Second Comings

When there were more Dads in households than there are now, wayward children sometimes were successfully terrorized into submission by the apocalyptic warning, you just wait 'til your father gets home! I for one rejoiced greatly over what I believed was the happy demise of this awful threat and the culture that legitimized it, even though my own father was pretty much of a pussy cat when it came to whippings out on the back forty. As it has turned out, though, my belief was wrong, and my rejoicing naïve.

It now seems clear that whole megachurches of Christians have never given up on waiting for Daddy to come home and straighten things out. To be sure, the latest version of this wistful hope puts it all in the hands of a favorite son rather than of the father himself. Skimmed the most recent "Left Behind" volume yet? It's a by-intent heart-stopping vision of Christ's return to earth in power, glory --- and vindictiveness. If The Book of Revelation wasn't enough to whip you into shape, surely this one, the authors believe, will get the job done.

From Paul's time to the present, believing that Christ will come again is indeed a core affirmation of the Christian faith --- e.g., the "he will come again to judge the living and the dead" article of the Apostles' Creed. The basic point of the doctrine of the second coming has always been that, all appearances to the contrary, the life and ministry of Jesus the Christ were not invalidated by his crucifixion. God's raising him from the dead proved that, and it is from a position of enthronement that the risen Christ will come to us as our true judge, to annul all of the claims of earthly kings and judges to have final authority over us.

So far, so good. Two problems, however, always present themselves whenever the doctrine of the second coming comes at us like just one more version of "Pop is after you." One is that most articulations of the doctrine never get beyond screaming that the Judge is coming and to run for cover. The still more basic point of the New Testament as a whole --- that the Judge forgives --- is almost always lost in the gloating over what is about to happen to everybody else. (Have you ever heard anybody proclaim the final separation of the righteous from the unrighteous who had not already put himself or herself in the first group?)

The second problem --- and it is one for which Paul is just as accountable as everybody else who salivates for Jesus' return --- is that the earliest Christian preachers took the resurrection itself to be God's validation of Jesus' life and ours. Whenever the principalities and powers of this world begin to look too strong for the cause of Christ, what we are supposed to dwell on is that his cause has already triumphed, not that God is going to give him a second crack at his enemies. In this sense, Easter was the second coming. Sorry you missed it.

But it still may not be too late for you, at least if you'll just quit harping on how all of the rest of us are finally going to get what's coming to us when the eldest Son comes knocking at our doors on the Father's behalf. You might have missed Easter, but you can't miss Pentecost, because it keeps happening again and again, just like it did in that upper room on Easter afternoon. (John 20:22) What was, perhaps, a third coming, for sure becomes a fourth, and a fifth, and a …, forever. Why? Because the breath that the risen Christ breathed into his disciples that day was and is the breath of eternal life. And as if this were not enough, it was and is the power of forgiveness.

How in the world did the message about the coming of God's Son to reconcile and make new devolve so quickly into a missile setting off only more alienation and hopelessness? Most probably, it had to do with persecution, and with the malignant hopelessness that too much of it so easily engenders. Comforting ourselves with the notion that our persecutors will get theirs is understandable.

But Jesus suffered more than a fair share of persecution himself, and at its height, Luke reminds us, he promised a thief on the cross next to him Paradise that very day, and died with words of forgiveness and trust on his lips. Those are far better words to remember in times of persecution than words of hate and condemnation toward persecutors and unbelievers alike.

Divinely Ordained Murder

When God speaks, do children have to die? Abraham thought so, and Isaac almost paid the price. Jesus thought so, and did pay the price. Andrea Yates and Deanna Laney apparently thought so, too, but their peers, unlike those of Abraham and Jesus, simply wrote them off as nuts.

In the long run, the mental health experts who messed with both of these terribly disturbed mothers' trials may do the rest of us more harm than good. First, they focused (as they should) on the accused parties'craziness, and on what medication can do for it. But they appear to have shied away from saying much about the religious culture which shaped both mothers' actions --- a culture for which there is only a theological remedy, not a pharmacological one. Second, they influenced two juries to draw cruelly different conclusions about the same aberrant behavior: while Ms.Yates' insanity warranted imprisonment, Ms. Laney's did not.

I would have hated to be on either of their juries, and I feel grateful, even if also a little guilty, that other citizens had to do what I was not called upon to do. The disparate punishments the two juries meted out, however, leave us with a daunting moral and spiritual dilemma: when someone is so out of touch with what God asks everyone to do, as to do exactly what God never asks anyone to do, what sort of punishment is appropriate?

There is, of course, a part answer to this question that is easy to determine. Whatever else punishment in cases like these should be, it has to ensure that people who do harm in God's name cannot remain in a position that allows them to keep on doing it. But the "whatever else" part of this answer still has to be dealt with.

If you think God is telling you to do something terrible to someone innocent, are you simply off your rocker? Are you merely hearing a voice in your own head rather than one from on high? Your therapist would say so, and every therapist to whom I have ever referred people with religious delusions also says so. Before you can get to a shrink, though, as the surviving members of Ms. Laney's family have discovered, there are a lot of people who get to you first with trust your inner voice messages, coming at you through the sponsorship of truly weird groups of self-proclaimed true believers. If there is psychosis to be ferreted out in the killing of theYates and Laney children, it is to be found in their parents' religious associations as much as it is in their mixed-up inner psyches.

It is surely psychotic to hate, maim, and murder any human being as a test and an expression of personal and communal faith. Unlike Abraham, we are supposed to know that there was a lamb in the bush on Moriah's slope, and that God desires all our sons and daughters to live. In fact, we know this so well that we have no excuse for acting as if it were not true. And no excuse for telling anyone else, in the name of God, to trust the inner voice and get on with suddenly sacred executions, whether of one's own children or an "infidel" peoples'. The only sacrifice of offspring that the one true God ever asked of anyone, he asked only of himself and of his own, and he intended that sacrifice to be enough for everyone. Let's say it all together: everyone.

And while we are on the subject, it is just as surely psychotic to take gleeful comfort in the notion that when Christ comes again, everybody who hasn't yet pledged fealty to him will be cast away to the outermost regions of hell. With the release of the last book in the "Left Behind" series (we should be so blessed), a lot of bookstores are going to be crawling with spiritual gloaters for some days to come. Frankly, this psychotic series left me behind a long time ago, and not in the way that its authors will think. Care to join me?

I hope and pray that Deanna Laney will finally get the help she needs and deserves in the hospital settings that await her. Hopefully, the staffs in charge will also keep at bay the people in her world who have assisted her so effectively to lose her mind. For the life of me, though, I cannot see how Andrea Yates is going to get the help she needs and deserves spending the rest of her life in prison. Some of the people who sent her there pretty obviously need the same kind of spiritual help that so many in Ms.Yates' world need even more.