Jesus is Coming, Look Busy

This Sunday we celebrate Palm Sunday and then we will have services every day for a week so that by noon on Easter, we will have enjoyed 11 worship services in eight days. It'll be a busy week next week and we are counting on God showing up for our worship. But what if God shows up first in the form of the Second Coming? What do you want to be doing when Jesus' returns?

I'm not saying that you can't get to heaven if you are eating wings at Hooters when Jesus returns, but really, is that where you hope to be when the last trump sounds?

I hope I'm preaching, teaching, or doing something pious. I hope I am not wandering around Blockbuster trying to decide on which movie I'm in the mood for. Or on second thought, maybe the Second Coming would get me out of that dilemma.

So what do you wish our Lord found you up to on his return? And then the obvious follow up is what are you waiting for? Because we kinda think God will see you either way, right?

Just sayin'.

For a more serious take on the same subject is the sermon from our archives The problem with the Rapture on our page of study materials Demystifying Revelation.

Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

William Butler Yeats: “The Second Coming” (1921)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
hings fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand;
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries
of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Apocalypse Wow

Related to my blog entry below is the latest video from Father Matthew:

The End of the World as We Know It

Over at On Faith, the fine folks at The Washington Post and Newsweek asked their panelists,

Do you believe the world will come to an end? If so, where, when and what will it look like?

The Anglican response comes from Bishop N.T. Wright of England in his essay, Read the Book; You'll Know How It Ends in which he says,

The NT [New Tsetament] picture is for heaven and earth to be joined together in a great act of renewal (Revelation 21-22), or for the new world to be born from the womb of the old (Romans 8), or for everything that destroys and defaces the present world to be defeated and overthrown, including death itself, which means not that the world will be destroyed but precisely that the forces of such destruction won't have the last word (1 Corinthians 15.20-28).

The great irony here is that a lot of muddled Christians are relentlessly opposed to Darwinism on the grounds that they believe in Genesis 1. Often the same people have no concern at all for what Genesis 1 insists on, namely that the space/time/matter creation is the good creation of the one good God -- who will, according to both Old and New Testaments, set creation right at the last by bringing together its two dimensions (heaven and earth) into one. That, after all, is what Jesus taught us to pray.

Columnist Cal Thomas agrees, writing,

The "world" will not end. It will be transformed, even re-created.

You can browse what all the panelists have to say here: On Faith: End of the World

I have written of this sort of thing in the sermon The Problem with the Rapture and we have a resource page on Revelation at Demystifing Revelation.

How would you answer their questions...Do you believe the world will come to an end? If so, where, when and what will it look like?

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor