 By The Rev. Ted Thornton
It’s a Waiting Game If you got to church on time this morning, a few moments ago you sat through a major event in the geophysical history of our planet. It happened at three minutes past ten while we were listening to Heather’s welcome. Happy Solstice! Spring is right around the corner, right? And, here’s one more word about today: today in the Anglican tradition, December 21st is the Feast Day of Saint Thomas, perhaps the most famous voice of doubt in all Christian history, Thomas, who in John’s Gospel says he won’t believe in Jesus unless he can touch the wounds made by the nails of the cross; Thomas, who, in turn then also in John’s Gospel, is invited by Jesus to put his fingers in those wounds, and thereupon utters the strongest affirmation of Jesus’ divinity found anywhere in the Bible, “My Lord and my God.” (John 20:28) I was ordained to the Priesthood on the eve of the Feast of Saint Thomas, the evening of December 20th, 1978 (forty-seven years ago last night). Thomas has always held a special place in my heart. Advent: It’s a waiting game. Our gospel eyes and ears this morning turn to Joseph, one of the great biblical models of faithfulness, endurance, and patient waiting: patience, faithfulness, and endurance in the face of powerful social and cultural forces aligned against him, against his decision to stay with Mary and help her raise the son of God. In Joseph’s part of the world, women pregnant out of wedlock and their male partners were and remain to this day targets of honor killings, carried out usually, by the unlucky woman’s father and brothers. Thank God Joseph listened to and heeded that dream! Joseph, patron saint of all fathers, and, I like to think, the unofficial patron saint of all step fathers, step fathers like me. The patience, faithfulness, and endurance of Joseph are visible in some of the greatest Christian art in history. By the seventh century Byzantine period, artistic conventions of the manger begin centering our attention more fully on Mary and the baby Jesus. Joseph is more often moved to the side, standing among the animals, and we all know what stabled animals do on stable floors. Sometimes he’s brooding. Often he looks lonely. Often he’s depicted as a much older man, more of a grandfather to the adolescent Mary than a husband. Beginning in the sixteenth century, at the behest of Counter-Reformation theologians like Johannes Molanus, this trend is reversed somewhat and artists are encouraged to bring Joseph back to center stage, now depicted as a younger, more vigorous man, as most fathers of newborns tend to be. And, for all the attention devoted to Mary and the baby, it’s a very vigorous Joseph who in his own way makes the story move, especially in his efforts to save his little family from the wrath of Herod by leading their escape into Egypt, Herod, the Roman puppet King, whose paranoid jealousies led him to murder one of his wives, along with his eldest son and heir, and before that the high priest of Jerusalem, whom, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, Herod drowned at a pool party at his winter palace in Jericho. The story of Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” in Matthew 2, all boys under the age of two, certainly fits with what we know of his paranoid, murderous proclivities. Advent is the season of waiting in our Christian calendar. Patience, endurance, and faithfulness, as embodied in Jesus’ step-father Joseph, are the marks and the fruits of waiting. Much of life is spent waiting for things to happen. We wait to board flights. We wait for people to arrive. We wait in lines at checkout counters. Life is largely a waiting game. If we know what’s good for us, we learn early on to do our waiting with patience and mindfulness. Doctors and nurses refer to us as “patients” because we spend a lot of our time in their offices patiently waiting to see them. Our younger daughter, Annie, learned the word “wait” at a very young age from her grandmother as they sat in a doctor’s office before one of the countless medical appointments and procedures Annie has had to endure since her birth. “We’re waiting, dear,” her grandmother would say. Since that first time, Annie, who has multiple health issues, was encouraged to regard the word “wait” in an active sense, as an opportunity, never as a passive chore, never something that happens to her. Waiting is a discipline. She doesn’t like it, but, now in her forties, she does it, time after time. Perhaps the greatest literary meditation on waiting and what it means is Samuel Becket’s play “Waiting for Godot.” It’s a play about two men on a lonely road who await the arrival of a third named Godot, who, you may have guessed by now, never shows up. It’s also about the hopes and fears that go along with waiting. It’s a play that underscores the importance of patience and how to endure the discomfort and lack of certainty when we’re waiting for something to happen. When it was first performed in the United States, it starred two great American actors: Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell. Some of you may have never heard of Tom Ewell, but I’m quite sure many of you know who Bert Lahr is. He played the cowardly lion alongside Judy Garland in the classic 1939 film version of “The Wizard of Oz.” The first performance of “Waiting for Godot” in the United States occurred in – of all places – the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Miami. The year was 1956. Now, it turned out that choosing a Miami night club filled with vacationers to open a play about waiting for something to happen was a really bad idea. Think about it: do people go to nightclubs where the entertainment features waiting for something to happen? No, people don’t go to nightclubs to wait for things to happen. People go to nightclubs expecting instant gratification, instant satisfaction in the forms of drink, food, and entertainment. So, they started walking out in droves only minutes into the show. The play bombed; it closed after a very short run. One year later, in 1957, the play was produced in – again of all places - San Quentin Prison, one of the most notorious jails in the country and the former home of California’s gas chamber. The ferry into San Francisco from Larkspur passes up close right alongside the prison. I’ve ridden that ferry. San Quentin - close up - is a frightening sight. As the ferry glided along in the channel, an inmate stared out at us through a fenced in exercise yard, his fingers clutching the chain link wires, the high, thick walls of the cell blocks looming behind him. They put the play on in an old shed where, in the days before the gas chamber, condemned prisoners were hanged. The actors were nervous as the lights went down in the room with its 1,400 noisy inmates. Everyone in that shed knew that, contrary to what happened at the Coconut Grove, no one in the audience was going to be walking out. But, fifteen minutes into the play a miracle happened: a deep hush descended on the room as the inmates began listening with rapt attention and kept listening all the way to the end. It turned out the play made such an impact on the inmates that they started a drama group inside the prison. Why? Why was the experience at San Quentin so different from the one at Miami’s Coconut Grove? Because, the play is a masterful exploration of what it means to wait, and those convicts – many of whom were lifers with no hope of parole - knew what it means and what it takes to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait. Are there prisons in your life? What do you need to do to walk out of them? Do your cellmates include despair, hopelessness, and worry? If you’re feeling locked in a prison of some kind this Advent and Christmas season, try cultivating prayerfully the capacity to wait patiently for release. And while you’re waiting, remember that the good life is a life of good doing. What good things can you do while you wait? Take a lesson from the San Quentin inmates who, after watching Waiting for Godot, were inspired to start their drama group. It’s Joseph with whom we stand this time around on the threshold of one of the two chief theological pole stars of our faith - Christmas and Easter - the mix of flesh and spirit that constitutes our human nature: the two pole stars of our our Christian faith when what we’re made of becomes most intensely revealed to us. Christmas is one of those pole stars. Christmas is that point in history when Spirit, Logos, the Word, the omnipotent power of God becomes flesh incarnate, born into human form in Jesus. The Easter season is the other pole star of our faith, and the more important one. The weeks of Easter mark that time when Jesus’ earthly life ends and returns to Spirit. The dialectical relationship of flesh and spirit at Christmas and Easter, a relationship often experienced as tension, is a mirror reflecting our human nature, recalling in the story of Jesus’ our own birth, foreseeing in Jesus’ death and resurrection at Easter our own death and return to God, and pervading everything we think and do in the time between those two great events in our lives: the who we and the who we can be. It’s a waiting game. What are you waiting for this Advent? Perhaps the answer will come to you this Christmas. I pray that it will. If it doesn’t, keep waiting with patience and prayerful trust in God that in time your release will come. My wife wears a ring on the small finger of her right hand bearing her family’s motto, an inscription first ascribed to the Roman poet Horace. It reads, “Nil desperandum,” (“Never despair!”). Horace is also credited for first uttering the famous phrase, “Carpe Diem (“seize the day”).” Seize each day this Christmas season to love others even better. And don’t forget to love yourselves as you love others: get plenty of sleep, eat and drink sensibly, and do what you can to alleviate stress. You know the drill. Merry Christmas and Every Blessing! Amen.  by the Rev. Ted Thornton
In Luke 10:9, Jesus instructs the seventy missionaries he’s sending out to spread the gospel with these words, “...say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ “ Imagine you’re a member of an updated 21st century group of “Seventy” called to go out into today’s world this coming week to proclaim this message. How will you choose to describe the kingdom of God to those who don’t know or don’t like God-talk? Is this assignment crazy? Think of what the original Seventy might have thought, especially after listening to Jesus admonish them about the resistance they were likely to encounter in a Roman province infamous for its hostility to Jews and Judaism. Jesus could not have put the danger more bluntly: “I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves (Luke 10:3).” Failure is at least in part assumed. Now remember: Jesus, like some of his Jewish contemporaries, was an apocalyptic prophet who didn’t think the world had much time to get itself ready to meet God. I don’t think many of us today really think that way or live that way. We more closely resemble Mark Twain, who said, “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky. They're always twenty years behind everything.” (Apologies to Kentucky!) In any case, most of us live our lives as if tomorrow will come and all too fast with its litany of first-of-the-work-week challenges. So, you should think about the words you will use in your preaching about the kingdom of God. For starters, is “kingdom” even the right word for our times? The evangelists after all didn’t take the Greek word basileia - “king” - literally to mean a person with a crown - so much as a realm or domain within us and between us [our Godly household or oikumene as depicted on the Whiteman window over the altar], the physical, emotional, and spiritual space we inhabit through which God’s love moves or tries to move if only we will let it. After all, haven’t we in our times had enough of kings actual and wannabe? “No Kings, no kings!,” shouted five million people across this country as they marched a few weeks ago on Flag Day, June 14, 2025. The “kingdom of God” is a communal attitude, an orientation, a sphere of action, a commitment to live a Godly life. And so, a growing number of Christians think a better translation of “kingdom of God” is “realm of God”: “realm” because that word conveys better the conviction that God’s presence is found in the way we conduct our everyday lives, not in the symbols of crown, scepter, and absolute power as we see them in history. This brings us to the most important question of all for how we might best proclaim the realm of God in our times: which is more important, proclaiming Jesus’ as our personal savior, or performing acts of loving kindness for others (what Jews call chesed)? Both themes are present in the New Testament: emphasis on right actions in the synoptic gospels and emphasis on belief in Jesus as savior in John. Have the meanings of love and belief changed since New Testament times? Actually, members of the early Church drew no distinction between Godly love and belief. They regarded practicing loving kindness toward others as the primary way we express our belief or faith in God and God’s son Christ Jesus. They didn’t think you could separate belief in Jesus from doing what Jesus told us to do: to treat one another with loving kindness. A reading of the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 5-7] makes this pretty clear. We express our belief and our faith in Jesus by behaving lovingly, compassionately, mercifully, and in the spirit of forgiveness toward one another. Martin Thielen, a retired Southern Baptist minister put it this way, “At its core, authentic spirituality is not about beliefs. It’s about behavior.” Rev. Thielen cites a scene from The Americans, a TV drama that aired from 2013 to 2018 in which one of the characters asks, “What if you don’t believe in God, or religion, or prayer? Her friend responds, “None of those things matter. All that matters is how we treat each other.” And, this corresponds to the dominant theme that unites both the synoptic gospels and John. The Great Commandment in Matthew 22:36-40 - “Love God and love your neighbor” - fits tongue and groove with John 13:34, where Jesus tells his disciples, "A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." Rev. Thielen concludes, “This ‘new’ commandment is a call to us to love each other in the same way that Jesus loved his disciples and the world. It emphasizes the importance of practical acts of love, kindness, and service within the Christian community and in the world at large.” This isn’t an easy fit for us in a world where zero sum thinking is the day to day “kingdom” we live in. Nevertheless, we Christians, the new Seventy, are called to challenge this plague of zero sum thinking that infects our relations with one another. Damien Cave wrote in a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (March 1, 2025, “Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out?“). Mr. Cave challenges the notion that the best outcome is winner takes all. How much saner and productive for all of us to work toward an outcome built upon collaboration and cooperation, where benefits and risks are shared across the board.The belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another has no place in the realm of God. Here’s a final problem for the new Seventy. Does the realm of God within us expect us and others to be perfect? This obsessive and cruel pursuit has spawned more bloodshed than any other philosophical and political doctrine in history. Think of Robespierre in France (as many as 17,000 heads fell to the guillotine), Lenin and Stalin in Communist Russia (thirty million dead), Pol Pot in Cambodia (seven million dead), and the worst of them all, Mao in China where an estimated sixty-million starved to death during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” sacrificed in the pursuit of a perfect society. Each of these leaders believed in the perfectibility of human behavior. Consider how at least one of these enterprises ended: the French Revolution finishes with Napoleon crowning himself emperor, a far more absolute ruler than the king whose head they cut off. It took France nearly a century, until the Third Republic came into being in 1870, to usher in a more stable form of democracy. We have badly misunderstood what Jesus meant when he says in Matthew 5:48, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." I’m among those who think that translation is again the problem here, especially when taken out of context. In Matthew 5:48, the Greek word translated as "perfect" is τέλειος (teleios). Instead of perfect, a better translation is the goal of completeness, maturity, or wholeness, not faultlessness or sinlessness, and certainly not literal perfection. Jesus certainly didn’t think perfection was a reachable end. He dramatically illustrates this point when he tells the mob that’s about to stone the adulterous woman to death in John 8:7, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” What Jesus means is that we are to strive to love one another as God loves us, and here’s the important part: to love one another without prejudice or partiality, not favoring one religion or race over another, or one sexual orientation over another, and to do so even if we can’t do it perfectly. And, when we fail, as we’re bound to, to confess our failure and ask God and those we’ve offended to forgive us.This is how the realm of God works, folks. The expectation that we will fail or make mistakes along the way is built right in. It’s one of the fundamental articles in the Constitution of the realm of God. The late poet and singer Leonard Cohen expressed this beautifully in his song, Anthem. “Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.” Your light, my light, our light; we shine through our cracks, our shortcomings, our errors, our vulnerabilities, not through our vain and selfish fantasies of perfection. Good luck and Blessings as you go forth this coming week to proclaim and live in the realm of God. Amen.  By The Rev. Ted Thornton
From John, chp. 19, verse 30 we read, “When he had received the drink, Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” A few millennia ago on this day, this Good Friday, Jesus’ business in this world was finished. What about your business in this world? Is your business finished? Is what the world sees when it looks at you the final version of you? What is the unfinished business in your life? There are a great many untidy and unfinished businesses in my life. With that line from our general prayer of confession in mind, I ask myself, “what have I left undone that I ought to have done?” When I sit and pray with people who are dying, more than once they’ve said to me, “I’m not afraid of death. I’m at peace with God on that score. What frightens me, and what I’m so sorry about is the mess I’m leaving behind for my beloved family to deal with.” Unfinished business. Adults in the room: have you discussed with your family or left written wishes to help them plan for the time after you’ve passed on? What unfinished business remains to prepare for your departure from this life? Consider the unfinished business of human society, not only here but across the globe. One of our penitential keynotes this Lent has been the role we Christians have played throughout history spreading the plague of antisemitism. Just before Lent began, some of us explored the role infantile narcissism plays in the creation of the cruel patterns of hatred and behavior directed at Jews, hateful remarks and behavior that have also targeted members of other minority racial, ethnic, religious, and immigrant groups today as well of those with different sexual identifications and how we Christians have been complicit in all of this. Holocaust camp survivor Elie Wiesel was once asked if he thought Christians were responsible for the Holocaust. He replied, “Christians were certainly involved in creating and carrying out the Holocaust. Was it the Christianity in them that caused them to do so,” he asked? Answering his own question, he said, “I hope not.” Good Friday is a solemn and subdued day to be sure. But, we need to remember that Jesus’ suffering ended a long time ago. In a few days we will once again proclaim his triumph over death. At a minimum, we bear witness to that triumph in the faith of the millions who have gone on before us throughout the two thousand years since it all happened. We rest assured even on this solemn day that for the Jesus who walked through this world, there are no more friends or enemies betraying him and abandoning, forsaking, or denying him. No more ridicule, no more false accusations. No more taunts from the mob. No more crowns of thorns and lashes across the back, no more brutality and sadism at the hands of his Roman executioners. For all its grim fixation on the cross, Good Friday is not really a day about a wrongful death. It’s a day about taking stock, which after all is what we’ve been doing since the long season of Lent began on Ash Wednesday. That was the day we started thinking harder about what kind of dust we’re made of, about who we are, about our unfinished business as those who say we want to follow Christ Jesus. How can we lead better lives, how can we be more kind, more good, more loving; how can we be released from our prejudices and become truly reconciled one with another especially in light of the fact that we don’t have unlimited amounts of time to finish our business? This is the real meaning of mortality, the real meaning of “dust to dust,” the sense that our own eventual deaths define a temporal boundary for us which is the price we pay for living in the natural, physical world. Lent introduces a healthy sense of urgency into our lives and it all comes to a head on Good Friday. Good Friday is not really, then, a day of grief alone. It’s a day that calls us beyond grieving into renewal, taking steps toward finishing our unfinished business. In short, Good Friday marks the final stage in our preparation for Easter. May God Bless you as we all strive toward finishing our own personal and collective unfinished business. AMEN.  By The Rev. Ted Thornton
The force fueling what we know as rapture theology was persecution, real and imagined. Paul’s little church in Thessalonika in northern Macedonia in 51 AD was undergoing real persecution by its religious opponents. Paul wrote his first letter in an attempt to counsel perseverance and hope. The key text is 4:17 (NIV). There we read, “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” This text gained the nickname “rapture text” because St. Jerome in his Latin translation of the Bible used the Latin verb rapio - meaning to snatch away - to translate Paul’s original Greek. More about this in a minute. But, here’s the quiding question for today: Is rapture the right way to think about leaving this world? Well, I was once a member of a small group invited to be raptured up to heaven. Had I accepted, I might not be here with you today to tell the story. Nearly fifty years ago, I was a student in a seminar at Harvard Divinity School with theologian Harvey Cox titled “Contemporary Theological Movements.” Harvey is now ninety-five years young. He’s the most influential theologian of our times. He published his first best seller, The Secular City, in 1965, and he’s still at it: in 2022, at the age of 93, he published his latest title - A New Heaven. One day, as I and my dozen or so classmates entered Harvey’s seminar room, we noticed a pair of strangers already sitting at the conference table. They’d been invited by one of our classmates who introduced them as representatives of the “UFO religion.” UFO Religion” is an umbrella nickname that covers many groups. Their starting point is the belief that messengers from heaven like themselves will come down to rescue the faithful from this evil world and “rapture” them, or “snatch them up” to heaven, as Paul puts it. Our visitors claimed they were no longer living mortal, physical lives. They’d been raptured up to heaven, and then sent back down to earth to rapture new converts into the hereafter. After about half an hour, Harvey Cox, who’d remained silent up to that point, had heard enough. He slammed his Bible down on the conference table and said, “Okay, time to show me where in the Bible the word ‘rapture’ appears. I dare you to find it.” Well, they couldn’t do it because the word rapture cannot be found anywhere in the Bible. Harvey then rose to his feet and stamped out saying he was heading home to seek some “rapture” of his own (he lived just down the street from the “Div” School). And so, our professor deserted us. We continued the discussion with these two guys on our own, and - no - we did not accept their invitation to join the ranks of the raptured. Harvey Cox was right: the English noun “rapture” cannot be found anywhere in the Bible. The closest you can come to it is in St. Jerome’s translation of the Bible from Greek to Latin, known as the “Vulgate Bible” (Vulgate meaning “common tongue”), which he completed in the late fourth century A.D. Jerome translated First Thessalonians 4:17 using a form of the Latin verb rapio which means "to snatch up"). Our violent English word “rape” comes from this word. Jerome used a form of this word altogether twenty times in his Latin translation. Before we go any further let’s clarify some terms. Rapture theology is a way some Christians understand eschatology. Eschatology comes from a Greek word meaning “last things,” and refers to descriptions of what will happen when the world comes to its end, or its “eschaton.” The literary form by which descriptions of the eschaton are transmitted is called “apocalyptic,” coming from a Greek word that means “revealing.” That’s how the final book of the Bible, bearing the Greek title, Apocalypse of John, came to be called in general English usage The Book of Revelation. The actual event at which the end occurs is often called informally “the apocalypse,” but in formal theology (“God-talk”) it’s called the eschaton. Finally, another word associated with eschatological events is Armageddon, the place where some believe a final cosmic battle will begin between the forces of good and the forces of evil. This word appears only once in the Bible, yet it’s one of the most familiar words in Christian discussions of the eschaton. The single occurrence is in Revelation 16, verse 16 (“And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”). Now, Armageddon was not just the stuff of eschatological nightmares; it was a real geographical place in ancient Israel (so by the way was hell, but that’s a story for another day). Armageddon was a city in ancient northern Israel named Megiddo, in Hebrew, Har Megiddo: “Megiddo Hill.” You can visit its archaeological remains. At its height during the reign of Solomon in the 900s B.C.E., Megiddo lay astride one of the busiest trade routes between Egypt and regions to the northeast, and as such was the scene of many battles as people competed with one another. It’s this history that led to the myth that at the eschaton, the final great battle between the forces of good and evil will occur there. Relatively speaking, no one paid much attention to biblical passages predicting the rapture until the nineteenth century in some parts of Europe and our own United States. Then, thanks to ministers like John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Scofield there was a surge of interest in Christian eschatological thinking, including rapture theology: the conviction that Christ will suddenly snatch “his bride,” the Church, and carry her off to heaven before the eschaton begins. Darby and Scofield were what we in the trade call “premillennial dispensationalists”: that’s a mouthful for people who believe Christ will return to the world at a particular place and time to prepare it for its final thousand years before it ends. The problem with this idea is that there isn’t a shred of support for it in scripture. The passage most often cited to tell us how it will really happen is Matthew 24, verse 36, where Jesus says, “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (NIV).” The Trinitarian Congregational Church in Northfield, where I served as a Supply minister for three months during Covid, called Cyrus Scofield as its pastor in 1895. Unfortunately, he is remembered as a disagreeable bully who, apparently not busy enough with pastoring, strove to control what was being taught in D. L. Moody’s Northfield school just up the street. Those who knew John Nelson Darby remember him likewise as an ill-tempered, controlling, and scornful curmudgeon. In Massachusetts during this period, William Miller persuaded tens of thousands of his followers that the world would end on October 22,1844. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was asked if he was prepared. He replied, “The end of the world does not affect me; I can get along without it.” A new surge of interest in the rapture and in eschatology began in the early 1980s, even reaching the White House. President Reagan once told a pro-Israeli lobbyist in 1983, 'You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we're the generation that's going to see that come about.” Reagan’s interest in Armageddon prompted one writer to investigate the activities of Pantex, one of the nation’s nuclear bomb assembly and storage sites, located in Amarillo, Texas. Amarillo plays host to a number of evangelical sects who believe fervently in Armageddon, and some of them believe that Armageddon and the rapture of the faithful at the eschaton will come to pass by way of a nuclear holocaust. Such are the beliefs of some who divide the world between absolute good and absolute evil, between the followers of the Lord and the followers of Satan. For them, nuclear war is the Armageddon that the Book of Revelation predicts and Rapture is the vehicle by which they will be saved while all others are destroyed and damned eternally. Rapture theology reached its height in popularity with Hal Lindsey’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which was published in 1970, and which the New York Times called the best selling non-fiction book of the decade. A few decades later came the “Left Behind” series, sixteen novels authored by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye that began appearing in 1995. So far, sixty million copies of the Left Behind books have been sold worldwide. The thesis of these books is that just before the Second Coming of Christ all genuine Christian believers in Jesus will be raptured: they will go straight to heaven into God’s presence without first passing through death, like the two gentlemen who came to my seminar. Those who don’t believe in Jesus will be “left behind” on earth to suffer and perish at Armageddon. They made a movie based on these books: a kind of Christian “Home Alone” film. In the end, what’s most disturbing about rapture theology and what’s missing is any vision of spiritual community, any vision of shared humanity in which all God's children put their hopes in a peaceful and just coexistence. And, this is the point that so many miss about biblical apocalyptic expressions of the eschaton: they are not predictions of the destruction of this world but allegorical cries of hope for release from tyranny in this world and the restoration of peace and justice in the here and now. The Book of Revelation was written by a man named John, almost certainly not the author of the Gospel, but another John who was sent into exile on the Aegean island of Patmos during the persecutions of the Roman Emperor Domitian at the end of the first century A.D. John’s book is an allegorical cry, not for the eschaton, but for release from the rule of Rome and restoration of the rule of God in what the Book of Revelation calls a “new Jerusalem (3:12 and 21:2).” Likewise, the apocalyptic Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible stands as a Jewish protest against the extreme Hellenism of the Greek ruler Antiochus IV, who in 167 BCE profaned the temple in Jerusalem by setting up an altar to Zeus there and sacrificing a pig on it. This event is referred to in Daniel 11:31 as “the abomination that makes desolate,” a phrase repeated by Jesus in his prediction of the destruction of the temple in Mark 13:14 and Matthew 24:15. Jesus thought the temple priesthood had been taken over by men whose principal loyalty was to Rome, not to God. And finally, Paul’s aim in his First Letter to the Thessalonians was to encourage his little church there to persevere in the face of persecution from far more numerous rival religious groups. But, let’s return to our guiding question: is rapture the right way to be thinking about leaving this world? As bad as things are in our world, you and I have not lived as members of a persecuted religious minority. The holy spirit speaks to us in different voices than it did in the first centuries of Christianity. I take that to mean that we should not read some parts of the Bible so literally. The rabbinical approach to the Jewish Torah has long been as follows: read a portion every day, pray about what you read, then behave according to the principle Jews call in Hebrew, chesed: doing “acts of loving kindness.” That’s very different from reading scripture with your hands tied behind your back. All of us want a future. Will it be an inclusive or an exclusive future? Will it be a future where some are damned and “left behind?” Does that vision make any sense to people who say they believe that God is love? Will it be a “meeting in the air,” as the old gospel tune has it, or a meeting here on the ground of God's creation, the good earth, where we can together - all of us - work to establish a healthy, sustainable present and future for all? It’s a choice between fatalism and hope. Which will we choose? Never give up on this beautiful world God created for you and me. Repent of the harm we do to it daily and to one another. Take a lesson from Harvey Cox. Look to the here and now for your rapture. Look for it in a gorgeous sunset. Look for it in beautiful music. Look for it in the faces of your friends and loved ones. Don’t let people like Tim LaHaye and those who are building nuclear weapons in Texas have the final say on rapture. Amen. |
Mission
We believe God is calling us to cultivate a community of love, joy, hope, and healing. Jesus is our model for a life of faith, compassion, hospitality, and service. We strive to be affirming and accessible, welcoming and inclusive; we seek to promote reconciliation, exercise responsible stewardship, and embrace ancient traditions for modern lives.
Office HoursTuesday 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Thursday 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Friday 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Closed holidays Our gardens and grounds are open from dawn to dusk for the community to pray, rest, be. Please help us take care of this sacred space by following the outdoor ethic & principle of “leave no trace.” |
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