Apocalypse When?. Jerry L. Sumney

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СКАЧАТЬ comfortably (if temporarily) maintained. Thus, the preacher will likely face a congregation whose folks are not in agreement about the state of the world. Some will resist sermons that courageously and prophetically name what is happening. Others may have already given up hope. But there will also be those who are looking to the Word of God for something, anything, that helps them make sense of the chaos and disintegration that they see happening around them. The sermon can help create meaning by pointing to the ancient wisdom of these apocalyptic texts and drawing out implications for what we face today.

      Even those who are comfortable—or comfortably numb—with the state of the world cannot deny that the culture itself is littered with “texts” that depict apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic futures. There is a plethora of books, movies, television shows, graphic novels, and video games that traffic in the images and story lines of end-of-the-world scenarios. The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, Divergent by Veronica Roth, and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood; movies such as Blade Runner, Mad Max, The Matrix, and the animated WALL-E; video games like Call of Duty, Half Life, and Fall Out; television shows such as The Last Man on Earth; comics like The Walking Dead (also a television series)—all of them present a vision of the future that eerily echoes biblical themes and scenes from apocalyptic texts.

      For preachers, these cultural texts cut both ways. On the one hand, one need only refer to a popular scene from one of these movies or books for contemporary hearers to tune in with recognition. Threatening skies, zombies roaming the streets, anarchy, mayhem, violence, desolation, and shortages of food and water in contemporary literature and movies seem to be lifted right from Daniel 9 or the book of Revelation (minus the zombies). But the preponderance of these modern dystopias presents two serious barriers for Christians to hear the biblical texts. First, in nearly all of these dystopias, evil wins. In fact, it appears that the genres themselves inadvertently create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The character Nix in the movie Tomorrowland explains why the messages of doom can backfire:

[I believed] the only way to stop [the annihilation] was to show it. To scare people straight. Because what reasonable human being wouldn’t be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they’ve ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up like a chocolate eclair! They didn’t fear their demise, they re-packaged it. It could be enjoyed as video games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon. 21

      This is exactly what we want to avoid in preaching apocalyptic texts from the Bible. When visions of fantastical beasts, death, destruction, and doom show up in Scripture, they are not intended to be repackaged as products for consumption, as has been done with the lucrative Left Behind series. Rather, their function is to tell a different story, which is that even if this is where we are now—heading toward the worst case scenario—God does not abandon the world or us. What we see, and what the proclamations of doom envision, are not the last word.

      To this, modern listeners may respond, “Of course! That’s where the hero comes in!” Within nearly every one of the secular stories of the apocalyptic genre there is the singular hero, perhaps with a small band of friends, who finds a way to survive, beat back the zombies, find a cure, or unlock the secret to a better future. They battle sadistic rulers, savage creatures, double-crossing fellow survivors, and the destitution of Earth, to emerge with a glimmer of hope for humanity. These stories have strong appeal, but they are based on a dangerous premise, which is that the salvation of humanity and the world is up to the individual. The theological premise of these genres is that we are alone, abandoned by God (if there ever was one), and the fate of the world rests in our hands. The best we can hope for are a few loyal and ingenious friends to accompany us as we make our way in this grave new world.

      This premise of the apocalyptic hero throws up the second barrier to preachers trying to proclaim—and listeners trying to hear—the gospel in end-times texts. The hero trope is antithetical to the intention of apocalyptic texts in the Bible for two reasons. First, Scripture promises that we are not alone, and that even if we fail, God does not. Second, apocalyptic texts in Scripture are not about singular individuals; they are about the community of the faithful who are strengthened and upheld by a divine and benevolent force bigger than themselves. In contrast, the modern day concept of the hero and a band of fellow stalwart survivors battling for survival is like a flame drawing moths. We are seduced by something that distracts us and draws away our energy that is needed for something far more important—building faith and building community. Thus, sermons based on apocalyptic texts will need to reveal the problematic nature of secular doomsday dramas while clearly pointing the way to the true light of the gospel.

      Yet even while the preacher is countering the distracting messages of the apocalypse in popular culture, there is an even more daunting task—refuting the dangerous “Rapture theology” of Christian millennialism.

      Leaving Behind Left Behind

      When I was nine years old in the late ’70s, a friend of mine and her family took me to their church to see a movie. I was very excited because I loved going to movies, and I thought it was cool that a church was going to show a real movie with popcorn and candy! But when we got to the church and descended the steps to the basement, I realized I was going to be disappointed. There was no popcorn, no candy. Only rows of hard metal chairs facing a screen.

      My disappointment turned to fear as I watched the film. It was a movie about the end of days and what was going to happen when Jesus came back to Earth. It was terrifying! It showed images of the moon turning the color of blood, the sun going dark, and stars falling from the sky. It painted a picture of mass confusion on Earth, with people running around in sheer terror as Jesus comes down in a great cloud of doom. The movie followed the story of one family’s trials and tribulations, including watching their young son being tortured by agents of the Antichrist.

      After it was over, my friend’s parents asked me what I thought of the movie. I said that I thought it was really scary and that I was worried that maybe the end of the world would happen while I was alive. They told me that everything I saw in the movie was in the Bible and is exactly the way things are going to happen when Jesus comes back. “You should be worried,” they said. “Everyone should be worried about Jesus coming again.”

      This was the same message I received from the books given to me by members of my extended family who attended churches where authors like Frank Peretti, Tim LaHaye, and Jerry Jenkins were read with as much fervor as the Bible. Books like Peretti’s This Present Darkness and LaHaye and Jenkins’s Left Behind series put the fear of God and angels into my nightmares and daydreams. When I think back on the way these books and movies created such dread of Jesus in my impressionable young mind, it’s a wonder I didn’t run screaming from the church and the Bible. Instead, by the grace of God, it led me into a lifelong pursuit of theological and biblical study that eventually resulted in my becoming a pastor and seminary professor of preaching and worship. Something in my head and heart told me that what they were showing me in that cold, dark church basement and in those terrifying books was not the Jesus and God of the Bible. I had to find different answers and wrestle with these biblical passages in other contexts in order to get a fuller understanding of what they mean for our lives.

      But for millions of people, Christian apocalyptic fiction is not a genre to be critically examined; it is akin to the Bible itself. An entire multimillion-dollar industry has been created around graphic Christian horror that grips the faithful in fear and fantasy. Worse, it peddles a narrative that supports a political agenda of war-making in the Middle East, environmental degradation, patriarchal control over women and their bodies, and anti-Semitic and Islamophobic white nationalism. Eighty million copies of the Left Behind books, along with numerous Rapture websites, movies, and spin-offs threaten to drown out the gospel of hope, renewal, and love. Meanwhile, the preacher on a Sunday morning has СКАЧАТЬ