcaster. He seemed a decent guy, actually, if you got to know him, but he became obsessed with finding the date and the time of the Rapture. He figured he’d cracked the code, and got the word out through his radio network. That date, if you’ll recall, was October 21, 2011. That was not a happy day for Camping and his followers, and honestly? The relentless media attention was a bit of an embarrassment for Christianity.
Second, the very idea of the Rapture makes the assumption that being Christian means escaping times of trial and suffering. This is not true, and it has never been true. Looking out over the course of human history, Christians have struggled and weathered their way through not just personal hardships, but disasters and famines and the collapses of entire societies. The faith remained when Rome fell, and the faith endured when storms raged and the earth shook.
Our faith gives us the strength to cope with trial, and to do so with as much grace as possible. But what it is not is an escape. We endure, and we transcend, but we do not flee from suffering. That’s why we have this symbol hanging in most of our sanctuaries.
Third, the Rapture puts more emphasis on a single moment than it does on the lifelong process of being transformed. Instead of focusing on the manner of life that should define every moment of a Christian’s journey, the misreading of this passage as indicating a “rapture” completely distracts from the entire purpose of the teaching. It’s about preparation in the right now, about living your whole existence in such a way that it reflects your end purpose.
The purpose of faith is not to distract us. It is to give us something that cements our integrity, that focuses our lives every day on a new way of living. That’s what transforms us, slowly but surely, in ways that go well beyond dropping extra pounds.
And for all of the joyousness of this season, that’s the entire point of Advent. It is a reminder that God’s most gracious intent for us does not exist as an abstraction. It was and is incarnate. It was born, and lived among us. It breathed and ate and grew, and in every moment, was fulfilling its purpose.
Being aware of that, and living into it, that’s the entire purpose of this Advent season.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN
No comments:
Post a Comment