“Left Behind”

A Sermon delivered at the First Universalist Society in Franklin

By the Rev. Carol Rosine

November 6, 2005

On Prairie Home Companion a year or so ago, there was a skit in which it becomes evident that the Rapture has taken place.  In this skit, Garrison Keillor places telephone calls to some folks that he assumes should be in the know—Billy Graham, the Pope, President Bush—but when they answer their phones, they are all unaware of what has happened.  And so he decides to call a Boston number and gets a recording:  “Thank you for calling the Unitarian Universalist Association.  Nobody is here to take your call so please leave a message and we will return your call as soon as possible.”  We hear the sound of a trumpet in the background and an astonished voice saying, “Oh!  My Clothes!”  And then silence.  Garrison Keillor responds,  “The Unitarians?  Gone?  Let me turn on the radio….”

A radio announcer is saying “Meanwhile in Boston, hundreds of men and women who were protesting the war in Iraq suddenly disappeared, according to eyewitnesses, leaving their clothing, all of which was made from natural fibers, lying in the street, ….”  Keillor interrupts the announcer,  “The Unitarians have been raptured.  Why?  They don’t want salvation, they want closure.  If a Unitarian ascends to heaven and no one is around to see it, did it actually happen?”

We laugh and yet, millions of Americans apparently are deadly serious about the Rapture.  The belief is that the end of time is drawing near, that at any moment now Jesus is going to secretly return and transport all true believers into heaven.  A Christian Century article explains it like this:  “Cars, trains and planes will fly into one another as believers are suddenly taken heaven-ward, leaving their clothes, personal effects, and vehicles behind.  (You may have seen a bumper sticker reading “Warning: in case of rapture this vehicle will be unmanned.”)  Those ‘left behind’ will endure seven years of tribulation, mostly inflicted on the world by the Antichrist, disguised as the leader of a one-world government (read:  the UN).  Some of those shocked by the sudden disappearance of their loved ones will become true “Bible-believing” Christians who will band together to resist the wiles of the Antichrist and conduct secret evangelism campaigns meant to grow the power and numbers of their ‘tribulation force.’   Finally, after seven years of death-dealing by the Antichrist and growing resistance by the tribulation force, Christ will return a second time to defeat the forces of evil at Armageddon, a large plain in Israel.  He will then reign, before the world finally ends, for 1,000 years, over a politically reconstituted kingdom of Israel, full of Jews who have converted to Christianity.”  

Variations of this belief have been around for a couple hundred years, but its immense popularity right now is due to the publication of a series of Christian novels known as the Left Behind series.  Have any of you read them?   These high-tech adventures have heroes, including Rayford Steele, the pilot of a 747 whose wife has been raptured, and his daughter, Chloe.  They’ve been left behind, convert into Bible believing Christians, become part of the Tribulation Force, and then spend 7 years thwarting evil.  These books are exciting and, for many, frightening.  . 

There’ve been other adventure series around, of course, in which battles are waged between the forces of good and evil, like Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings.  Even the Harry Potter books.  But fun as they might be, most of us don’t transform our lives based on what we’ve read or use the plots in these books and films to shape our whole system of belief.  So it’s easy to dismiss the Left Behind series as just another addition to a whole genre.  Not to be taken seriously. 

A Methodist pastor in North Carolina tells about a parishioner who approached him and said,  “’I heard that when the tribulation comes, China will be one of the few countries with a big enough army to take over the United States.’  She looked at me earnestly, awaiting confirmation of her theological and political observation.  This woman, the spiritual rock of the church, doesn’t fit the media profile of those who believe in the rapture.  She is well educated, deeply involved in the community, and a successful businesswoman and civic leader—hardly a Neanderthal or escapist.

    I decided to respond with what I took to be a fairly plain-vanilla, non-controversial geo-political observation:  ‘Actually, North Korea’s army is bigger than China’s.’  She nodded, satisfied, and headed off to her third church meeting of the week.

    What a failure on my part.  But I wasn’t equipped to respond adequately.  I had seen the glossy displays of the Left Behind series in bookstores, had heard claims that the novels had sold more than 60 million copies, but had never met anyone who actually believed in the rapture, neither in my college evangelical fellowship groups nor in seminary.  Then I received my first rural church assignment and quickly discovered that out here I was the only person who didn’t believe in the rapture.  My parishioners simply assume that this is what the Bible teaches.  And why shouldn’t they—they’ve never heard otherwise from their preachers.”

This was true in the seminary I attended as well.  I never heard anyone talk about the rapture either.  Even the book of Revelation upon which this belief is supposedly based received short-shrift in my Biblical studies courses.  All I was taught is that the book of Revelation, the final book in the Christian Scripture, describes a vision in which John is shown how the world as it is known will end and how the new kingdom will be established.  We were taught that this was written in 96 AD, more than 20 years after the Roman Empire destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and either enslaved or exiled the Jews.  We were taught that John was probably a refugee & had witnessed what had happened,  that his intent in writing was to unveil the truth of Rome’s brutality.  That Roman control of Jerusalem was illegitimate and, therefore, would soon end.  John was prophesying in the book of Revelation, revealing the truth. 

This way of understanding scripture is common within mainline Christianity, including Unitarian Universalism.  Scripture is de-mythologized.   It is placed within the context in which it was written and the attempt is made to understand the intent of the writer and what the deeper meanings of a text might be.  The fundamentalists however, take the opposite tack.  They remove these texts, which were written thousands of years ago, from the context in which they were written, apply them to life today (literally), and in the process create some pretty incredible systems of belief, including, of course, their beliefs about the end times.

The temptation is to just dismiss all of this talk about the rapture, about Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.  People can believe what they want to believe, right?  What does it have to do with us?  Well, the sad reality is that it has a lot to do with us, because this belief about the End Times is not confined to those living in rural North Carolina.  With the increasing power and influence of those on the Religious Right, this belief has spread to those who are in positions of power and, as such, is having a serious impact on public policy in this country.

James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, was in the news during the debacle around the Harriet Meiers nomination to the Supreme Court.. He said that President Bush had reassured him personally that she was a tried and true conservative, a born-again Christian who was active in an evangelical church. Ted Haggard pastor of a 9000 member fundamentalist church in Colorado Springs that was founded only 10 years ago reveals that he talks with President Bush every week.  It is said that there are currently 130 members of the House of Representatives who are born again.  And then there are all those who are appointed to their positions of influence.  All those serving at the state and local level—on school boards and in environmental protection agencies. 

Can you imagine how this belief in the rapture might be influencing those who have the power to make & carry out public policy?  James Watt, Secretary of the Interior during President Reagan’s administration told senators that “we are living at the brink of the end-times and implied that this justifies clear-cutting the nation’s forests and other unsustainable environmental policies.  When he was asked about preserving the environment for future generations, James Watt said, ‘I don’t know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.’”  His understanding of our relationship to the earth’s resources was to use it or lose it.   More recently the right-wing pundit, Ann Coulter, said, “God gave us the earth.  We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees.  God said, ‘Earth is yours.  Take it.  Rape it.  It’s yours.’”

Just this week the Senate approved a bill that would allow drilling for oil in the pristine Arctic wilderness. 

And it’s not just environmental policy.  It’s the U.S. policy in the Middle East, it’s the U.S. suspicion of the United Nations, it’s the way in which Evil Empires have been identified as justification for war, it’s this current administration’s focus on the War on Terror and Homeland Security .  A couple of years ago, our President told West Point graduates that “We are in a conflict between good and evil.  And America will call evil by its name.” 

This clear division between good and evil is grounded in a theology in which the world itself is seen as hostile, as evil, it’s a world that is beyond saving.  There is no sense that we are to assume responsibility for the care of the earth, that we are to care for the disenfranchised, that we are to work for more justice, for more peace.  Instead the goal is to save individual souls who will then be able to escape the world. 

This theology is so different from Unitarian Universalism and indeed, from mainstream Christianity as well.  Historically the Universalists & the Unitarians said that the creation is not evil but good.  That God is not a vengeful, punishing God, but a loving God.  That human beings are not rotten to the core and in need of the vicarious suffering of a Christ to be saved, but that human beings are capable of infinite goodness. The focus within UUism has never been on a world to come but on this world and on our responsibility to live in such a way that will make a difference here—and now. 

During the forum following worship today I’m going to show a short video about the Universalist understanding of Universal Salvation, that in the end all will be saved, a belief spread by Hosea Ballou and other great Universalist preachers.  We’ll have a chance to talk in more depth about how this belief contrasts with rapture-thinking. 

During the time in which Jesus lived, there was a lot of apocalyptic thinking.  People were concerned that the end of the world was near.  In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is reported to say repeatedly in response to people’s questions that the Kingdom of God is not going to arrive sometime in the future.  The Kingdom (or the new Jerusalem as some Christians say) is not in heaven. Instead it is already here.  It can be found within us, he said.  It can be found spread upon the earth.  But people don’t see it, Jesus is reported to have said.

Barbara Rossing, a New Testament scholar who teaches the book of Revelation in a seminary says that she asks her students to take the image of God’s New Jerusalem, the holy city described in Revelation, and to imagine how this holy city could be realized in their own cities here and now.  One of her students met with a group in a church in East Boston and asked them to imagine what a new East Boston could look like.

What does our city look like? she asked.  “I hardly had to wait for a response:  stinky; scarey; there are gangs… people are crying because they are hungry… there is poverty; people are homeless;  it’s unsafe.  It seems a far cry from the glorious, radiant, new Jerusalem.”

‘Where is that holy city where God dwells among the people?’  I asked.  They replied:  The promised city must be describing heaven.  It’s something we look forward to, in the future, after we die.  It’s impossible now, they said. 

Then I asked the group, ‘Can we try to imagine what the holy city, what the new East Boston might look like?’  The people were quiet… and in the end this is what they said:  ‘We saw the holy city, the new East Boston, coming down out of heaven from God…. It has clean streets in which people can walk in safety and with peace at any time.  There are no drugs, no fire, no fighting;  no one is hungry; everyone has a place to live.  People are planting flowers and trees… and God is there.”

Martin Luther King said this in response to the hunger and poverty that he found in Memphis:  “It’s alright to talk about ‘streets flowing with milk and honey,’ but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day.  It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee.  This is what we have to do.”

Those who focus on the End Times, on the Rapture, on the Second Coming have a distorted understanding of what we are to be doing with these precious lives we have been given.  Our purpose is not to escape the world, but to help transform it.  This glorious world that so many think awaits in heaven can be experienced in bits and pieces,  here and now.  The Gospel of Thomas says that the kingdom is within us.  It’s spread out before us, if only we would see.  It is up to us to open our eyes and do our part in helping this new world to be.   

(open mic for discussion)