The Rapture

As I puttered through traffic on my way in to classes this morning, I found myself meditating a bit on the theology of the rapture.  With the deep and woeful disappointment of Harold Camping's followers now just a few days away, there are a whole bunch of folks who believe this is a central part of Christian theology.  That belief goes well beyond the devotees of that sepulchral radio evangelist.

It also goes deep into others who claim to be Jesus followers, like, say, in the toight-as-a-toiger teachings of our slickity local Jesus MegaCenter.  It's all over the place.

Rapture is just a central part of evangelical doctrine.  Folks eat it up with a spoon.  Tim LaHayes narrative extrapolations around the Rapture have sold an abundant pantload of Left Behind novels, and produced some of the most ragingly unwatchable films in the history of moviemaking.

Honestly, I just have never gotten it.  Not even a little bit.

I know it draws inspiration from an interpretation of one section of Luke's Gospel, in which Jesus says some are taken, and others are left.  And...well...that's pretty much it.  There are some extrapolations, followed by some interpretive gyrations, followed by some Olympic-level proof-texting, but it's essentially just that one little chunk of text, interpreted through the warping lens of the Archangel Scottie and his Bible-Believing transporter room.

Here's the essence of my problem.  This morning, as my sitting-in-traffic-mind immersed itself in the section of Faure's Requiem that was pouring through my six-speaker sound system, I found myself in a rapture-reverie.  I found myself viscerally envisioning that moment, were it to happen to me.

Now, I know this is a stretch.  As a progressive Christian, married to a Jew, a same-sex-relationship-affirming liberal Presbyterian, I know I'm not really on the Tim LaHaye shortlist.  Still, one never knows.

So here I am, envisioning what that moment would be like.  The world is coming apart.  Earthquakes.  Fires.  Buildings crumbling.  People crying out in terror.  And as one chosen, I'm unaffected.  I'm rising up, not really bodily, but into that deeper reality of God's presence.  I'm suffused with light, radiant with the power of my ascension to a place of peace and glory, my physical form yielding to my spiritual body as I began to move beyond the spreading cries and conflagration.

And it would just suck.  I'd feel horrible.  It would be the worst moment of my soon-to-be-over corporeal existence.

Why?

Because Jesus matters to me.  What he taught matters to me.  How he lived matters to me.  And from the Spirit of his radical and transforming compassion, I'd look down at the fading, burning world and weep.  I'd want none of that suffering for any of those souls remaining, even those who have hurt me deeply.  I'd feel not satisfied, or relieved, or joyous, but consumed with horror and loss and disappointment.

Like, say, Christ would have felt, if from the cross he had seen the story play out differently, watched the world consumed by annihilating fire, the fury of a father destroying everything that had hurt His child.  I can understand that anger, but it bears no resemblance to Christ.  It's a human rage.  If the fire had consumed centurion and swept aside zealot and pharisee, Christ would have seen it as betrayal.  He would truly have been forsaken.  His purpose, all his love, all his hope, all his teachings, all his transforming logos-radiant meat and bone and blood...wasted.

The reason the rapture works for folks, theologically, is that it is all about them.  It says, in defiance of the cross, that real Christians don't have to suffer when the world falls apart.  It reinforces ego and sense of otherness, at the expense for the hard Kingdom compassion that lies at the heart of the Gospel.

It just isn't Christian.

Common Jesus

 

The deeper I get into reading for my course on leading diverse communities, the more I'm filled with a sense of despair.  Much of the thinking behind the books I've been reading is fine, albeit a tich on the leftist side.  Well, more than a tich.  It's full throttle liberal academe in it's most stereotypically inaccessible glory.   For the past few days,  I've heaved my protesting mind through page after page  filled with phrases like:

"...the binary finds its place, is protected from its dichotomizing and territorializing ways, and so flowers within that teeming, polymorphic milieu where Word and Spirit are enlivened in ever-new combinations."

and

"Latino(a) theology should also be willing to traverse the boundaries of group knowledge and interest in order to envision and articulate a social ontology that can more tangibly enable relationships across personal and group difference."

Being of a lib'ral smartypants persuasion myself, I know what these things mean.  I understand why they are written.  I even agree with them, more or less.   But I find them nearly as mindbendingly frustrating as the writings of Joel Osteen, for completely opposite reasons.

It doesn't matter that the various theologies of liberation and the particularist theologies of academic feminism think that they're oriented to and addressing the needs of the oppressed and downtrodden.  If you want to empower someone with knowledge, they first have to have some clue what you're talking about. 

As Paul showed all us Jesus people when he taught on the Areopagus, common language is the foundation of relevance.  And to be blunt as a bludgeon, the oppressed and the downtrodden are more likely to find relevant insights in the gibbering ecstasy of glossolalia than they are in the self-indulgent semiotics of academic theology.  That seminarians and Ph.D. candidates can make ten thousand compound sentences dance multivalent on the head of a freakin' pin means jack-squat to the souls who cry out from the depths of the world's oppression.

I don't mind reading this [stuff], honestly.  But what I don't want to do is write it.   Because if I get in the pattern of writing that way, then I'll get in the pattern of thinking that way.  And if I start thinking that way, I'll render myself useless.

Alrighty.  Calm down.  Deep breath.  I've got more reading to do.