The Beginning and the End

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Ecclesiastes 3:1-13
Revelation 21:1-6a

What time is it?

That is the question that is always before us as people of faith. Today it is easy: January 1, 2012. “Happy New Year!” Of course, if the end-of-timers are correct, the fact that the Mayan calendar concludes with the year 2012 may mean that today marks the beginning of the end of the world as we know it. So . . . “Happy New Year!?”

(In the flippant response of the 1980s band “REM,” I feel just fine about that.)

We are justified in rolling our eyes at such nonsense, even if we did shell out 20 bucks for a box office ticket and a bag of popcorn to watch the pending apocalypse unfold at a movie theater near you. And we are justified in dismissing such talk of the 2012 “end of time” as so much attention-seeking or escapism or fear-mongering. And we are justified in repudiating the glorification of death and destruction that too often coincides with the dramatization of “the last days.”

But if we take the gospel seriously we are only justified to a point. Because the truth is that the Christian hope in the coming kingdom of God, the Christian hope in that “end of time” when all of creation will come to ultimate and everlasting perfect communion with God and one another, the Christian hope in that “peaceable kingdom where the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and nation shall not rise up against nation and death and mourning and crying and pain will be no more” is, quite literally, the heart and soul of the ministry of Jesus.  

“The time is fulfilled,” Jesus says, as he begins his preaching ministry in Mark’s Gospel. “The kingdom of God has come near.” And then he proceeds to touch and teach and heal all he meets in the name of the kingdom that is at hand. And he dies for it when the coming presence of God’s kingdom threatens the current reality of Caesar’s kingdom. Which means that we who follow in the footsteps of Jesus should take this “coming kingdom” business very, very seriously.

What we in modern American culture think we know about the biblical basis for the coming kingdom of God at the end of time actually comes from getting stuck in literalism halfway through the one book of the Bible (Revelation) that is so clearly presented with symbolic—and not literal—imagery. We get so focused on which one of our current wars or natural disasters best fits the description of destruction in the middle chapters of Revelation that we never get to the culminating vision of wholeness and hope that was proclaimed in our New Testament reading this morning.

But that vision of wholeness and hope really is the entire point of the Revelation. In fact it is the entire point of biblical faith: that someway, somehow, God will find a way to dwell with us in eternal grace; that someway, somehow, God is already doing this; that someway, somehow we have a small taste of that coming presence in the witness of Christ, whose birth we just celebrated one week ago today. And that someway, somehow our preparations to celebrate the anniversary of the first coming of Christ have been a chance to prepare ourselves for what we call “The Second Coming of Christ.” Which is another way of speaking about this vision of wholeness and hope that really is the point of Revelation.

Again, I would urge us not to get caught up in a literalism that has always been intended to be symbolic. We are talking about a vision here. We are talking about a future hope that cannot be put into words and that, quite frankly, we cannot really understand. “As little as children know in their mother’s womb about their birth,” Martin Luther said, “so little do we know about life everlasting.”

And so we call it “the kingdom of God” or “the Second Coming” or “the end of times” or “the heavenly banquet.” Or, as Martin Luther called it, “the life everlasting.” Each phrase a symbolic representation of our grasping for words to describe something we can sense but cannot quite comprehend, something for which we long but cannot quite possess.

And yet it is this hope in “life-everlasting” that permeates the Scriptures and that grounds our common life together in worship throughout the year. “To everything there is a season” says the preacher in Ecclesiastes, and the seasons of the Christian calendar are no different.  We begin with Advent, preparing for the coming of Christ, and move through the season of Christmas in celebration of his coming. And yes, Christmas is a season and not just a Sunday, and we are still in it! Right here, right now. In Epiphany, we see that Christ is for the world and not just for us, but then we move into contemplative and reflective season of Lent, reminding ourselves what we who are far too human do to the coming kingdom of God. In Easter—another season and not just a Sunday—we celebrate the hope that God’s kingdom really can overcome all evil, and on Pentecost we usher in a whole new life in the Spirit that is the life of the church in these past 2000+ years.

Each season of the Christian calendar offers God an opportunity to train our hearts and minds and bodies and spirits into the new creation in Christ we are invited to become in the fullness of time. Each season has its ebb and its flow, its contemplation and its action. And each season points to that time when we shall dwell in the house of God forever.

Over the course of the recent season of Advent, for example, I spoke openly about the place of Advent in our liturgical calendar as a time of preparing for this “Second Coming,” for this “end time,” for this “heavenly banquet” that is our Christian hope. And I will say now that this 12-day period we currently celebrate between Christmas and Epiphany is, if we are living according to the seasons, a time for living as if the Second Coming has, in fact, come!

Imagine! What might it be like if, for just these few days in the beginning of 2012, we really did live as if this were the end of the world as we know it, if we really did live as if 2012 were the beginning of the new heaven and the new earth we have glimpsed in our vision from Revelation. Because this is, in fact, the “season” we are in.

Perhaps this new reality in this new year might be something like what many of us have seen in the YouTube videos of an 18-year old young man with a life-threatening heart condition chronicling his experiences of “cheating death” and then spending the short remainder of his young life using those experiences to help him dwell in the peace that passes all understanding. And sharing it with others.

With a comforting smile and a serene presence in these videos, Ben Breedlove describes the bright light and the deep sense of peace that accompanied three separate occasions in his life when he almost died: the first when he was four, the last just a few weeks ago. “I couldn’t stop smiling,” he said, of all three occasions. “I wish I never woke up,” he claimed of his most recent experience. And his wish to rest in that bright light forever came true on Christmas Day when death finally claimed him and peace finally enveloped him, and the rest of us were left to marvel at his wisdom and insight and trust.

“Do you believe in Angels or God?” Ben Breedlove writes at the end of his last YouTube video. “I do,” he says. “I do.” And how could he not, given his experience of peace in the face of his mortality? And how could he not want to share that peace with anyone who would pay attention, through a YouTube video that has spanned the globe and made national headlines. And how could we not respond with reverence and hope and trust in return?

It is truly an “apocalyptic vision” that Ben Breedlove has shared with us: apocalypse meaning “revelation,” apocalypse meaning a vision of reality that is ever-present before us but that we need help seeing and experiencing and sharing with others. Apocalypse meaning a chance to wake up and live in the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot ever overcome it. Which is what the Book of Revelation is trying to get across. No matter what God is still with us. In this life and the next.

In the fullness of time, the beginning and the end turn out to be one and the same, and this is the final point of our lesson from Revelation. “I am the Alpha and Omega,” Christ says, “the beginning and the end.” And the point of the peace that passes understanding isn’t just about preparing us for our death, as beautiful as that is. It’s about invigorating our life! It’s about walking together on this planet with the promise that the communion of the saints is real and that everyone—and everything—we encounter lives in the light that can never be extinguished, the kind of light that leaves us smiling forever and full of a peace we don’t want to wake up from.

How would we treat each other if we really saw this reality that is ever before us? If we really knew this with every part of our being? It truly would be the end of the world as we know it, with our wars and our greed and our suffering. It would, I dare say, be an excellent thing for 2012 to usher in the “end of time” with a peace that passes understanding.

We have a chance to practice that peace when we come to the table this morning, where the “Last Supper” Christ introduced to his disciples just before his death becomes the “first fruit” of the heavenly banquet we share in the fullness of time. In fact, the whole point of the Sacrament is to give us a brief taste of the “perfect communion” that is coming, to live for one brief moment as if the kingdom really has already come. Because, in a very real sense, it has.

So come to the table with the posture of one whose life of despair and destruction and devastation is ending in 2012, whose new life is dawning with a bright light and an overwhelming peace that will guide us and protect us and strengthen us in the days to come. However they begin. And however they end. In this new year, and in every precious year that is given to us on this earth.

I pray it may be so. Amen.