Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 11, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Now, I’m sure that claim strikes you as absurd as it strikes me; but it didn’t strike an awful lot of Americans in the early 1840s as absurd at all. Miller took to the lecture circuit and developed a significant following, perhaps as many as 100,000 people. As the great day approached, many of these people sold their homes, quit their jobs, and gathered at Miller’s farm in northern New York to await the blessed event and to be welcomed into the Kingdom by Jesus Christ himself. Of course, nothing happened. That nothing came to be known as “The Great Disappointment,” and you’d think that it would have put an end not only to the Millerite Movement but to all such absurd uses of the Bible altogether. It didn’t. The Millerite Movement per se more or less died out, but out of its ashes as its direct spiritual descendant arose a Christian movement that is still very much with us today, even right here in Monroe, namely, the Seventy Day Adventists. For the first several decades of that movement’s existence its leaders continued to predict years in which Jesus would return. They don’t do that any more, but the denomination still places great emphasis on end time prophecy as a cornerstone of the Christian life. Like me you have probably received invitations to the “Prophecy Seminars” that they hold from time to time.

Literal belief in the Second Coming of Christ has lead to many such ridiculous incidents in the history of Christianity, but belief in the Second Coming itself is not a fringe element in the Christian tradition. The Apostles’ Creed, the oldest Christian creed, still used by most Christians around the world, holds that Jesus ascended into heaven “whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.” The Nicene Creed, another ancient Christian creed still widely used, has it that Jesus “shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead” and that thereafter his “Kingdom shall have no end. These assertions are grounded in scripture, which has many references to the Second Coming of Christ. Belief in the Second Coming, then, is an element of orthodox Christian belief and has been since New Testament times.

And it is something with which I have an immense amount of difficulty. Frankly, it has always struck me as patent nonsense. Everyone who advocates the doctrine seems to understand it literally, which of course I have a lot of trouble with. It leads to absurdities like the Millerite Movement and belief in “the Rapture,” a latter day version of belief in the Second Coming that holds that Jesus will one day come and snatch the saved from the earth into heaven. You’ve probably seen the bumper stickers: “In case of rapture this car will be unoccupied.” I saw one once that I like a lot better: “In case of rapture, can I have your car?”

It seems obvious to me that a literal Second Coming of Christ has lost all credibility given the fact that it hasn’t happened in the nearly 2,000 years that Christians have been proclaiming that it would. Yet I have an even more serious objection to the doctrine. The wisest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about it is that belief in the Second Coming is Christianity’s great denial of the first coming. It seems to say: God, you got it wrong when you sent Jesus the first time. Now do it our way. Send him back to make it right, to smite the evildoers, defeat our enemies, and usher us into the Kingdom. The idea of the Second Coming passes the buck back to God. It relieves us of responsibility for creating the Kingdom of God on earth. It allows us just to sit back in self-righteous indignation and wait for God to come and vindicate us. At least, that’s what I sure hear a lot of people who believe in the doctrine doing. Given all these objections to the idea of the Second Coming, when I saw the reading for this week from 2 Thessalonians going on about it I quickly decided that I wouldn’t be preaching on that text any time soon.

But then I got to thinking. You mostly object to the doctrine because its advocates always understand it literally, and you contend that a literal understanding of the Bible is spiritually and philosophically unsound. So I asked myself: Is there a non-literal way, perhaps a metaphorical or symbolic way, of understanding the doctrine of the Second Coming that might make some sense out of it and give it some spiritual value for us? It’s not easy to come up with one, actually. The doctrine seems to speak so literally of a time in the future when certain specified events will happen. It’s easier to understand stories about things set in the past as symbolic than it is to think of stories about something that will happen in the future that way. Still, I think there is one possible non-literal use of the idea of the Second Coming that is worth taking a look at. Here it is.

The one positive thing about the belief in the Second Coming that I have been able to discern is that it keeps us connected to the hope for a better world, for the coming of the Kingdom of God, for the transformation of the world from the way it is to the way God wants it to be. Why, after all, to people so cling to a literal belief in something that has never happened, that it seems to me can’t assume will ever happen, and that has produced so much nonsense and so much disappointment in its 2,000 year history? It is, I am convinced, because our desire for a better world is so strong. We are so appalled at what we see, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, as all the evil in the world. We so long for a world of peace and justice, a world where righteousness is rewarded and evil does not flourish the way it does in the world we actually experience. That yearning is what gave rise to the belief in the first place. The earliest Christians saw no hope of relief from the oppression of the Roman Empire coming from this world, so they looked for it from the next in the form of a Second Coming of Christ. They looked for divine intervention to do what the world seemed, and seems, so incapable of doing on its own. When hope in the world fades, hope in the Second Coming flourishes.

That was true in the first century CE, and it is true now. And it is so hard to hold onto hope in the world. If we can see those stories set in the future rather than in the past as stories about that longing, that yearning for a better world, there may yet be some value in them. If we use them as reminders that the world is not as it should be, that God desires a different world than the ones we humans always create, and that God calls us to strive for the coming of that world, then the stories of the Second Coming can be worthwhile. There can be spiritual truth in them.

Which isn’t to say that I’ve become a convert to the Second Coming way of thinking. On balance I still believe that the doctrine is seriously flawed. It really is the great denial of the first coming, and I am convinced that God calls us not to wait vainly for the Second Coming but to take seriously the first coming. Our call is not to hope that Christ will come back and do it “right.” Our call is to see that God in Christ did it right the first time. Our call is to see and to live into the truth of the Christ we have, not some future Christ that we don’t have. Our call is to live in the past and present reality that Christ is in the world, not to sit by and hope for some different reality that Christ may, we hope, become in the future. God did what God willed to do in Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago. Our call is to see the truth and the divine wisdom in what God did then and in what God is doing in and through Christ in the world today. In and through Christ in the world today God is working for that peace and that justice for which we, and God, so long. It’s often hard to see, but that is how God has determined to do it; and our call is to join God in God’s work, in God’s yearning, for a better world. It’s not to sit around waiting for God to do it “right,” the way we want rather than the way God wants.

So as to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, let no one deceive you. Let’s take from it what there is of value in it. Let us see it as an expression of our and humankind’s longing for a better world, a world of peace and justice for all people. But let us not use it as an excuse to abdicate our own responsibility for creating that world. And let that doctrine not distract us from our faith in what God did and is now doing in Jesus Christ as he came the first time and as he remains a living spiritual reality among us. What God did and is now doing in Jesus Christ is truly sufficient for us. God’s grace in Jesus Christ now is enough.

Will Jesus return one day personally to transform the world in a dramatic and decisive way? I can’t rule it out. It’s not for me to say what God can’t do. Still, we make a big mistake if we let the hope that Christ will return one day distract us from the grace we know now and the work we are called to now. Let that be our focus. Let that be our call. It is what God as ordained now, and it is enough. Amen.