WHO SHALL BE SAVED?
Daniel 12:1-10, Philippians 2:5-1, Matthew 24:36-51
[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript seeks to stay close to the exact words spoken.]
Gil Bailey, in one of the lectures I heard him give a few years ago, invites his hearers to a rather odd and perhaps macabre thought experiment. He asks, What would it be like if we took the cup--the Eucharist, the cup we take in Communion--as the people in Jonestown took that cup of Kool-Aid? Now, many of us might remember what happened in the mid-1980s, when the Reverend Jim Jones started an abusive cult and moved it to Jonestown, Guyana; and as the investigators were closing in on him and his community, he ordered his followers to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
What would happen--and I know it's an odd thing to think about--but what would happen if we took that cup with that mind? What if, somehow, having taken it, we had five minutes? Think about what you would do. What would you do? Would you freak out and run for the exits? Would you go to your knees in prayer? Would you hug the person next to you? What would you do?
When the movie Titanic came out several years ago, I found myself thinking about what I would do if I were on the deck of that ship in those fateful last moments. Do you ever think about that? What would you do? Would you be like John Jacob Aster, cool and collected, and sort of indifferent up until the end, straightening your tie? Would you be fighting for a seat on the lifeboat? Would you be helping someone else? Would you be like the musicians, who were playing until they slid off of the deck into the cold waters? What would you do if you were facing the end? Would you face the end like Father Gabriel, the character played by Jeremy Irons, at the end of the movie The Mission...walking along with the innocents into the bullets of the conquistadors, in the faith that you were walking into a larger universe where God's justice will indeed be done, and where the poor will not get trampled underfoot? What would you do, if you were facing the end?
It's an interesting thought exercise, isn't it? It illustrates how consequential our actions become when we're facing the end, or when the end is facing us--when it is imminent. I wanted to invite us to do that because I think it is a way, a small way, for us to enter the theological spirit of much of the New Testament--the theological imagination of those who wrote much of our Scriptures. Because much of the theology of the New Testament, especially, is marked by a kind of theology known as apocalypticism. Now, if you want some study notes about that subject, I have given you some in the worship notes in your bulletin. I'm saying most of that in my sermon, but if you want that to take home, it's there.
Apocalypticism is a fancy word that simply means "the theology of the end times." Another fancy word for it is eschatology. You see, the writers of the New Testament and some of the books of the Old Testament understood that we're on the deck of the Titanic, and some are getting a seat on the lifeboat, and some are not. Apocalypticism holds that there is a point to history. It's not a meaningless cycle repeating itself; it is a drama in which God is the main character and actor. And we need to ask ourselves the question, "Are we part of that great drama, or are we living in the melodrama?" I find so much of life, and my life, can be living the melodrama, instead of the great drama, by which God is claiming and redeeming and reconciling the world to God self. There is a point to history--an "end" to history--and as I said last week in my sermon, I intend a double meaning for that word, "the end." Because it can mean a chronological end, but also a purpose--there's a point to history. God's justice will be done.
Now apocalyptic theology--the theology of the end times--is a kind of theology that developed later in the writings of the Old Testament. The early writings are relatively free of this kind of theologizing. The first five books of the Bible have to do with God's calling Israel, and claiming Israel as God's people, and how divine justice gets done in this realm, and in this life. If Israel is bad, God somehow gives the consequence for that behavior in this world. So the Babylonian exile, for example--a terrible period in history, in the life of Israel--was seen as a consequence for its apostasy; its failure to live up to the covenant. So justice gets done in this life--God is punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous in this life.
Now apocalyptic theology developed somewhat later in the game, I think in large measure due to the recognition of some cognitive dissonance. Because people started realizing that, you know, it ain't necessarily so, that the wicked are punished and the righteous are rewarded. Because we all know--we all see that bad things happen to good people and the wicked do prosper. People get away with murder and somehow God doesn't act. What do we do about that? So apocalyptic theology saw that at the end of history, there would be balancing of the scales. God's justice would be done not necessarily within the realm of history, but on the day of the Lord, at the end of history. The righteous would be resurrected, those not living, and the wicked also would be resurrected, and there would be a day of reckoning for them. That is the vision that Daniel lays out the scripture that Mary Alice just read. The great and glorious day of the Lord when justice would finally be done, so that people can know now that you can't trample the weak--the strong cannot oppress the lowly; you cannot do evil and ultimately get away with it.
Now that kind of theology, apocalyptic theology, is of course still alive and well and living in America, especially this kind of theological imagination about the end times. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples of apocalyptic theology that many people know about, is the kind of theology that we read about in the popular novel series called Left Behind by Timothy LeHay and Jerry Jenkins. That novel series imagines the literal unfolding of some few verses of Scripture, especially a verse from I Thessalonians that holds that those who have died and who are righteous, and who have been claimed by God, will be reunited with an earthly body; and those still living who are righteous will rise up to 30,000 feet and meet Jesus in the air. And there are many people, including myself, I would have to say pretty clearly, who see this kind of theology as terribly misguided at best, and perhaps a dangerous perversion of Christian theology at worst. I do believe it's a terrible perversion of Christian theology, because it takes literally a few very select verses of the Scriptures in constructing what is, essentially, a lifeboat theology. Where the name of the game is having the right brand of evangelical Christian belief so that you and your family can get a seat on the lifeboat. And it ignores about 98% of the rest of the gospel, which has to do with loving our neighbor, loving our enemy; with clothing the naked, and feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger, which is truly our preparation for the end, for the point of history to come.
But I think that we shouldn't necessarily, we ourselves, get off so easily by rejecting those other forms of theology that seem odious to us. Because we ourselves are certainly not free, nor should we be, of this kind of apocalyptic thinking. We, as children of Calvin, understand a destiny for ourselves that is either in heaven, or...the challenging reality is that Calvin taught that some also were destined to be rejected by God. Now I know that last week, I promised to preach about predestination. And I know how much you've been looking forward to that. All week! He's going to talk about double predestination, I can hardly wait! Right?
If somebody knows nothing about Calvin--the average person on the street, you mention Calvin, and they say, "Oh, the guy who taught about predestination." Right? Or if they know a little bit more, they'll say, "The guy who taught about double predestination. The guy taught that God predestined some to go to Heaven, and some to go to Hell...." And on the surface of it, you know, that very small slice of Calvin's theology, in a very superficial way, is correct. Because Calvin took seriously the radical sovereignty of God. God is in charge of history, and there is a point to history, and there is a purpose to your life, you see? And he, like Apostle Paul, and like St. Augustine, looked at the reality around him and he realized that some people get the message, and some people are liberated by it. And some people are not. Not everyone gets it; they keep doing destructive things--self-destructive things, in the face of knowing what the good is. And so he looked at that picture, and he said, "If God is sovereign, God must have intended that some get it, and some don't." Because it's God's freedom to choose. Calvin's point is that we don't necessarily choose God--God chooses us.
Now I just want to briefly revisit this business of free will that I spoke about last Sunday. If you can handle it. I realize we're kind of swimming in some rather deep theological water, but hang with me for a little bit. Last Sunday I talked about how hell is a byproduct of human freedom. If we are endowed with the dignity of human freedom, the ability to make choices, and it is that which separates us from the animal kingdom, we have to allow for the possibility that we will not choose life, we will choose death. Hell is a consequence of human freedom. And if God sets before us life and good, death and evil, then of course let's hope that we choose life.
But Calvin is very pessimistic about our ability to choose life, to be free. This idea that we have free will...Calvin would be rather suspicious about. Because his concept, what he understands from Scripture, is that our will has been damaged from the beginning. We are not able to be free because we're subject to a kind of compulsion in life. This isn't an image from Calvin, but I think he'd OK with it....It's almost as if each human being were born with a straightjacket. You know, he'd say, because of Adam's sin, that we were, all of us, born with this kind of compulsivity, this lack of freedom. And the tragedy is that we think we are free. We have this wonderful straightjacket, and human life, and human culture is like a straightjacket fashion show. We wear around these beautiful bridles, and we say how wonderful it is that we're free, when that is an illusion; we are not free. We're wearing a straightjacket.
You know in the 60s, people had the idea: we'll get rid of the straightjacket, all the restraints, we'll be free! The straightjacket was also seen, in part, in terms of the constraints put upon people by religion. We'll just get rid of that, and we'll be free. The insidious thing about that is...it's just exchanging one straightjacket for another. You know, Calvin says, if we're lucky, we come to the realization that we are wearing a straightjacket, and that there is no way we can untie ourselves. People who are tied up with addiction know much more clearly than the rest of us that that's the straightjacket they're wearing, the compulsivity that they can't untie themselves from. So ours is to simply accept that power that can untie us.
That is the Good News!--that God has chosen to untie you and to give you a white robe, to give you a festal garment, and a place at the great banquet. It is God who gives us true freedom which is freedom from our compulsivity. And it's then that our choices truly are free. And so, Calvin looking at this situation, saw that some people get that, that freedom from God, and some don't. But the point is...that Calvin is making...we shouldn't worry about who's in and who's out. Only God knows that. Yours is to rejoice in the fact that God has chosen you. God has chosen to untie you--trust that, and indeed, you can see it happening before your very eyes, through the power of God at work in you. God has given you a white robe and a place at the great banquet. And only God knows who's in, and who's out.
Now that being said, I need to kind of come clean myself. And to say, as much as I respect John Calvin, I still don't buy it. I still can't get down with that. I can't look at you and say, "Maybe you're going up, and maybe you're going down." When I came in front of this Presbytery...I can't resist the temptation to tell this story, and hope it's illustrative for you, in your own thinking about this....When a minister changes location--comes to a different Presbytery--one has to go before the new Presbytery and have one's theology examined. (Maybe one has to have one's head examined, too). That's the way it works. You write a statement of faith and the presbyters, your colleagues in ministry, evaluate your theology based on that statement of faith. I stood in front of my colleagues, and there was an image in my statement of faith about the great banquet, and that all are invited, and all are included. And the first person to ask a question said, "Do you mean that all will be included, in the great banquet?" And my strategy going into this was to not give them more rope with which to hang me than was absolutely necessary--to give them a minimum amount of rope. So I answered with one word. I said, "Yes." And then the proverbial situation where "all hell breaks loose" happened.
People started asking me about my heretical theology--my being a universalist. And you know what? I guess I am! But I'm in good company. You know, Origin, Gregory of Nyssa, Karl Barth, although he would not necessarily admit to that...were universalists too. And I guess the person whose theology comes closest to my own is that great theologian of the church, Karl Barth. Because Karl Barth...he called himself a neo-Calvinist--trying to make Calvin make sense for modern people. And he too believed in double predestination. But here's what he said; here's his spin on double-predestination. He said that there's only one person who was predestined to hell. One person who went to hell and suffered the utter rejection of God. And do you know who that was? It wasn't Judas (I'll give you a hint). It was Jesus. Jesus is the only one who went to hell, and suffered the consequence that we all deserve, so that we wouldn't have to pay that penalty. "He who knew no sin became sin for our sake...." so that all of us would receive a white robe--all of us would have a place at that great banquet table. I believe that. I believe that. Now whether everyone accepts that invitation, or somehow in the eternity of time will do so--we don't know. That's in God's freedom to decide. But I hope so. Will it be the case that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God? I don't know. I hope so.
This is a story about that hope. It's an old legend about Judas that Madeleine L'Engle tells--the wonderful Christian writer Madeleine L'Engle. The legend is that after his death, Judas found himself at the bottom of a deep and slimy pit. For thousands of years he wept for his repentance. And when the tears were finally spent, he looked up and saw, way, way up, a tiny glimmer of light. After he had contemplated it for another thousand years or so, he began to climb up towards the light. The walls of the pit were dark and slimy, and he kept slipping back down. Finally, after great effort, he neared the top, and then he slipped and fell all the way back down to the bottom. It took him many years to recover, all the time weeping bitter tears of grief and repentance. And then he started to climb up again. After many more falls, and efforts, and failures, he reached the top, and dragged himself into an upper room, with twelve people seated around the table. "We've been waiting for you, Judas," Jesus said. "We couldn't begin without you."
That is my hope. "That at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God."
May it be so. Amen.
March 8, 2009
The Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos
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