And he said, ‘Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, “I am he!” and, “The time is near!” Do not go after them.’ ” This is the heart of our gospel reading today. For those of us who live a comfortable middle class existence, it can be easy to dismiss our whole reading with its predictions of persecutions, earthquakes, and famines. How could those apply to our lives? For those of us who live comfortable lives in Christian majority countries, we do not know what it is to be persecuted for our faith. And if we live a comfortable middle-class existence, we likely have never really been hungry, so we cannot even begin to imagine what it is like to go for a long period of time without enough to eat. Depending on where we live, an earthquake might be a real poss…