Advent 1, Year A | Matthew 24:36-44
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
November 27, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” – Matthew 24:42[1]
Our new Church year opens with a deep dive straight into the most apocalyptic section of Matthew’s Gospel. This reading is a short portion of Jesus’ final sermon before he heads into Holy Week. The rest of it contains frequent warnings to “watch out” or “keep awake” and includes such famous stories as the Parable of the Fig Tree, the Parable of the Ten Virgins, and the Parable of the Talents. His message is clear throughout this entire chapter: “about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father….Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”[2]
Growing up in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, my sister and I weren’t allowed to attend many movies. Dad would take us to the occasional Saturday morning screening of Flipper or the old animated Charlotte’s Web, but apart from those and some pre-Black Cauldron Disney fair, we rarely saw any films—unless we were at church, where youth groups, Awana Clubs, and Sunday School classes would occasionally fare on a trilogy of psychological horror movies. These films graphically portrayed the Great Tribulation, drawing on imagery from the Bible’s books of Daniel and Revelation—visions of monsters and famine and violence and blood and terror and—a weird detail that continues to stick out for some unknown reason—guillotines.
Forty-ish years later, portions of a 1970’s folk ballad I associate with those movies still jumps to the front of my mind anytime we read today’s Gospel text:
“Two men walking up a hill
One disappears and one’s left standing still
I wish we’d all been ready…”[3]
No matter what your theological background might be, chances are you’re familiar with the idea the song and movies were promoting. If not, the last two lines of that stanza might just bring things into focus:
“There’s no time to change your mind
The Son has come, and you’ve been left behind.”
The thought of the Rapture terrorized me throughout my childhood, in no small part because of those awful movies. I remember multiple occasions where I would become lost at a store and freezing in horror upon realizing my parents weren’t around, absolutely certain in my heart that the Rapture had taken place. I’d wake up from feverish nightmares during Wisconsin’s severe summer thunderstorms and wonder if my family had been snatched away amidst the “distant thunder.” Even today the Rapture is one of the first things to cross my mind when Shannon’s even a little late getting home: “it’s too late to change your mind—the Son has come, and you’ve been left behind!”
For those of you (blessedly) unfamiliar with it, the Rapture is a theological assertion that at the end of time, faithful Christians will be snatched away to Heaven before the rest of the unbelieving world is mercilessly punished for seven years, a period known as the Great Tribulation. After that[4] comes the Last Judgment, when “Heaven and Earth will pass away” and Christ will divide the sheep from the goats, shepherding his flock into their Heavenly reward while everyone else is driven into everlasting torment in the Lake of Fire. With its outsized presence in pop culture and the Modern American Church, many Christians consider the Rapture to be a foregone conclusion.
But the idea for the Rapture is actually a modern concept, with no evidence of any influence or even existence before 1830. First described in a prophetic vision, the idea remained on the far fringes of the Church world until an Irish evangelist named John Darby brought it to the United States in 1862 as a central theme of his revival campaigns.
For a population in the throes of the Civil War, people who already feared that the world was ending, the thought made perfect sense.[5] Everywhere Darby went, everyone already knew it was the End Times. After all, brother was fighting against brother and father against son, just like Jesus had warned. Clearly, if ever Christ were to return, it would have to be then. In the midst of such unprecedented sorrow and suffering among people who understood themselves to be God’s Chosen Nation, the City on a Hill described in the Sermon on the Mount, the hope of escape from this world of death and despair was nearly impossible to refuse. The idea further embedded itself into American theology when wealthy patrons made free copies of Darby’s commentaries on the Scriptures available to preachers across the United States. In 1909, the publication of the world’s first ever study Bible—the Scofield Reference Bible, whose commentary was largely based on Darby’s teachings—pretty much cemented the Rapture as an essential pillar of Modern American Christianity.
However, popularity is rarely a solid measure of truth. New ideas aren’t necessarily wrong in and of themselves, but it’s important to remember where our teachings come from—to distinguish between what’s genuinely Biblical and what’s simply theological. We know this particular idea emerged from a young Scottish prophet’s then-unique reading of I Thessalonians 4, particularly verse 17: “…we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with [those who have already died] in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”[6] This statement Paul wrote to encourage the Thessalonian congregation during a period of suffering was adopted as the first prooftext for the Rapture. With the root of the idea established and Darby’s Dispensational framework continuing to develop, many more have been added over the past 200 years—including our Matthew passage, which, when looked at carefully, technically associates being “taken” with destruction or enslavement and connects the idea of being “left” with forgiveness or escaping cataclysm.
Whether or not you believe it will happen, knowing this history reveals one important thing to us: the Rapture[7] is clearly a theological construct, not a Biblical one. We’ve talked about this difference before: for something to be Biblical, the Bible needs to make a clear and simple statement regarding it. We can recognize a theological concept by observing how it takes pieces of the Bible and puts them together to make a new assertion. The entire idea of the Rapture, along with its supporting structures and timeline, is patched together by combining verses from various books and authors with the goal of supporting a specific interpretation of those verses. Therefore, we need to recognize the Rapture is rooted in theological interpretation. It should never be considered a doctrine or, strictly speaking, even a Biblical teaching.
But what does it really matter whether or not someone “believes in” the Rapture? Frankly, it doesn’t—until that belief system starts to affect the lives of those around you. Having grown up in a subculture deeply focused on the Rapture, I recognize that this theology, undoubtedly intended to inspire hope,[8] carries some subtle expectations which can and have had very real and damaging individual and societal affects.
The most common problem is the division that it, like many other theological concepts, can cause among members of a family or congregation: those convinced of its truth demand that everyone else adopt their position and follow their path. Anyone who doesn’t is branded as a heretic and condemned to Hell while the group that caused the fracture in the first place hails itself as the final branch of the one true Church.
The second concern emerges when Rapture theology begins to mingle with other theological ideas, like the rise of the concept of “faith” as an intellection assertion rather than the practice of faithfulness so clear in the New Testament’s Greek text. By combining the two, you end up with people who call themselves Christians because of what they claim or think drifting toward the assumption that their actions ultimately have no consequences:[9] God’s already forgiven whatever it is I might do, and in the end it doesn’t really matter because God’s going to wipe out everything and start over anyway.
The most real and physical danger I’ve seen, however, is the partnership of that mingled Rapture theology with what’s known as Dominion theology—a misreading of the first chapter of Genesis which claims God created humankind to “rule over” Creation rather than to be its caretakers. Dominion theology declares Man[10] to be the absolute master of this planet and all life thereupon. Because of this Divinely-ordained status, we humans can behave with impunity. Dominion theology is what Christendom and its offshoots have used to justify themselves when driving animals to extinction; when conquering and colonizing other civilizations; when kidnapping, enslaving, and selling other ethnic groups for financial gain; when destroying those same peoples’ land and extracting its beneficial goods and materials for our own consumption. We’ve essentially used Dominion theology to excuse centuries of utterly self-centered and even genocidal behavior. That same lie is what continues to allow us to think we can take anything we want from and do anything we want to the earth.
Presumptions of absolute mastery met with intellectual hubris and loss of any expectation of consequences has resulted in individuals, nations, and entire societies who hoard, abuse, and destroy resources without thought for who or what may come after. It’s given us a Climate Crisis that a large percentage of American Christians ignore, deny, or simply don’t care about—after all, if we’re the rulers of Creation and God has organized an escape plan, nothing we do to harm the earth ultimately matters. We might as well burn this sucker to the ground so we can finally go party in “a better place.”
This mindset is the antithesis of Christ’s call to love and serve our neighbor, the antithesis of respect for the gifts God has given to sustain and support life, and the antithesis of the parables surrounding our passage, all of which condemn presumptive, wasteful living while encouraging a kind of preparation that expresses itself through conservation and careful investment of limited resources.
It's the first Sunday of Advent, and this season largely defined by what comes after shares traits with our expectations leading up to the end of the world. In our mad rush to what will be, we downplay or completely overlook what is. We gaze so far beyond our hope or expectation that we forget the significance of where we are right now and what decisions and actions might be necessary to achieve what will be. We place so much emphasis on a prophet’s vision that we miss the metaphor and ignore the continuing effort required to realize it. In our fevered delusion regarding where we like to think we’re headed we’ve ended up tripping and falling and flailing about in a pool of mud, oil, and garbage, all the while declaring our fen to be the Crystal Sea.
The end will come when it will come: “about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Until then, Jesus calls us to face what is, the reality where our world is always ending and our world is always just beginning, where we have a choice of what to do and how we might proceed along the way, where we mustn’t ignore the work required in the present simply to boast or speculate about a reward none of us have yet achieved.
“Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Matthew 24:36, 44
[3] https://genius.com/Larry-norman-i-wish-wed-all-been-ready-lyrics
[4] With a variety of highs and lows along the way, including the rise of a single world government, Christ’s Millennial Reign, the rebellion of Gog and Magog, and Satan’s final defeat.
[5] Especially when bolstered by the brand new Dispensational theological framework Darby had devised to support his views
[6] King James Version
[7] Dispensationalism as a whole, really
[8] And very definitely intended to draw crowds
[9] Sometimes described as “easy-believism”
[10] Generally those of European heritage