John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Hear the angels sing

"O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing!"
- Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810 – 1876)
Christmas greetings to you, valued reader. Unemployed and threatened with homelessness, feeling affinity with Joseph on the road to Egypt today: the Christmas story as vital and valid as ever.

Left behind with Jesus

.... Jesus revealed to us the ultimate triumph of the Kingdom of God by his resurrection. Not the End Time, but this one-off event in the life of the world is the most important one for all who put their faith and hope in him. At the resurrection the power of loving forgiveness broke through into the world, and the power of God’s absolute generosity overcame all that the kingdoms of the world could throw at it. For we Christians, this is the point on which history turns. The resurrection is the focus of our hope and our salvation. This is not The Rapture, but The Rupture. 

The New Testament is far less interested in describing a coming rapture as it is in describing an already come rupture in time and history. The endless cycles of rising tides of human violence have been interrupted with an incarnate, nonviolent word from God in Jesus Christ, a word that is unconditionally one of loving forgiveness. It is a rupture that begins creation again with a power of life from God that reveals itself as more powerful than our powers of violence and death. We who are already baptized into that promise of life need not hope in some future rapture. Our hope is in the coming fulfillment of what was already begun in the cross and resurrection. [Paul Neuchterlein] ...

 - from my grapple with Larry Norman, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' pretribulation, premillennial, Christian eschatological perspectives of the end of the world, Left behind with Jesus, at Waterloo United Free Church, today.