I have some good news and I have some bad news.

First, the bad news. According to a brochure that I found stuck to my windshield a while back, the world is due for a terrible end. God has finally grown tired of our fooling around and is going to take a few thousand of his friends up to heaven and, with a cosmic finger snap, zap the rest of us.

There were even some official pictures of the event sketched out in the brochure. Hundreds of smiling people, the chosen ones of God I suppose, dancing up this stairway to heaven, happy as can be, while the rest of us back here scream and writhe in agony. Pretty graphic, nightmare-inducing stuff.

But now for the good news.

All of this was to have taken place last Wednesday.

It did set me to thinking and for that I am deeply grateful. Why, I wonder, has the history of Christianity been so consumed with concern over the afterlife? Volumes upon volumes have been written about what heaven and hell will be like, based on absolutely no empirical evidence. Yet we have made the authors of such speculation very rich indeed.

I am intrigued about all of this because judging from what I read about Jesus in the Bible, the afterlife was not one of his...excuse me...burning concerns.

I’ve done a little research and discovered that of all the times when Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven, there are precious few that point only to a time beyond this life. Over and over again, Jesus’ image of the kingdom includes both the now and the not yet, the life here and the life to come. Jesus’ concern was never centered only on who would or would not enter into a heaven in the great by and by.

Clearly, from the gospel accounts, Jesus is consumed by the need to reach out in love to the world right now, offering the rewards of grace right now.

Acceptance, forgiveness, love...right now.