Eulogizing Harold Camping

"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.  For the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."  

Ah, Harold.  It was tough to see you go.

It's not that I agreed with you theologically.  I don't, and we wouldn't have seen eye to eye on almost anything where our relationship to the Creator of the Universe was concerned.  I suppose you now know the truth of it, as I will one day.

Here's hoping I'm right, because I'd like to share this with you, and maybe talk for a little while.  Or do whatever it is one does where you are now.

Though we wouldn't have agreed about most things, it's still hard to see the way that you are remembered, with slight snickering.

In your latter years, you crossed a line, one you'd been toeing for a while.  From your earnest, self-taught heart, you made a deeply unwise call that made you a global laughingstock.  Pesky thing, this social media era, particularly for the unwise.

But you weren't a charlatan, a two-faced huckster just out to fleece his flock so's he could have another Bentley for his "ministry."  There are plenty of those out there, but you weren't one of them.  You really believed what you said, which made it painful watching you fail.  I never thought you were right, of course.  You were wrong in some very significant ways.  But that does not give me the right to mock  you, or to snicker and smile at your pain.

Your response to your error was telling about your soul.  You didn't double down.  That's what cultists do, and the insane, and the evil.  They find a reason they were right.  They cling to their error, no matter what.

After a humiliation of global proportions, you said, publicly, to everyone: "I was wrong.  I wasted my long life on this pursuit.  Faith is about other things.  I'm sorry."

No excuses.  No rationalization.  Just, "I was wrong."  That takes a certain type of person, it does, and it speaks well of who you were.

We probably still wouldn't have agreed about most things, even then, but let me share with you three good things that I can honestly tell you about your life and the effect you had on me.

First, in the midst of the hubbub of your globally publicized mistake, you stirred my thirteen year old Jewish son to talk with me about what it meant to be a faithful person.  Did I, as a Christian, believe what you believed?  I was able to tell him that I did not, and to explain why.  Teens are notoriously hard to open up, particularly about matters of faith and meaning, and double-extra-particularly if you're their father.  I still remember that conversation, and I'm grateful to you for making it possible.

Second, as I've grown spiritually over the years, my worldview has changed.  I'm shaped by a peculiar fusion of faith and science, one that you'd probably have found a bit heretical.  OK, a lot heretical.  Given that your creation was only 6,000 years old, and mine is…well…an infinite multiverse…we understood our place in the scheme of things rather differently.

What's peculiar about my view, though, is that within it, there's a place where you weren't wrong.

Oh, sure, you were completely wrong in this space-time.  But in the wild and crazy multiverse of creation, there are functionally countless universes, identical to our own.  In more times and spaces than we can shake a quantum stick at, a six-kilometer wide hunk of mostly-iron came barreling out of the inner solar system on October 21, 2011.  Blinded by the sun, all of our sensors and telescopes would have missed it.

Just as we were all collectively tweeting our snarkery to #haroldcamping #lol, the heavens would have lit with the fire of a species-ending epochal asteroid strike.   I'm not sure how validated you would have felt by that, but hey.  "Close enough" counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and apocalyptic events.

More importantly, in the infinite multiverse of God's creation, some mistakes are wrong, and some mistakes are evil.  You were just wrong.  Your life has reminded me, as I often need reminding, that there is a difference.

Third, I've found myself reflecting on the impact your wrongness had on your followers.  Here's what they did.  They gave up all their possessions.   In those months before things did not go as you'd said, those who took your message seriously lived their lives as if every moment mattered.  They abandoned the drab routines of our culture, and set themselves towards doing something they viewed as being of ultimate importance.  That thing did not involve doing permanent harm to themselves, or harming others.  They just set all the crap aside…all of it...for a season.

This, in reflecting on your life, strikes me as interesting.  Because Lord knows I feel that desire now and again, as materialism and consumerism sits heavy on my soul.  But I am just too much of a coward to do it.

In countless churches around the world, that's what gets preached every week, and particularly in this season of Advent.  This time matters!  Possessions are not what counts!  Wake up! Spread the word!

This is kinda sorta what Jesus asked us to do, thems of us who take him seriously. We preach this from our pulpits, but more often than not we fail to live it.  Sometimes I wonder, frankly, if the only way to pull people out of the mire of our broken culture is with a message as radical as yours.

And wondering that is a good thing.

So, Harold.  Thanks for really apologizing, in an era when that skill is almost forgotten.  Thanks for helping me talk with my son, and for the way you were wrong but not evil, and for the reminder about what it often takes to stir us to action.  I'll see you on the other side.

Thank You Harold

As six o'clock in the evening begins to circle the world, the earthquake and teleporting fundy event does not appear to be coming to pass.  But as absurd and delusional as the Harold Camping prophecy has now proven to be, I have to say that I've felt blessed by Harold Camping's ministry these last several weeks.

My calling to preach and teach can often get crunched by the blahness of day-to-day life.   Instead of talking about theology, and sharing what the essence of the Gospel is, I find myself sucked into being a shuttle-driver-dad, or an administrator of a semi-functional local fraternal order.   The relationships of grace that are the essence of the Gospel and the heart of faith sometimes feel far distant.

But the lingering presence of Camping's little bit of memetic crazy has meant that for the last week, I've been having lots of theological conversations.  People want to talk about it.   It's totally insane, but that makes it also kind of interesting, and interesting gets people having conversations.

Like, say, my recently-mitzvahed 13 year old Jewish son.  The net-connected kids at his middle school were all a-Twitter about it, about how the world would be coming to an end.

So here's what happened.  He actually started a conversation with me about what I believed about the rapture.   I told him, of course.  I told him that there were too many non-Christian folk who I loved, himself included, for me to ever buy in to that theology.  I told him that if it were true, I would cling to the treetops and clamber back down if that was what it took to be with them.  Then we talked about what I really believe, and how while I'll admit I might be wrong, even if I am wrong, the world is still a better place because of it.

But let's go back and really hear the important thing in what I just said.

Harold Camping's ministry got a 13 year old boy to get into a conversation with his father about God  and the essence of faith.  Yeah, it ain't walking on water, but if you've got a teenager, you know that there's something miraculous in that.

So for those conversations, for those chances to share the grace and goodness of God, for those opportunities to be in faith conversation relationship, I have to admit that I'm feeling positively towards Mr. Camping right now.

Harold, in a thousand-thousand ways you need to wake up and smell the Gospel Coffee.  But honestly, for getting us all talking, you've been a blessing.

So, thank you, Harold!  I'm sorry today was such a bummer.

The Rapture

As I puttered through traffic on my way in to classes this morning, I found myself meditating a bit on the theology of the rapture.  With the deep and woeful disappointment of Harold Camping's followers now just a few days away, there are a whole bunch of folks who believe this is a central part of Christian theology.  That belief goes well beyond the devotees of that sepulchral radio evangelist.

It also goes deep into others who claim to be Jesus followers, like, say, in the toight-as-a-toiger teachings of our slickity local Jesus MegaCenter.  It's all over the place.

Rapture is just a central part of evangelical doctrine.  Folks eat it up with a spoon.  Tim LaHayes narrative extrapolations around the Rapture have sold an abundant pantload of Left Behind novels, and produced some of the most ragingly unwatchable films in the history of moviemaking.

Honestly, I just have never gotten it.  Not even a little bit.

I know it draws inspiration from an interpretation of one section of Luke's Gospel, in which Jesus says some are taken, and others are left.  And...well...that's pretty much it.  There are some extrapolations, followed by some interpretive gyrations, followed by some Olympic-level proof-texting, but it's essentially just that one little chunk of text, interpreted through the warping lens of the Archangel Scottie and his Bible-Believing transporter room.

Here's the essence of my problem.  This morning, as my sitting-in-traffic-mind immersed itself in the section of Faure's Requiem that was pouring through my six-speaker sound system, I found myself in a rapture-reverie.  I found myself viscerally envisioning that moment, were it to happen to me.

Now, I know this is a stretch.  As a progressive Christian, married to a Jew, a same-sex-relationship-affirming liberal Presbyterian, I know I'm not really on the Tim LaHaye shortlist.  Still, one never knows.

So here I am, envisioning what that moment would be like.  The world is coming apart.  Earthquakes.  Fires.  Buildings crumbling.  People crying out in terror.  And as one chosen, I'm unaffected.  I'm rising up, not really bodily, but into that deeper reality of God's presence.  I'm suffused with light, radiant with the power of my ascension to a place of peace and glory, my physical form yielding to my spiritual body as I began to move beyond the spreading cries and conflagration.

And it would just suck.  I'd feel horrible.  It would be the worst moment of my soon-to-be-over corporeal existence.

Why?

Because Jesus matters to me.  What he taught matters to me.  How he lived matters to me.  And from the Spirit of his radical and transforming compassion, I'd look down at the fading, burning world and weep.  I'd want none of that suffering for any of those souls remaining, even those who have hurt me deeply.  I'd feel not satisfied, or relieved, or joyous, but consumed with horror and loss and disappointment.

Like, say, Christ would have felt, if from the cross he had seen the story play out differently, watched the world consumed by annihilating fire, the fury of a father destroying everything that had hurt His child.  I can understand that anger, but it bears no resemblance to Christ.  It's a human rage.  If the fire had consumed centurion and swept aside zealot and pharisee, Christ would have seen it as betrayal.  He would truly have been forsaken.  His purpose, all his love, all his hope, all his teachings, all his transforming logos-radiant meat and bone and blood...wasted.

The reason the rapture works for folks, theologically, is that it is all about them.  It says, in defiance of the cross, that real Christians don't have to suffer when the world falls apart.  It reinforces ego and sense of otherness, at the expense for the hard Kingdom compassion that lies at the heart of the Gospel.

It just isn't Christian.

Camping Out for the Apocalypse

As May ticks by, it must be an exciting time to be Harold Camping.  As a moderately progressive Presbyterian, my exposure to Camping had up until that last month or two been essentially zero.   He's a fundamentalist, King James reading, highly conservative self-trained pastor over a radio ministry, but one who seemed to have had some purchase in the conservative community. 

The past tense there is intentional.  He recently alienated many of his conservative pastorly allies by declaring that no-one should go to church, because time for the church has passed.  Stay home!  Listen to your radio!

Most significantly, Camping's ministry has been focused on the return of Jesus and the beginning of the end times experience, which...from his exhaustive shamanic poring over the monkey entrails of scripture...is real soon.  Meaning he's called a date, now less than one week away, on May 21, 2011.  At 6:00 PM, exactly.  This is when the Raptcha will occur, and subsequent hilarity will ensue.  Oh, the horrors of that day!

In this, Camping joins a long line of end times prognosticators, for whom the disappointment of seeing the day go by inevitably unapocalypsed seems only to breed more zeal for finding out the "real" date.  The last few months...with immense natural disasters and historic foment in the cradle of monotheistic religion...must have been really exciting for folks who listen to Camping.

Several things strike me about this most recent in the long and storied line of Yeah-Sure-I-Know-The-Day-And-The-Hour End-Times obsessives.

First, and this is likely because Camping has significant media penetration and resources, this whole May 21 thing seems to have become something of a social event, much more so than any "prophecy" I can ever remember.  It hums everywhere in the collective subconscious, and this goes well beyond the realm of churchy life and conversation.  End-Times Parties are planned.  Snarky Facebook pages are joined.   The web-connected world sees the fleets of snappily decorated Doom RVs, giggles, and tweets about it to their friends.

Second, I am as a Jesus person going to be doing some praying at six o'clock this Saturday.   This will be for one of two reasons.  Reason number one, which has a 0.00000000000000000000000314% chance of being true, involves a major Destruction-of-Krypton type earthquake event, during which the Bahais, the Quakers, a handful of Unitarians, and both remaining Jains turn into energy beings.

I'm pretty much up poop creek if that be the case.

Reason number two, which is far more likely, is that Harold Camping and his followers will be facing a major existential crisis.  Camping is utterly wrong, about the Bible and many many other things, but he's not a charlatan or a monster.  I don't find it hard at all to feel compassion for him.  For those who follow him, this could be the thing that shakes them loose from faith not just in Camping's wackadoodle approach to the Bible, but also in the goodness of the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus Christ.

And that, well, that would be worse than the end of the world.