Why The Blog Has Been Neglected…

It’s been an entire 2 months since my last post. It’s not because I’ve stopped seeing God in my days, but that I’ve had a new, exciting writing project on the go.

When I left teaching, a real anxiety came up as I wondered, “What am I supposed to be doing now?” For a while I thought I’d be working 1/2 time in teaching, but when that didn’t work out, a window opened for me with a 1/2 time job at my house church, and a lot of that has involved writing.

I’ve been hard at work writing entries to a new blog, which is launching today. In 2015, Watershed did a study on the book of Revelation, that wacky book at the end of the New Testament which one author has called “off-the-charts weird”. It was such a helpful study for us that we decided to offer a summary of it in a 10-week “online course” called “Rescuing Revelation”. It became my first job assignment, and it’s been a doozy.

I don’t know what your associations are with this book, but it was a source of terror for me growing up. The idea of that Christian would be suctioned up to heaven (with “non-Christians” being left behind) in an event called the “rapture” was introduced to me as a teenager. (For the record, the word or concept of “rapture” is not ever mentioned in the Bible.) The church of my youth showed a 1972 movie called “Thief in the Night,” which showed people suddenly disappearing when Jesus came to get them.

It terrified me! Every time I came home to an empty house, my heart would start to pound as I thought  the rapture had happened and I was left behind. It led me to “asking Jesus into my heart” over and over again, which if you ask me is not a great way to start being someone’s friend! (Luckily we got through that rough start!)

I know I’m not alone in that experience. My heart grieves for others who were ever terrified or led astray like me from the heart of the gospel. The “left behind” theology is so dangerous because God loves the world, and God will never leave the world behind.

When we began our course in January, 2015, our first assignment was to listen to the book of Revelation straight through. It was like trying to listen to someone’s really long, bizarre and violent dream, and it wasn’t long before I began tuning out. Honestly, I was dreading the course, and I know I wasn’t the only one.

Like any tricky subject, having a good teacher makes all the difference. And Revelation is definitely a tricky book. You need to know what you’re reading and how to read it. A Lutheran theologian named Craig Koester was our main guide through the course. He has made the study of Revelation one focus of his life’s work, and through “The Great Courses” (which offers university-level video courses), he teaches about it in 24 video sessions. He makes the book clear, engaging and meaningful.

What we learned through the video series, the accompanying book and the guidance of our resident teacher and mentor Paul Patterson, is that Revelation is a call to faithfulness for anyone who is struggling or even seduced by the false powers of the dominant culture. Despite our deep initial reservation, Revelation went from being a book we were slightly embarrassed by into one that became hope engendering and profoundly practical.

Whenever someone has experienced a health conundrum, as I have with headaches, you need something greater than the problem to take you through it. Otherwise a person starts to despair. For me, my assignment of writing about Revelation has been that “something greater”. I had the honor of sifting through all the material again. I listened once more to Koester’s lectures and our rich discussions and began to summarize and synthesize the material. It’s largely how I spent my winter, and I’m still not done. The themes of love and healing in the book helped me maintain my focus and give me a deeper source of hope in God. I truly fell in love with this book as I wrote about it.

If you’d like to take a peek, here’s a link and an invite. The writing is mine and my friend Linda did the technical side of things. We’ll post a new blog entry every Monday for the next 10 weeks. And hopefully it won’t be too long before I write on this blog again.

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Revelation is a book many people would rather ignore. With its violent imagery and a sword-wielding, warrior Jesus who seems straight out of a Hollywood movie, it hardly seems to emulate the “Love thine enemies” Jesus of the gospels.

Besides the skewed reading of the violence, Revelation has also been misused as a crystal ball over the centuries, in a (failed) attempt to predict the end of the world. Christians supposedly get suctioned up to heaven in a strange event called the “rapture”.

So, why should we read the book of Revelation? Read more…