Beauty is Imperfection

Christians Face Rapture Crisis: Will We Be Wearing Anything During Judgment Day?

Nashville, Tenn. (API) Teams of theologians and ecumenical councils have lit upon this leafy city in the past two weeks to discuss a critical matter to Christian thought, one that threatens its very underpinnings:

“When the day of rapture comes, what will we all be wearing?” asked Pat Robertson at an opening plenary session last Saturday. “We all know that our spiritual angelic souls can’t take our Chanel and Brooks Brothers clothes to heaven.”

Robertson left that thought hanging in the room for a few moments as several clerics and laypeople realized what he was implying, and then several audible gasps rose.

“Oh my God,” said Roman Catholic Bishop Tomas O’Reilly of New York. “We’re all going to heaven naked.”

Since that opening day, the world’s foremost Christian thought leaders, bishops and scholars have banded together in groups and breakout sessions at the Sommet Center in downtown Nashville to discuss the terrifying ramifications of the imminent rapture and the sinful prancing around of naked humans, newly be-winged and sumptuously, erotically naked to the world.

The following several days have seen the most heated debate in Christianity since the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican closed in 1965.

“Women will be flying through the air, their fulsome and white buttocks and breasts shuddering nude for all to see,” said Robertson. “What does this mean for modesty? What does it mean for temptation? I’m at a loss.”

“Frankly this is much worse than the Y2K problem,” said Roman Catholic Archbishop Leopoldo Jose of the Archdiocese of Managua. “Because this is like, God we’re talking about. I don’t want to go to him naked. I don’t want anybody to see me naked. I’ve got a few moles and I haven’t been to the gym in a while.”

“Don’t you think he knows what you look like naked?” answered a Greek Orthodox bishop, His Grace Demetrios of Nicomedia. “There’s no way we can hide it. He knows already.”

Many of the sessions degenerated into such squabbling as the scholars tried, in many cases fruitlessly, to come up with different solutions to the problem. One Jesuit who asked that his name not be used suggested making albs and robes out of ectoplasmic material.

“And where are we going to get that,” snapped Bishop Obando of San Salvador. “I suppose you’ve got a bunch of it at home with a drum of No. 2 gasoline.”

“Well you don’t have to get flip about it,” retorted the Jesuit who said he had 20 degrees and demanded a little bit of respect.

“Well it was kind of stupid,” said His Eminence the Metropolitan of Montenegro. “But I guess there’s no reason to have a Great Schism over it,” he tittered.

“Is that some kind of pun?” said Obando.

“How about a Great Cleave?”

“You ought to be taking this more seriously.”

“Well we’re all going to be naked when we go to heaven. I’m sure that God had some funny reason of his own for that. At least I’m trying to have a sense of humor about it.”

A few of the Catholic priests in one Spanish contingent suggested that perhaps it would be all right to be naked on the day of rapture because the righteous would no longer know shame. But Robertson dismissed this.

“Everybody knows Spaniards are all communists.”

John Quoiner, a Calvinist minister from nearby Kentucky, asked, “And besides, shouldn’t some robes be different from others?”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Grace Demetrios.

“Oh nothing, just throwing some thoughts against the wall. I don’t want to be naked either.”

Theology professor Bram Stewart said that many of the attendees had simply decided that this was a matter of personal faith.

“Faith in the sense that we have to have faith that our God is a righteous and loving God, not a retributive Pagan God who delights in perverse jokes like having us all go to heaven with our bubble and squeak hanging out.”

“Who knows,” says Stewart, “Maybe God is less offended by nudity than by camel toe.”