Pastoral Status Update

Status Update: Still a pastor; also, I have received a first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.

I’m not usually excited to share personal medical info, but I’m happy to share this good news. I know some of us are feeling a little wary of these vaccines. While I don’t want to offer any medical advice, I will say that I’m feeling fine and I’m very thankful to have had the opportunity to get a vaccine. I can’t get back to the visitation schedule just yet, but this is a definitely step in the right direction. One more thing . . .

I know some Christian folks have been leery about getting vaccinated because it reminds them of the “mark of the beast” from Revelation 13. But think about this: In verse 18 of that chapter John writes, “let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.” The writer wrote these words to an audience that knew what he meant. That was the whole point. He did not write them to people who couldn’t possibly understand what they meant because they applied to a situation two millennia down the line. Readers of the Bible have been applying these cryptic verses to all kinds of situations for centuries. The predictions based on this kind of misreading of John’s Revelation have been laughably bad. These applications across the centuries show more about the reader’s fears than they do about the text itself. Let’s not let our fear of the unknown cause us to misread the Bible or create needless barriers in an already difficult situation.