A Future God Can Live With

A sermon about our fitting in

A week ago Luke and I took in a matinee, and what should pop up among the previews but a promo for the action thriller “2012.”

Instantly the widescreen exploded with Technicolor chaos and carnage as solar flares superheated the core of the earth, plunging the crust into convulsions, and toppling California into the Pacific Ocean. Whereupon the ancient Yellowstone caldera erupted, and a mega-tsunami swamped the flanks of the Himalayas.

The cast of adrenalin-charged characters narrowly escaped one catastrophe after another in a life-and-death race to reach lifeboats stowed high in the Himalayas, where an elite few would be buoyed above the apocalyptic flood.

The story line is very old—director Roland Emmerich told reporters he always wanted to make a biblical flood film—but the twist and spin are very new. Emmerich’s film taps into a wildly profitable craze for all things end-of-the-world. The plot got hatched back in a 1995 “non-fiction” bestseller, Fingerprints of the Gods, which allegedly decoded the real truth about our planet’s fate—a predetermined doom which scientists were supposedly hiding from us. The year 2012 was targeted for the screenplay because of rapid internet trafficking in ancient Mayan calendars, predicting great cosmic happenings on December 21, 2012. Who knew?

And the film’s blockbuster release was hyped by high octane viral marketing including a fictitious web site, posted by IHC, the Institute for Human Continuity. Early trailers for the film encouraged viewers to enter “2012” in their search engines, and “find the truth” for themselves. Once directed to the IHC site, viewers were invited to enter a lottery for lifesaving seats on those Himalayan lifeboats, and to help select the individual they trusted to lead them, as survivors, into an uncharted future. The site was so pseudo-scientifically realistic that after viewing it more than 1000 visitors appealed to NASA for help, including teenagers contemplating suicide because they could not cope with a world falling apart. Now those are some special effects!

The best-selling Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye tap into this same cataclysmic craze.

Like Emmerich, LaHaye also works off a web site that presents his fiction as thinly veiled fact, ostensibly supplying the codes to break into secrets kept from the public by malevolent authorities. In this story line God is set on destroying the earth at time certain; the fuse is already lit, and the clock is ticking. However those in the know, select insiders, will be snatched away by Jesus in the nick of time—leaving the rest of humanity behind, gasping their last. In this scenario salvation turns out to be a kind of personal 401(k) plan that saves only you, and select people like you.

Roland Emmerich was right in realizing that this story line would sell at the box office—imagine being able to preview your own heroic triumph over cosmic forces of destruction!—but Emmerich was dead wrong in calling it biblical.

End-time scriptures are not encrypted messages about a doomsday plot in which insiders star, but wake up calls for everyone’s faith. The history of this world we share has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We’re all living in the middle, and our personal endings will turn out just fine, so long as we stay in step with the true story we are living.

Our Gospel today delivers that kind of wake up call. Not surprisingly, it is often misquoted by preachers of LaHaye’s persuasion. End-time zealots home in on commotion that can draw a crowd, and covet dramatic distress—but the point they miss here is that Christ, the King of the Universe, is returning not to snatch away his supporters, but to stay and reign over this wayward world…there’s no way this can happen without setting off some fireworks. In speaking about this awesome future, Jesus advises that we look carefully at the signs of his approach. The commotion and drama turn out not to be portents of death, but heralds of life. They are signs of new life just as buds bursting through bark herald spring. Even though we might first see them through dark gusts of wind and rain, there’s no doubt that summer is coming.

We live in the middle of time, sometime after the beginning of creation and sometime before its ultimate end. Here where we live it is always spring—that’s the first and fundamental message of Advent, arriving mysteriously as it does just as winter is closing in. Even now, it’s high time to wake up and shake off dormancy, time to pay attention to the vital life-sap ready to rise from our roots. Time to look up and watch for the sun which will be breaking through the clouds, climbing high in the sky above us. Jesus himself will come back one day, appearing among clouds like these. Jesus will come back to finally recall all life to its God-given purposes, setting aright everything that has ever gone wrong, and reconciling heaven with earth.

We need this wake up call. Here in the middle we get endlessly distracted away from relationship with God. Our Gospel comes to snap its fingers in front of our roving eyes, to rivet our attention and rouse us to our feet, so we can be ready to stand face to face with Christ. Our Gospel comes to us while there is still time to clean up our act, and get ourselves ready to fit in with god’s happy ending. While there is still time to get our heads on straight, and begin living like the baptized people we are.

Flip open the Prayer Book to page __ and you’ll find how at every baptism we join in rejecting the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God. Same with the corrupting powers in the world around us, and the sinful desires inside ourselves. You’ll see how we together commit ourselves to turning to Christ as our Savior, putting our full trust in him, and following him daily. We’ve been taking these same solemn vows for 2000 years, joining forces across the generations and around the world in claiming Christ’s ultimate victory over darkness which defeats, and facing toward the light which liberates.

Next Sunday afternoon we will be throwing open the doors of St. Michael’s and inviting all Issaquah in to join with us in singing Handel’s Messiah.

We’ll be inviting everyone within earshot to sing out this story with us. You can bet that the most robust singing of all will break out as we reach the Hallelujah Chorus, a rousing reprise of the Bible’s end-time vision: Christ at last returns to reign, with God’s people gathered round.

Just listen with Advent ears to the lyrics: The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ. And He shall reign for ever and ever, King of kings! and Lord of lords! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

All of us together, members and guests, friends and strangers, tots and octogenarians, all of us will stand together and join in this magnificent preview of the great end toward which we are all already all heading: Christ’s reign, for all and over all, for ever and ever. Amen.

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