As it turns out, the prophesied rapture this week ended up being a whole lot of ado about nothing. One person who definitely didn’t fall for the end of times hype was Sherri Shepherd, but mostly because she’s been tricked before in an apparent case of “fool me once.”
The 58-year-old host made the admission on the Wednesday, September 24 episode of her nationally syndicated daytime talk show, Sherri.
“I didn’t plan on being here today, I thought the rapture was going to take me up to heaven,” Shepherd quipped after South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela claimed that the world was going to end on Tuesday, September 23, after claiming Jesus had come to him in a dream. But this wasn’t Shepherd’s first time being aware of a predicted rapture.
“People were getting their affairs in order, but it didn’t happen,” she explained. “I believe in the rapture, I believed it was coming. But this one, I didn’t fall for … because I have been through this before.”
“I used to be in a religion that told me that the rapture was coming,” Shepherd continued. “They told us to get our house in order. And I said, ‘Why? I’m not going to need a house where I am going. I don’t need those worldly possessions.'”
“I didn’t pay my bills. I didn’t pay my taxes. I did not pay my traffic tickets, because why would I pay anything when the world’s about to end?” she asked. “My registration had been expired for two years. I had seriously $10,000 worth of unpaid moving violations.”
Shepherd noted that she had received several traffic violations, but because she never showed up to court, they became bench warrants. “So I didn’t show up to court, because, again, why would I show up to court when the world is about to end and I’m about to get taken up to heaven?” she said. “Jesus don’t care about no parking tickets!”
It’s not difficult to see where she’s going with the story, as obviously, we’re all still here.
“Well, the world never ended. I went to jail. And you can tell I was not expecting to go to jail ’cause when the police pulled me over, I was wearing this,” she explained, cutting to a throwback photo of what appeared to be a very ’90s look. In the photo, Shepherd was wearing a psychedelic top with matching platform heels that could have been taken right out of a Spice Girls video.
Though there have been several threats of a rapture over the years, the one she’s likely referring to was supposed to have taken place on September 6, 1994, predicted by Christian evangelist Harold Camping. When the rapture failed to materialize, Camping claimed he had made a mathematical error, and revised the date to September 29 of that same year and then to October 2, but it never came to fruition.
Shepherd said that she ended up going to jail for eight days over her mountain of unpaid tickets. “Because I fell for the rapture, I became a hardened criminal,” she joked, to laughter from the audience.
Let this be a lesson to anyone else putting off any important responsibilities because of the possible end of times.
