Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
What About the Rapture?
Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Bernard Brandon Scott who first introduced this interpretation of this passage when he spoke here at Knox in 2008.
What do you do with a problematic piece of scripture? Our reading today absolutely counts as one of those because, to our very modern minds, it describes something impossible.
Do we dismiss it as the dreams of unsophisticated people who didn’t have the benefit of a scientific education? Do we take it literally and try to work out all the implications that follow? Dismissing it is a problem, if you consider scripture to have authority, but taking it literally has problems too. Both approaches are too simplistic.
There is a large branch of Evangelical Christianity that takes it literally. This is the passage that gives rise to the idea of the “rapture” where Jesus returns and sweeps faithful people up into the air, to be saved from the coming trials and tribulations of the Apocalypse.
My Dad had a bumper sticker in lime green that he put on the passenger-side dash-board of the family car. It read:
WARNING: Jesus is coming soon. Driver will disappear!
The youth group that Lori was part of joked about “rapture helmets” so you wouldn’t hurt your head as you were pulled into the air, through all the lumber and plaster of whatever building you happened to be in. Nobody really worried about head injuries; they assumed that Jesus would protect everyone, but they were clearly thinking about the literal application of this biblical image.
More seriously, it has entered popular culture. In 1995 the book Left Behind was published about the dramatic adventures of people who weren’t raptured, and who became believers when the miracle of millions of people being raptured proved the literal truth of the Bible.
This led to a whole series of books and in 2014 to the movie Left Behind starring Nicholas Cage. This year saw the release of a sequel – Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist, starring Kevin Sorbo (the former star of the Hercules and Andromeda TV shows).
There are millions of dollars tied up in this interpretation of scripture, which should give you a sense of how widespread this vision of the end of the world has become, at least where the more Evangelical versions of Christianity hold sway. It even contributes to US financial and military support for Israel because in this theology, the return of the Jewish people to the promised land is held to be a sign that the Son of Man will come within a generation.
This is a bit of a problem, since a biblical generation is 40 years and the state of Israel was formed in 1949. But, inconvenient mathematics aside, a lot of modern American apocalyptic thinking arises from the attempt to turn these various biblical passages into a coherent, literal narrative.
When the Apostle Paul wrote the first letter to the Thessalonians, he didn’t know about all the stuff in the Book of Revelations – that wouldn’t be written until decades after his death. He would have been astonished that his words were so tightly woven with that dark vision of the end of the world, because his vision was very hopeful and positive.
Paul followed the teachings of Jesus closely, which included a vision of the “Son of Man” as pictured in the book of Daniel. The Son of Man was a human who would descend from heaven to institute the Kingdom of God on Earth.
The early Christian interpretation was that the nameless Son of Man in Daniel was clearly Jesus and that was why they expected him to return, having been born on earth like every other human, then ascending to heaven and returning to bring God’s just kingdom into being as Daniel’s vision had proclaimed.
Paul, like others of his generation, expected Jesus to return right away, before that generation had died out. This left some serious questions when people started to die of accidents or disease or age and they were asking Paul: What about them?; What will happen to them?; Will they miss out on being part of the Kingdom of God?
There was no expectation that they would go to heaven. Earth was the place for humans; so, what would happen?
Paul answers that question in this passage. According to his best understanding of what Jesus had promised, he incorporated his understanding of the resurrection which was a spiritual resurrection into something he called a spiritual body – as we see in 1 Cor. 15 – and the idea of the Son of Man coming to be the Earthly ruler of the Kingdom of God.
So, why were the dead in Christ being raised up at that moment? And why were the faithful being caught up into the air? To welcome the arriving Son of Man, to welcome Jesus as he comes into his kingdom. It’s like crowds spilling out of the city gates to welcome the conquering hero and escort him to his throne except that, as Daniel said, he was coming from Heaven.
So, instead of spilling out onto the road, the faithful, those resurrected and those still living, had to greet him in the air. Frankly, Paul’s theology here presents an opposite vision of the return of Jesus to that presented in the book of Revelations. It’s not surprising: in Paul’s day the official persecutions had not started and things were quite hopeful. By the time of Revelations, the full might of Rome was murdering Christians. It was a much more violent time and produced much more dire visions about the return of Jesus.
Our circumstances don’t match the time of Paul or the time of Revelations.
I believe that each age must struggle with what it means to make real the Kingdom of God in our midst and discover how to bring Jesus into this world. As we do this, we should not forget the visions that have shaped our scriptures, but we should remember that they are just that: visions – images of what we hope for, not literal predictions of what will be.
How shall we, as Christians, try to make the teachings of Jesus come to life in this place, in this time? What does it mean to bring the Kingdom of God into being in the 21st century?
I hope we have that question in mind as we set priorities with the new ideas we are considering as presented in the New Directions list.
We are God’s people: how do we do God’s work in this time and place and into the future? I hope we can show at least as much inspiration in answering this question, as the people of the Bible did.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 