Thanksgiving in
the Ebb Time of Antichrist: Atonement, the Empty Throne, and the Reparative Leading by the Meek toward the New Advent
Rev. Dr. Douglas
Blake Olds, Ret.
November 21, 2025
“The present world, a world without consecrated
authority, seems caught between two impossibilities: the impossibility of the
past, and the impossibility of the future.”
—Chateaubriand
Abstract
This prophetic sermon in its classical sense brings not comfort but clarity;
not reconciliation but rupture. It is not doctrinaire but Christopoetic,
issuing both an exegetical and ethical demand. It critiques the American
Thanksgiving tradition through the lens of unatoned national sin,
eschatological urgency, and covenantal ethics. Drawing from biblical texts
(Exod. 21:16; Num. 35:33; Jer. 6:14; 2 Thess 2; Matt. 5:5; Rev. 1:7; Isa. 11),
the message contends that the United States’ refusal to reckon with the original
sin of slavery and the theological betrayal of the Confederacy renders
Thanksgiving a simulacral celebration—a rite of public denial that veils
ever-present divine testing and ongoing judgment. The Constitution’s empty seat
of authoritarian sovereignty, while designed to restrain tyranny (the katechon
of 2 Thess 2:6-7), becomes the metaphysical space for both Christ and
Antichrist to appear in tandem, echoing the political-religious crisis at
Jesus’ first advent under Caesar and Herod. Drawing on Kierkegaard and
Tocqueville, the sermon diagnoses the collapse of moral accountability in
democratic individualism and proceduralism, arguing that the American
civic-theological project now faces an apocalyptic crossroads. The return of
Christ as ethical judge of nations, particularly on behalf of the meek, calls
for a new kind of Thanksgiving: not nationalist myth, but Eucharistic
repentance, covenantal memory, and liturgical action in solidarity with the
dispossessed. Framed by the typology of Advent and eschatological discernment,
the sermon calls for national atonement, communal repentance, and the
enthronement of the Lamb in the present—not as nostalgia or spectacle, but as
ethical inheritance. Time is short: The wolf is lying down in judgment. The meek next week are dining upon God’s Holy Mountain.
I. The Unatoned
Crime: America’s Original Sin
The American celebration of Thanksgiving has long
symbolized national self-congratulation and providential exceptionalism.[1] Yet,
the season is haunted by the unatoned-for crimes of kidnap slavery and
Confederate insurrection,[12] which have never received a full juridical or secular
reckoning, while the theological is pending. Thanksgiving, in its present civic
litanies and formulae, reflects not a covenantal nation’s recognition of neighbor or Creator,
but a simulated harmony atop theft of labor, genocidal oppression, and Antichrist
rebellion. The current moment is the final occasion for piercing lament with
spiritual truth-telling and prophetic orientation toward judgment and grace.
Biblically, true thanksgiving arises only from
covenantal obedience and neighbor-recognition, BUT "Whoever steals a man
and sells him... shall be put to death" (Exodus 21:16). The United States,
by preserving Confederate symbols and failing to prosecute its (January 6)[2]
re-emergent sedition as theological betrayal, remains under this unlifted
curse. Thus, American Thanksgiving is a paradoxical sign, not so more than
now-- not simply a harvest of gratitude, but a mirror of unfulfilled divine
justice, summoning a return to covenant justice and to relaunching ethical
memory of the First Advent into a new condensation of confession of eternal
moment: Second Advent’s new Pentecost of Repair.[3]
Central to the Antichrist crisis is the nation’s
enduring refusal to reckon with its foundational, “New World” crime:[4]
slavery and the Confederacy’s attempt to preserve it by force and to recurrently,
generationally emerge from its dishonor. While the Civil War formally abolished
the institution of slavery,[5] no
binding national atonement followed. No covenantal reckoning took place—no
sackcloth, no reparative ritual, no Jubilee release. Instead, the postwar
compromise allowed the white South to mythologize its defeat, to reassert its
racial order and theft of labor through sharecropping, lynching, and carceral
control, and to enshrine the Lost Cause in marble and curriculum. This refusal
to repent mirrors the Sovereign Israel’s and Judah’s stubbornness at the call
of prophets: “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace,
peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14). Ahab’s and his wife’s rejection of
Elijah’s call to justice repeated again and again.
The Confederacy and the Theft of Image-Bearing Flesh
In Exodus 21:16, God’s covenant with Israel is
explicit: the theft and sale of another human being demands death. The United
States, by building its wealth and institutions on such theft—by defying the
divine image placed in every enslaved person—entered into direct violation of
God’s law. The Confederacy, as a theological project, declared that God
ordained race-based bondage. No repentance, no Nuremberg-style reckoning
followed Appomattox. Worse, the Confederacy’s monuments still stand as open-air
liturgies of false sovereignty. Lincoln’s extension of grace to the defeated in his Second
Inaugural Address was a noble failure in the moment but roosted proleptic
greatness in eternal cedars where vindication and verdict await.
The so-far-unatoned theft perpetuated violent, Antichrist
logic: a logic that once sacrificed Christ to empire and still today justifies
the incarceration, impoverishment, and ghettoization of His modern-day body.
American churches that spiritualize Christ while deferring or ignoring this
history crucify witness not with nails but with silence.
The American failure to atone has metaphysical
consequence. Without national confession and reparative turning, transgression
accumulates and festers like swelling boils. Unatoned blood pollutes the land:
“You shall not pollute the land in which you live… for blood pollutes the land,
and no expiation can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it,
except by the blood of the one who shed it” (Num. 35:33).
Confederate bloodshed has never been sustained by
truth. Instead, America has drifted into a fugue of false reconciliation and
reactionary nostalgia. The South rose again, not in justice but in simulation.
For these transgressions and by countering, emboldening structural openness of
the nation (immigration, Constitutional sharing of powers), the final battle of
Good and Evil was always destined to be staged within the confines of the
United States. This, not the supposed merits of American capitalism, was the
divine purpose for this nation. The conclusion of that struggle is determined,
while God’s patience waits for those few who have yet to get the Good News on earth
as it is in heaven (Matt 6:10).
II. Consecration
of the People and Kierkegaard’s Dread: The Empty Seat of Sovereign Authority
The American constitutional project, though
quantifying the merits of kidnap slavery in its Electoral College, was radical
in its Enlightenment-era context. It endowed moral policy making authority not
in monarch or metaphysical form it called “church,” but in the people
themselves represented in their legislated,
elected assemblies. Yet by refusing to enthrone any concrete sovereign—no king, no
pontiff, no prophetic lawgiver—the Constitution, for a brief and hopeful time,
diffused the see of accountable power. That power was made immanent to
procedure and plural opinion, not to a covenantally unifying vision of
righteousness. Instead, accountability was placed on individuals through an
eliciting of personal rights, as the Enlightenment demanded when traditions
were cut off from their role in keeping moral account. What remained to be said—by the new structure of legislative moral
authority--was the conditions of obligation in these rights to freedom. The
divine-right monarch was displaced, but no secular replacement emerged with
either the moral weight or theological charter to bind a nation’s soul to
justice. As Kierkegaard warned in The Present Age,[6] taking an individual interest in the demands
of responsibility we call existentialism, by leveling erases “the qualitative,”
substituting disinterested spectatorship. Tocqueville similarly foresaw in Democracy
in America that, without anchorage in accountability to the divine,
democracy tends toward soft despotism—infantilizing the people even as it
flatters their identities.
In a widening void—marked by collapsing checks on unaccountable power and
unfettered claims of “freedom” that reflected the people’s ethical
decadence—the United States became uniquely susceptible to eschatological
projection and the emergence of hardening despotism. It was the one nation
that, by Constitutional design, intentionally left the sovereign seat empty of
any single person. This vacancy, balanced by a system of divided powers
intended to act as the katechon (2 Thess. 2:6–7)—the
restrainer of tyrannical ascendancy—nonetheless opened the nation as the
intended stage for the return of Christ but, unintentionally, also for the
advent of the Antichrist. By radically separating sovereign powers in
katechonic fashion, the Constitution sought to evade tyranny—but instead had only deferred the final act.
The throneless yet organic republic of peoples—an ethnos language group of
shared aspiration—turned into mammon’s theater of original sin, devoted to the
pursuit of unaccountable and unhinged happiness. As in Roman Judea under Pilate
and Caiaphas—where imperial brutality named peace veiled by messianic
crisis—modern America now exhibits the apocalypse of material seduction and a
soporific promise of spiritual joy through money-accumulation. The absence of a
divinely intended sovereign modeled by the organic people—their virtues of the
Lamb returning as enthroning expectation—has left this sovereign space open to the Great Apostasy (2 Thess. 3): a simulacral ruler selling
private, signed, for-profit Bibles; technocrats and crypto-crap smuggling
through algorithmed backdoors plans to hijack reality and the future; idols of empire
sanctifying speciation events in the Anthropocene; and economic totalities
seeking a justice-lax deity somewhere in outer space, while the imprimateurs of
artificiality chase emoluments under the guise of cronyist Baksheesh.
Yet even in such a throneless republic, the possibility remains: that the
true sovereign has returned, enthroned not by spectacle but by covenantal
reawakening to meekness—by a renewed accountability that welcomes and hosts
virtue, and begins, again, to pick up the pieces.
The U.S. Constitution’s theological risk lies not in
its rejection of monarchy, but in its inability to resist the Antichrist
because of its unatoned transgressions of the Confederacy lying dormant until
its monsters awakened. Authority was checked and power balanced, but is now
undergoing vitiation and assault, while prophetic critique has become demonized
as “woke, libtard, demonic, unpatriotic.” Popular sovereignty devolves into
populist rage linked to procedural nihilism of frankensteined, partisan
identity. Kierkegaard’s dread—“the dizziness of freedom”[7]—becomes
collective: the People are free to choose but lack the spiritual formation to
choose rightly. A nation without prophetic guides to obligations to the
whole, save the anti-prophet ranks of careerists and military recruiters who lack
ability to see the covenantal dimensions of justice and katechonic restraint of
the feral that cannot atone, cannot repent to unifying care, and cannot discern
messianic visitation when it arrives. Because they have chosen beastliness as
their saintwage.
Tocqueville foresaw that democratic equality, absent
spiritual virtue, breeds conformity and comfort rather than greatness. The
warning is not against equality per se, but against (in)equality unmoored from the
Golden Rule as accountable to neighbor, both governor and governed alike. In a
society where “every man is the best judge of his own interest,”[8] the
divine disappears under welters of whips and Machiavellian stratagems—not
because God is denied as a benefice and great performative Transactor, but
because God and his Providence are privatized in the age of the Antichrist into
irrelevance and siphoned into privilege and aggrandizement. The checking and
balancing of the People’s shared power with the visually unoccupied center has
lost the necessity of eternal vigilance and paramount concern with responsible
justice. The marketplace and pursuit of disembodied and disembodying wealth is
a hollow locus around which spin and buzz empty forms of legality, marketing,
and media spectacles.
The paradoxical—actually interrogatory (Who do you
say He is? Cf. Mark 8:29)--co-appearance of Antichrist and Christ in history
resonates with this reading of the U.S. Constitution. Rather than an idolatrous
concentration of sovereignty, the Constitution enshrines a kenosis[9]—an
empty-of-person throne—where the people and their wealth are trustees of moral
policy under God, yet without a crowned human sovereign. As Tocqueville noted
in Democracy in America, this experiment places immense responsibility
on the civic conscience, demanding virtue without coercive command. Kierkegaard
similarly warned that when truth is entrusted to the individual conscience, it
must be fearfully and tremblingly owned; not performed for holier-than-thou shouters and discerning, gimlet-eyed “watchers.”
But when the people, entrusted with sovereign
agency, consecrate evil as their norm—such as chattel slavery,
post-Reconstruction racial regimes, the Antichrist and his dechordate minions
in the “tech sector”—then the seeming empty throne is surrounded by the stench
of white supremacy, capitalist domination trying re-gin reality on transacted
terms, and Department of War anarcho-nationalism. In such a case, the absence
of atonement has become not just a historical failure but a metaphysical
crisis. The constitutional kenosis is weaponized by monsters of unreconciled
power. The Antichrist cameth.
III. The Dual
Advent: Antichrist and Parousia Together
As in the first Advent of counterposed symbols and
types—wolf and lamb, Rhea Silvia and Virgin Mary--so now in the second: the coming One and the Antichrist appear in tandem. The Antichrist comes as a
horned beast’s system that names itself Christian while crucifying the poor and
withdrawing behind walls and pentagrams’ pyramids of violence. It is a
simulation of religion that allies with Mammon and state violence, blessing
domination and calling it providence that dispenses both necessary goods and
bizarre capitalist simulacra of perceptual exchange, with the latter app-ing the lessening of the latter. Mammon's simulated church
sacralizes Thanksgiving as national harmony while occluding theft and
generational sin. In contrast, the Parousia—accompanying Spiritual presence--comes
through ethical upheaval—transforming the earth into an entrusting inheritance
for the meek (Matthew 5:5). Both vectors are now engaged for our loyalty. Only
the meek are ensured a future.
Double vision manifests the apocalyptic of our age.
The false messiah arrives as patriotic religious strong man, as capitalist
spectacle, as surveillance simulacrum; but the Son of Man comes with judgment,
as He did once in Herod’s shadow. “Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and
every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him” (Revelation 1:7). The
moment of Thanksgiving in the shadow of antichrist and artifice condenses this
moment into a renewed Advent and Pentecost—not a comfort but a crisis of
discernment requiring new, eruptive language and courage. For what has become
the vacuum of a now/not yet eschaton, both false messiah and true Messiah have
announced their arrival. This is the eschatological crux: America, by refusing
to enthrone justice and having left the throne vacant has thus invited both
counterfeit and real claimants into a highly compressed moment of judgment. As
in Jesus’s birth under Caesar Augustus, when Herod massacred the innocents and
Magi sought divine light, so too now does a twofold arrival take shape. The
Antichrist arises in the form of simulacral sovereignty: technocratic
panopticons, AI god-forms, charismatic nihilists who promise order without
covenant. Meanwhile, the true Parousia—Christ’s return—manifests not in
spectacle but in the ethical visibility and promised viability of the meek.
“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb” (Isa. 11:6), and yet the returning Christ
will not wear the wolf’s fleece of imperial power, but casts it off entirely.
There is no middle course in this apocalypse as in every age.
The bifurcation of messianic expectation fulfills
Jesus’ own prophetic warning: “False christs and false prophets will arise and
perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray… even the elect” (Matt.
24:24). Those who do not discern the difference between the crucified Lamb and
the enthroned Beast of Revelation 13, who performs signs and signatures and
compels worship as the Great Apostasy—“standing away from.”[10] This
is not a future dystopia—it is present political-theological condition,
wherever sovereignty is unmoored from justice and truth inside the open-sky
temple of heaven detailed by Ezekiel (40-48).
IV. The Meek
Shall Inherit: Toward an Ethical Eschatology
In the first messianic Advent, the Messiah entered
not to overthrow Rome by force, but to transform the very metaphysical
structure of violence. The wolf realm—Rome and its client collaborators—was not
toppled by legions, but transformed into the sheepfold by the embodied witness
of the Lamb and new shepherd. "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb"
(Isaiah 11:6) becomes not only eschatological hope, but incarnate reality, as
Jesus proclaims, “I send you out as sheep among wolves” (Matthew 10:16). This
poetic inversion disrupts natural order: the reign of predation is interrupted
by a kingdom of dispossession and neighborly love.
Thus, the wolf realm’s violence is unmasked by the
pacific embodiment of the Christ, whose birth was already overshadowed by
Herod’s anti-Advent and infanticide (Matthew 2:16–18). The historical parallel
is precise: Christ’s birth occurred amid a Roman-Judean regime of simulated
peace of the wolf-suckled orphans of Rome masking structural injustice—the
matrix of Antichrist and true Christ appearing simultaneously.
This twin emergence (“matrix”) has occurred again
today. If the first advent transformed the wolf-realm into the sheepfold, the
second advent is completing the reversal in the transgression of the transhuman
project: not by converting the wolves but by judging their “machined,
dechordate patternings.” Christ returns not to reason with the Pharaoh-lonic,
but to liberate the captives in simulation. The ethics of the Beatitudes
(“Blessed are the meek…”) and the virtues that follow become the constitution
of the Kingdom. The parousia enacts what the first advent proclaims: “He has
cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:52).
The faithful remnant church must have prepared for
this moment not through alignment with worldly power but through prophetic
repentance, missional renewal, and covenantal justice. As Paul says in Romans
8:19, “Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.”
This unveiling occurs not in rapture but in repair—in concrete acts of mercy,
restitution, and truth-telling. It begins with national, reparative atonement
for crimes long buried. It proceeds through the reclaiming of the throne for
the Lamb who was slain (Rev. 5:6), the only one worthy to rule.
V. Thanksgiving Reclaimed: Toward an Ethics of the
Meek
Thanksgiving is therefore reoriented not as a myth
of providential nationalism but as a rupture in the memory of unatoned sin,
unmerited mercy, and the Messiah’s new Advent of Repair. True thanksgiving, in
biblical terms, follows deliverance, not denial; it flows from Jubilee, not
genocide. “Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His mercy endures forever”
(Psalm 136:1)—but mercy for what? Not for convenience and quietude, but for the
release of the bound and lost sheep, the return of land to the dispossessed,
and the cessation of lycanthropic predation.
This day’s Thanksgiving is a theological
provocation. The table is not a feast of forgetting but a Eucharist of memory:
where gratitude names the cost of grace and the debt owed by those who find justice.
Christ overthrows the table of the moneychangers, so must this nation overturn
its liturgies of hiddenness and denial and embrace the ethics of the meek.
"I desire mercy, not sacrifice" (Hosea 6:6; cf. Matthew 9:13).
VI. Conclusion: The Christ of the Second Advent Is
the Judge from the First
Thanksgiving without repentance desecrates. Advent
without judgment is parody. A nation that desecrates justice and degrades its
substrate—earth and embodied perception—for the lure of outer dreams and pithed
intelligence—does not stand. The Antichrist is already post its tipping point
and is zombie-dancing.
A Constitution without covenant to its full people
invites catastrophe like the prophets repeatedly pointed out to the bad kings
of Judah and Israel. The American refusal to atone for the Confederacy, to
enthrone righteousness, and to reject Antichrist, simulacral and cryptic
claimants to sovereignty has opened the door for judgment. As Hebrews 3:15 demands,
“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” The new advent dawns
not merely as crisis but as opportunity—an apocalypse that discloses the need
for choice between falsehood and truth.
“The present world, a world without consecrated authority, seems caught [in foxholes] between two impossibilities: the impossibility of the past, and the impossibility of the future.” —Chateaubriand
The Spiritual throne over America in Ezekiel’s
cosmic temple was never empty—the alpha and omega never vanished and never will--but
the Lamb still waits to be enthroned by the people’s heart and recognition on
earth despite their attempt to have safely hidden him in heaven.
But in this very hour—as when Herod and Caesar ruled in cooptation of the Temple establishment—Christ is moving anew among the scorned. Will we know Him? Will we tremble? For blessed are the meek, for their earth at the Thanksgiving table dines with the Holy Mountain that has been prepared for them (Isa. 11:9 read in conjunction with 65:11-13f).
In this the created intent of our past is come to kiss our potential in the present, coursing off into
symphonies of the eternal. AMEN.
N.B. For constructive mission that picks up the
pieces, I have outlined the eschatological church’s role on this blog, esp. the
conclusions to https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-restoration-of-reason-from-eyes-of.html and https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/06/hegemonys-authority-by-hallucination.html
[1] My
earlier, 2020 meditation of Thanksgiving in a more traditional vein is at
https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2020/11/biblical-thanksgiving-and-american.html
[2] The
2021 inverted epiphany:
https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2025/01/for-generation-at-centurys-quarter.html
[3]
https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/09/from-spectacle-to-repair-lambs-victory.html
[4] The
Native genocide and displacement being a recurrent Old World crime advanced by
Social Darwinism. Its resistance to repentance is manifest in effete “land
acknowledgement” protocols.
[5]
Except for the shameful 13th Amendment’s legitimation of
slave-conditioned slave labor, capitalized in the private prison industrial
complex.
[6]
Seren Kierkegaard, The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion.
Translated by Alexander Dru,
With an Introduction by Walter Kauffmann. Harper Perennial Modern
Thought, 2010, 14-15, 44.
[7] China Miéville’s "ecstasy of
nihilism."
[8]
Jeremy Bentham’s phrase as the founder of Utilitarian Ethics a generation
before Tocqueville.
[9]
Constitutional kenosis (vacated individual sovereign space) stands in ironic
tension with Christo-theological kenosis (Phil. 2:7), making the USA a
parabolic field ripe for the double cropping in Matthew 13.
Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for
that day will not come until the rebellion [Apostasy] occurs and the man
of lawlessness] is revealed, the man doomed to
destruction. 4 He
will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or
is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple [Ezekiel 40-48],
proclaiming himself to be God.
5 Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? 6 And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. 7 For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. 9 The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, 10 and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. 11 For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie 12 and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness. (2 Thessalonian 2:3-12 NIV].
[11] See the section on "Double Mirroring" at https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/07/mammons-dogs-public-sermon-douglas-olds.html
[12] https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/posts/pfbid02AhSyXq6Qe4Dtci53ibaC99LPdSanzWNpdXQvMyU27ePxZou5iqFvdr8EGFkNFMdxl
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