COMMENTARY
I inhaled as I stepped behind the pulpit, ready for a fight. It was a sermon series on the end times, and I knew there’d be controversy. I looked out at the elderly man in the fourth pew with his ScofieldReference Bible in tow, the woman in the back with her John Hagee book on the Middle East crisis, the teenager in the front with the Left Behind video game on his computer at home.
I expected an onrush of feedback after the service. "I can’t believe you don’t believe in a pre-tribulation Rapture!" "You mean you don’t think the land belongs to the Jewish state?!" "What do you mean you don’t think 666 is a microchip in the arm?"
I was wrong. There was controversy, but it wasn’t one of comparing prophecy charts. My hearers were most provoked by what I said, in passing, about an issue we rarely think of as eschatological: cremation.