Swept Away and Forgiven

One of the pesky things about being a Presbyterian pastor is that it ain't easy getting there.   Out in the wide world, all you've got to do is to slap the word "pastor" in front of your name.  Anyone can say they're a pastor.  "I don't need none a that highfalutin' bible schoolin', 'cause I got the Lord's anointing!"  There are no requirements besides charisma and confidence, and if you can find a flock fool enough to follow you, well, Lord help you all.  

But denominations have expectations.  Degrees and certifications, layered one atop the other, along with a byzantine committee-driven process that...for me, at least...absorbed nearly a decade of my life.  "Trial by process," I call it, and it certainly does weed folks out.  Including folks who burn with the fire of the Holy Spirit, unfortunately, but so it goes.

One of the collateral blessings of that whole mess was that I had to complete coursework in Biblical languages, in Ancient Hebrew and the Common Greek of the first century.  I know just enough to get myself into trouble, but when I encounter a particular scripture that chews at my soul, at least I know where to go.

I've been leading a class on Matthew over the last two months, and this week, we reached a text that I've always wrassled with.  It's Matthew 24:40-41, where Jesus lays out what will happen when the end of all things comes to pass.  Generally speaking, this is taken as a proof text for the Rapture, that peculiar fundamentalist doctrine that argues that when the going gets tough, the faithful will be miraculously rescued.  

"Then two men will be in the field," Jesus says.  "One is taken and one is left.  Two women will be grinding at the mill, one is taken and one is left.  Watch, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming."

I've generally taken this to be part of the larger teaching that fills most of Matthew 24.  Meaning, it's primarily a call to stay morally and spiritually prepared.  I mean, it straight up says that, right?  

But while reading it this time around, I found myself struck by something.  The operating assumption of folks who buy into the Rapture is that being "taken" is good, and being "left behind" is bad, right?  I mean, that's the entire schtick of those feverish novels and unwatchable movies.  It's always struck me as lazy, escapist theology, a theology that assumes the faithful don't have to take up their crosses and bear witness no matter what.  Still, it's got appeal.

But...why?  How do we know that's what Jesus meant?  What in the words of Jesus indicates whether staying or being taken is the desirable state of being?  There's an obvious binary here, with a positive outcome and a negative outcome contrasted, but which is the good and which is the bad?

I mean, I'm personally very conservative.  I am wary around change, because change isn't always for the better.  Like, for completely hypothetical example, when a republic becomes a dictatorship?  That's a bad change.  Or when a healthy part of your body breaks, or becomes cancerous?  That's a bad change.  There are variant meanings to saying something was taken and something was left.  "My child was taken" is not necessarily a better thing to say than "My child was left."

So which is it?

First, there's narrative context.  Jesus was a storyteller, and I think it's fair to say he was a good one.  Immediately prior to these verses in Matthew, Jesus reminds his listeners of the story of the Flood, in which oblivious human beings kept on about their lives until the waters swept them away.  Who remains after the flood?  Noah and his family and all the critters two by two.  Who goes?  Everyone who wasn't prepared.  

I mean, if you're showing one state of being as good and another state of being is bad, that primes the listener to grasp that staying warm and dry is a good thing, eh?  That being swept away is a bad thing, right?   I mean, this is Jesus here, people.  He knows how to tell a story.

But what of the Greek, one might ask?  Are there clues in the language Matthew used to indicate what the intent of Jesus may have been?  Of course, Jesus would have delivered this whole schpiel in Aramaic, but we don't have that.  Instead, we have the koine Greek used by the Gospel writers and by the Apostle Paul.  

The word used for "taken" is paralambanetai, and the word used for "left" is aphietai.  Neither is a cognate shared with English, and each has a variety of meanings depending on the context and usage.

Assuming those details don't pop to mind, it's generally efficacious to pop open a trusty old Strong's Concordance, and to consider every variant form of the word as it appears in Scripture.

Paralambano is used, in variant forms, fourteen additional times by Matthew.  It typically means to "take with," meaning that a person or object is brought along with another.  Like Joseph taking Mary with him to Egypt and back, that can be a positive thing in Matthew, but it can also be a negative thing.  When the devil twice took Jesus with him to tempt him in the high places, for example, that's the word used.  It's also the word used when an evil spirit one has driven out of one's soul takes seven more dark spirits and returns with a demonic posse to make your life even more horrific.  When the soldiers took Jesus into custody to be tortured?  That's the word Matthew uses.   

So "taken" is neutral and contextual, which doesn't help us much.

Aphiemi is the core form of the word meaning left, and in Matthean usage, it has other resonances.  In the Gospels and Epistles, the word does often mean to leave something unmoved, to depart from a thing or a place.  That's the use in a slight majority of the cases, and that can be positive or negative.  But there's another term that rises from that root, one that's nearly as common.  Nearly as often, variants of that word mean to "forgive."  When Jesus talks tells us to pray that God would forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors?  That's from the same root.  It can also mean to "suffer," but not in an "experience painfully" kind of way.  It's the more archaic meaning of suffer, meaning to accept as it is, to tolerate, to allow, or to endure.  Between "forgive" and to "accept," a majority of Matthean usage of the root concept rolls that way.  

It is probable, given my limited Greek, that I'm missing or overstating something here, doing the etymological equivalent of assigning numerological values to Hebrew words to come up with a "secret" meaning that the plain text doesn't support.  I'm willing to cede that it's likely.  

The narrative context, though, seems far clearer.

Somewhere, somehow, proponents of the Rapture may have gotten it exactly backwards.  

"One was swept away, and another was allowed to remain" really would put a different spin on things.

Thank You Harold

As six o'clock in the evening begins to circle the world, the earthquake and teleporting fundy event does not appear to be coming to pass.  But as absurd and delusional as the Harold Camping prophecy has now proven to be, I have to say that I've felt blessed by Harold Camping's ministry these last several weeks.

My calling to preach and teach can often get crunched by the blahness of day-to-day life.   Instead of talking about theology, and sharing what the essence of the Gospel is, I find myself sucked into being a shuttle-driver-dad, or an administrator of a semi-functional local fraternal order.   The relationships of grace that are the essence of the Gospel and the heart of faith sometimes feel far distant.

But the lingering presence of Camping's little bit of memetic crazy has meant that for the last week, I've been having lots of theological conversations.  People want to talk about it.   It's totally insane, but that makes it also kind of interesting, and interesting gets people having conversations.

Like, say, my recently-mitzvahed 13 year old Jewish son.  The net-connected kids at his middle school were all a-Twitter about it, about how the world would be coming to an end.

So here's what happened.  He actually started a conversation with me about what I believed about the rapture.   I told him, of course.  I told him that there were too many non-Christian folk who I loved, himself included, for me to ever buy in to that theology.  I told him that if it were true, I would cling to the treetops and clamber back down if that was what it took to be with them.  Then we talked about what I really believe, and how while I'll admit I might be wrong, even if I am wrong, the world is still a better place because of it.

But let's go back and really hear the important thing in what I just said.

Harold Camping's ministry got a 13 year old boy to get into a conversation with his father about God  and the essence of faith.  Yeah, it ain't walking on water, but if you've got a teenager, you know that there's something miraculous in that.

So for those conversations, for those chances to share the grace and goodness of God, for those opportunities to be in faith conversation relationship, I have to admit that I'm feeling positively towards Mr. Camping right now.

Harold, in a thousand-thousand ways you need to wake up and smell the Gospel Coffee.  But honestly, for getting us all talking, you've been a blessing.

So, thank you, Harold!  I'm sorry today was such a bummer.

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.