“…And We’re All Still Here.”

The title of this post is taken from a story I was told by a fellow seminary student from Baltimore back in 1996. It had been the usual mid-Atlantic 3-H Summer: hazy, hot, humid. Several days of 90+°(F, not C) and 90+% humidity had finally broken in typical fashion, with a late afternoon line of thunderstorms that formed over the Poconos and came roaring across central New Jersey with a vengeance. A group of Summer Language students who were from the West Coast who had never seen anything like this before were standing in the Quad, staring at the post-storm sky—a miasma of golds, reds, slate greys and greens. Dr. Gillespie, the president of the seminary, came out of the Admin building at that moment, and came over to the group of students. He, too, started at the sky, and then said, “Huh. Just as I always thought: the Rapture happened…” he looked down at the students and with a twinkle in his eyes deadpanned, “…and we’re all still here.”

As I write this, Harold Camping’s absolute, unequivocal prediction of May 21, 2011, as Judgment Day has come and gone…and we’re all still here.

It would be easy to mock him and his followers, as many have already done long before this day proved Camping wrong (again). Heck, I’ve been sorely tempted myself to crack jokes at their expense. As I rode the tractor around the back lawn Saturday, I thought to myself “If Camping is right, I’m going to be p.o.-ed that I spent my last moments in this life mowing the freaking grass!” But the people who spent their life savings, spent years traveling to tell others, who decorated their cars with messages about Judgment Day deserve neither derision, nor pity. We have more in common with them than any of us would want to admit.

In their book Lucifer’s Hammer, authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle describe something they dub “Hammer Fever”: as a comet (nicknamed “the Hammer”) threatens to hit the Earth and wipe out civilization, some people not only embrace the idea but look forward to it. Network news reporter Harv Randall reflects that people do so because they hate their jobs, their marriages, their lives, they want out of their mortgages, their responsibilities, and they see “the Hammer”, the comet, as a way out.

It comes down to one word: hopelessness. Camping, and others with an eschatological obsession, look at the world and all they can see is insurmountable problems…how the greedy triumph and the powerless are exploited, how the good suffer and the evil seem to prosper, an explosive population growth and global climate change, and “wars and rumors of wars”, nation against nation, famines and earthquakes, increasing wickedness and love grows cold, abominations and desolations… And they are overwhelmed.

What is needed in the aftermath of the Judgment Day That Wasn’t is for all of us to not only find but promote those places of hope in our lives and in the world around us with the same commitment and passion Campings followers had for promoting The End.

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