Every year, when the new church year begins, the Gospel reading in the lectionary is about the second coming of Jesus. I wonder if the folk who put the lectionary together would have done that if they had known what a feeding frenzy the end times speculation would become.

  Something like 60% of Americans, many of them non church going folk, believe the Bible has prophecies that detail the end times. The folk who developed the Left Behind series have sold more than $60,000,000 of books, movies, video games, and related merchandising. Christian radio and TV programs fill the airwaves with end times scenarios, and Christian bookstores devote a lot of shelf space to the topic.

   To start the Christian year with readings like today’s from Luke’s gospel is, literally, risking getting the year off to a bad start. I imagine when the lectionary was put together the reason such readings were included at the beginning of the year was to help us do the preparation work Advent is about. The event Advent points to, the birth of Jesus, has already happened, but Christmas is more than commemoration. The second coming passages help us to think about the fulfillment of that birth story., that God is working with a plan. As great as the story is, it’s just the beginning. That baby didn’t stay in the manger.

The problem, though, is that I think all this speculation about the second coming of Jesus has done great harm to the church. Here are the some of the problems I have with it.

  First of all, it’s bad interpretation of the Bible. It’s amazing the interpretive gymnastics people have to go through to get out of the Bible what something like the Left Behind books purport to be there. It’s no wonder there are so many seminars, lengthy books, and sermon series about the end times, it’s all pretty complex and takes lots of explanation. And these are often the people who take pride in the fact that they are reading the Bible literally rather than interpreting it. A classic in the literature is the grasshoppers you read about in the book of Ezekiel, which the end times folk say is an obvious reference to United Nations helicopters.

  A more disturbing interpretive principle of the folk who focus on the end times is one that was outlined for me by one of its adherents around our dining room table. He said that the Gospels aren’t really for us. All that Jesus taught, he said, is really for the age that follows the rapture. Now, again, this is a person who takes considerable effort to make sure people realize he doesn’t interpret the Bible. He had a long explanation about all of this that I don’t have time to go into now, but if you come to sermon talk back time on Tuesday evening we can talk more about it there. Suffice it to say, it’s a stunning way to totally dismiss the life and teachings of Jesus.

  There are lots of ways that people interpret the Bible. Some claim to be literalists, others might be into form criticism. People interpret the Bible through the lenses of Calvinism, Liberation Theology, Feminist Theology, Anabaptist Theology, and a whole host of other theologies. There are Catholic interpretations of the Bible, Lutheran interpretations, Baptist interpretations, Pentecostal interpretations.

  Many inside and outside the church, however, seem to think that this type of interpretation that leads to all this end times speculation is the correct one. But I, and a whole lot of others, argue that they aren’t even close.

My second complaint about popular end times theology and interpretation is that it has done serious damage to the church because it has been linked so closely with nationalism. And that is not just something that has happened in our own day.

  In his book American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips traces the history of the end times movements in the history of the Church. During World War I, it was fairly common for British and other European churches to equate the battle with the Germans as fulfillment of end times prophecies. The allied forces were the forces of light battling the anti-Christ of Germany.

  And one of the primary objectives of the British forces was to ‘complete the Crusades’ and reclaim Jerusalem from its Muslim inhabitants during that war. Many British and European preachers saw it as a fulfillment of all the Bible pointed to when the allied forces engaged the enemy in a winning battle near Medego, the place known in Europe and North America as Armageddon.

  Churches all over England hung the Union Jack behind their altars during WW I, and called for God’s blessings on allied troops as they fought this holy war.

  Kevin Phillips points out that when the war was over, church attendance began a precipitous decline in England. He sites as an important factor in that decline the blatant nationalism tethered with an end times theology that turned many from the church once they examined the horrors of that war and its justification as a part of God’s end times plan by so many churches.

  History has, indeed, repeated itself in this country. Nationalism and end times theology go hand in hand in many churches in this country. I’ve noticed on the Christian TV stations that the U.S. flags have gotten bigger and bigger behind those preachers who have declared this current war the U.S. is fighting as a vital piece in the end times puzzle.

  It’s no wonder to me that the church seems more and more irrelevant to more and more people in this country. Some of you may have seen the discussions on line or in the newspapers about the newest Left Behind video game where you score points by killing non Christians, and peacemakers are the allies of the anti-Christ.

  This is an example of the most popular portrayal of Christianity in our culture. Instead of peacemakers being the blessed children of God, they are the enemy that must be destroyed. Instead of loving our enemies as Jesus taught us, we are supposed to kill them. If you wonder how they can do that, I would refer you back to that conversation where it was stated that the Gospels aren’t really meant for us. Why would anyone want anything to do with that kind of Christianity? I’d stay away from that.

There are other complaints. There’s the narcissism of the whole thing. Like so many before us, we can’t believe that something like the second coming of Jesus wouldn’t pertain directly to our own time and place. Isn’t it all about us, after all? All those scriptures that were written 2,000-3,000 years ago, pointing to the end times, have to be about us, don’t they? Which means, of course, that for those past 2,000-3,000 thousand years they didn’t have any meaning for folk living in those days.

  There is also the fact that when things don’t work out with one scenario these end times prognosticators go right on to the next scenario without batting and eye. In WW I and II Germany was the home of the anti-Christ. Then it was the Soviet Union. Now it’s the Arab world. Do any of you here remember that little book, “88 Reason why the Rapture will happen in 1988?” Well, it didn’t happen, but the same people are telling us they have figured out the current signs indicating the end of the world.

  Here, though, is my most serious complaint about all this end times stuff. It’s the wrong question. Instead of asking when Jesus is coming again, we need to ask why he came in the first place. Until we get that one down better, we don’t need to be asking the other.

When you aren’t paying attention to the Gospels here’s what you miss. You miss that Jesus launched a revolutionary movement that he never expected to be well received by the powers that be. Jesus would never have imagined any nation being a Christian nation, because if we get the message right no nation in its right mind would fail to vigorously oppose it. “They’ll arrest you, hunt you down, and drag you to court and jail. It will go from bad to worse, dog-eat-dog, everyone at your throat because you carry my name.”

  But Jesus goes on to say ‘stand tall with your heads up high. Help is on the way,’ which is exactly the message of the Book of Revelation. This world is tough, there are earthquakes, hurricanes, national and personal disasters. The powers that be in this world want to be the powers that continue to be.

  They can’t defeat Jesus, though, as hard at they try. And they try hard. But his is a different kind of power they are up against. He was born in a stable to a poor peasant girl. He went about Israel doing good, showing people the way of God’s Kingdom. He refused to meet their lethal violence with more violence. And he was raised from the dead. How are you going to conquer that? So hold your heads up high.

  The story of Advent and Christmas that needs to stick with us is the most elemental part of the story. It’s not figuring out all the end times scenarios that matters but realizing that God is with us, ‘you shall call his name Emmanuel which means God with us.’

 In the hard times in this world and the hard times of our lives, God is with us. Through the wars and hospital stays, God is with us. Through the economic collapses and the lost jobs, God is with us. Through the ethnic cleansing and family conflicts, God is with us.  
 
 The Apostle Paul said it best, “there is nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

  Hold your heads up high, help is on the way. ‘God is with us. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we shall not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried off into the midst of the sea.’ That’s what we need to know.

  The issue isn’t when Jesus is coming again, but that he has been here. God can take care of the end of days. During Advent we are invited to prepare ourselves for the coming Jesus who has already come to us, who calls us to hold our heads up high no matter what life sends our way, because help is on the way.