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The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost A few years ago, one of my best educated, most sophisticated, worldly wise parishioners came to me with a pastoral problem. For a few nights running, he had been losing sleep, thinking about whether or not Osama Bin Laden was the Antichrist. The Antichrist. It was the first time in all of my time as an ordained priest anyone had mentioned that name. And when I thought back on my 22 years of being an Episcopalian, I can’t remember ever once hearing the Antichrist mentioned. Which was okay by me. You see, in my younger days I had heard a great deal about that fearsome being. I was introduced to this archevil figure early on by my fundamentalist Christian relatives. They held that the world was about the end, and the events predicted by the biblical prophets and the Book of Revelation were about to happen, and if I wasn’t right with the Lord, I might be left behind when the rapture happened. Back then, this apochalyptic vision scared the hell out of me. It comes out of a dispensational theology that has its origin in the late 19th century in this country. In this conception, the world is in the time of the final dispensation of God, when all of time and history will come to a cataclysmic end with the Second Coming of Christ, who will establish a new heaven and a new earth under his eternal rule. It was based in large part on various readings of scripture, two of which we have read this morning. These belong to a genre of the bible that is known as apocalyptic literature, or stories about the end of the world. When times grew desperate and hopeless in the history of Israel and then again in the history of the early church, stories about the apocalypse became the norm. When things got so bad, people would long for the end of the world, when God would come as a Judge and Conqueror; when in the word of the prophet Daniel this morning: the day will come when “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt; or in the words of our Gospel, when nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be wars and rumors of wars and great earthquakes and famines. In every dark age then and since, the apocalypse has functioned to give the faithful a sense of hope in the face of utter despair, and a sense of vindication when times seem bleak and full of violence and destruction. In the wake of the nuclear arms buildup and the real fears of potential annihilation in the 50’s and 60’s, one recent version of this doomsday doctrine came in the best-selling religious book of that era, The Late Great Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsey. Perhaps you remember and even read it. I know I did. But in time, I consigned it and all those terrible apocalyptic scenarios to the dustbin where I put my other childhood nightmares and bogeymen. I have not thought about it since, for the longest time now. Until that night a few years ago, when the Antichrist was mentioned again. And then again, a few days after that, when one of the most imminent theologians of our time, Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School, in an address I was attending, held up a book you no doubt have seen or even read. It’s called Left Behind, by Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins. Yes, I had seen it selling like hotcakes at Barnes and Nobles and B.J.’s. And yes, I had even noticed that it was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. But like most mainline Christians, I had dismissed it as the musings of the lunatic fringe in this country and around the globe. At best, it was no better than mediocre science fiction. At worst, it was innocuous claptrap. Dr. Cox that day told me the others who had no clue about Tim Lahaye and his cohorts, much less the dispensational theology they espoused, that we ignore this phenomenon in our culture at our peril. So, on the way home, I went out and got my own copy of Left Behind. And I began to read. On one level it is entertaining stuff, a fictional account of the so-called Rapture. One day, in the twinkling of an eye, millions around the globe all of a sudden disappear, setting off a state of international chaos, bordering on anarchy. As those left behind begin to sort out this mysterious disappearance, some, who didn’t get it the first time around, see it as the Great Rapture, the prelude for the cataclysmic end of the world, a prelude for the second coming of Christ. There are already nine more installments of this doomsday novel, chronicling the tribulation, the rise of the Antichrist, the battles between the forces of good and evil, the mark of the beast (666), the desecration, and so on. All of these follow closely the dispensational timetable gleaned from the prophecies of scripture, the very same scenario I had heard about as a child. Since September 11th, the Internet has been rife with doomsday warnings. But if you log on to Left Behind.com, you will read about the mother of all doomsday warnings, courtesy of Lahaye and Jenkins. There, you can order video games for your kids, where in the ad it says‘they can join other tribulation force youth as they courageously face the unraveling of the world.’ Or you can read you can read updates about how the Left Behind series is capturing the imagination of millions as it tells the stories of those left behind following the rapture experience the tribulation and other events prior to Christ’s return to earth. Or you can pray with the authors, or join their chat room, and revel with them, as they tell you how glorious and sudden the end will be, and how soon it is coming. Or you can consider their arguments that you are a part of this strategic generation who will witness as time, as we know it, comes to an end. Now I wish I could tell you this morning, friends, this is harmless fiction, an alternative to going to see Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. But consider this. This is the best-selling religious book in the world right now. Over 45 million copies are already in print in several languages. And I thought I had left this all behind me many years ago. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I arrived at St. Mary’s two years ago, and found not one, but two complete sets of the series in our parish library. In the seats of power in this country and around the globe, dispensational theology is held as literal truth. And the great danger is, it may be self-fulfilling prophecy. Nowhere in the world is this truer than in Israel today. Biblical fundamentalists are ultra-Zionist. But make no mistake, they are not pro-Jewish. The Jews return to their homeland is simply a prop to set in motion the endtimes. Biblical fundamentalists are also anti-Muslim, seeing their elimination as the precursor for the rapture. And most ironically of all, biblical fundamentalists are anti-Christian, because in essence they are Deist and fatalistic, consigning to God a static, detached role as they usher in their doomsday agenda. Today, Christian Zionism welcomes, and even invites a real apocalyptic end to the world. And I believe this should concern us, and all people of faith because in this precarious time we are living, this dispensational worldview turns us in the direction of our self-destruction. Over against this understanding, we must hold fast to our belief that our creator God has made the world and blessed it and called it good; that our redeemer God has sent Jesus into the world not to condemn the world but to save it; that our sustainer God desires that we and those who follow us care for the world and those who inhabit it. Dispensational theology is fundamentally flawed because it takes the Bible out of context, and makes it a tool for a hideous agenda. Yes, in every age, apocalyptic literature is found, but never to be taken literally as a blueprint for human action and design. This is most especially true when it comes to the Bible, where in each and every case of the apocalyptic, it is always God who stands at the beginning and end of time, and it always God, and never mortal beings, who can know how and when time begins, and time ends. It is always God, not humanity who is in control. This much we know about our times, however. We must vigilant as people of faith. We must not be swayed by every passing doctrine and whim. We must endure, by holding fast to our faith in God, and our commitment to doing right. And we must, in the face of the biblical fundamentalism of our time, enter the fray, by doing as our collect says this morning: learn, really learn what scripture is saying, hear scripture, read scripture, mark, and inwardly digest scripture, so that we may embrace and hold fast to the blessed hope of everlasting life.
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