To all the Sinners, Apostates, and Heathens

Hello fellow heathens, apostates, and sinners!!
If you are reading this, then you have officially missed the Rapture that was predicted on social media to have taken place on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025.  This means that a few things could have happened:

1. You were left behind to experience the trials and tribulations to come while “true” Christians were beamed up to heaven.
2. Jesus took one look at this world and decided that none of us were good enough to Rapture up to heaven.
3. The Rapture, as a theological idea invented in the 1830’s, is being used once again to instill feelings of fear and/or self-righteousness in people.

I have spoken about the Rapture in sermons before.  I largely consider it to be “Christian Fan-fiction,” Christian propaganda, and a tool of control.  It is used to get believers to abdicate responsibility for the state of the world because they are about to be beamed up to heaven and Jesus/God are left to punish those who made life on earth miserable. It is used as a fear tactic to often used by authoritarian pastors get people with questions or doubts to “fall in line” with their teachings or be “left behind” for the trials and tribulations.

However, repeatedly, throughout scripture, Jesus states that no one knows the time or place of the coming of the Son of Man… not even Jesus himself!  The Apostle Paul reiterates that Jesus will return “like a thief in the night.”  By the witness of scripture itself, the one way to guarantee that the Rapture won’t happen on a particular day (apart from the fact that the Rapture has no Biblical basis) would be to predict that it would happen on a particular day.

As I have stated before, I have stopped wishing for and a believing in the end of the world.  I now advocate to look around every day for how Jesus has come again that day.  Every time that someone apologizes for the harm that they’ve caused, Jesus has returned!  Every time that someone works to repair a relationship that has been broken, Jesus has returned!  Every time someone feeds the hungry, shelters the homeless, or gives hope to the hopeless, Jesus has returned!  Jesus has returned again and again and again, if we only look around us.  With that in mind, we have work to do: The Kingdom of God won’t build itself “on earth as it is in heaven” without us getting our hands dirty.

So - what can we do?  Well, if you haven’t yet, please attend one of the Town Hall Ministry Focus discussions.  We will be discussing various way that we can reach out into the community and make Jesus return to people’s lives yet again.

The next one will be THIS THURSDAY, September 25th at 7 pm on Zoom.  (Check your email for the link.)

The last one will be after church this Sunday, September 28th in the lounge.   Even if you haven’t signed up, please come anyway.

So, I hope you have a wonderful post-rapture day.   And may you see Jesus in the faces of others and in your own actions.

Blessings,
Pastor Chris