“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.”

Debi and I have been fortunate enough to have seen my best unmet friend, Jimmy Buffett, in concert three times now. We don’t go each year, I’m way too cheap for that, but every two or three years we make our way to the traveling Margaritaville circus.

And each year there are rumors flying that this will be the last year because Jimmy is going to give up the traveling life. So each year when he sings “One Particular Harbour” – which may be my very favorite Jimmy Buffett song - he gets to the lines that go: “I can see the day, when my hair’s full of gray, and I finally disappear”. Then he pauses, looks out the audience for a few silent beats and grins and says “But not yet, because we’re still here!”

I feel that way this morning.

I feel that way in part because there were some people who claimed that yesterday was going to be the day of judgment. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it, I did see some of the billboards and I understand that they really didn’t mean yesterday was the end of the world, but that yesterday was a day when the faithful would be taken and the rest of left here to deal with all sorts of disasters.

This is a train of theological thinking, that was developed in the 1800’s, that takes what I believe to be poetic, symbolic, figurative statements in scripture and applies them rigidly, literally and I believe wrongly, and comes up with this rapture notion.

You can’t find anything about the doctrine of the rapture in the writings of Martin Luther, John Calvin or John Knox, you can’t find anything about the rapture in the faith statements of the Reformed, Presbyterian, Methodists, Lutheran, Episcopal, Orthodox, Roman Catholic Churches. In fact you cannot find anything about it in the teachings of any Church prior to the mid-1800’s!

And if individuals within any of those Churches believe in it, it is by the influence of TV preachers or hundreds of books that have come out in the last few decades with one clear purpose: to make money for the preachers and publishers.

This minister out in California who started the recent turmoil heads up a Church with $104,000,000 of assets. And it is sad, if not sinful, to hear the stories of people who quit their jobs and spend their savings to promote yesterday’s hullaballoo!

I don’t know, nor does anyone else, when or how my life or our life together will end, but there is no biblical or theological reason to believe that we will be sucked up in a giant holy vacuum cleaner to another place while bad stuff happens here on earth.

What I do know is that someday the world, as we know it, will end. Someday our lives, my life and yours, here in this world will end. But I am profoundly disinterested in discovering when that will happen. Not out of fear, although I’m certainly not anxious to learn or experience any of it, nor was Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane – if you remember - but out of a sheer, holy apathy.

You see, I may struggle with scripture passages that have unclear or ambiguous meanings; I may be slow to jump on board with complex theories that claim to have the precise knowledge of God’s plans on an unwavering time line; but I will trust myself – my life, my family, my friends, my ministry - completely and without hesitation to the things that I do understand, the words of Christ that are as clear a bell and as necessary as oxygen: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.”

And the Greek word that we translate as “Believe” here can also be translated as Trust”.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, trust in me.”

If yesterday had been the day, or if a hundred thousand more years go by before the perfection of God’s creation, the end of this world and the start of the new and finer and holier world, it makes no qualitative difference to me and it shouldn’t to you.

It only means that Christ has done exactly what he promised to do: In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.

It’s going to happen to each of us, and all of us, but it didn’t happen yesterday and it won’t happen according to our plans, agendas and calendars.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, trust in me.”

And then Jesus says And you know the way to the place where I am going.

And when Thomas, ever honest but often far too literal, hesitates and claims ignorance, Lord we don’t know the way and Jesus answers him: yes, you do Thomas, I am the way, the truth and the life,

You see, in contrast to those who try to scare people into faith, Christ continually tried to love people into it.

That is a remarkable confidence that God has in us, isn’t there?

You know the way

Most of the time we don’t think we do, most of the time we get confused by scripture, or by the ways in which other interpret it, and we want to cry out: “We don’t know!”

And Christ says You know the way

We don’t know how words of forgiveness fit with the empty skyline of lower Manhattan or with the cross for that matter.

And Christ says You know the way

We don’t know how to choose which passages of scripture are limited to a certain time and place and cultural context, and which are eternal and so the Church has stumbled, time and again.

And Christ says You know the way

We don’t know – and maybe don’t want to know – how to follow even the clearest of commands: Honor your father and mother,

Don’t commit adultery, Tithe, Keep the Sabbath Holy, love one another as Christ has loved us.

And Christ says You know the way

And what is the “Way” of Christ that we know?

Well, there are many answers, but today let me remind you again that, in contrast to those who try to scare people into faith, Christ always worked to love people into it.

That is the “Way” of Christ that we can know and follow, because God believes in us.

And Christ says You know the way

I know that in my own life, when I have encountered a conflict between what I believe and what God believes, God has always been right.

There have been so many things in my life that I have done that I didn’t think myself capable, or worthy, of. Standing here on any given Sunday is the clearest example, but being a husband, being a father, being a friend, the basics of my identity, teacher, coach, pastor, I could not hope to fill those roles except that God – working through the trust and encouragement of others – expressed the belief that I could.

They trusted me with it, they encouraged me in it and they filled me with determination and determination wins the day!

So I did it and so I do it.

As do you.

As do we, together as a Church. Peter says that we are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,

And as a result of that all of our doubts and shortcomings and flat-out failures and bone-headed ideas count for nothing.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

We’re still here, not because we have no place to go. No, we’re still here because it isn’t time yet for us to go.

For now this is the place where we belong, we are the people we belong to, the people we are meant to be.

And when we aren’t here anymore we will be in that place that Christ has prepared for us, so there is nothing to fear.

And what will that place be like?

Well scripture is pretty clear on that, it will be like a great banquet, a reunion, a wedding feast where there is no more sorrow, no more tears, no more suffering, no more fear.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, trust in me.”

One more Buffett reference, as we move into the warmer weather, he didn’t mean it the way that I will use it, but he is exactly correct, and echoing Christ, when he sings “There’s a Party at the end of the world”!

And we will all be there.

That I know without hesitation, I believe without doubts and I anticipate without reservations, even as I enjoy all of the hints and tastes of that future party here and now, in this world, in this life.