"The end is near" according to St. Strangelove

Unlike most of the rest of the world, I did not watch the debate tonight. But what I find really funny is I will still know who won. Fox news, Rush Limbaugh, and the Wall Street Journal will all insist that Bush won it. Buzzflash and Al Franken will insist that John Kerry won it. And Michael Moore will argue that John Kerry didn't try hard enough.

I think I am despondent about it; I fear the mess in Iraq is past the point that anyone can clean it up. It just sickens me to think of all those Iraqi children who died today, all the soldiers over there who can no longer figure out why they are even over there, and all the aid workers who are being threatened with being brutally murdered by some wingnut named Al Zarqawi who wants to make Internet snuff videos. The best we can hope for, I fear, is that the fires set there do not spread outside Iraq.

Sometimes I think that the Book of Revelations is going to turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I certainly don't believe that it is God's will to lay bare the middle east and then usher in the end of the world. But many people, weak in their understanding of scripture, thinks that is exactly what the Bible calls for - then they vote for politicians they think can make it happen. Frankly, I think human beings will do it, each side trying to force God's hand, as it were. (Most people don't know that Islam also has an apocalyptic end of world prophecy that has Jesus and some fellow named the Mahdi ushering in the end of the world, but in that version, it is of course Islam triumphant.)

And the scary thing about all of this is that the apocalyptic genre in the Bible was never meant in the Nostradamus sense in which we read it. As any serious bible scholar will tell you, John was writing about his own era - persecutions of Christians that began with Roman emperor Nero. He uses symbolic numbers and signs from Daniel and other apocalyptic traditions to make theological sense of their suffering - only in Chapter 21, once the inspired writer has riffed on Daniel does he truly move into prophetic voice.

So it scares the crap out of me that people are designing public policies around the poor eisegesis that has resulted in the premilennial "rapture industry." Look folks - God does not want us to try and kick off the end of the world! When John, the Revelations writer, asserts in one of his letters that "God is Love," do you picture that God as as a world-destroying Zeus?

If the world does end, and Jesus does come down, it will probably because of a fridge magnet I saw in the rectory.

It reads, "Don't make me come down there!!"

It is time for Christians to call each other to be a more hopeful people. Don't wait to disappear in your clothes. Establish in your heart the kingdom of God, right now - for it was already at hand 2,000 years ago.