Got a Light?
The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by John Martin, 1822.
I’ve found, as the parent of a toddler, you’re never really prepared enough to think about fire trucks as much as you’re asked to. I sometimes wonder if it’s a primal memory refracted through several layers of civilization: the gift of fire to the fire in the hearth to now the fire station where fire exists only in its negation; fire trucks put the fire out. Yet, on a daily basis he and I are always on the lookout for fire trucks. It’s a kind of alertness that comes from child-like joy: that the world is full of possibilities, and seeing a fire truck is one of the best. And honestly, when my son wants to see a fire truck so bad that he things any red truck is a fire truck, I can see it getting out of hand a bit, where he imposes his desire on things that don’t match up; but that’s a small price to pay for the unrestrained joy when we see the real thing.
Thinking about fire trucks, fire stations, and the general outlook of firefighters has helped me enormously in reading these texts. I’m on twitter, though I’m not very good at it, and along with my esteemed co-pastors, one of the best people I’ve followed on there is an episcopal priest who is also a firefighter. She loves Jesus, she loves her church, and she loves being a firefighter. Earlier this week she shared this thought: “firefighting has made me care 8000% less about silly things. It’s like God knew I was so in need of sanctification that it took something strange and vaguely life-threatening to keep me off my nonsense. Thanks, God. I’ve been sleeping well, making kind friends, staying off the internet…and I haven’t thought about church doomerism in months. To do list: Preach the Gospel. Put out Fires.”
I don’t plan on taking up firefighting, but she’s onto something that I want too. Clarity. Simplicity. Doing the next right thing. Helping people. And I hope by the end of this sermon, we’ll all have a little more of those things.
Actually, let me say my point right up front: only one person knows when Jesus is coming back: the Father. Not even Jesus. The only thing you need to be ready is to simply obey what Jesus said. That’s it. You need to practice kindness, generosity, and hospitality to the least of these, because you’re doing it to Jesus. That’s the oil, that’s the light, that’s the presence of the Spirit, and that’s what it means to be wise in the Kingdom of Heaven. God wants you to have the oil from a million olive trees and all you have to do to get it is love your neighbor as yourself. That’s what it means to be ready for Christ’s return: mundane, daily, unexciting, but consistent love.
But that’s not the feeling most of us get when we read these passages, right? More often, it’s a feeling of dread, disquiet and doubt: am I wise or foolish? Did I bring extra oil (whatever that means) or not? Am I ready for Jesus to come back? What about the rapture?
What I hope this sermon accomplishes is to correct the trauma that these passages have caused for many christians, and give you a better way to read scripture than what parts of the christian tradition have given you. So, for the rest my time, I want to address two things:
The popular idea of the rapture causes trauma, not discipleship.
Jesus is showing us how to be attentive to the Kingdom of Heaven already in our midst and how to live in light of its unveiling - literally, its apocalypse.
Look. These passages in tonight’s reading aren’t easy. And let’s also name the fact that they don’t have the same effect on everyone. Some folks here might not have ever heard of the rapture until you got to college and it was a part of a lecture. Some folks, well, you couldn’t be left in a room alone too long without wondering if you’d been left behind. Count me in that group. Some had it worse than that: ordinary tasks were treated like a test to see if you were “ready” or not. You had to believe some very specific things about the end of the world: honestly, a horrible reality to contemplate. Plus ideas of identifying precisely who the antichrist was, and the fact that you–again, if you were really ready–were going to be whisked away at any instant. But that “readiness” was always up for grabs, and could be lost at any moment. You were constantly on edge, constantly dislodged by an ending that only a few true believers saw coming, and constantly turned back in on yourself with this question: am I ready? In that context, is the return of Christ any sort of good news at all?
We’re the unfortunate inheritors of a way of reading these scriptures that has fundamentally damaged the world. I mean that literally. Historian Matthew Avery Sutton in his book American Apocalypse lays out how a group of protestants who believed in the impending end of the world radically changed it: from the cold war, to the culture war, to the geopolitics in the middle east. In some ways, we’ve all been touched by rapture thinking, by a worldview where it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of unjust social systems. Apocalypse for thee, but not for me, to put a twist on an old saying.
Now, folks who have been at Christ our Advocate for a while know that in one of my sermons, I made a joke about “Anglican Preaching Bingo,” where you would have squares for when the preacher “Criticized the lectionary,” says “we have an altar call every service,” or quotes a poem by Mary Oliver.” Mtr. Emily and Fr. Ronnie added their own squares, it was a running joke for a while. Well, guess who’s back? That’s right, we’re going to put another square on the card tonight, and it’s called, “the preacher talks about Anglicans who broke bad.”
John Nelson Darby was an Anglican priest in the established Church of Ireland–the Anglo-dominant church–in the 1800s, a time of tremendous change and upheaval. When he was a child, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, Britain’s colonial ambitions were reaching their apex, and in Ireland, the Church of Ireland - loyal to the British crown - was working hard to convert the native catholic inhabitants. Darby was a bright student, translator, and principled pastor. He worked to convert poor and rural catholics, but when his bishop made swearing allegiance to the British king a part of conversion, he resigned in protest. After his resignation, he suffered a fall from a horse, and while recovering, began to reconsider his christianity apart from the established church. What if the Kingdom of Heaven was completely outside the established church? he wondered. A good question, considering the church’s behavior. But his conclusions led him to adopt a kind of primitivism - just go back to the early church - that a few years later became the Plymouth Brethren.
Darby’s crisis led him to develop the theology of dispensationalism, out of which the idea of the pre-tribulation rapture was a cornerstone teaching, around the 1830s, and propagated it through speaking tours, commentaries on scripture, and his disciples. While many christians had devised systems of historical epochs, it was Darby who used 1 Thes. 4 to theorize a rapture of the church before prophesied tribulation and Christ’s return. If you watched TV preachers in the 90s, you may have seen John Hagee’s enormous charts and graphs, not to mention his commentary on politics and prophecy. Darby’s ideas were also fictionalized in the Left Behind series. Maybe you’ve heard of it? I don’t want to get into the details of pre-tribulation teaching, much less pass judgment on Darby, who rightly resisted the abuse of power within the church. But I do want to highlight a few things.
Darby’s disaffection from the church was born of trauma; but his turn towards a literal reading of biblical prophecy that fundamentally disrupts history was also a work of trauma. Further, his tendency to see the church as exclusive and alienated from society led him to think that he could understand the workings of history and the rational pattern of prophecy. Establishing a pure, exclusive group of true believers was the answer to the sin of the church. This posture was in the air across the church and politics. Everyone was looking for the “end of history” - communists, colonialists, royalists, socialists, revolutionaries. That Darby promulgated yet another world-historical picture that was completely confident about how things would end was not that odd at the time. It was en vogue. And like many world-historical projects, once it was understood, it could be enacted by force. Jesus Will return when these things happen, so let’s make these things happen. Dwight Moody would go on to use Darby’s rapture theology to launch the global missions movement–so he didn’t have to deal with American Christianity’s participation and guilt for slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.
What’s more, what made one a true christian was, for Darby, in the last analysis, not faith in Jesus but agreement on a particular view of history and prophecy. This question of what makes an authentic christian is one we’ve all wrestled with, and rightly so; it’s raised in the scripture itself. It’s a question scripture raises, and answers, more definitively and simply that we’d like to think. The problem is, and we’ll get to this, the answer is hard, and not very exciting. But we see the power of the question used over and over by one group of christians to destabilize another: you’re not a true christian because…
you didn’t have an experience
you don’t share our eschatology
you do ‘dead liturgy’
you don’t have the right systematic theology
you don’t welcome the right people
You don’t vote for the right party
you’ve compromised with culture.
As an Anglican - in a time of disaffecting and disaffection - preaching in a Plymouth Brethren building, there’s a certain “glass house” dynamic that I’m keenly aware of, as well as the deep irony of history. It’s not everyday you get to deconstructing the rapture while planting an Anglican church in a Plymouth Brethren church building. But these are the legacies and traditions of reading that shape our relationship with, and trauma from, scripture. The teaching of the rapture that Darby and his disciples put forward placed an ideological yoke on the scripture that we need to dismantle. And here’s where I suggest we start:
Parables are not about history. They are not about the past, present, or the future. They make the kingdom present. They are poems. (So are most prophecies, actually). They demand to be read and attended to differently. Their purpose is not predictive, they are not a secret code. They make the Kingdom present here and now.
So, how can we read Matthew 25 in a non-traumatic way? I’m not convinced that Jesus wants to traumatize his disciples, actually. Yeah, really! He wants to guide them, bless them, prepare them, and give them light. He’s not a jack-in-the-box: surprise, rapture, everyone you love is gone. Not in the least.
What we need is to hear the scriptures with the ears they suggest we have, with the kind of attention the words themselves demand. And that’s where firefighters come in.
Firefighters are a community of people who live with respect, and in response to, a reality outside themselves: fire. Fire is an absolute. Fire creates warmth, survival, and industry. Fire destroys, consumes, and harms. Firefighters are people who have ordered their life around the reality of fire, of its certainty. In every community there is a fire station (much to the delight of my son) because we expect fire to happen. And we ask that some people dedicate themselves to being ready to respond to fire.
But notice the kind of alertness the firefighters have in their work. They are prepared. They train–extensively–for all kinds of fire scenarios. They have the right tools, equipment, and regimen to be ready. They are rested. Let me say that again. They are rested; there is a place to sleep, eat, and attend to the body. Some of us just need to sleep in the fire station for a while. They are not anxiously waiting for the bell to ring, but when it rings, they’re confident and prepared to address any situation.
Firefighters work in community and train in community. There are no solo fire brigades. At the same time, one firefighter can’t rely on the other firefighters to know what they’re doing. Every firefighter must be a firefighter for themselves. There are no cosplayers in a fire station. If there are, you find out really quick. You don’t a want ride-along showing up to your house, right?
When there’s a fire, you want people with knowledgeable, attentive experience, and endurance; people who, through practice, have quieted their anxiety in the face of the expected-unexpected, and are, above all, prepared. This is what it means to be a firefighter.
In Matthew 24-25, Jesus is teaching his disciples how to live in preparation for the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, an event that will fundamentally change humanity’s relationship with God. It is a wisdom discourse, meant to show what wise and foolish courses of action are in this time-between-times. Each of the parables of the kingdom makes present the kind of waiting Jesus wants his disciples to have. How are his disciples to wait for his return?
Extreme skepticism
Rejecting wielding power over other disciples in Christ’s absence
The abiding knowledge that the world is God’s and he is not abandoning it
Now, the parable. The parable poetically makes clear the kind of posture disciples are supposed to take. I’ve officiated a few weddings, and been in a few myself, and you know what happens in weddings? Stuff. Stuff happens. My wife knew this way better than I did. She had a plan that accounted for every detail. And, because she actually couldn’t be the one enacting the plan, she entrusted it to one of our friends who had extensive wedding experience. Well, not to short myself any credit, there were three other priests in our wedding party, so if the one we asked to marry us didn’t show up (which he almost didn’t, his plane was struck by lightning during taxi), we would get married, no matter what. We had backup clergy. Could we anticipate everything? No. Of course not. But Whitney was prepared.
It’s not enough to be excited to be in the wedding. You have to prepare. It’s not enough to be forgiven. You have to love what is good. Dispensationalist theology is simply another posture of folly: thinking you are prepared for “the rapture” isn’t obeying Jesus’s words, it’s an attempt to control him.
In the Kingdom of Heaven, how do you prepare?
Jesus gives us the answer at the end of Mt. 25. He doesn’t end with a list of ways to be prepared. He ends it with the parable of the sheep and the goats. Unfortunately, it’s another text with a history of traumatic reading, but let’s focus on the reality that the parable makes present. Those who have prepared for the Kingdom have done something. They’ve clothed, fed, visited, welcomed, and healed. To whom have they done this? Jesus, who is the least of these. How did they prepare? They did what Jesus said, in normal, quiet, mundane, and disciplined ways. They did normal christian stuff. They didn’t start a movement, they didn’t pray for 24 hours, they didn’t burn out for God, they didn’t write books, they didn’t preach revival, they didn’t build institutions or prophecy or any miraculous works.
They fed, clothed, quenched thirst, visited, and healed those who have nothing, who are the least. That’s it. That’s the oil, that’s what is wise in the Kingdom.
Poetry isn’t a puzzle, but it does encourage us to make connections. The foolish virgins say, “Lord, Lord!” And that’s not the only time people say that in Matthew’s gospel. In the Sermon on the Mount, those who don’t do God’s will–to believe and obey Jesus–won’t enter the kingdom no matter how many miracles they do, they cry out, “Lord, Lord.” At the end of Matthew 25, those who did not feed, clothe, and visit the least also say, “Lord, Lord, when did we see you?” As if they would have done it had they known it was the Lord, and not the poor.
If you want to be a firefighter, you don’t start by dressing as a firefighter and putting lights on your truck and getting a fire extinguisher. It’s a tragedy that the church has accustomed christians to live out their faith in exactly that way. Just get saved, just have this experience, just believe these right things. That’s christian cosplay, and we package it as discipleship. Shame on us. We’ve traded the call to holiness for the enactment of earnestness and sincerity. That I sincerely believe God loves everyone does not make me generous with my time or money. There’s no reserve oil in that way of living. May God give us space to repent and actually love those who he has identified with.
Christ our Advocate, what is our oil? How can we practice loving attentiveness? Christ the stranger will walk through our doors on a weekly basis, he’s told us. How will we greet him? How will we speak with him at dinner? How will we order our common life in preparation for his presence?
May God give us grace to encourage each other to lives of mundane constancy, loving attention, and holy simplicity. Amen.
