POV

"Happy Holidays!" 

When does holiday season start? It's POV, point of view, more an apprehension, a perception, than hard copy. It's how your brain is wired or rewired. If you are Christian, or any manner of American in this culture overlaid with our matrix of Christian feast days, you may realize that we have inched as surely as continental drift to where Holiday Season now starts with Halloween, October 31st, and here we are. Happy Holidays! By the Time the future gets here, Holiday Season will be ignited by Fourth of July fireworks. 

For me, Happy Holidays! started with this morning's email from the coffee club announcing my November bag of coffee has been shipped, is on the way. First the announcement, then its arrival when I open the package and 7H is filled with coffee aroma. 

But retired into Super Age, which is a better notion than Extreme Old Age, I'm with Pinocchio on the way to Pleasure Island, where every day is a holiday. If you live to get here, maybe you also will find it an age like no other, and that you would not trade with anyone. 

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Here's our Second Lesson for the upcoming Sunday:

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

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1 Thessalonians is Paul's first and oldest letter that we have and that is included in the New Testament. Paul is responding to anxious folks at the church in Thessaloniki that he founded there. He had assured them that the End of Days was imminent, when Jesus would return from heaven with the General Resurrection (already started with Jesus' own resurrection) and inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth, and it would happen in their lifetime. 

But Paul's promise seemed to collapse as people died and Jesus had not returned: what's going on?! So Paul writes to them assuring them that when Jesus does return (still in their/his, Paul's lifetime), those who have died in Christ will be the first ones to benefit. 

Paul repeats this assurance later when he writes to folks in the church he founded at Corinth - - 1 Corinthians 15:35f, and finally at Romans 13:11f. I'm not sure Paul ever lost his confidence in his apocalyptic vision, which many scholars and theologians say was also Jesus' point of view.

I may say that in this later day and age, my own POV is far different.

RSF&PTL

T88&c