Author: John Drymon

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A few years ago I was taking the elevator back down to the lobby in a hospital after visiting somebody, when a man with whom I was sharing the ride asked me “going up?” I thought it a strange thing to ask since he knew as well as I which direction the elevator was headed. I said “no, I’m going down to the lobby, too” and he replied “I mean are you going up in the rapture when Jesus comes back?” I chuckled uncomfortably and said “well, that’s a different question,” and then, thank God, the elevator door opened and I escaped. As I was walking away I heard a woman who was also in the elevator, and whom I assumed was my inquisitor’s wife, say in one of those whispers you can hear across a room “I think that means ‘no.’”

I imagine I’m not the first person of whom this man had asked this particular question on a descending elevator. I imagine he thought himself rather clever. I wonder if I was the first person in a clerical collar he had asked and how he would recount that story later to his co-religionists. Would he say that he had run into a preacher that didn’t believe the Word of God? Would it be further evidence of some prejudice he or his friends held about churches that weren’t really Christian? I’ve debated with myself whether I should have engaged the man and his wife in a theological conversation, whether such a conversation would have done any good for any of us or if we would have all left such a conversation feeling more smug and superior than he, she, and I already probably felt. I just don’t know.

In his First Epistle to the Thessalonians, from which we just heard, Paul writes:

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

This has become a key text in the ideology of modern Christian fundamentalism, as many of you are no doubt aware. What you may not be aware of is how this came to be the case.

In the year 1827 an American preacher named John Nelson Darby popularized a theory called premillenial dispensationalism. He was building on some of the hypotheses of the seventeenth century puritan preachers Increase and Cotton Mather and the eighteenth century Welsh historian and Baptist preacher Morgan Edwards. While the Mathers and Edwards were somewhat oblique in their description of the eschaton, or end-times as some have taken to calling it, Darby developed a remarkably specific vision of the future. Taking the passage from First Thessalonians as his central text and placing it in the context of apocalyptic events described in the books of Daniel and Revelation, Darby presented what he believed to be a timeline for the end of the world.

While the theory is complicated the short version is as follows: Jesus will return and believers will be raised bodily into heaven and disappear, the unfaithful will be subjected to seven years of tribulation, Jesus and the Church will return to reign on earth for a thousand years, there will be a final battle between good and evil, and then the final judgment will take place and everyone will go to either heaven or hell.

This remained a somewhat marginal view until the 1909 publication of the Scofield Reference Bible. As far as I know, it was the first English bible since the 1560 Geneva Bible to include commentary right alongside the Scriptures themselves, and it encouraged one to read the bible in such a way as to accept Darby’s theory. Incidentally, it was also the bible which introduced the modern strain of “Young Earth Creationism”- the idea that God created the world sometime in the last ten thousand years. It is Scofield whom we can thank for Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, the popular Left Behind series of books, the virulent antiscientism of tens of millions of US Americans, Christian Zionism and Christian Nationalism, and the most terrifying website I’ve ever seen- raptureready.com.

The most remarkable part of this story is that a guy in the nineteenth century basically made it all up. The Mathers and Edwards notwithstanding, virtually nobody believed any of this stuff two hundred years ago. This is not to say that every Christian in the world believed exactly the same thing about the eschaton prior to Darby. There have been good and healthy debates between people who believed different things about the second coming of Christ, particularly whether things were going to get better and better or worse and worse leading up to Christ’s return and the General Resurrection. Each of these schools of thought can be argued on the basis of Scripture and traditional Church teaching. But each of these schools of thought reads the fourth chapter of First Thessalonians as referring to the General Resurrection on the Last Day which immediately precedes Christ’s judgment and his gracious act of establishing a new heaven and a new earth.

This is neither a conservative nor a liberal point of view. Anglicans believe it. Lutherans and Presbyterians and Methodists believe it. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians believe it. Moderate and Progressive Baptists believe it. The Amish and the Mennonites believe it.

But a heck-of-a-lot of Christians in this country have been taught premillenial dispensationalism. Seven of the Left Behind books have reached “number one” on the New York Times Best Sellers list, which gives you a good idea of how popular the theory is. I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of television and radio preachers teach the theory- a theory (and I don’t normally make such a bold claim, but in this case I believe it to be justified) which simply doesn’t hold up under any serious program of reading and interpreting the bible. But why, you might ask, does it matter?

Is this not an issue on which we should just agree to disagree? I don’t agree, for example, with the Presbyterians on how many sacraments there are or with the Roman Catholics on papal infallibility. These issues seem more important or at least more relevant, yet I don’t get really exercised about their points of view, at least in my preaching.

First, I think theological positions like that have a basis in at least some ways of faithfully interpreting Scripture and Church Tradition. One can have civil, theologically informed debates over those issues. Maybe it’s some unexamined prejudice on my part, but I just don’t see the same conversation being possible with the issue in question. It’s almost like fundamentalist eschatology uses a language which isn’t intelligible to me, like I’m speaking in English and they’re speaking Mandarin, and neither of us even has a phrase book.

The other reason is that I honestly believe that premillenial dispensationalism produces a dangerous worldview. This is not a politically correct or absolutely inclusive thing to say, and I beg your pardon, but I believe this to be both true and deadly serious. The idea that one smart or lucky enough to be a believer should be spared difficulty while the nonbelievers deserve tribulation leads one to one of two equally dangerous conclusions- either we should stop caring about the plight of those whose creed is different from our own because God ordained them to suffer or else our only responsibility in this world is to rack up converts, put notches in our belts for the souls we (not God) have saved. I’ve not read the Left Behind books, but I have read excerpts of some of the nasty bits as well as interviews with the authors, and the tortures they describe being inflicted on nonbelievers(by Jesus himself, no less) is nothing short of despicable. It reminds one of the genre of film that has come to be called “torture porn” in which one is meant to get a kick out of horrible violence being inflicted on people. It dehumanizes “the other”, making the most depraved, wicked sort of hatred not only palatable but fun. It is not hyperbolic to say that this sort of “entertainment” harms one’s soul, and when one doesn’t believe it’s entirely fictitious it can eventually make one vicious.

The most terrifying thing to me is that there are people who completely buy in to this theory in positions of power in business and government making decisions based on it. I know there are people here, considering our currently divisive political reality, who agree with me on certain matters of our country’s foreign policy and those who don’t. That’s perfectly fine. Reasonable people can disagree. It scares me witless, though, to think that there are some people with a lot of pull with regard to our policy in the Middle East who honest-to-God believe that the modern state of Israel has something to do with Jesus’ second-coming.

I’m sure there are some here who disagree with me with regard to education and energy policy. That’s fine, too. Reasonable people can disagree. It horrifies me, though, that there are people deciding what textbooks our children read who don’t believe in science and that there are lawmakers and bureaucrats who believe that the world is going to end anyway, Jesus is going to give us a thousand-year-long do-over, so our planet is more-or-less expendable.

So, what do we do? I believe it is time for reasonable Christians to start talking about eschatology again, both in private conversations and public forums. We’ve been reticent to do so and have ceded that topic to a very vocal minority. It’s time for us to say that Jesus is coming again, but not to torture heathens. He’s coming to breathe new life where death reigns. It’s time to admit that we’ve made a hash of things, but we don’t get a millenial do-over so we’d better start being more virtuous and responsible and loving here and now. It’s time to start preaching the Resurrection again, because that message is a whole lot more compelling than anything a fundamentalist post-apocalyptic horror story can come up with.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The great English writer G.K. Chesterton once said of today’s Gospel, “Jesus here tells us to love our neighbors. Elsewhere the bible tells us we should love our enemies. This is because, generally speaking, they are the same people.”

I am reminded of this reality increasingly as I walk or ride around town and see houses right next to each other, one with a Trump/Pence sign and the other with a Biden/Harris sign. Indeed, there is one house on South Main which appears to me to be a single-family home, albeit a large one, with a Trump sign on one end and a Biden sign on the other. Now, perhaps that house as been divided into two units, but I like to imagine its occupied by one family figuring out how to live together despite political strife.

Our clergy day program a couple weeks ago was about this sort of thing, but in the context of congregations and communities regardless of what happens November 3^rd. It could have been a good program, that topic being so much before us right now. Sadly, I think it was a missed opportunity. The presenter (a retired bishop of Newark; not the one you may be thinking of, thank God) is on the board of a nonprofit aimed at bringing people who voted differently together and “repairing the breach” that may have opened between them. It’s a good idea, important work, but it was all presented in this sort of lowest-common-denominator civic religion, which seems typically to hold a vague theism and the U.S. Constitution as basically on par with each other. One would think a retired bishop talking to a bunch of priests and deacons could have actually just shared the Gospel in this context, because I think it gives us all the rationale and tools we need, and it starts with today’s Gospel lesson.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

We may respond to this by asking “well, then, who is my neighbor?” Even the neighbor who votes differently from me?! In St. Luke’s version of today’s Gospel, the lawyer who asks the initial question and receives Jesus’ famous response, proceeds to ask this second question—Who is my neighbor?—in order, it should be noted, to trick Jesus, and Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which we heard at Morning Prayer on Thursday.

Even if you didn’t pray the office that day (tut-tut) you still likely remember how that one goes. The priest and the Levite—righteous men by Jewish religious standards—pass by the wounded traveler without offering any kind of assistance. The Samaritan, a member of a race and religion very much at odds with the Jews, rescues the traveler and pays his expenses during his convalescence. Who was the traveler’s neighbor? None other than a man whom circumstance and ideology had made his enemy.

We have a rather narrow definition of love, which I don’t think is unique to our time and place, but which is nonetheless misguided. We hear the word “love” and what do we think? We probably think of warm feelings for somebody because of some kinship or friendship or personal attraction. Warm feelings for somebody are well and good, but Christian charity is a much broader concept, and it seems to me to have little to do with those we are predisposed to like.

Love in the Christian sense includes a commitment to act on behalf of those with whom we have little in common and even those with whom we are at enmity. Look back at that reading from Leviticus. Unfortunately it skipped several verses which are germane to our discussion of love. In the verses we heard, the Israelites are commanded to avoid prejudice and partiality, to avoid slander, to shun hatred, and to divest themselves of resentment and grudges. In the thirteen verses our lectionary skipped, the children of Israel are also commanded not to steal, not to put off paying an employee even one day, not to be cruel to those who cannot defend themselves, and even not to harvest all of one’s land so that the poor might take the produce around the borders of one’s farm. All of these commandments are summed up in that elegant but seemingly impossible commandment: love thy neighbor as thyself.

You’ve heard me say it before from this pulpit and here it is again, perhaps my most often repeated comment on the Christian life: love is not about warm, fuzzy feelings; love is about commitment and sacrifice. If one is committed to loving one’s spouse, he must sacrifice his own selfish concerns for the good of the relationship. If one is committed to loving one’s children, he must sacrifice getting what he wants and doing what he wants to a great extent in order to be present and to support the child. If one is committed to loving the poor, she’s got to do something about it at her own expense. If one is committed to loving Christ’s Church and those who do not yet believe, she must give sacrificially of her time, talent, and treasure to support the Church’s mission of reconciling all people everywhere to God and each other.

And the really hard part is that we cannot show partiality. We cannot choose to love only those whom we like. We must commit to sacrificing ourselves for those whom we don’t particularly like:

Love your enemies [Jesus says] and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

This seems an impossible task, but in truth we already have the greatest example: Jesus Christ who laid down his life not only for the people with whom he had mutual fondness, but for those who hated him, those who spat at him, those who scourged him and nailed him to the Cross. We are commanded to take up our own cross, to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others as Christ had done. Will we do it?

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

As tempting a text as this morning’s Gospel is, especially since we’ll soon embark on our annual stewardship drive, there is something about the Old Testament which I find compelling and, thus, want to focus on. Isaiah’s prophecy is the climax of a fascinating period of history which I think interesting to enough to rehearse briefly, because it makes this morning’s Old Testament lesson all the more surprising. So, on with a bit of a history lesson, and apologies if it seems dry to some. I for one find it to be a really enthralling story.

If you follow the daily office lectionary, and include two readings at each office, you’ve been hearing a great deal of the background of this morning’s Old Testament over the past couple of weeks in evn=ening prayer. To bring you up to speed, the last great king of Judah, Josiah, had done what none of his predecessors had managed- namely, large scale religious and political reform. Though Judah was a client state of Assyria, Josiah managed to tear down the altars of foreign gods and encourage the worship of Israel’s god alone- a feat not even managed by Solomon himself. He used tax revenue not to underwrite the monarchy’s expenses but to undertake a significant renovation of the Temple. Sadly, when Josiah died in the year 609 B.C. a whole series of bad kings followed. Josiah’s son, Jehoahaz, ignored his father’s reforms and was captured only three months into his reign after an ill-advised war with Egypt. Jehoahaz’s brother Jehoiakim was installed in his place by the Egyptian conquerors, but his eleven year reign was defined by his apparently constantly shifting allegiance to Egypt and Babylon who were at war with each other, and, worst of all, after facing criticism by the prophet Jeremiah, he undertook a policy of burning the prophet’s writings. Finally, Jehoiakim’s son, Jeconiah, only managed to rule for three months and ten days before he allowed Jerusalem to fall to the Babylonians and the best and brightest of Judah to be sent into exile throughout the Babylonian Empire on 16 March in the year 597 B.C.

Now, skip forward almost sixty years. Jerusalem had fallen, leaving only a puppet monarchy and the poorest of the poor remaining in Judah. Educated and wealthy Jews had established communities throughout Babylon, leading to an increased nationalistic and religious fervor which the Empire had sought to quash by its program of forced exile. This was a period in which the Jews learned how to maintain their Judaism, their connection to the God of Israel, outside the land given to their forefathers and without the benefit of temple worship. For the common Jew, this meant an increased attention to kashrut, faithfulness in observing the laws of purity and morality found in the Torah. For scholars, it meant not only an increased attention to studying the Law (the beginnings of modern, Rabbinical Judaism) but also an explosion of creativity. It is not in Israel but in Babylon that much of what we call the Old Testament was finally written down.

More and more, though, the Jews realized that they could only follow the God of Israel in the manner they desired by returning to the land and rebuilding the temple. The only problem was, they had no army and a couple generations of life in exile had made repatriation seem little more than wishful thinking.

But then, something unexpected happened. The Word of the Lord came not just to the prophet but to one identified in this morning’s lesson as God’s “anointed”. Indeed, considering that Isaiah was holed up in Babylon, we might assume that this prophecy was not even mediated through the prophet to this “anointed one” but went directly from God to him, 500 miles away from Babylon in the city of Susa.

And who was this “anointed one”? Cyrus, the Zoroastrian king of Persia. God says to Cyrus that He has “called [him] by name. I surname you,” God says, “though you do not know me… I gird you, though you do not know me.” God chose not one of His own chosen people, but a king following a foreign religion (though, arguably the only monotheistic religion at the time aside from Judaism) to bring deliverance to the Jews.

We Christians often miss this part of the story because we read Isaiah on one level when there are at least two levels on which the prophecies function. Isaiah most certainly points to Jesus Himself as his people’s redeemer, but on another level he also point’s to King Cyrus. It’s not a matter of figuring out when the prophet speaks about one or the other; he can be understood as speaking of both in the same breath, a difficult thing for us linear-thinking modern people to get our minds around.

Anyhow, there is more in this than a history lesson with a twist at the end, because I think the twist-ending itself gives us an important lesson about who God is. We talk so much about coming to know God more fully, but we miss what is arguably more important- namely, that God knows us fully. To Cyrus, the God of Israel, if he had even heard of him, would have been a minor tribal god. He probably wouldn’t have seen this strange religion of displaced Jews as being particularly interesting. But God knew Cyrus, just as he knows each of us: completely. Because God knew Cyrus before Cyrus knew Him, this foreign king was made an instrument of the one true God.

The fact is we can never fully know God. We project all sorts of cultural and personal biases onto Him, and getting an even slightly clearer image of Him is a life’s work. It is my strong belief that even those who reject God most vociferously (the so-called “new atheists”) are rejecting not God Himself but some inaccurate image which we’ve created—some white-bearded chap who lives in the clouds—that has less to do with who God is than it does with our own hang-ups.

That being the case, the Good News is that however skewed our image of God is, God’s image of us is perfect. God knows us fully and can employ the greater angels of our nature, made perfect in Christ Jesus, to do His Will whether we realize He’s doing it or not. It is a great God who can take some pagan Persian king to be a channel of his peace and deliverance. It is a great God who can take us, confused and sinful as we are, and build a Kingdom for which there is no end. May our ignorance of God be overshadowed by God’s perfect knowledge of us, and may His perfect love find a home in the hearts who as yet do not know Him at all.

+In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.