Last October The Week magazine introduced its readers to a whole new, unexpected group of people who are stocking up on non-perishables in preparation for the end of the world.
Traditionally, “preppers”, as these folks are known, have been defined as people “who could survive independently for 30 days” and are usually “white, rural, conservative, male ... survivalists with basements full of firearms, Spam, and canned beans.”
One prepper told a pastor I know that “when the end times come, I will need to have only two things ready to go: a motorcycle and a lot of cash!”1
The magazine reported that modern day preppers seem to need more that that.
“Preppers are snapping up water filtration systems, hand-cranked radios, manually powered grain mills, and pepper spray and other self-defense tools. Costco sells the $100 Readywise Emergency Food Supply, a “curated” 150-serving bucket of freeze-dried and dehydrated foods.”2
That is nickel-and-dime stuff compared to what the new group of preppers are spending. They are urban liberals who “cite climate change as their main driver and the fear that the government will be unable or unwilling to help, others worry that the U.S. could be engulfed by political violence. People understand “that the world as we knew it and counted on it is beginning to cease to be,” said Eric Shonkwiler, who writes the left-wing Prepper newsletter “When/If.”
Some people are spending big time.
California-based Vivos Group is leasing space in what it calls the world’s “largest survival shelter community,” 575 empty ex-Army concrete bunkers on South Dakota grasslands. In Kansas sits the Survival Condo, a former missile silo converted into a 15-story survival habitat with a movie theater, bar, swimming pool, rock-climbing wall, and units that start at $1.2 million. Then there’s Fortitude Ranch, a collection of eight compounds around the country founded by a retired U.S. Air Force colonel. Over 1,000 members have paid from about $2,000 (which gets you “shared bunk spaces”) to $41,000 to become members, plus annual dues up to $1,550. The compounds are stocked with solar panels, food and medicine, farm animals, and guard dogs. “It’s like the old saying goes,” said a retired CIA officer who has bought in: “When trouble is on the horizon, a wise man takes precautions.”3
But I think an even wiser man was the late comedian John Pinette who said of his relatives who were preppers:
“As far as the end of the world goes, I believe you’re prepped. There is nothing you can do.”
“If I wake up, look out my window and say, ‘Oh, it’s doomsday.’ I turn off the light, and I go back to bed. There is nothing to be done.”
“But my relatives, they say things like ‘We got about six months of water, some ramen noodles, and we got a lot of firearms.’
And I think to myself, ‘It’s a good thing you got those guns because after six months of nothing but ramen noodles and water, you’re going to want to use them.”
“And, they think their cellar is in a different universe.
They say, ‘You know we got a two-foot-thick door.’ And I look at them and think, ‘Well, I’m sure that will stop the 30-megaton nuclear blast. I’m sure nothing will happen to you. You’ll be safe. You won’t be doomed like the rest of us poor suckers . . . scraping for a tomato.’”
Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “All this talk in the Bible about the end-time is intellectually difficult and pastorally problematic.” The apocalyptic texts are ultimately supposed to be messages of hope, but if you focus on the long list of terrifying things — wars, earthquakes, famines, plagues, and the like — then it is hard to hear the hope.4
For Saint Matthew’s original readers hope would have been hard to hear. Reading his words in the last quarter of the first century thing looked pretty bleak for them. Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us:
Things had never been worse in Palestine. The chosen people were scattered, the Temple was destroyed, the promised land was a province of Rome, and there was no relief in sight. “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place,” Jesus said, but something had obviously gone wrong. Most of the generation that heard him say that had passed away, and the ones who were still alive had beards down to their knees. God’s alarm clock must not have gone off. Or had God forgotten?
With questions like that in mind, Matthew made sure to include Jesus’ disclaimer that even he did not know when the end would come. “No one knows,” Jesus said, “not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only”5
We don’t like the idea of not knowing. “This is a hard pill for us to swallow in an era of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and long-range forecasting.” Not knowing what’s going to happen to us makes us anxious.
I can’t begin to tell you how anxious Lowell and I were on Wednesday and Thursday while we were looking at the forecasts and trying to decide whether I should cut vacation short by a day so that I could be sure to be here on Sunday or take my chances that the snow would be light, flights would be unaffected, and I could stay through Saturday. Clearly, we chose correctly.
We not only want to know flight schedules in iffy weather, we want to know not only what tomorrow may bring but the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that. That anxiety is especially present when we seem to have lost control of our lives to a universe that appears hostile or even to other people when plans they have made concerning our lives are unknown to us.
We want our lives to be neatly planned out so that we will know what to do. We want to be able to make plans for our own futures. At the least want to know how many bags of ramen noodles we should buy thinking that if we have a six months' supply of those things in our cupboard, we will be less anxious. But we won’t be.
Even if we somehow knew with absolute certainty that the end of the world would come three weeks from next Thursday, we wouldn’t be less anxious. If anything, we would be more anxious wondering what we should be doing between now and then.
However, as we continue on reading the words of Jesus, we’ll hear him tell us what we should be doing, and it is pretty mundane stuff.
He describes people who are eating dinner and perhaps having a glass of wine afterwards. Couples preparing to get married. Men and women working at home or in their business. Jesus is talking about people who wait for his coming not by building bomb shelters but living out their lives.
And here is where the next images Jesus uses can seem scary and cause even greater anxiety. Two men in the field and suddenly one is gone and the other is left behind. Two women grinding at the mill, one is gone and the other is left. And we think this is some kind of disappearing act. One moment one person is there. The next moment, poof! Gone!
But it is not a matter of disappearing off the face of the earth and being caught up in the clouds — that was Jesus’ act not ours. It is a matter of following Jesus and him only.
We owe our modern beliefs about something called “the rapture” for which some of those preppers who are stocking up their shelves and loading up their guns in preparation for to “a renegade Anglican priest from Ireland named John Nelson Darby, who spent a large part of the 19th century preaching about that moment in time when Christ will return “the wicked will be destroyed in the final battle of Armageddon, and Christ will begin a 1,000-year reign on earth.”6
You’ve heard this stuff from TV preachers. You may have seen or heard of the “Left Behind” series of books and movies. You have probably even seen the bumper stickers: “I Break for the Rapture.” “Warning: In case of the rapture, the driver of this car will disappear.”
Whenever I see one of those bumper stickers I can’t help but think of an opening scene from the classic program “Six feet Under” where a woman whose car is sporting one of those stickers is listening to a radio program where the host and hostess are telling her that she should be submissive to her husband no matter what is driving along and nodding her head.
Not far from her, two probably “high-as-a-kite” wise guys are driving a truck loaded with helium filled inflatable mannequins. Laughing and not paying attention they almost hit a skateboarder. Slamming on the breaks the netting holding the dolls in the back of the truck begins to come loose and the dolls begin to float skyward.
Seeing the dolls rising up through the air the woman mistakes them for people being raptured, angels being taken up into the sky. She stops her car and, with eyes closed and arms outstretched, she wanders out into traffic where she is immediately run over.
In one of their classic “fade to black” moments the next screen reads simply: Dorothy Sheedy. 1954–2003.
I have always been one of those cynics who wanted a bumper sticker that read: “When the rapture comes, can I have your car?”
That’s because what little Greek I have mastered tells me that word for “taken” here doesn’t mean “to go up” or “to meet” but “to go along with.” It comes from the same root as our word perambulate which simply means “to walk.”
The people who are with Jesus in the end are those who have decided to follow him now. They are the ones who, like his disciples, decided to “go along with” Jesus.
Think of it like what happened when they were called. Remember?
Jesus saw two brothers: Simon (later called Peter) and Andrew. They were fishing, throwing their nets into the lake. It was their regular work. Jesus said to them, “Come with me. I’ll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I’ll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass.”7
“Immediately, they left their boat and their father and followed him.”8
Do you see it now? They were taken as they decided to follow Jesus and their father, through no fault of his own, was left behind in the boat. Some taken, the other left.
If we’re walking with Jesus we’re prepped.
The people who are with Jesus in the end are those who have decided to follow him now. They are the ones who, like his disciples, decided to “go along with” him.” They are the ones who are walking with him. Here is a message that serves to engender hope rather than fear among the faithful.
The truth of today is something we all know. “That Christ comes again, and again, and again.” The truth we all know is that Christ “has placed no limit on coming to the world but is always on the way to us here and now. The only thing we are required to do is notice – to watch, to keep our eyes peeled.”9
So, put away your baseball bat protecting your house from being broken into when Christ comes “like a thief in the night.” The good news is he’s already in not only your house but your heart, and mind, and soul.
Boil up all those Raman noodles that you have been stocking up on there are lots of good recipes on the internet that won’t remind of those dark days in college when you really thought the end of the world was coming because you were fresh out of cash.
Drink all that stored up water. A healthy, active adult is supposed to be drinking 8 to 12 glasses a day anyway.
And, for the love of God, don’t run out into traffic thinking the end has come because, if you do, I say most assuredly that if you’re lucky and it doesn’t come for you at that very moment it will scare the life out of the panicked driver breaking frantically to avoid hitting you.
Christ is coming into our lives every day. Watch. We’re prepped. We’re ready because our lives, our time, is ultimately in Christ who comes to us at Advent, at Christmas, at Easter, and Pentecost and every day in between.
________________
1. Camille Cooke Howe, Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, November 16, 2025.
2. The Week US, “Ready for the Apocalypse,” The Week, October 21, 2025, https://theweek.com/culture-life/apocalypse-preppers-survivalist-movement.
3. The Week, loc.cit.
4. Cook Howe, loc.cit.
5. Barbara Brown Taylor, “Don’t Say When: Expecting the Second Coming,” The Christian Century, September 21, 2004, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2004-09/dont-say-when?
6. ibid.
7. St. Matthew 4:18–20. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE: Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004)]
8. St. Matthew 4:22. (NRSVue) [NRSVue=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]
9. Taylor, loc.cit.
