Rapture Practice (29 page)

“Hell is real, young people—an actual place created by the One True God, and I’m here on his behalf today to ask if you are
sure
about where you will spend eternity after you die.”

It’s the last week of classes, and an evangelist named Todd is preaching in today’s chapel service. He is a short man with a tall pompadour and a practiced, rhythmic cadence that you can tell he really enjoys hearing. He’s preached this sermon hundreds of times; his memory is perfect, his pauses placed with surgical precision. He’s wearing a polyester blazer, and the louder he gets, the redder his face becomes.

“Young men and women of God, make no mistake that hell exists, but each of you has a
choice
to make. I warn you now that if you slip into a Christ-less afterlife, you will find your nostrils filled with the putrid stench of eternal death, where the sulfurous fumes of damnation turn the very tears you shed
into streams of acid that burn rivulets into your cheeks as you cry out for a drop of water to quench your eternal thirst. But there will be no reply, young man. There will be no relief, young woman. This is what will happen if
you
go to
hell
.”

“If You Go to Hell” is the name of this sermon, and every so often Tom says these words as a frightening form of punctuation. It already has several of the teachers shouting out “amen.”

I hate sermons like these.

I’ve grown up with my dad preaching in churches, and his dad before him, but their sermons are different; thoughtful and passionate without being brash and showy.

Grandpa Hartzler was a cabinetmaker who’d only gone to school until eighth grade. Years later, when Dad was a little kid, Grandpa had taken night classes at the same Bible college where Dad now teaches and become the pastor of a tiny Mennonite church. I don’t remember Grandpa ever yelling when he preached, but I do remember the way he prayed—standing in the pulpit, talking to God with his arms stretched out and his head raised to heaven, asking for healing and goodness and love, tears slipping down his rough-hewn cheeks.

During the summer before my fifth-grade year, Grandpa asked the whole family to come to the church he pastored for a special healing service. He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he humbly explained to the congregation that he was asking for healing, but he only wanted God’s will for him. If the Lord had chosen this as his time to pass on, then he was ready to meet Jesus.

“It is appointed unto man once to die,” he quoted, “but after this the judgment.”

My dad and his brothers joined the other men from the church and walked up the aisle to meet Grandpa in front of the pulpit. Grandpa pulled a small bottle of Orville Redenbacher popcorn oil out of his suit jacket pocket and handed it to my dad. There was nothing special about the oil. I knew it wasn’t blessed or considered holy or anything; it was just used as a symbol of what the apostles used to do in biblical times.

Grandpa knelt on the floor, and the men gathered around to anoint him. His skin had already turned a toxic yellow-green from jaundice, the same color as the oil Dad dribbled into his hair. Each man in the circle laid a hand on Grandpa’s head, or his shoulder, or the shoulder of the man they were standing next to, and many payers were said for his healing.

As I watched, I couldn’t help thinking this seemed like a long shot. Other healing attempts were under way as well. One of my uncles had filled Grandma’s meat-and-potatoes kitchen with macrobiotic foods like seaweed and kept talking passionately about how God would heal Grandpa to prove his wonder-working power.

Six months later when Grandpa died, the people he had helped over the years packed the funeral home for his visitation. People our family had never met or heard of spoke about how he’d changed their lives with a tiny act of kindness; fixing their tractor or the leak in their roof, or visiting their sick mother. No one mentioned how enthusiastic or polished or well rehearsed his sermons were, but person after
person talked about his prayers. “Every time he prayed, I felt like I was in the presence of God.”

I know Grandpa Hartzler believed hell was a real place, but I don’t ever remember him trying to scare anyone with it. By contrast, Evangelist Todd is marching back and forth across the stage in chapelwaving his arms and shouting. He will
not
be ignored.

This is good, old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preaching, and it’s working. No matter how often I question whether our theology makes sense, sermons like this scare me senseless. Any logical question as to whether Jesus is
really
coming back, or whether it makes sense that oil could be an agent of symbolic healing fly right out the window. I feel guilty for having ever asked such questions in the first place. My stomach is quaking, my heart is pounding, and a single question drums in my brain:

What if I’m not really saved?

I remember asking Jesus into my heart, but it was the week before my third birthday, so it’s mainly snapshots, most a little hazy. I remember setting Josh up in his carrier and playing with the flannelgraph board, teaching him about Jesus using Mom’s figures—pictures of Jesus, crucified and bleeding, flocked on the back, fuzzy under my fingers, pressing them against the soft felt on the board so Josh could see them, telling him the words Mom had said to me so many times: sin, heaven, Jesus, wash away, born again, heart, saved….

I remember asking Mom again if I could be saved. Playing with my Lincoln Logs until Dad got home from work.
Sitting on the couch with Mom and Dad, bowing my head in prayer; asking Jesus to forgive me for all of my dark sin and to come into my heart so I could live forever with him in heaven.

It’s hazy, but I remember bits and pieces. Mom wrote down the words I prayed that day in the front of my tiny blue New Testament. She and Dad have assured me many times that once I sincerely trusted Jesus as my personal Lord and savior, I was saved from hell for all eternity. Jesus said in the Gospel of John that He gives those who trust Him eternal life, and that “no man shall be able to pluck them out of my hand.” It’s a doctrine called “eternal security,” which means once you sincerely trust Christ as your savior, you’re always saved, no matter what. Still, every time I hear a sermon like this, I doubt my salvation.

When I was in fourth grade, Dad rented a TV for the holidays, and Channel 50, the Christian TV station in Kansas City, played a movie we watched as a family called
A Thief in the Night
. The movie was made in the sixties, about a group of friends who get left behind after the Rapture because they aren’t saved when Jesus comes back. The Antichrist comes to power, and one of the girls refuses to take the mark of the beast, so the Antichrist sends out his soldiers in big white vans that read
UNITED
on the side, to hunt her down.

I was so scared after that movie that I asked Jesus into my heart every night before bed for quite a while:
This time I
really
mean it.

I feel the same gnawing doubts in my stomach right now
as the evangelist pleads with us to come down the aisle, kneel at the front, and “get right with God.” He’s not quiet about it the way my grandpa used to be. This guy is all bombast. His altar call has the texture and subtlety of a commercial for the Labor Day blowout at a used-car lot.

Of course, it works. Even with my head bowed and my eyes closed, I can hear the rush of other students making their way down the aisle toward the front. It even works on me, but I don’t move. This sermon, these scare tactics aren’t about a relationship with God. This man is scaring us into re-upping a contract for services, pure and simple. This is fire insurance.

There are plenty of us still glued to our pews, shaking on the inside, perhaps, but not moving on the outside. Without leaving my place, I silently pray one more time:

Dear God: If I haven’t been sincere enough before, or if for some reason it didn’t work, please come into my heart. I’m sorry for all of the sin in my life–lying to Mom and Dad, going to movies, thinking about sex, jerking off, drinking. I believe that your Son, Jesus, paid the price for all of those sins when he died on the cross. Please forgive me and wash my sins away so that I can spend eternity in heaven with you. In Jesus’s name, amen.

Even before I’m done praying, I feel silly.

Do I need forgiveness for those things? Are they really wrong? Plenty of kids in this room have parents who let them go to movies, and do all sorts of things my mom and dad don’t allow. There are all sorts of Christians with all sorts of different rules, not to mention other people who believe in other
religions. What about all of the people on the other side of the world who believe as strongly in their God as we believe in our God? Are they going to go to hell because they were unlucky enough to be born in the wrong place?

A crowd of students kneel on the stairs at the altar and drape themselves across the front pew. They’re praying for forgiveness, crying, talking with teachers and hugging each other as the rest of us file out of chapel. Bradley falls into step with me as we lead the ashen-faced unrepentant out the back doors of the auditorium and return to class.

“
Jesus
,” he says, under his breath. “What was
that
?”

“The Good News.” I sigh.

He shakes his head like he’s trying to clear his brain of the last hour. “What are you doing tomorrow night after graduation?”

“I have a date with Megan.”

“You’re still coming to my party afterward, aren’t you?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.” I smile. “After that sermon? I need a drink.”

My friend Eric and I are the junior marshals at the graduation ceremony. We line up with Bradley and the rest of the seniors in the choir room. I’m wearing a black gown and carrying the American flag down the aisle of the auditorium and up to the stage, stepping slowly and deliberately to the rhythm of “Pomp and Circumstance.”

Next year I’ll be wearing purple and getting my diploma.

After the ceremony, I join the pandemonium in the foyer of Tri-City Ministries, taking pictures with my friends in their purple caps and gowns. I confirm with Bradley I’ll be spending the night at his house, then Megan and I head to Fuddruckers for burgers.

“That’ll be
us
next year,” she says.

“Unless Jesus comes back first.”

She laughs. “Oh, c’mon. I’m guessing we get another year at
least
.”

“It’ll happen the very second Principal Freisen hands me my diploma,” I say. “A cosmic joke by Jesus, the moment I graduate.”

Megan dips a fry in some ketchup and chews thoughtfully. I love the way she cocks her chin and narrows her eyes when she’s considering a proposition.

“Do you really believe Jesus is coming back?” She squints at me through her long lashes.

I swallow a bite of my cheeseburger. “Do you?”

The question hangs in the air, unanswered. We both take a sip from our straws and change the subject.

I’m kissing Megan on the couch in her living room, which is bizarre because her mom and dad are on the other side of the wall in their bedroom. It’s only the two of us now, lit by the glow of the TV screen. This has happened before, but
I’m still getting used to it. The idea of making out with a girl on the couch at my house is unthinkable. My parents would never go to bed and leave me alone with a girl on the couch. Megan’s mom hung out with us and talked for a long time after we got back from the movie. Megan curled up against me on the couch and held my hand while we chatted like there was nothing weird about the fact we were touching in front of her mother.

Maybe there
is
nothing weird about it.

After her mom went to bed, Megan and I chatted while the credits rolled on
90210
. I was in midsentence when she pulled me down on top of her. “Shut up, and kiss me,” she whispered.

So I did.

We haven’t stopped kissing for a long time.

Her hoodie smells like fabric softener, and our bodies are pressed up against each other like we’re trying to meld our own unique individual bodies into one organism. Her breath is heavy, and when I slide my arm under her back to pull her closer into me, I feel strong and powerful.