I found this on a fundamentalist website:
2011 AD—On May 21st, Judgment Day will begin and the rapture (the taking up into heaven of God’s elect people) will occur at the end of the 23-year great tribulation. On October 21st, the world will be destroyed by fire (7000 years from the flood; 13,023 years from creation).
So the rapture is this Saturday, conveniently arriving on a weekend. I’m sure you’ve heard it too and maybe wondered if you should be just a bit nervous about being “Left Behind”. Raven had a conference on the book of Revelation last fall and you can check out the way our scholars put the symbolism of Revelation in its historical context. Let me assure you that the rapture is not only not coming on Saturday, but the very concept is not found in Revelation and is based on a gross misreading of Scriptures.
Yet I have this feeling that we are experiencing a great tribulation, and perhaps standing at the edge of a greater cataclysm than humankind has seen before. If we are, any destruction which comes will be authored by the same angry divinity that has brought us past ones. We need no divine intervention to destroy the world – we are perfectly capable of doing it ourselves, thank you very much.
Look around, read the papers, watch the news: Tyrants continue to keep a stronghold on their populations, and the world community continues to prefer stable autocracy to messy liberation. The columnist Robert Koehler makes the painful observation that the United States seems to have embarked on a new normal, which is a state of perpetual warfare. I could go on listing reasons to run up your credit cards, quit your job and take a trip around the world, but I’ll let you fill in the blanks with your favorite reason to think God is tired of giving us one more chance. What I’d like to point to is the pinprick of hope twinkling in the darkness.
Change comes in convulsions. It’s always two steps forward, one step back. Positive, beneficial change happens so imperceptibly and comes in the midst of so much agony that we barely notice it above the din. Think about the long march of history and try to name some changes for the good. I’ll get you started with some obvious ones – slavery is a totally discredited economic system; universal human rights is part of the vocabulary of international relations; victims have rights – this is a revolution in thinking so long in coming that we barely realize that victims (of violence, birth defects, economic hardship, class belonging) were once thought to be either symptoms of an unchangeable social order or under God’s punishing judgment. Judgment day was not in the future but woven into the fabric of now. So I suppose it’s a moral achievement of sorts, a positive historical change, that we are looking forward to a not-quite-yet Judgment Day.
My point is that violent upheavals may be harbingers of something more happening to human beings than we can imagine in the midst of them. I think of the Arab Spring that way, as part of a long tradition of humanity being dragged to a better future, kicking and screaming as we go. The change we are in the midst of now is one we can barely see hidden by the smoke of gunfire, beneath the rubble of bombed out buildings, and drowning in innocent blood. But it can be glimpsed in the nonviolence protests: It is the move away from faith in violence, and that move will be the most bloody of all because violence will not die a quiet death. This change has been millennia in coming, with generation after generation taking two steps forward, one step back. My hope is that the United States will find its way a bit closer to the right side of history on this one. This May 21, as you find yourself left behind in this glorious, messy, imperfect world, it might be a good day to commit to putting yourself on the right side of history, too. Take a step away from violence and see where it leads us all.
