Beam Me Up

Are you good with waiting? You know those times when your car is in the shop and they have ordered you a rare and mysterious part to be installed. Your mechanic says.  “I will call you when it comes and give an estimate of when the work will be complete.” You probably call back at least once to ask how it is coming.

Remember when you were little, anticipating Christmas Day, and how time slowed down, turning days into weeks? I think that is why Advent calendars were invented: so, parents could give kids their bearings on the rhythm of days, and be more patient. Time is incredibly elastic, perceived from our subjective experience. A three hour visit with your best friend goes by in a flash. Half an hour in the dentist chair feels like half a day. (I have an appointment with my dentist today…a new crown…So excited!)

Waiting is especially tough when the thing you are waiting for comes at an unknown time. You are sitting in the chair outside the principal’s office and told to wait until Mr. Whalen comes and calls you in. You had your medical test and are told you will be called with the results. Anxiety changes the way we experience time. What was it like for Christians in Thessalonica who were told Jesus the Savior would return, perhaps imminently? No one knows when, and no one knows how things will be from then on. All will be caught up in God’s restructuring of things, setting in motion a new heaven and a new earth. When will “the day of the Lord” come, and what will it be like? The believers wonder if they will be okay. Would you call Paul’s words reassuring?

Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them…But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. … For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.      —1 Thessalonians 5:1-3a, 4-5, 9-10

(This is our Epistle lesson for Sunday.) The infant church in this Greek city was left with no hint on the timing, no sense of how it would go, but with the assurance they would be brought safely through the day, into life with their eternal Deliverer.

When I was in high school and college there was a popular craze among Christians about the second coming of Christ. There were descriptions about how all this would go crafted from books of the Bible—Ezekiel; Daniel; Mark, chapter 13; the Letters to the Thessalonians; and of course, the Apocalypse of John. There was frightening talk of a terrible time, the “tribulation”. There were theories about the tribulation coming before or after the rescue of the believers in a flash. In the “twinkling of an eye” the faithful would be raptured, swooped up to be with the Lord. We all wanted to be snatched up and out of the misery of the tribulation.  The thought was not quite, “Beam me up, Scotty” but similar. It was all in the realm of the unprovable, but the speculative writer, Hal Lindsey, and many others sold thousands of books explaining it all.

I think it is important neither to obsess over nor to dismiss these themes of the Second Coming. They actually can move us to diligence in our Christian walk. It wasn’t just those years, mid-70s through the 80s, that saw a fixation on the rapture and other features of the apocalypse. There have always been “Adventist” groups from the first century to the present that have focused there. I remember friends putting decals on their car dashboards reading: Warning – In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned. I remember decals countering those with the sarcastic wording: In case of rapture, may I have your car? Honestly, I neither laugh off the ponderings about the return of the Savior, nor do I get lost in them. I cast no dispersions. I only say it matters how we read and absorb this apocalyptic material of the Bible in order to benefit and be edified. Can we be more awake, and find we are “children of light and children of the day”?

Consider just how we might wait for the final disclosing of Creator’s reshaping of the cosmos and securing of God’s creatures. We don’t know when, we don’t know specifics. We know only that we want to busy ourselves with actions consonant with God’s purposes: things that shape us in a godly way. We do this for ourselves, but also for each other. Paul instructed us to encourage one another and edify one another. All of this makes watching, wondering and waiting go better. We are not staggering around through the day, we are not sleeping through the day, we are clear-headed and happy to serve. Again from Paul’s letter:

But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. —1 Thessalonians 5:8-10

The church in Thessalonica was living in very uncertain times, with many threatening factors looming. Can you relate? Rather than spend our days wringing our hands about what we don’t know, we can rally with what we do know. We know we belong to the one who secures the future. As many have told me before, we don’t know what the future holds but we know who holds the future. We don’t have to fixate in a worried way on cryptic symbols within apocalyptic literature. The intent is to give us hope in the strong Deliverer who is the absolute Sovereign. Guess what: you’re going to be fine.