Day Sixteen: Public Service Announcement

Total mileage: 1,364

Song of the Day: “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” (R.E.M.)

Book of the Day: Revelation

Okay, since I’m about to do two services in two days, I’m taking a break from the church stuff tonight to address a problem that affects us all: the impending arrival of Armageddon. 

As of the last time I checked, the Rapture Index is at 182, approaching record highs.

The Doomsday Clock is positioned at 11:54 PM. 

I have no idea what the terror index says or even how to read it.

Natural disasters are occurring at a startling pace.

Katrina.

The earthquake in Haiti.

The earthquake in Japan.

The floods in the southeastern U.S.

General Climate Change type stuff.

There is war in the Middle East.

There is turmoil in Israel.

Lots of heavily-armed countries and ethnic groups hate each other.

They’ve made a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film.

Yep, the end is upon us.  In fact, according to some, the Rapture is supposed to happen tomorrow.

Incidentally, as best I can tell, Rapture Ready doesn’t seem to be on board with this whole 5.21.2011 thing; they’re more in support of the 2012 theory.  I disagree with them, but I respect their consistency on the issue (even though the 2012 thing is supposedly based on the Mayan calendar which, last I checked, wasn’t considered part of canon scripture).  Of course, the whole idea of the Rapture --the reaping of righteous souls from the face of the earth to mark the beginning of a time of tribulation before Christ’s return and reign-- originates with a selective reading of 1 Thessalonians:

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.  For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.  For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died.  For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.  Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.  Therefore encourage one another with these words. (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18)

Now, that could be taken in a lot of different ways.  Is it necessarily about the end of time, or could these simply be words of comfort when thinking about death?  After all, when Paul was writing, some of the people who had walked with Jesus were being martyred, and I’m sure that the people in the early church needed some words of encouragement.  Could these verses just be an assurance that, when Christ returns, the dead will not be excluded from the celebration?  What does it really mean to meet God in the air?  I’ll come back to this stuff later.  First, a quick detour.

My History with Left Behind

So, my opinions on the End of Days have gotten me into plenty of hot water in the past (particularly back in high school when I hadn’t quite learned to be more sensitive and respectful in religious discussions).  You see, what gets to me is that there’s an entire industry that’s been built around a sensationalized reading of the Book of Revelation, and nowhere is it better exemplified than in the Left Behind series of books and films.  Now, Tim LaHaye (the books’ primary author) openly describes Left Behind as fiction, “biblically-based fiction,” but fiction nonetheless.  For that, I hold no personal ill will against LaHaye or even the books themselves.  The problem comes when people read books like LaHaye’s and assume that they are actual carefully-exegeted accounts of the end of the world rather than works of fiction.  The books were not intended as prophecy, and yet, many people take them as such, and I suspect that this is the reason they sell so well.  I’ve met some people over the years who have taken these works far too seriously and literally, and one example was a Bible Study leader I had back in middle school.

This teacher was well-intentioned, but she had a lot of predictions about how the world was going to end, and I couldn’t escape the suspicion that she was putting a lot of stock in the Left Behind version of Revelation, rather than allowing the Bible to speak on a more spiritual level.  She was promoting a fear of the impending end of the world in willing listeners, and we were a captive audience.  As part of this process, she would often draw connections between the book of Revelation and current events/technological innovations/etc., and these links were often something of a stretch.  For example, Revelation 9 describes the coming of a great plague of locusts who are the size of horses, wear crowns on their heads, and-- actually, you know what?  Here’s the citation:

Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given authority like the authority of scorpions of the earth. . . . In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle.  On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women's hair, and their teeth like lions' teeth; they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle.  They have tails like scorpions, with stingers, and in their tails is their power to harm people for five months. (Revelation 9:3, 7-10)

Now, that description sounds like it has some pretty deep symbolic value.  Crowns of gold could imply earthly dominion.  The teeth imply ferocity.  The mixture of animal and human features implies a combination of intelligence with brute force.  That’s a really cool symbolic description of an oppressor that really would’ve resonated with readers in John’s day.  Still, this is not what we were taught in the Bible Study.  After reading this passage, our teacher asked us, “Now, doesn’t that sound like a helicopter to you?  Could it be that John was shown this in a vision and was trying to describe it to people who had never seen a helicopter before?”  I suppose that’s plausible, but that description really sounds nothing like a helicopter to me.  It sounds like it symbolizes something else (almost certainly something other than a helicopter).

Of course, this Bible Study was over a decade ago, and with the arrival of the year 2000, End Times hysteria might have been at even more of a fever pitch back then, so I can see how people were buying into this stuff.  I don’t blame my teacher for trying to draw links between Revelation and current events, but I think she was falling into a trap that plagues many End Times enthusiasts: trying to control the uncontrollable and know the unknowable.  The Bible tells us that no one will know the hour or the day, but the human mind isn’t content with that.  As humans, we are incredibly curious beings, and our natural instinct is to try to have a handle on everything about our world: where it came from, why things happen in certain ways, and how it all will end.  Now, thanks to the contributions of science and religion, we’ve pretty much nailed the first two, but what about the end?

The Bible is pretty vague really.  Yeah, Jesus alludes to the coming of the Kingdom, and the letters promise a perfected age, and we really don’t get exactly what Revelation was talking about (allegory for the fall of Caesar Domitian blah blah blah).   Based on the Bible, all we can really say with certainty is that, eventually, Jesus will come back and restore all things to glory, bringing about a perfected age.  Revelation calls it the New Jerusalem.  Hebrews calls it the culmination of the ages.  The Gospels call it the Kingdom of Heaven.  Some people interpret these to be metaphorical or allegorical with applications to daily life and significant spiritual significance.  Others see them as literal events, times, and places.  Personally, I see value in both of these approaches (maybe erring a bit more on the literal side), and all of this is perfectly orthodox.  On the other hand, trying to interpret the words of Revelation as some sort of Christian disaster movie --which, let’s be honest, is what Left Behind was-- comes mighty close to heretical, and I think it’s a dangerous mindset that misrepresents what Christ and Christianity are really about.

At the end of the Revelation study, we watched the Left Behind film starring Kirk Cameron, and rather than feeling scared or repentant or faithful, I was just bored.  No matter your opinion of the book, Left Behind is agreed to be one of the worst movies of all time, as the film was rushed out to ride the popularity of the book.  In fact, Tim LaHaye even sued the filmmakers for breach of contract because he thought that his work had been that poorly adapted.  As I sat there bored, I realized that the end of time is a pretty big business these days.  I don’t want to say that these people are in it for the money, because I think they genuinely want to spread the love of Christ, but it’s still gotten awfully commercial, and it plays on people’s fears and uncertainties about the future, and that’s not how Christians should behave in this day and age.  My teacher is not bad for buying into this; she was just falling into a borderline-heretical trap that had been laid by the innate insecurities and curiosities of the human subconscious.  It's not her fault.  Everyone was falling for it.

I think this serves as a pretty typical example of how End Times hysteria affects Christians.  Perfectly smart people grasp at the interpretations provided by respected and well-meaning Christian authors and pastors, and things just get out of hand.  I’ve heard the Left Behind version of the end of the world accepted as biblical fact plenty of times, and that’s not what the author of the book intended.  The idea of a climactic final showdown involving a politically savvy antichrist and the forces of darkness makes for great and compelling fiction, and if we view Revelation through a very specific lens in isolation from the rest of scripture, you could almost call it biblical.  Still, taking Left Behind as gospel is not really true to the larger vision of the Bible.  It hypes up the tribulation and time of trial at the expense of the beautiful vision of a world made perfect through Christ.  In short, it cheapens the return of our Lord, and so does this 5.21.2011 business.  So does Rapture Ready.  So does 2012.  So did a bunch of these other people . . .

A History of Sensationalism

Really, this is nothing new.  People have been predicting the end of the world as long as there’s been a world (especially my people, the Baptists).  A quick look through the writings of the early Baptists reveals a slew of comparisons between the King of England or the Catholic Church and the beast from Revelation.  In these treatises, political figures of the day are named as Satan unironically and unapologetically.  I realize that I can get a bit vitriolic in my writing from time to time, but I’ve got nothing on these guys.  These writers suggested that the church had festered into an unholy juggernaut, and these were its last days.  It was powerful rhetoric that grabbed a lot of people’s attentions, but rather than ending the world, the goal became to create a purified church free of corrupted leaders like King James (yes, that King James-- the one famous for the King James Version of the Bible and slightly less famous for ordering the imprisonment and execution of dissidents like the forerunners of my denomination).

Of course, around this time, you’ve also got people like John Winthrop calling on the language of Revelation and Matthew by suggesting that America is going to be the New Jerusalem, and from where I’m writing in poverty-stricken Chicago, I think it’s safe to question that assertion now.  Go a little further in American history, and the Millerites are selling their possessions in preparation for the end of the world in 1844.  Even the Progressive movement had its end-of-the-world-related overtones, and don’t even get me started on all the End Times buzz that’s been circulating ever since the founding of Israel in 1948.  The second Ghostbusters movie actually made light of predictions that the world would end in the 1980s, and Harold Camping himself (originator of the 5.21.2011 rapture theory) already made one incorrect prediction by saying that the world would end in 1994.  And, of course, who could forget Y2K?  Oh, Y2K!  I realize that this is quite a laundry list, but it is by no means exhaustive.

Predictions about the end of the world and the Second Coming are nothing new, and yet, people always buy into them.  For the most part, these are things that can be laughed off, but every now and then, something really serious can result from it.  The best approach is really just to ignore this stuff, because even the most ardent Rapture believers will tell you that we’re not supposed to know when it’s all going to go down.  Sure, the 5.21.2011 crew can point to “signs of the apocalypse,” but there’s been conflict in the Middle East for decades, disasters tragically occur all the time, every generation has its charismatic political and religious leaders, and the only thing that’s really changed about the world is our ability to report disaster via 24-hour news networks and the internet.  The world is not getting worse; we’re just becoming more aware of how much bad stuff is really out there, and our brains haven’t quite absorbed that yet.  Maybe instead of lamenting the perceived downward turn of the world and formulating theories about when and how it will end, we should focus on lifting the world up through prayer and relief efforts instead.

You know, just a thought.

Getting Back to 1 Thessalonians . . .

Of course, in all of this, I think it’s important to keep the rest of that 1 Thessalonians passage in mind.  I think it’s a good word of caution against people who would like to make prophecies about the end of time to spread panic and fear:

Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you.  For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.  When they say, "There is peace and security," then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape!  But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. (1 Thessalonians 5:1-5)

Listen, we know that, eventually, all this stuff has to come to an end somehow.  Impermanence is a basic part of the human condition, and that same impermanence also extends to the earth and even the universe.  Even if you don’t believe in the second coming of Christ, science tells us that the sun will eventually convert all of its matter from hydrogen to helium and eventually on down the periodic table to iron, at which point the reactions in the sun will cease to produce the energy that keeps earth so abundantly alive.  We will more than likely go extinct long before then due to nuclear war or climate change or a meteor or who knows what.  The world will end.  There’s no way around that.  There’s also no point in dwelling on it and no point in trying to predict when and how it will all come to pass.

The Bible calls on us not to be concerned with the end.  We can’t know when it will happen, and we have to trust that God will work everything out.  Instead of spreading hysteria, the Bible calls on us to spread love, to work for the kingdom here on earth, and to be a light in times of darkness.  So don’t buy into the hype.  Don’t try to scare a neighbor with talk of the end of the world.  Show love instead.  As Christians, we believe that Christ will someday come physically and make all things right, and that is a cause for rejoicing, not fear.  Until that time comes, Jesus walks with us as an advocate, filling our hearts with the same compassion and mercy we were shown.

A fringe group of Christians believe that the Rapture will occur tomorrow at 6PM, ushering in five months of tribulation before the end of the world in October.  I’m going to go ahead and suggest that they’re probably wrong.  Still, we should be showing love to the world constantly, as if that end really were just around the corner.  We should be seeking to lift up the world and make it a more livable place by acting on the command to love our God and love one another.  The world will end when it’s supposed to end, and there’s no point trying to figure out when that will be.  To borrow Rob Bell’s language, in the end, love will win, but that’s no reason that it shouldn’t win now as well.

Don’t spend tomorrow afraid of the end.

Rejoice in new beginnings.

Rejoice in the knowledge that Christ will eventually make all things right.

And, in the meantime, love.

Peace and Blessings,

Tom

P.S.-- Personally, I always thought we'd get blown up by aliens, but first, we'd design a ship containing the genetic material of every lifeform on earth so that we could start over on an artificially-terraformed world crafted from the swirling hot gases of a nebula through a fusion of technology, nature, and the indomitable human spirit.  Also, that movie was way better than Left Behind, and the Christian symbolism was actually a lot more effective.