Explosions in Tripoli, bombs in the West Bank, radiation spewing from Japanese nuclear reactors, pirates seize an oil tanker,forty-five dead in Iraq government hostage siege, housing prices near a double dip… and these are just a few of the news stories being reported today. Depressing, isn’t it? News like this poses some big questions for me. Is it any wonder that so many people of faith have devoted themselves to whatseveral pastors label an “evacuation theology”? Is it any wonder we are afraid?

As I wrote a while back in my introduction to The Mockingbird Parables: “Somewhere along our journey we have managed to reduce the power of the good news of Jesus to a system of delivery, one that will carry us to the ‘sweet by and by’. We have managed to relegate Jesus’ command to love your neighbor as yourself to the periphery of our faith practice. It is a dilemma that Harper Lee articulates so profoundly through Miss Maudie, who points out that some people are so concerned with going to heaven, that they never think about how they should live here on earth and what changes they might bring about, even on their own street… One might speculate that we have condensed the gospel to the weight and size of a train ticket; our primary goal is to have the conductor punch the card as we piously sit back to watch the broken world pass by outside the window. In doing so, we have ignored the truth found in the command of love from John in chapter 3, verse 16 (‘For God so loved the world . . .’). We have forgotten that our primary call is to bring reconciliation to the world—the whole world. C. S. Lewis writes so brilliantly in The Weight of Glory, ‘It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.'”

Honestly, who can read the news or watch television and not think of a plan of escape? Isn’t evacuation and punching your proverbial one-way ticket to heaven the easy answer? I wonder if people who believe that the Gospel is primarily acquiescing to a simple phrase (punching a ticket) in order to escape from this broken world to heaven aren’t standing on a theology built out of fear? We are told in the New Testament, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18)… The letter explains that we must love (here and now) because God first loved us. There certainly is comfort in the idea of things being set right; nothing about the Gospel or the crucifixion supports a Jesus who looked passed His work on earth. If we believe Jesus to be who He said He was, we must also acknowledge that on the way to the cross He turned down the chance to “evacuate” in rather dramatic fashion. I believe it is in the cross that we most clearly see God’s answer to those who would portray a life of faith as “The Great Escape”. These discouraging headlines should probably be our best reminder of how much work we have to do in the here and now.