In today's Gospel reading from Matthew, the author calls Joseph "a righteous man".  I think that nowadays we don't know what to do with the term "righteous" any more.  Usually when we hear the word we immediately jump to "self-righteous", as in someone who is stuck on themselves, or thinks they are better than others.  Or we might think of someone who is quite rigid and legalistic.  Or, in youth culture, we might be used to hearing "righteous" as another way of saying "cool" or "great".

When Matthew said that Joseph was "a righteous man", he meant something quite specific which is not any of the ways of understanding that I just mentioned.  To be righteous in the Biblical sense is to be a person who maintains a right relationship to God, and right relationships with other people.  A righteous man would be someone who honours and obeys God, and treats all people with respect; in other words, someone who keeps the Ten Commandments.  He would also be a man who would give alms to the needy, especially widows and orphans, but also generally to anyone who was in distress.  In the text, Matthew gives us a little hint at Joseph's righteousness, when it says that he was "unwilling to expose [Mary] to public disgrace".  But his righteousness is further heightened when he heeds the words of the angel in his dream and takes Mary as his wife after all.  In other words, he is compassionate, discrete, and above all, obedient to God.

The righteous man, the "tzadik" in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, is the subject of much praise in the Bible.  The tzadik is an ideal of the faithful and obedient servant of God.  He is the embodiment of all of the best aspects of the Old Testament Law.  But, in those days as today, there were probably only a few people in any village or family circle whom people might consider a righteous man or woman.  So, for Matthew to explicitly call Joseph "a righteous man" is a very high complement indeed.  This is even more noteworthy when you consider the very unkind words that Matthew reserves for those who only put on the appearance of righteousness, the so-called "hypocrites" whom Jesus often attacks with stinging verbal barbs.

The early Church dropped the term "tzadik" or "righteous one" in favour of the term "saint" or "holy one."  That's an interesting shift, because holiness is quite different from righteousness.  While righteousness is something that we do, holiness is something that comes to us from God.  As I have said before, only God is holy in and of God's self.  Everything and everyone else is only holy by association with God.

Let me outline how the word "saint" changed over the centuries, in order to understand more clearly what the New Testament means by "saint."  While in the  New Testament, the term "saint" is a fairly generic and even democratic term like "citizenship," only a few centuries after the writing of the New Testament the term "Saint" came to be associated specifically with the martyrs: those who died for their faith under persecution.  The persecutions of the 200's and the beginning of the 300's shaped a cult of the martyrs.  The tombs of those who had died in the persecutions quickly became destinations for prayer, then came to have miraculous healings and visions associated with them, and finally had churches built over them.  Saint no longer applied to all Christians, but only to those who had succeeded in holding fast to their faith under fatal torture.  This kind of heroic faith is, of course admirable, and I'm not sure I would have the courage to do what they did.  I understand why the martyrs were espcially called, "holy ones."

When the persecutions ended, monks and nuns, part of a trend in the Church that had started during the great persecutions of the 200's and early 300's, took the place of these martyr saints.  The new saints subjected themselves, voluntarily, out of a sense of calling, to all kinds of deprivation and hardship in the quest to follow Jesus perfectly.  Back then to "convert" was even the term used for taking up the life of a monk or a nun.  These people, some of whom also became priests and bishops, but always reluctantly and at the urging of their superiors, were now the ideal.  The most popular of these ascetics, after they died, also quickly had miracles associated with their tombs, and so, like the martyrs of previous generations, were popularly acclaimed as "saints."  Again, in the minds of the people of those centuries, these ascetics came as close as humanly possble, by the grace of God, they would add, to being "holy."

While in the Greek and Slavic east, the process for deciding who ought to be called "saint" remained fairly organic and locally driven, the western European church, under the guidance of the Bishop of Rome (AKA "the Pope"), developed a specific, organized, and centralized process for "canonizing" saints.  This is the system most of us have become familiar with through the news, as some people push for quick canonizations of Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul II to become offical "Saints" of the Church.

But, oh! what a contrast to the word's original use in the New Testament.  While the later uses of saint imply that the person, like Joseph, is special, has done or achieved some special spiritual status through extra good behaviour or notable obedience, the original use is just the term for those who have come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ.  It is really a term which embodies the grace of God, the understanding that, even when we were sinners, Christ died for our sins.  God does not wait until we are perfect to claim us, but claims us in our imperfection.

Luther, of course, noticed this in his studies, and so said that we are all both saints and sinners at the same time.  We are saints because God has claimed us in Christ.   We are sinners because -- well, just look at the world today, where wars rage, people are exploited for money, things and ideas are placed above humans, and so on, and it is clear why we are all still sinners.  And lest you imagine that you have nothing to do with all that, think again: the global system is so intertwined that every dollar that passes through our hands is tainted with some form of violence, abuse, exploitation, oppression, or crime.  We are indeed, as a human race, mired in sin.

But in Christ, God declares us holy, which is the first step to becoming freed from the web of sin.  Jesus came to save us from ourselves!

So there is an interesting shift in emphasis from the Old Testament's "tzadik" to the New Testament's "saint."  We are saints because of what God has done.  For me, this always begs the question: so what are you going to do about it?  Here is a wonderful gift, will you open it?  You are holy in Christ, now what?

I think here we have to bring in that sometimes overused, but not always fully appreciated word: love.  When holiness moves out of the realm of being just a word we say, to somehting we sense or expereince, then it is the expereince of coming into the presence of God.  Not that God isn't always present, but rather that we become aware of that presence in an intense way.  We sense this in worship, in prayer and meditation, in reflection and contemplation on God's creation, and so on.

For me, the process that takes place is the process of falling in love with God.  I begin to recognize that God is in love with me, and I begin to let the patient and persistent "lover of my soul," as the traditonal phrase puts it, into my life.  Once I fall in love with God, I begin to realize something: there is only one proper impetus for doing what God asks of me: the love for my Beloved.  It is my burning desire to be close to my beloved.  God is everywhere, but the veil of the material world appears to keep us apart.  I perceive my Beloved's handiwork in creation, but my Beloved is always just beyond my grasp.  As I follow my desire to be close to my Beloved, I begin to see how the language of letting go and letting God, of surrendering to God, of following Jesus, all this language is the language of love.

The mystics rightly recognize in their experiences of God's presence in their prayers and meditation that in letting go of distractions we begin to touch the breeze from the movement of the garment of the Beloved; the sweet perfume of holiness that signals that the Beloved is near.  I embrace the life of following Jesus, of becoming what God wants me to be, to become love to all people, because I love my Beloved.  It is all for love: love of my Beloved, my Beloved's love for me, my Beloved's love of all people, and therefore my growing love for all of my Beloved's people.  Holiness and love go hand in hand.

So I come back to Joseph.  Matthew uses the Old Testament word "righteous" to describe him, but see how much love Joseph has.  He loves his fiancée so much that he, like God, is prepared to overlook what must have seemed to be a terrible transgression of the Law for him.  He loves God so much that he will go against social pressures and perhaps his better judgment, to embrace Mary as his wife, and the child as his own.  Rightousness, holinesss, love: they all hang together.  Amen.

Where do you put your trust?  What do you look to for security?  Who do you look up to, or perhaps even try to emulate?

Today's Psalm is in part about these kinds of questions.  Our assigned portion of the Psalm for today begins at verse 5, but listen again to the words of this Psalm beginning at verse 3:

"Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.  When their breath departs, they return to the earth: on that very day their plans perish.  Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God..."

Where do you put your trust?  To whom do you look to make it all better?

In earliest childhood we instinctively look to our parents, or those who have become our parents, to make the world a safe and stable place.  Later we begin to transfer some of this to other people and things: teachers, friends, ideologies, religions, authority figures real or imagined.  Money and financial security also figure prominently for most of us once we move away from home.

But as many often learn the hard way, all of these people and things have their limitations and will, in one form or another, fail or betray us some day.  I included "religions" in my list, because a religion is a human system built around a belief in God.  A religion is not God, it is a human system built around a belief in God.  Religion will fail you as any of these other human things will.  When people say they have lost their faith in God, it is usually a particular version of God, portrayed in the religious system they grew up with.  It might be good to lose faith in such a false or partial God. The Psalmist declares that God will not fail you.  "Blessed are those... whose hope is in the Lord their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them..."  God will not fail or betray, or, as it says in another Psalm, "If my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will take me up." (Psalm 27:10)

I want to caution you, however, to think through carefully what you understand by what I have just said.  It is often the case that when we hear declarations like, "God will never forsake you, so put your trust in God" that we understand this to be a promise that God will shield us from the hardships of life.  This sometimes comes across as an invitation to project onto God all of the childhood instincts and longings for security and safety that we projected onto our parents.

As one of my favorite books in the Bible so rightly reminds us, "there are righteous people who perish in their righteousness, and there are wicked people who prolong their life in their evil-doing... the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil... This is an evil that happens under the sun, that the same fate comes to everyone." (Ecclesiastes 7:15; 9:2,3)

So let me walk you through a process that I believe is implied in the Bible by these declarations of God's faithfulness in this life.

1. Putting one's trust in God begins by recognizing how life is unjust and unfair, and that all of the people, things, institutions, religions, and ideologies, no matter how good they are, are also limited, fallible, flawed, and bound to let us down, disappoint us, or even some day betray us.

2. Then you have to recognize your own powerlessness in the face of the overwhelming problems on earth.  I cannot, you cannot, be the saviour of the earth and its people.  Only God can do that, but God will not do that in the way that may seem most efficient or appropriate to us, who have a very limited view of time and reality.

3. Then you have to surrender yourself completely to God, and say, "God, I can't do this, only you can."  Again, this is the surrender, not into a Santa Claus God who gives us what we want if we've been nice, but withholds gifts if we've been naughty.  Rather this is a surrender into the One who is beyond our human capacity to comprehend, whom we know only partially, but is revealed to us by means of things we can understand, especially in the person of Jesus who comes as close in human terms as is possible to embody God.

Once you have stopped trying to fix everything, and you begin to let God do the fixing; and once you have stopped trying to form God to your convenience or your particular personal troubles (and we all have troubles, some larger, some smaller) an amazing thing happens.  You begin the change from the inside out.  You begin to see that:

1. You have a calling, a purpose, a task on planet earth; a mission to the people in your life, and perhaps even to people on the other side of the planet.  For each person that purpose and mission will look differently.  But having recognized your own powerlessness, you see the power of God working through you to transform the world, one relationship at a time, one act of kindness and compassion at a time, one prayer at a time.  You are changed, and the world is changed.

2. Your trouble, the thing you fear in your own life, may in fact be something that God is using to touch others.  Not that God gave you your trouble, but that again and again in the Bible, God uses the things that happen to people as the "in" to either help someone or some group of people move forward, or as a vehicle to break through to others.  We see this in Genesis, where the cruel treatment of Joseph by his brothers turns out to be God's way to save the whole family from famine (Genesis 37-50)  And we see this in Paul's life, where God did not seem to answer his prayers to take away a physical malady of his, but out of God's apparent refusal to heal him, Paul learned the most important lesson of his proclamation: God's strength is made perfect in our weakness (II Corinthians 12:7-10).  Of course that's the case, because it was not Jesus' physical strength that triumphed, but God's mysterious ways through Jesus death on the cross and God's raising up of Jesus after that defeat.

So, God opens our eyes to see in a new way.  God opens our mouths to speak in a new way.  God animates our feet to move through the day in a new way.  Instead of spiritual poverty, we discover spiritual treasure, and all the earthly treasure becomes incidental, just a tool to get a job done.  If you have more, you can facilitate more, if you have less, then you embrace your mission within those constraints.  The same for your health.  If you are well, you receive your health as a wonderful gift to follow through on God's charge to you.  If you are unwell, you learn to see that charge through within the constraints of your illness.  Moreover, we learn to care for each other when someone needs to be cared for.  Jesus said the last would be the first, the needy the ones who give, and the simple the ones who teach.  As St. Paul also noted, we live to God and we die to God, so whether we live or die, we belong to God. (Romans 14:7-9)

When you allow God to reach into you and change you from within, God will not let you down.   When you allow God's Spirit to reshape your thinking and your feeling, God will not let you down.  When you surrender all your own agendas, and let God's agenda guide your life, God will not let you down.

So do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in the passing things of this world.   Blessed are you when you put your hope in God who made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them.  Amen.

Is the world a better place than it was 2000 years ago?  Did the coming of Jesus have any positive effect on the world, or did nothing really change?

It is the reading from Isaiah the prompts me to ask this question.  You see, the prophet Isaiah had a vision, expressed in poetic, metaphorical language, that one day there would be peace and harmony: shalom, where all things are in balance, where the powerful and the vulnerable live in peace.  He used images of animals (prey and predator) and children (the vulnerable) to convey this.  Now, maybe in his mind he really imagined that somehow the animal world would be restored to the way it is portrayed in Genesis before the Great Flood, where all animals are herbivores, and people are all vegetarians.  But we forget that the prophets were poets as much as anything else, using symbolic words, symbolic actions, and so on to convey God's message to the people.

So we see, for example, the prophet Jeremiah using a ruined loin cloth and an empty wine jar as images to talk about God's judgment, not on loin cloths and wine jars, not even on weavers and potters, but on the leaders and people of Israel (Jeremiah 13:1-14).  Or, in an even more extreme version of wild "performance art" like that of the art student in Toronto who recently staged a bomb scare at the Royal Ontario Museum as an art project, the prophet Hosea married a prostitute and had children with her, giving them symbolic names, not to declare God's judgment on prostitutes or the children of prostitutes, but again as symbols for the judgment and hope God was bringing to Israel.

In this way I think we have to read the Old Testament prophets as poets, and sometimes, like Jeremiah and Hosea, even as conceptual performance artists, and understand their statements in the broadest, most metaphorical and symbolic way.

Isaiah's vision is of a world healed of its divisions.  Conqueror and conquered become companions; powerful and weak embrace each other.

The first Christians, after Jesus had been crucified and had appeared to them as the risen Christ, began to see in him the fulfillment of all the hopes expressed in the Old Testament.  You can trace, historically, in the layers of the New Testament and in the years after the New Testament's last books were written, how these early Christians saw the Old Testament through new eyes.  When they read in Isaiah, "A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse," which means from the cut off house of David which had last ruled Israel 500 years before the time of Jesus, they said, "Hey!  That's him!  That's Jesus!  He's the one!  He's the shoot!"

When they read, "He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he will judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth," they said, "Wow!  That's what he did!  We saw and heard how he was good to the poor and the meek.  That's him too!"

So, has the world become a better place since Jesus came, or has everything stayed the same?  Did his presence and then the existence of his followers over the last 20 centuries make any positive difference?

Many people today like to point to all the excesses and abuses perpetrated by the Church.  They like to point to crusades and witch burnings and heretic burnings and religious wars to say things like, "Christianity is one of the worst ideas anyone ever had," or more broadly, "Monotheism is one of the worst ideas ever invented" or more broadly still, "Religion is the cause of all human evils."  Those are serious accusations, and I think they cannot just be sloughed off.  There needs to be a response, but not to defend the Church or Monotheism or Religion, but for us who claim the name of Jesus to ask ourselves, "Has the world benefitted from the fact the Jesus came and that he has had followers through the centuries?"

After having pondered this question for a while, I have to answer, "Yes!  The world is in fact a better place, not in every detail, but in those areas which Jesus specifically addressed."  How is it that I come to this conclusion?

First of all, Jesus came in solidarity with those at the fringes of acceptability and to the powerless.  He was the first to do so that we know of, and no other religious leader or founder has made such a specific association with those elements of society, except perhaps the founder of the Baha'i faith, who was of course influenced by the example of Jesus.  Otherwise all of the founders of the other major religions of the world in one way or another either were from the elite circles of their day, or they became the leaders of their people governing them like a chief or a king, or preparing them to fight by force of arms, albeit in the name of God, of course.

Jesus came from a poor family of no influence.  He had no status, nor did he seem to have any formal training.  He is the complete outsider, and he identified himself so closely with outsiders, that the defenders of acceptability became so angry with him that they felt that he had to be done away with.  Jesus did not arm his followers for a revolt, but taught them to endure and let God take care of these grand sweeping matters of history.  He died a shameful death, the most shameful of that time.  In earthly terms he failed, but God declared Jesus right by raising him from the dead.  God's lot was cast with Jesus.

So, Jesus is the foundation for what we today call human rights.  The fact that anyone even cares about what happens to unimportant people in other countries has to be traced back to Jesus.

Now note: it was not the organized Church that promoted human rights.  Rather it was a movement that was reacting to the violent religious excesses of the 1500's and 1600's: the Enlightenment.  How appropriate that it should be so, because Jesus did not look to the religious establishment to find the will of God.  Rather, he took up his lot with the losers, the sinners, and all the wrong sorts of people.  The Jesus movement began outside of the proper channels for making religious decisions.

In fact, I think that often the best and truest followers of Jesus through the centuries have been other people who don't fit into the mold of the Christian religious establishment.  Sometimes when we try too hard to follow Jesus in a religious way, we miss what it means to follow.

I have said many times before that the Church lost its way when it bought into the power politics of the Roman Empire.  As a group of followers of Jesus, I think it is not possible to have power or influence and be true to Jesus.  The true followers of Jesus are those who cross the boundaries over to the outcasts and untouchables of the society.  Doing that is Jesus' invention.

Paul got Jesus.  Paul worked his whole ministry trying to get the blue bloods of the new Jesus movement, the Christians who had Jewish roots, to accept the Gentiles, the non-Jews, as full members of this new movement.  He was breaking down the barriers between people.

Some of the more insightful ascetics of the early Church also got Jesus.  They would never condemn others for what were considered sins, but would rather help, befriend, and pray for those people, sometimes taking the blame on themselves, mimicking Jesus' act of self-sacrifice.

Francis of Assisi got Jesus.  During the Crusades, in a beautifully naive and faithful imitation of Jesus, Francis travelled to Egypt to try to get an audience with the Emir in Cairo, believing that if he just told him about Jesus, the Emir would see the light and hostilities would cease.  He got the audience (remember, half of Egypt's population was still Christian at that time, so it wasn't odd for a Christian to seek an audience with the Emir).  The Emir listened patiently, but declined Francis' suggestion that he become a Christian.

Menno Simons got Jesus.  He gathered the shattered remains of the Anabaptist movement and set them on their way to become the pacifist and simple living Mennonites.  George Fox, the founder of the Quakers likewise got Jesus.  Both these movement often defied the pressures from the establishment, which in some places was officially Lutheran, to help people in need.

In the last hundred years, people like Mohandes Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. and Theresa of Calcutta were the ones who got Jesus the most.

Interestingly and appropriately none of these people stood at the centre.  Each of them were at the edges, outside the power circles, outside the cliques which determined acceptability and orthodoxy in the Church.   They each in their own ways bucked the established order, or went outside of it, or created a unique niche at the edges of it, in order to do something different.  But all of them looked back to Jesus for their inspiration in very concrete and direct ways.

I think the lives of many millions of people have been made better than they would have been because in every generation, some people "get" Jesus, and follow him.  Amazingly, many of them are even officially Christians who sometimes even hold to orthodox teachings.  Maybe as the Church becomes more and more marginalized in our society, we'll see even more of that happening.

Yes, Isaiah's vision begins to find its fulfillment in Jesus and in those who follow the way of Jesus.  Amen.

On the calendar of the Church, we have come to the season of Advent, the beginning of the Church Year.  But in the lessons we turn to the end of all things.  So at the beginning we turn to the end, which is, of course, a new beginning.

In today's reading from Matthew, Jesus says that no one, not even the angels who attend to God in the heavenly places, nor he, Jesus, knows when this end is to be.  All he can do is talk about what it will be like; much as Jesus talked about what the Kingdom of God is like in his parables.  Jesus sees the end as a sorting out, a sifting.  He uses the image of the Great Flood when Noah and his family, who were prepared, were able to remain among the living, while those who were not prepared were swept away.

One of the most popular fiction series in the United States today, and I would guess that it also has a following here in Canada, is the "Left Behind" series, which uses commonly held notions about the end, the return of Christ, the apocalypse, as the setting for stories about people's lives.  The title of the series, "Left Behind," is a play on the common notion that at the end of all things, when Christ is about to return, the good people will be taken up, while the bad will be left behind to endure the terrible tribulations of the end.

Jesus, in today's reading, actually paints a different picture.  By making the comparison to Noah and his family, he implies that the heroes in the story get to stay, while the villains get swept away.

I mention this to highlight how images, preconceptions, and notions about the Bible and what it says become deeply entrenched in popular thought, even if they have no real basis in the Bible.  This has been going on for a long time.  For example, from early on, Mary Magdalene came to be thought of as a reformed prostitute, when the Bible itself suggests that she was a woman from wealthy family whom Jesus had cured of seven demons.  Or, in another example, many sincere Christians believe that somewhere the Bible either says or implies that "God helps those who help themselves."  This is nowhere the case.  If anything, the Bible encourages people to become dependent on God for all things, whatever that may look like in practical terms.

Needless to say, in a matter as potentially dramatic and exciting as the end of the world, all sorts of notions have rooted themselves deeply into people's psyches.  The common images, taken from Revelation, see a series of terrible natural disasters, coupled with the reign of terror of an oppressive earthly world government.  Those who claim Jesus as their Lord get to be "raptured" (taken up into heaven) while the rest have to suffer.  Among those who are much taken up with these ideas, there is also a tendency to read current affairs in such a way as to support their views.  So every move toward global integration is seen as a step toward the reign of the Antichrist, and every move toward chaotic weather as the early warning signs of the end.

While the people who see things this way may be right (who knows?!), the Biblical record itself is much more ambiguous.  It is quite possible that Revelation, which is clearly, even in the words of its author, a "vision" seen in an ecstatic state (Revelation 1:10), was a kind of symbolic vision of comfort for someone who was living in hard exile during the turmoil of the Jewish War (AD 66-70) when Rome's legions were destroying Israel, Jerusalem, and the Temple, and God's people, both Jewish and Christian, found themselves targets of Nero's reign of terror.  In other words, Revelation may not be so much about our future, but about the then present situation of the world that John lived in.  Even the famous number 666, which is supposed to represent the name of the Antichrist, corresponds very neatly with the name Nero when the Greek numerical values of the letters is added up.

So what is this end that Jesus is talking about in today's Gospel reading.  He says that his listeners must be ready for the coming of the Son of Man.  Jesus' use of the term Son of Man' is always somewhat ambiguous.  On the one hand he never says "I am the Son of Man," but on the other hand, whenever he talks about the Son of Man, he seems to be talking about himself.  At any rate, Jesus seems to suggest that the end is near, or that some sort of end is near that may correspond to the end which the prophet Isaiah talks about: the restoration of Israel.

The famous Swiss theologian Hans Küng wonders if Jesus wasn't just wrong about the end; he made a mistake.  Küng says that Jesus is supposed to be without sin, not without error.  Making mistakes is a key way that we humans learn.  If Jesus was completely human he has to have made mistakes, otherwise he couldn't qualify as being human; and perhaps this was one of his mistakes.  It looked like the end was near, when it really wasn't, and besides, as Jesus himself acknowledged, only the Father in Heaven knows the time.

On the other hand, the religious and cultural world in which Jesus lived did come to an end, about 40 years after his crucifixion, in that same Jewish War which may have been the theme and symbolically portrayed content of John's vision recorded in Revelation.

On the other hand, Jesus did not return in the clouds, as Paul thought he would; the Son of Man did not return when the sifting of the Jewish War took place.

Many have struggled and grappled over these issues, even before the time of Jesus, and in the Christian context, since that time.  Jesus was born into a religious and cultural world rife with end of the world expectations, so his language here reflects some of that.  The early Christians, including the apostle Paul, picked up on this and ran with it.  One well known Jewish Paul scholar, Daniel Boyarin, calls Christianity, the last remaining apocalyptic movement of Second Temple Judaism.

   However, when the end did not come soon, when the life of Christianity began to stretch into decades, people had to rethink their expectations, as with the verse in II Peter (3:8) that says, "with the Lord, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day."  Since then, most Christians have accommodated themselves to the long haul.  We acknowledge in our Creeds (crafted several centuries after the time of Jesus) that we expect a return of Christ to judge the living and the dead, but most of us refrain from attaching a time to it. In Lutheran circles, the dominant approach has tended to be the personalized version of the end, that Jesus comes to each of us, in the clouds' so to speak, when we meet our earthly end.  This fits well for pastoral care and the comfort of troubled consciences, which has always been Lutheranism's strongest trait.  Of course there have always been those other voices within Lutheranism as well.  Anyone who grew up in the context of Scandinavian or German Pietism, will probably have been exposed to the more lively, apocalyptic view of the end, joined with the certainty that it would be very soon, possibly during our lifetimes.

At the end of this little excursus, I have  no conclusions to give you, except any that you might have drawn yourselves.  I know that we each meet our earthly end, and it may be that some end will come to the world as we know it.  More than that I can't say.  In the midst of this, all I can cling to is God's presence with me, and the mission of love for the earth and all people that God gives each of us.  Let the end come when and as it will, God's got it under control.  Amen.