December 2, 2007 - Watch - Frank Alton

Matthew 24:36-44



MP3 File

When I was in the fundamentalist period of my life during college there was a famous Christian singer called Larry Norman. He was strange – a combination of a long haired, hippy and a fundamentalist who didn’t look the part. He wrote a popular song called, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” I listened to it so many times I could still sing it. I won’t; but I could. He obviously believed in the Rapture which is the name given to the event that some Christians believe will happen in the future when all the true believers will just disappear off the face of the earth up into heaven, whilst the rest of human kind is left on earth to slug it out with the Antichrist.
“Life was filled with guns and war and everyone got trampled on the floor. I wish we'd all been ready. Children died, the days grew cold,“A man and wife asleep in bed, She hears a noise, she turns her head, he's gone! I wish we'd all been ready. Two men walking up a hill,One disappears and one's left standing still. I wish we'd all been ready. There's no time to change your mind, The Son has come and you've been left behind.”

Of course, it’s based on our reading this morning: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.” This could be the way the world ends but I somehow doubt it. The contemporary expression of this belief comes in the mega popular books in the Left Behind series. It may seem best to leave Left Behind behind us. But when a book perpetrating a dangerous lie sells 120 million copies, ignoring it may not be such a good idea.

The most serious problem with the Left Behind series of novels is that in this version Jesus is no longer the Lamb slain but a perpetrator of the same violence of the Roman Empire under which the early Christians suffered. According to Left Behind, when Jesus comes again, he will simply wield a vastly superior firepower. Lest you think I’m exaggerating there's an excerpt from a 60 Minutes II interview with the books’ authors aired April 14, 2004, in which Morley Safer comments to the authors: "The Left Behind novels give a graphic version of the New Testament prophecy of the end of the world happening in our time, in which only the righteous are saved. Glorious Appearing tells the story of the return of an avenging Jesus, slaughtering non-believers by the millions. It's an image of Jesus that many evangelicals say is long overdue.

One of the authors, Jerry B. Jenkins, responds: "Unfortunately, we've gone through a time when liberalism has so twisted the real meaning of scripture that they've manufactured a loving, wimpy Jesus that would never do anything in judgment. And that's not the God of the Bible. That's not the way Jesus reads in the Scripture." The other author, Tim LaHaye, adds: "That stuff is straight from the Bible. The idea of him slaying the enemy with the sword that comes from his mouth, which is His Word, and the fact that the enemy's eyes melt in their heads, their tongues disintegrate, their flesh drops off -- I didn't make that up. That's out of the prophecy."
But it seems that he did make it up. There's nothing about the enemy's eyes melting in the Book of Revelation. Instead, twice we see God wiping away the tears from the eyes of God's people (Rev. 7:17; 21:4). There are people gnawing on their tongues in anguish (Rev. 16:10), and birds feeding on the flesh of the dead (Rev. 19:17-21), but not tongues simply disintegrating nor flesh dropping off at the words from Jesus' mouth.

At stake is the God we meet in Jesus Christ. In the New Testament version of Jesus we are shown a stark contrast to the darkness of our human violence wrongly attributed to God. We human beings are the ones who put our faith in superior firepower. For example, in Matthew’s Gospel, the ones who are taken are those who get caught up in a rising tide of violence without even noticing it. Those who are left behind are actually those who resist getting swept away by the violence, and remain faithful to God. They stay awake to recognizing Jesus in the hungry, the stranger, the sick and the imprisoned. But in the Left Behind novels the darkness of that human violence is once again attributed to God, especially through the fictionalized figure of Jesus in the last volume.

Advent is the season in which we focus on preparing for God’s coming. But we prepare for very different ways of being in history depending on whether we follow the Left Behind books or the New Testament. The Left Behind view practically makes the violence of torturing accused terrorists a sign of God’s coming. The biblical view sees caring for the victims of violence as the primary spiritual practice to prepare for God’s coming. It matters greatly which way we prepare.

A group of us have been gathering this past week to listen to different ones of you share about the impact of Clelia and Alberto’s departure from Immanuel’s staff, and about where we go from here. In yesterday’s session, one person spoke passionately about the importance of Immanuel’s ministry in Los Angeles, and challenged us to with the need to wake up to the ministry that God has dropped in our laps. People know that Immanuel stands for justice; and, sadly, they are surprised that a church cares so much about what they care about. But they don’t know enough about our congregation to actually try us out.

We need to be bolder in our witness. Advent is a great time to wake up to that call. As James Alison puts it, “In Advent, God breaks through the clutter of our lives to announce to us that God’s Presence is very near, irrupting into our midst, hauling us out of our half-truths and the ways we have settled for what is religious rather than what is holy, alive and real… Someone wants to speak to us. The oomph behind the ‘isness’ of everything that is wants to invite us into the fullness of a project.” (Christian Century, November 13, 2007, p. 19)

And as Reinhold Niebuhr puts it: "Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love."

So, what does it take to wake up? Jesus indicates that it has something to do with paying attention to the right things. Everyone is looking for something, but we’re not always noticing the right things. We live in an advent season of history that offers clues about what to watch for and how to hold the watching itself. We watch for what really matters and stay with it. We don’t get swept away with the temptation to commit violence in order to defend ourselves, or with pleasures to escape reality. We are left behind as victims of violence, and with all the weight of reality, though accompanied by God’s promises in the midst of it.

In the time of Noah most people were not noticing the right things. Noah, it seems, was different. Noah knew enough to come in out of the rain, and he knew to listen to God. What of the one in the field or grinding meal who is not swept away? What is it they listen to? What makes them ready for the coming of the Son of Man, as Noah was ready for the flood?
Last week I sat with a member of this church as he shared how he has started listening. He calls it “dialoguing with myself.” Sometimes he only spends 5 minutes a day doing it. But already he talks about ways that he is seeing the world and the people in it a little differently.

Peter W. Marty shares a scene from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town to highlight the need to see things differently. A young woman named Emily dies at the age of 26. She asks the stage manager narrating the play if she can return for a brief visit with her family. He grants her the wish, advising her to choose the least important day in her life -- which "will be important enough," he says. She chooses to return on her 12th birthday, only to find her father obsessed with his business problems and her mother preoccupied with kitchen duties. Emily exclaims, "Oh Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, 14 years have gone by. I’m dead!" Unable to rouse her parents, Emily breaks down sobbing. "We don’t have time to look at one another. . . . Goodbye, world! , . . Goodbye, Mama and Papa. . . . Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you! Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?"

It is this incapacity to attend to the important things in life that brings urgency to Advent. We sleep through God’s signals of alarm and act as if today is like every other day. But if we are casual with today, what chance is there that we will be careful with our lives? What hope is there that we can live less selfishly and more peacefully? In an attempt to rock us out of these complacent ways of living and believing, Jesus presents us with a most dreadful picture -- an intruder stepping into our bedroom while we’re sound asleep. "If the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into," Jesus says. The very fear of that nighttime break-in is the cause for a change in thinking, an adjustment in priorities.

It seems more than coincidental that World AIDS’ Day always falls during or right before the first week of Advent. The scale of the AIDS’ disaster seems overwhelming. In the face of a disaster of this magnitude, it is tempting to stay asleep, to wish we did not know about it, to wish we were still blind, for the need is so great, the changes necessary so enormous, and we feel so small. Last night a number of us attended a showing of a new documentary called “Out in India.” Tom Zehnder wrote the score for it, and Tim and Tom’s song, “Any Day”, was featured. It tells the story of two gay fathers and their two children going to India to mobilize artists to unite in struggling against the AID’s crisis. At one point David Gere said, “During the 80s our country had a president who prohibited anyone from mentioning AIDS in his presence. Imagine how things might be different if that hadn’t been the case.” Pretending to be asleep, pretending to be blind, will not work. With eyes open, we must proclaim our hope that God and good are greater than the deepest despair and the most despicable evil, greater even than the devastation of HIV/Aids. With our eyes wide open, we proclaim our faith in a God who turns the world upside down and calls us to act from mercy, not judgment. We are still free to choose whether or not we will act that way. What will we choose?