My sister doesn't go to church. She was raised Roman Catholic and back when she was a kid she figured she'd committed a mortal sin so it was all over for her so to hell with it. Regretfully she hasn't seen much of any church since to draw her back. She cannot for the life of her figure out why Christians seem so obsessed with gay people.
She's an avid reader and she came back from a used book sale in town with a bunch of books to read on the bus ride back to California. I'm looking at her books and I gasp in horror when I see "Left Behind". "WHY did you buy THAT book?" I demanded.
"What?" She never heard of the Left Behind series. She's never heard of millennialism. She likes science fiction and thought the idea of a bunch of people mysteriously disappearing sounded pretty interesting. She thought it was science fiction.
So she comes downstairs this morning outraged after reading the first few chapters. "People are saying in the book that GOD took these people. Children - little children! Nobody would believe that. What kind of a God does that? Why didn't they make it the devil taking all these people? Why did they say it was God? That is stupid. Nobody believes that."
"Um, a lot of people believe that"
"Well I don't believe that. MY God doesn't do that. My God doesn't take children and loved ones away from people and leave them to suffer" She was furious. It's the most passionate I've ever seen her about religion. She thought the idea of "rapture" was the most ridiculis thing she'd ever heard of.
I did tell her Lutherans don't believe that. "WELL THANK GOD FOR THAT!"
*My sister died of breast cancer in May 2015
*My sister died of breast cancer in May 2015
Thank God for that!
ReplyDeleteYes, thank God for that!
ReplyDeletesad how many people do....I hated those books - or rather I was only able to barely gag my way through one of them, and then only because ALL my parishioners were reading it...ick. your sister is wise.
ReplyDeleteWho was it that said, "Tell me about the God you don't believe in because I probably don't believe in that one, either"? I don't remember.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this is another good reason we as Lutherans need to do a better job of telling about the God that we do believe in.
That was Marcus Borg.
ReplyDeleteWell, Joelle, maybe Marcus Borg said it too, but I heard it from N.T. Wright.
ReplyDeletejust recently had a good conversation with a woman in our congregation who went to one of Beth Moore's Bible studies on Daniel. She was so relieved to find out about the God we didn't believe in (she kind of suspected...)