Friday, May 6, 2011

How Then, Shall We Live

What will you be doing on May 21?  If Harold Camping is right, of course, you’ll either be swallowed up in a massive earthquake that ushers in the rapture or you’ll be flying up to heaven behind a resurrected body that has just escaped the grave. 
Camping has used mathematical predictions applied to the Bible to predict dates for the end of the world.  Apparently that date is May 21, which will either really sweeten your Victoria Day weekend or put a slight damper on your projects.  One way or another, it’ll interrupt your plans.  Or not.  As I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility that May 21 will pass like most any other, a day filled with to-do lists, rushing from one appointment to the next, wondering how you’re going to get it all done; on second glance I suppose it’s possible that May 21 could be like most days – filled with small acts of courage and kindness, expressions of heart-wrenching beauty, a day filled with grief and grace and traces of God. 
It might be possible that the day brings an end to things as we know it and we see the world with new eyes: see the Christ in each other, the holy in the ordinary that unleashes a rapture of being given this astonishing gift we call life.  “The kingdom of God is around/within you,” Jesus said, no doubt on a rapture-filled day.  And when we enter that kingdom here on God’s green earth, when we live with an open heart, work for justice as we live in peace, perhaps, just maybe, we are indeed given a new heaven and a new earth.
I don’t know if you’re swayed by Harold Camping’s mathematical predictions that arise from his particular reading of the Bible.  But I do believe the rapture is here, that we can be enchanted with this very ordinary miracle of a day, that we can be enraptured in the grit and grace of life.
What will you be doing on May 21? 
How then, shall we live?
Dan Chambers

1 comment:

  1. Thank you Dan. A lovely re-viewing of the eschatology of the rapture.
    kimiko

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