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Sunday,
May 23, 2004
Sermon: "Sensation or Dispensation"
Scripture: Revelation 22:12-21
Reverend Larry Gerber
Join the club. Be an insider. That's the pitch for the Left Behind Prophecy
Club, which anyone can join for a mere $44.95 a month. News flash: God has already
told us all we need to know.
Wait!! the price for a subscription has gone down from $44.95 a month, to $6.50
a month. Perhaps it will get more people to buy, thus the volume of subscriptions
will bring more revenue, before it is too late to collect enough money for the
journey.
What's the going rate for predicting the future? Your local fortune teller will
gladly swipe your VISA and tell you what you already know, or that the time
is propitious for a financial investment, or that a mystery stranger from the
South, maybe Georgia, maybe Louisiana, is about to enter your life.
Or, you could consult Miss Cleo, who — until she was booted off the television
for fraud — would rifle through her tarot cards, point to the love card
and tell you: "You betta drop that nosewipe loossuh of yours rat now, girlfriend,
'cuz if you don't drop him, he gonna drop you!"
But if you're a Christian, visiting a spiritualist is theologically out of bounds.
Unless you call it "prophecy."
In that case, the going rate is $44.95, excuse me, now $6.95 — a month.
That's how much it costs to subscribe to the Left Behind Prophecy, Club Web
site, which promises an "insiders" view and interpretation of world
events as they lead us toward the end of the world predicted in Revelation.
Log in and find out answers to burning questions like:
• Are we living in the end times?
• Could the events of today signify that the Rapture and Tribulation will
occur during our generation?
• Are ATMs and other revelations in global banking foretelling The Mark
of the Beast?
• Is the U.N. a precursor of the One World Government prophesied in the
Bible?
Here are the answers all in one place.
The site is maintained by self-proclaimed "prophecy scholar" Tim LaHaye
and writer Jerry Jenkins, they of the wildly popular Left Behind series. To
date, LaHaye and Jenkins have sold over 50 million books, spawned a less-than-stellar
movie, and have become two of the most popular speakers and authors in evangelical
Christianity. The franchise includes what , with the newest release, has become
12 best-selling novels, tapes, CDs, graphic novels and even a Left Behind: The
Kids series of 26 books. In a post-9/11 world, the series has become even more
popular, showing a "FICTIONAL" account of what the authors predict
will be real-time, end-time events.
The $6.95 buys you LaHaye and Jenkins' particular view of the end of time —
the Rapture (when "true Christians" are all instantly taken up into
heaven), the seven years of Tribulation for those "left behind," the
creation of one evil world government ruled by the Antichrist, and so forth.
LaHaye makes no bones about his political/theological predictions.
For example, he says: "I wouldn't be surprised in today's geopolitical
situation — and I address this in my new book Babylon Rising, where the
United Nations and the European Common Market will gradually grow together and
join other countries of the world against the United States, and gradually they
will move the center of government to Iraq."
No matter what the world event, the Left Behind franchise has an answer to today's
toughest questions. All it takes is a credit card.
The truth is that what LaHaye and Jenkins are selling isn't all that new. For
centuries Christians have been making predictions, interpreting world events,
and making preparations for the return of Christ. Witness the slack-jawed gaze
of expectation Jesus' own disciples are caught with in Acts 1, where the angels
say, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus,
who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you
saw him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11). By chapter 2, they've gotten used
to the idea that though Jesus was gone in body, he was still present with them
in the person of the Holy Spirit, and they get to the work of being the church.
But that hasn't stopped Christians in our century from continuing to "look
up" to heaven no matter what the current world situation. Before Jenkins
and LaHaye, Hal Lindsay had cornered the market on prophecy in the 1970s with
his book The Late Great Planet Earth and its many and varied sequels. For Lindsay,
writing in the midst of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China were the agents
of the Antichrist. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, "prophets" like
Lindsay had to reconfigure their apocalyptic calendars to resemble a sort of
"Beast of the Month Club" focused on the international villain du
jour.
Unlike the prophets of Israel, however, the prophets rarely pointed their fingers
at their own national kith and kin.
The truth is that it's the "sensationalism" in "premillenial
dispensationalism" that really sells. Many Christians seem to love the
idea that the trials of this world can be escaped with one rapturous pass of
the Heavenly Hoover, sucking them up into the great beyond.
It's the stuff great thrillers are made of. Good wins out in the end and enemies
are left smoldering in the ashes. It's no wonder that these prophets are making
a profit.
Many of you have been enjoying "The Left Behind" series, as I have.
I have jumped on the band wagon. I can't wait to read the next book in the series,
which I purchased just last week. It is fascinating, intriguing, exciting, and
FICTION.
But here's a question that we might want to consider before we join the Tim
and Jerry Show and start pulling the earthly ejection handles: Is this really
the point of the whole witness of Scripture? That we simply fly off to heaven
in the end and too bad for you if you're not on the plane? Is that all there
is? No validation to this life other than as a torturous preparation for the
life to come?
Is the primary focus of our Christian life to simply get off this third rock
from the sun before it's blown away?
Maybe. But consider this: If the Christian life is merely about going to heaven,
then why is the Bible so thick? Why does it take 66 books to give us all that
stuff about loving neighbors and enemies, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked,
being stewards of the environment, and taking up our crosses? Is it merely something
to do while we await the trumpet sound, or is there more to it than that?
The answer to that one is a freebie. It's time many of us who follow Christ
get our noses out of the novel and get back into the Book. Read the novel, but
read it for what it is, religious fiction!!
The point of John's vision in Revelation, and the reason that it's at the end
of the Bible is that it brings full circle what God has been doing from the
beginning. In Genesis, God creates the world, the humans in it, and calls it
"very good." Humans have tried for their whole history to make it
less than good through their sin, their corruption, their own creative ways
of messing up what God so freely gave them. The biblical prophets constantly
called people back to God and back to the work of being God's people. And they
did it without a book of the month deal.
They saw it, and so will we if we're looking closely enough — that despite
our repeated attempts to the contrary, God is constantly renewing, remaking,
and reforming God's creation; even to the point of coming himself in Jesus Christ
to give us a lesson on how to properly live in that creation with God and with
each other. Christ's bodily resurrection from the dead is really a validation
of that creation — a foretaste of what's to come, a renewed and resurrected
life in a new and resurrected world, the way it was meant to be from the beginning.
The church's role is to be the agent through which God is already at work bringing
in the kingdom. John's revelation simply announces to churches struggling with
the task, with opposition on every side, that the work will eventually be completed,
whether it's tomorrow or 10,000 years from now. It will happen in God's Time!!
Jesus certainly is "coming soon" (22:7), no doubt about it. Not to
take us away, but to take over.
In the meantime, we need to quit looking up and start looking at the world around
us — the world that you and I are supposed to be working to change, not
escape. Instead of spending over $500 a year to be a "prophecy insider,"
invest it in a homeless shelter, or soup kitchen, or your church's youth ministry.
Invest it in someone like Lisa Dufort, or a scholarship in honor of our retiring
Bishop, so that someone called into ministry, from the Desert Southwest Annual
Conference, can prepare for ministry with a little less indebtedness.
World events will continue to happen, and we'll continue to have little we can
actually do to prevent or provoke them. Better to focus on what we can do —
what we're called and commanded to do: Forget about escaping the world and get
on with engaging it with the grace and love of God.
A bumper sticker recently seen on a VW Microbus said, "Jesus is coming.
Look busy." The question is, when Jesus returns in whatever way that's
going to happen, what will he find us busy doing? Will we be caught looking
up, scanning the latest newspaper, or reading a novel?
Or, like his disciples and the great cloud of witnesses before us who have "wash[ed]
their robes" in the blood of the Lamb (22:14),will we be found doing the
work of the kingdom here and now, making this world more and more into what
God created it to be in the first place?
Taking care of this world in the here and now is an eschatological action.
You don't need a subscription — just Scripture — to tell you what
to do.
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Sources:
Left Behind Prophecy Club Web Site
Leftbehind.com. Viewed December 3, 2003.
Libaw, Oliver. "Buying like there's no tomorrow: Apocalyptic science fiction
series becomes a long-running smash hit." ABCNews.com, February 6, 2002.
Abcnews.go.com