“Leaving Behind Left Behind”

November 28, 2004

Scripture Reading:   Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 24:36-44

 Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

Blue Point Congregational Church

Worried about the world lately?  If you are I don’t blame you.  There are plenty of reasons to be worried.  Some favorites are – global warming, the emergence of a new disease, killer asteroids colliding with earth, weapons of mass destruction, ozone depletion, dirty bombs.  The astrophysicist Stephen Hawkings predicts that the human race won’t survive the next 1000 years.  The editor-in-chief of Discovery troubles his audiences with the lecture entitled, “15 Major Risks to the World and Life as We Know It.”  Worried about the world lately?  A lot of people are and a lot of people feel doomed.  How will we survive?

So enters the widely popular book series, Left Behind.  These are a series of novels written my Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.  They are about one cataclysmic moment when millions around the globe disappear.  Vehicles suddenly unmanned, careen out of control.  People are terror stricken as loved ones vanish before their eyes.  The end of the world has come and those who are believers have been saved and swept up to heaven while the other non-believers are left on a doomed earth.  Why is the series so popular?  The book inspires a sort of hope in a troubled world.  It gives the impression that good will triumph over evil.  Newsweek writer David Gates says:

As the world gets increasingly scary, with much of the trouble centered in the Middle East – just where you would expect from the Book of Revelation – even secular Americans sometimes wonder (or at least wonder if they ought to start wondering) whether there might not be something to this End Times stuff…In an age of terror and tumult, they may find these books Biblical literalism offered certitude to millions of Americans amid the chaos of our time.

I don’t know who here has read the Left Behind series.  Certainly I have nothing against a good suspense novel that gets one thinking about religion.  Yet, it is good to know the theology that underlies the basic premise of the books.  The theology of end times that they are based on is called “dispensationalism” and it was started by John Nelson Darby in the 1800’s.  Dispensationalism stresses how some parts of the Bible expects Christ sudden return.  We find this in the passage from Matthew that we read today, and more so in the book of Revelations.  At that time there would be a rapture of the saints as they are taken up into heaven leaving the rest of us to the tribulation.  This is the way dispensationalism tries to find hope for many people who find no hope left in the world.  Never mind that this hope depends on the conversion of the Jews, on the destruction of God’s innumerable enemies, and on the decimation of vast stretches of creation.  Still in spite of these flaws, or because of them (after all if it is turned into a full length movies dispensationalism would afford a lot of special effects action shots) – it provides some form of hope in admittedly scary times.

There is a problem with dispensationalism, the Left Behind books.  The first problem is that is seems to convert people on the basis of fear.  Better believe or you will regret it.  I always wonder if a person believes in Christ simply because he or she is scared not to, is that belief a valid one?  If a person doesn’t feel free to say “no” how can their “yes” mean anything?  There is another problem I have with Left Behind books.  The problem is that some people are left behind.  Some people are in and other are out.  That is the bottom line.  It just doesn’t seem right to me.  It doesn’t seem like the God of Jesus to me.  In fact a generation of conservative evangelical theologians are beginning to recognize this as a problem with such thinking.  Brian McLaren says, One of the greatest enemies of evangelism is the church as fortress or social club; it sucks Christians out of their neighborhoods, isolates them in a religious ghetto.  There it must entertain them (through various means, many of them masquerading as education) and hold them (through various means many of them epitomized by the word guilt and fear).  Thus Christians are warehoused as merchandise for heaven, kept safe in a protected space to prevent spillage, leakage, damage or loss until delivery.”  The shadow side of dispensationalism is that it is better to keep people safe from “bad” influences than risk them being left behind at the rapture.

So, where do we find hope then?  We all are looking for hope.  We all worry.  It might not be about the impending doom of the world.  Most likely we worry about things more close to home.  More likely what really chills us are things like cancer and heart disease, the children and the friends they are keeping, the marriage, job security, retirement, and more…

Christianity, if anything, is a religion of hope.  What the Left Behind series has right is that Christianity is always looking forward and moving forward trusting God’s promise that in the end God’s good purpose will overcome all evil in creation .  In the end God will take this redeemed creation into a new and eternal form of existence beyond death and with union with God.  But, there are other ways the Bible envisions how this will come about than that which we find in the book series.  For instance, the passage from Isaiah which we read today is very different.  Remember it says: 

Many people shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the god of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.”  For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.  He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. 

This vision of the ending of the world sounds very different doesn’t it?  Here no one is left behind.  There is no destruction and doom rather it is the beginning of a great peaceable kingdom. 

How do we reconcile these very different accounts of the end times that we find in the Bible?  More importantly, how can we Christians have hope in the future without leaving people behind?  The earliest Christians believed that they were living in the end times.  For them the end had already begun in the events of the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus.  The presence of the Holy Spirit was understood as the life of the new creation already present under the conditions of this world.  The German theologian Jurgen Moltman picks up on this early Christian experience.  He writes:  The believer is not set at the high noon of life, but at the dawn of a new day, at the point where night and day, things passing and things to come grapple with each other.”  In other words where we see the end times happening, where the dominion of God is entering our world even as we speak, is not in the sudden disappearance of people into heaven, but where brokenness is made whole by grace.

Let me give you an example of how this happens.  Take the story of David Argo, a Methodist pastor who spent his teen age years, like many of us, in a turbulent relationship with his mother.  The two of them felt quite distant from one another.  Then, when he was a young adult, they battled over which of them had the correct vision of the world – a battle that lead to a kind of uneasy truce.  As they both gre older, they invested less and less energy in who was right and who was wrong, but they never really felt a sense of peace in their relationship.

Then when she was 92, David’s mother suffered a massive stroke.  The doctor said that she might not live for very long, so David traveled across several states to be with her.  He sat by her bed, not knowing if she were aware of his presence or not.  For several days, he talked to her, sang hymns to her, read the Bible to her, prayed and cried. 

The hospice staff was amazed the she was continuing to live.  Finally one of them said, “We think she just enjoys having you here.”  David realized that he had not been in the same room with her for entire days since the time he was an infant.  Somewhere in the course of those nights and days, he realized that “the wolf and the lamb were feeding together.” 

Of course, he was not exactly sure who was the wolf…and who was the lamb.

David was given an experience of God’s new creation.  It was a time where brokenness was made whole by grace.  Moreover, he came to understand that there were people that he needed to sit with, spend time with and find a way to see more clearly.  Even if he once saw his mother as an enemy, he found that their shared hunger allowed a new peaceful creation to unfold.   This was God’s new creation, even here in this broken world, even now in these broken times. 

That is an example of Christian hope.  Martin Luther would say that the world is now in its working clothes and that by and by it will be arranged in its Easter garments of joy.”  For the Methodist minister, David, a work glove had been caste off and he found an Easter glove had been slipped on next as he sat next to his dying mother. 

 I believe that we are chosen not to leave people behind but we are chosen to be sent to go get people. 

How do we get to heaven?  We are not going to be swept up in a rapture because we are in and others are out.  Rather we get to heaven through moments of grace that we encounter here and now.   The in breaking of God’s new creation is like this:  (Yancey’s book What’s So Amazing about Grace)  God in heaven holds each person buy a string.  When you sin, you cut the string.  Then God ties it up again, making a knot – and thereby bringing you a little closer to him.  Again and again your sins cut the string – and with each further knot God keeps drawing you closer and closer and closer.   “The grateful vote” would not imply that those who voted one way were better than others.  Rather it implies that their vote was based on a feeling of God’s unconditional love for them inspite of their shortcomings.   

To end, I think it is time for a new series of religious novels.  I think it is time to leave being Left Behind.  I suggest that these new novels be called “The Collectors.”  It too would be about the end times when good wins out over evil.  Yet, it would go more like this scene from the movie Ironweed with Jack Nicholson and Meryle Streep.  In it they have stumbled across an old Eskimo woman lying in the snow, probably drunk.  The two debate about what they should do about her. 

“Is she drunk or a bum?” asks Nicholson.

“Just a bum.  Been one all her life.”

“And before that?”

“She was a whore in Alaska.”

“She hasn’t  been a wore all her life.  Before that?”

“I dun no.  Just a little kid, I guess.”

“Well a little kid’s something.  It’s not a bum and it’s not a whore.  It’s something.  Let’s take her in.” 

Reaching out to the poor, the outcast, the suffering, and the sick is the beginning of the end.  The message of the gospel is not that of leaving people behind, but just the opposite.  Jesus was about reaching out to the left behind and showing them the love of God and bringing them, especially them, with him.  This is how a doomed world is going to be saved.  This is how good will win out over evil.  This is the dawn of the reign of God here on Earth.