Sermon by the rev'd. John C. Bauerschmidt

Proper 29, Year B
November 26, 2006
Christ Church, Covington

“’I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev. 1:8).

This is a season for beginning and ending. The calendar is winding down, both our church calendar as well as the calendar of the year. We come, soon enough, to Advent, Christmas, the New Year celebration. The old year ends and a new one begins.

We human beings mark the passage of time. Time (inconveniently) seems to move in one direction only, so that we inhabit the present and are able to contemplate the past, but cannot see the future. This is what the Greeks called “chronos”, the time in which we live. The present slips inexorably and ineluctably into the past, and the past is always getting away from us, while the future remains inaccessible and unknown. Time is carving out new territory in its passage, from beginning to end. We reflect on the past, with celebration and penitence, and peer ahead into the future with hope.

In the Revelation to John, God calls himself “the Alpha and the Omega”, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Jesus Christ calls himself the same, meaning “the beginning and the end” (Rev. 21:6) of all things. If our times and seasons have a beginning and an end, God has neither. He is and he was and he is to come, as our reading says. The past does not escape him, and the future is well known. In fact, Christians have speculated that God knows no time, no “chronos”, and that all things are eternally present to him. He has no need for calendar or sequence of events. And because he is outside of time (and space), he can hold all things, past, present, and to come, in his hand.

So we mark the passage of time, but God does not. We are creatures of the calendar, but God is not so bound. Jesus Christ is Alpha and Omega, the One who holds together all times and all seasons. He brings events to an end, but there is always a new beginning, because Jesus Christ has risen from the dead. He is the source of our hope. Nothing ever really “slips away” into the past when it is in Christ’s keeping. And with Christ, our future is realized, revealed, and made known. We look for him to come again, to bring time to a conclusion, and to usher us into God’s eternal “present” in the kingdom.

It’s truly a time for beginning and ending. The creatures of the calendar live with change and transition, and this is true of the ministry of the Church. Clergy come and go, but the ministry of a parish remains a constant, though its particulars will change and develop too with the passage of time. But God does not change. The beginning and the ending are the same: “Alpha” and “Omega”. He is always “present”.

The “take away” today is that this is a unique and exciting time for Christ Church. It is a “kairos” moment for us, God’s time. Remember to tell your friends, because this is a message people need to hear. Beginning and ending are coming together, and this is exactly the point at which we can expect God to be at work. There are new possibilities all around us. Ending always brings grief, but here for us there are new beginnings, and these bring new life. There is a new day coming. God is at work, and it is precisely at these points that we can see this clearly.

We inhabit the present, we remember and celebrate the past, we look forward in hope to the future. We do these things through the One who holds all time and all place in his hand, our Lord Jesus Christ. He is both Alpha and Omega. We have confidence that, though the past seems to slip away from us, nothing is ever lost with him. We have confidence that, though the future is unknown to us, he is trustworthy and true for all time.

John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.

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