Last Sunday I preached on the end of the age based on the scriptures for the First Sunday in Advent. When I preached the sermon, in my effort to be brief and to the point, I omitted three paragraphs that I had written. They do make an important point, at least one important to me. Those paragraphs follow. If you would like to read the entire sermon you can go to www.firstpreshartford.org/12-03-06.htm

I am frankly more concerned about what we humans are doing to ourselves and to our planet than about what God might be doing with us. I have spent most of my life living in the nuclear age. The first Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima when I was 4 years old. I remember the Atomic Bomb drills when I was in elementary school, and I still remain frightened of the possibility of nuclear warfare. Although the cold war is supposedly over both this nation and the former Soviet Union still posses enough power to wipe out human life on earth many times over and more and more nations are trying to join the Atomic club. It may be that the clouds of the Apocalypse are the mushroom clouds of nuclear warfare.

Al Gore in his book and movie An Inconvenient Truth makes a convincing scientific argument that we have already set in motion forces of global warming that may not destroy human life, but certainly have cataclysmic effects on our civilization.

We are in the midst of a global pandemic caused by the HIV virus, one that is so severe in parts of the African continent that a population collapse is a very real possibility. Bird flu or other diseases spread accidentally or deliberately as part of biological war or terrorism could have a similar effect.