By Amy Butler
Well, another Rapture prediction has come and gone and I don’t know about you, but I’m still here.
This time, everybody seems to be talking about it, from conservative Christian friends, to non-believers, to my friends who practice other faiths. Since interest is coming from every religious corner, plus a whole lot of non-religious corners, I began to think about why “the end of the world” is so mesmerizing to all of us.
Apparently, the concept of “the end of the world” is a regular part of human society and has been ever since we began residing on this planet. (And, really, you have to admit, another movie about it is pretty much the only hope Arnold Schwarzenegger has for any kind of revival of his movie career.) Now that the auspicious day has come and gone, two things come to mind.
First, isn’t this whole Judgment Day thing the perfect example of our ever-present human need to believe in something? Most of us don’t like the idea of our current reality as the final word on human life here on earth. We like instead to have something to hang onto, something we can’t see but that we’re convinced will come and make everything better. Of all the varied coping mechanisms available to us, I suppose choosing to believe in something is not the worst way to go. The snag comes, however, with the focus of our belief, doesn’t it?
And that’s the second thought that keeps coming to mind. I think Judgment Day/End of the World/Some People Are In, Some People Are Out, is a convenient belief option for the current state of our world. We’ve got to believe in another reality, so wouldn’t it be nice and neat to clench our fists, close our eyes, count to 10, and then — magic!
All the bad stuff will go away. A new reality will be foisted upon us. God will reward our approach by fixing everything and setting us up in a really sweet mansion as a reward for getting it right. And all the people who disagreed with us will be somewhere else, far away, wishing they had listened to us when we tried to tell them.
Believing in something like this is an understandable impulse, of course, because all around us we keep experiencing annoying things like disease, war, poverty, death. We’ve tried to fix them, but the problems are too big; we’re in too deep. It’s almost a relief to believe it’s all going to end and we get to start over, that this mess we’ve made will just be rebooted and God will step in to fix things.
Ending the world and starting over would be an easy way to manage the pain and disappointment, sin and conflict that often come with living very human lives in flawed community on a suffering planet.
But I am just not so sure that this kind of belief is the be-all and end-all of God’s plans for the world.
In other words, while there are days when the most hopeful thing we humans can do is throw up our hands and surrender, God has not given up hope. God has not yet given up on this world or on us, and God is actively engaged, in fact, in bringing about redemption right here.
I suppose we could just try really, really hard to focus on Oct. 21 or some other date for which I am sure we could devise a biblical formula.
But perhaps the bigger challenge of faith is having the courage and audacity to believe instead that God loves the whole world. And that through this love, God is hard at work redeeming the world slowly, slowly, slowly, sometimes so slowly we can’t begin to guess it’s even taking place.
But we believe it.
We believe it so much that we’re willing to stake our lives on the promise of God’s redemption, and to offer our hands and feet, everything we are, to the work of God’s transforming love in this world. This, it seems to me, is an even more audacious, ridiculous thing in which to believe than an instantaneous end to everything.
Apparently the Rapture didn’t come on May 21, at least as far as I know. But if we take this as an opportunity to think about what we really believe, on what we’d really want most to stake our lives, we might even have a hand in God’s redemptive work in the world.
What would it be like around here if love and forgiveness, equity and grace were the values by which we all lived? It could very well be the start of something brand new, the end of the world as we know it.