Kristi and I spent yesterday with the seminarians and their spouses / significant others, grilling brats, drinking beer and frozen cosmos, and jokingly awaiting the end of the world. At 5:59pm we shouted out our countdown to 6:00pm (drawing a few looks from nearby apartment windows) but, as everyone else in the world has noticed, nothing happened.
Many of my much smarter compatriots in ministry addressed the non-existent rapture this morning in their sermons, including my dear friend Carolyn, who said:
And as easy as it might be today to use him as the butt of a series of jokes… I don’t bring him up to distance our views from his… or to gloat… or to make us look like mature and reasonable believers when compared to him and his listeners.
Rather, I would like to talk about how we are similar… how we, like Harold Camping, so often miss the richness of the gospel because we think it would be preferable, or at least more comfortable, if we could just find a nice math solution to our existential angst.
But I was not thinking much about Harold Camping this morning at worship.
