Apocalypse When?. Jerry L. Sumney
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 about fifteen to twenty minutes to proclaim that Jesus’ return is about justice, transformation, and healing. So it’s important to make these sermons count for deconstructing harmful theology and reconstructing a theology of nonviolence and an ethic of care for those most vulnerable.
These distorted fundamentalist end-time narratives pose the opposite problem of secular doomsday products. They insist that the state of the world is God’s will. The suffering endured by people and the planet is the result of God’s wrath against the heathens, and, worse, it is inevitable. Those ascribing to this theology assent to the suffering of others (and even their own suffering) because they see no possibility for a better future until they are whisked away by a vengeful God smiting the Earth and all his (sic) enemies. In both secular and Christian apocalyptic fiction, however, the result is the same. People resign themselves to having no agency in God’s work of restoration. Or, worse, they believe that polluting the Earth or stirring up war in the Middle East is going to speed up Christ’s return.
Preachers, then, have a profound challenge—to reintroduce their listeners to the apocalyptic texts in a way that takes them on a journey that is different from either the secular or fundamentalist Christian paths. It is not a journey that leads to war or ecological collapse or oppressive dystopias, but rather “a journey into the heart of God, a journey into the heart of our world,” says Rossing. Apocalyptic texts give us a way of seeing that “teaches us how to look at the stories of our lives and the structures of violence and power in light of God’s shepherding Lamb. It teaches us to challenge oppression and to look for signs of hope, even when evil seems overpowering. It gives us an urgent vision for our future in which God dwells with us, on earth.”22 And it invites us to actively participate in that future in a life-giving way.
Homiletical Orientation
The sermons in this book will be grounded in a theology of preaching wherein “the Word of God spoken is itself the Word of God in preaching or God’s own speech to us. Thus preaching has a dual aspect: divine activity and human activity, God’s Word and human speech.”23 This dual function of preaching emphasizes both the human activity of the preacher who takes the suffering of humanity and Earth into consideration when proclaiming God’s Word, as well as God’s action of calling people to awareness, repentance, and hope in the midst of despair. Such proclamation is enhanced by engaging with other dialogue partners, as Richard Lischer states: “Beyond the preacher’s pastoral experiences lies theology’s perennial dialogue with psychotherapy, anthropology, philosophy, ideology, politics, the arts, science, medicine, cybernetics, and ethics. This dialogue not