Tension with the World

The other day I received a gag gift from a colleague. It's a print of a rather cheesy painting entitled "The Rapture." (You can still order prints of it online.) The painting was commissioned by a group called the Bible Believers' Evangelistic Association. This group offers tracts and eight foot long "Bible Maps" depicting the the various "dispensations" or periods of history that have happened and will happened. The rapture, the return of Christ, and the earth's destruction happen in three of those yet to come dispensations, the rapture being next on the calendar.

I've not heard much conversation on the rapture in this or any other congregation I've served. The notion of dispensationalism and the rapture were invented in the late 1800s, and after a brief period of respectability, have been a fringe theology for many decades. Not something we Mainline types mess with.

I share my painting and my very limited understanding of dispensationalism (premillennial or otherwise) because the minute you start talking about the end times or anything "apocalyptic," you enter into a territory that Mainline Christians have generally seeded to rapture types. Just mention the book of Revelation, and many Mainline folks get nervous.

In truth, Revelation is not a book of strange predictions but a word of promise to early Christians who were in great distress. And our fear of talking about end times and Jesus' return has too often spiritualized Jesus' gospel, removing the promise of a new day with a new social order.

In today's gospel, Jesus is talking about the coming of that day, and he warns us, “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap." Jesus clearly thinks that the patterns of this world do not fit into the new society he anticipates, and he calls his followers to conform now to the new ways.

One place the rapture sorts are more faithful to Jesus than Mainline folks regards Jesus' unease with the ways of the world. They get off track when they start thinking God hates creation or is going to destroy things, but they are right that Jesus sees a fundamental problem with how the world operates. That's why he talks about the poor being lifted up and the rich and powerful being pulled down. But many of us Mainliners are quite happy with the world. Ours works well enough for us, so we'd like to keep Jesus focused on recharging spiritual batteries and filling the void that seems to remain no matter how many wonderful consumer goods we acquire.

But Jesus keeps talking about the Kingdom, that new day when things get remade. And he calls us to start living by Kingdom ways now. That doesn't mean believing in a rapture, but it does require a bit of tension with the ways of the world.

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