You know, sometimes things are just too easy. Like today’s scripture reading, from what we think of as Paul’s Second Letter to the church at Thessaloniki, a text that says the end times can’t come until the lawless one appears, a self-promoting man who will convince people to believe total lies. Yeah, about that…
Maybe we’d better start packing, ’cause we’re about to be raptured, or, if God is really the complete jerk some seem to believe, get sent off on a very warm and very permanent vacation. Like SPF 5 million sunscreen and asbestos board shorts type of vacation. Happy Armageddon, Y’All!
The good news is that people have been predicting the end of the world for a very long time, and the evil men and women who are setting fire to our democracy are not the first cult leaders to sell the snake oil of mass delusion. The world hasn’t ended yet, though we’re doing our level best, what with human-caused climate change and all.
In other ways, today’s text is far from being easy. My favorite biblical commentary uses words like delusion, disorientation, and dismay when describing this chapter.
So what are we to make of this passage and more broadly of what we call biblical eschatology, of all the texts that suggest some form of divine re-ordering, whether that take the form of a Day of the Lord that establishes an earthly order that matches the divine will or an apocalyptic destruction in which the sheep and the goats get divided and earthly life ceases? The whole “Left Behind” scenario, or maybe the Omen series…
And let’s answer that before we come back to the challenge the late Madeleine Albright offers, what to do with politicians who view texts like the Revelation to John of Patmos as an operations manual for domestic and foreign policy, who have enough hubris to believe they are guaranteed a spot in heaven. Besides making sure we never give them the nuclear codes.
Some Christians understand the Bible as God’s inerrant word, a product of direct revelation. To them, every verse in it is divinely ordered, either through mystic messages given to the prophets, or through the Holy Spirit’s control of the process of writing, editing, translating, and selection.
In this view, Paul’s letter has what Dr. Cavan Concannon describes in a recent book as “braided authorship.” The author is both Paul and God, giving the words on the page divine authority.
Now, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend for a moment that everything in the Bible is true and consistent, which it isn’t. But let’s pretend. Erasing human agency from the process of composing, editing, selecting, and translating texts is akin to other toxic theologies that portray humans as being without will, little more than puppets or cannon fodder in a great cosmic battle between good and evil, for in order for the holy to impose divine will on the text, human will must be removed.
Except that isn’t my experience of the world. I have will, albeit entangled and chaotic and complex and fallible. And the reality of human will puts the kibosh on the whole inerrant word part before you even get to the contradictions in the Bible, for even within its own world, the Bible is a mess. Then, you know, science… And here at the Park Church, we science…
The Bible is a human text, a story of one culture’s experience of itself, of the mystery of existence, of the holy. That it is a story, and a human story, doesn’t mean there is no truth there, is nothing transcendent and divine there. I believe there is. I believe what I think of as God can be found in the living story that stretches back to the rebellion against the Pharaoh. And it is my cultural story, my context, as weird as it often is, the story that shapes European history and spreads through colonization around the globe.
But it isn’t the only story or the only truth, and while I find a purpose in life in Micah 6:8 or the Sermon on the Plain, I’m totally cool with others finding purpose in the Heart Sutra, or stories of the Great Spirit. Heck, there’s even something to be learned from the Great Pumpkin, some good news about hope and justice, though I’m not quite ready to join the Church of St. Linus van Pelt.
For most of Christian history, this selective literalism, this worship of the biblical text as inerrant was at the fringes. The heresy of fundamentalism didn’t exist until science, especially Darwin, made humans question their importance and immortality.
If we are ready to understand the story as what it is, people trying to make meaning in their context and in their experience, then we need not get freaked out about end-of-world predictions in a text that is almost two thousand years old, for the letters to the church at Thessaloniki are among the oldest surviving Christian texts, the first written around 52 C.E., years before the gospels.
Our second challenge is what to do about Paul specifically. Some, like Dr. Concannon, want to eliminate him entirely. Paul didn’t write half the letters attributed to him, and the body of work that is attributed to him has been used to justify all sorts of evils, from slavery and misogyny to antisemitism and obedience to the Third Reich.
Paul never even knew Jesus when he was alive, and Paul’s vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus can easily be seen as a guilt-induced psychotic break.
Paul is convinced the world is going to end pretty soon, something we see in the text. He’s also convinced his Roman citizenship is going to save him after he is arrested as a public disturbance. We can only assume that didn’t work out so well for him, and that maybe we are meant to be more Jesus than Paul, more confrontational and less servile.
The problem, for me at least, is that there is no Christianity as we know it without Paul. We can look at Jesus in his context as a Hebrew reformer and maybe messiah, but everything we have that we call Christianity comes from Paul adapting this Hebrew reform movement in a way that allowed it to spread among non-Hebrews throughout the Roman Empire, in a way that met the needs of people who needed to believe that God was love and that the universe was meant to be just. The message of Jesus as interpreted by Paul offered hope to people who desperately needed hope.
Paul, real Paul and pretend Paul, is a problem. I don’t think we can throw him away, but we need to be cautious, need to reach past Paul and try to bring the Hebrew context into focus.
So we have this text that is a human story from a questionable source that people insist on reading literally no matter how silly that is, and that just isn’t how we, in our tradition, read the Bible.
Then we come to the question of eschatology, a term I used earlier which is just the technical word for the study of these end times texts and beliefs. Paul believes the world is coming to an end, as you can see in both letters to the Thessalonians. Jesus may have believed the world was coming to an end, though he may have instead believed that the world simply needed to be rebooted, and since all of our accounts of the life of Jesus come on the other side of Paul, we’re never really going to know for sure. We have the three great apocalyptic texts in scripture, one in the Hebrew Testament, the last six chapters of the Book of Daniel, and two in the Greek Testament, the 13th chapter of Mark and the Revelation to John of Patmos.
And I guess I can understand being so overwhelmed, in such despair, that you hope God will destroy the world. At least I can understand it intellectually, though I’ll be damned if I can understand why a bunch of upper middle class white folks driving eight cylinder SUVs in the suburbs are looking for the apocalypse on their way to the Cowboys game.
I can understand why the desperate might want the Rapture, but I can’t feel it. Because I see holiness all around me. I am wired to see what might be. I’m not ready to give up on humankind, at least not most days, and I see too much miracle, too much beauty, to want some anti-Christ to nuke the planet while the holy ones all disappear from their Escalades and float up into the sky.
There are bad days. I’ve had bad days. But I choose hope. I choose beauty. Because believing is seeing.
And in the end, this is where I land. Texts like today’s reading reflect a belief that is both negative and passive, that the world is more cursed than blessed, that humans are incapable of doing what is right. And that’s not a world I am prepared to live in. I believe, that there is a holy mystery at the heart of it all that I call God, that we get glimpses of that beautiful mystery in the stories people tell about their encounters with the holy, in a burning bush and in an un-credentialed street preacher from Nazareth, in a traumatized veteran in Assisi and in theology nerd resisting the Third Reich, in you and in me and in this river valley. And I am not powerless. We can’t always control our world, but we can always control how we respond to it. And in my case, I have agency, privilege, power, that I choose to use for love, the love that tries to make the world a better place.
What to do with those who choose apocalypse as foreign policy? Well, I guess since I don’t believe apocalyptic texts have anything to do with God, and their confidence in their personal salvation, their negativity about the world and passiveness in the face of the holy doesn’t reflect my experience of the world and the holy, then I say love them, call them to love, show them the holy, and if they can’t see it, send them packing.. Vote them out. Strip them of power. We’re going to have a hard enough time overcoming our own fear and greed. We don’t need to add their fear to the mix.
So, in conclusion: no rapture, no apocalypse, just a beautiful wounded world and a beautiful possibly wounded you, and lots of work to do, with some breaks for sabbath and celebration. Let’s live.
Amen.