Today is the last day of a 4 week series on our banners, and we are focusing on the symbols of the Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and the Vine with its fruit. Incidentally, some of you may recall that I often pray before preaching that my words either bear good fruit or be struck from your ears that only things pleasing to God come from this place.
I started doing that as kind of a disclaimer a while back because I know that some people listen to me as a person with authority – or at least someone who has the responsibility of faithful interpretation of scripture – and I wanted to be clear about the fact that I am, at best, a person making a faithful attempt to connect God’s word with our lives. At my worst, I’m a person who is limited by my own needs and desires, and so my hope is always that something of God still shines through.
That is, after all, the meaning of revelation – something of God is revealed in the midst of our human attempts to understand the One who is beyond our capacity to understand – which is the subject of the text I just read. As I said a few weeks ago with another text, the book of “The Revelation of Jesus Christ'' is an ecstatic vision that is full of symbolism and subtext that it would take a book to describe, and I again recommend Elain Pagel’s Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics.
Let’s talk a little about the book of “The Revelation of Jesus Christ,” which is named after the first line in 1:1. In Chapter 1 we learn that all of this is a vision given to John, who has been exiled to the island of Patmos by Roman Authorities for speaking out about the gospel of Jesus Christ. Scholars have various opinions about who this is, and the safest bet is to say that it was written in the tradition of Johanian communities (those started by John the Apostle), and that it may have been compiled from more than one source over about a generation – which is a little weird, given that it talks about the imminent return of Jesus.
What we know about it for sure is that it was written in the style of Jewish Apocalyptic Literature and that it was written to encourage Christians in desperate situations as the Christian faith began to become a destabilizing influence in the Roman Empire. Apocalypse, by the way, means “to reveal,” and usually refers to God’s judgment in some final way that rewards the faithful few and brings the rest to ruin – thus proving both God’s faithfulness and the faithfulness of ones who remained true to God’s expectations for worship and praise and care for those in need.
Now, today we have three verses that explicitly state that God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Let’s talk about that a little bit.
In 1:7 we have a general proclamation about this revelation and the person of Jesus as the Human One spoke of in Daniel 7:13 who descends on a cloud to approach the Ancient One, just as promised in Acts 1:11. We are also told that the people will weep because of the judgment he will bring (as promised in Zecharia 12:10). Then in 1:8, God brings out the big “I am.”
By saying “I am the Alpha and the Omega” God is saying, “I alone am the source of all things, and I am the one who directs the course of all things!”
In chapter 21:6 we see it again, right after the claim that God has already made a New Heaven and Earth, and God’s life-giving presence will dwell with us. Then we get the mic drop that connects everything in between. In 22:12 we are assured that God will bring about justice and in v13 we are reminded that God is both the origin of all things and the one who gives us our purpose and meaning.
God is the Alpha – not in the dominant predator kind of way, but more like in the way Paul described in Act 17:28 to the people who hedged their bets by worshiping an “Unknown God.” Interestingly, he quoted the Poet Epimenides when he said that “God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being,” but that’s also what it means to say that God is the Alpha.
God is also the Omega – not in the sense of a thing that comes to an end, but more in terms of purpose. The Greek word used for “end” is “telos,” which means something more like a “reason for being.”
I don’t want to bore you with a lecture on Greek words or try to impress you with fancy speech, but I think it is important to note that the people who wrote these texts were all influenced by some fundamental ideas that we still wrestle with. Whether we are aware of it or not, we just can’t get away from the influence of that early Hellenistic Philosopher – Ya Boy Aristotle.
If we are going to talk about God as both the ground of all being and the One who gives us purpose and meaning, then it also raises some questions about what we are, how we came to be, what makes us unique, and why are we even here in the first place? (aka Aristotle’s Four Causes).
Fortunately for us, all of these questions are answered in John 15:1-8. In John 15:1 we are told that Jesus is the “true vine.” In sort of a Platonic revelation of forms, we can trust that Jesus is the essence of God’s love, which is the real substance – the stuff of life. God is the vine grower, so God is the cause behind all causes.
In 15:2,3 we learn that God removes the parts of us that don’t bear fruit and makes way for the parts that do. I’m sure that you could read this as God getting rid of people that don’t “bear fruit,” but I can tell you that my experience has been more about realizing that there are some things that I do that are less likely to demonstrate love, and God tends to affirm the things that do demonstrate love. What’s really great about that is the assurance that those who follow in the way of Jesus have already been cleansed (or pruned) by the word of love and forgiveness that is Jesus, and we can be assured that we will bear good fruit if we just attend to the love and forgiveness that we have received!
Likewise, 4-6 we are told to abide in Jesus so that we may bear fruit (live into the purpose of loving) or realize that without love our lives will lack purpose. Then finally, in 7-8, Jesus tells us what he really, really wants – and what it means to bear fruit. If we truly align our hearts with Jesus, then what we want is what God wants, and what God wants will come to be. What God wants – and this is truly our “why” – is that we bear fruit and be disciples.
Now, bearing fruit seemed pretty easy before he tagged on that discipleship thing, right? Up till then bearing fruit was like: be nice, forgive people, take care of others – but discipleship? That’s a word that tends to make people uncomfortable in certain circles, and possibly for good reason.
There’s this guy named Carey Nieuwhof who is a Christian author and motivational speaker who talks a bit about things we sometimes get wrong about discipleship. He’s not particularly Reformed in his theology, but I think he makes a faithful attempt to be guided by scripture. Anyway, and I’m paraphrasing him and editorializing a bit, he says that discipleship is linked to evangelism. The base code of discipleship is not to go to Sunday School or sit around reading your Bible (although that’s certainly part of it). Discipleship is about putting faith into practice in a way that encourages others to believe.
He has more to say about it than that like we’re in it with Jesus and we often get things wrong but grace abounds, but the big takeaway is this. We do what we do because love compels us to do it. We do what we do as followers of Jesus because we want what Jesus wants.
Sarah Jackson wrote about her experience of realizing what Jesus wanted for her life in the book, The House that Love Built: Why I Opened My Door To Immigrants And How We Found Hope Beyond A Broken System. It’s a compelling read, and I tell you about it because the word that she keeps coming back to is a word that we have often wrestled with, and that word is “philoxenia,” which means “love for the stranger.”
That is a word that we have used to describe our “why” as a congregation, and it’s one that we are always trying to live into faithfully. In the end, our trust and hope need not be in our ability to show that love, but instead in aligning our hearts with what God is doing in our midst.
If and when we do that, we will find that we are also, as one of our hymns proclaims, building a house where all are welcome – even you, and even me.
I started doing that as kind of a disclaimer a while back because I know that some people listen to me as a person with authority – or at least someone who has the responsibility of faithful interpretation of scripture – and I wanted to be clear about the fact that I am, at best, a person making a faithful attempt to connect God’s word with our lives. At my worst, I’m a person who is limited by my own needs and desires, and so my hope is always that something of God still shines through.
That is, after all, the meaning of revelation – something of God is revealed in the midst of our human attempts to understand the One who is beyond our capacity to understand – which is the subject of the text I just read. As I said a few weeks ago with another text, the book of “The Revelation of Jesus Christ'' is an ecstatic vision that is full of symbolism and subtext that it would take a book to describe, and I again recommend Elain Pagel’s Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics.
Let’s talk a little about the book of “The Revelation of Jesus Christ,” which is named after the first line in 1:1. In Chapter 1 we learn that all of this is a vision given to John, who has been exiled to the island of Patmos by Roman Authorities for speaking out about the gospel of Jesus Christ. Scholars have various opinions about who this is, and the safest bet is to say that it was written in the tradition of Johanian communities (those started by John the Apostle), and that it may have been compiled from more than one source over about a generation – which is a little weird, given that it talks about the imminent return of Jesus.
What we know about it for sure is that it was written in the style of Jewish Apocalyptic Literature and that it was written to encourage Christians in desperate situations as the Christian faith began to become a destabilizing influence in the Roman Empire. Apocalypse, by the way, means “to reveal,” and usually refers to God’s judgment in some final way that rewards the faithful few and brings the rest to ruin – thus proving both God’s faithfulness and the faithfulness of ones who remained true to God’s expectations for worship and praise and care for those in need.
Now, today we have three verses that explicitly state that God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Let’s talk about that a little bit.
In 1:7 we have a general proclamation about this revelation and the person of Jesus as the Human One spoke of in Daniel 7:13 who descends on a cloud to approach the Ancient One, just as promised in Acts 1:11. We are also told that the people will weep because of the judgment he will bring (as promised in Zecharia 12:10). Then in 1:8, God brings out the big “I am.”
By saying “I am the Alpha and the Omega” God is saying, “I alone am the source of all things, and I am the one who directs the course of all things!”
In chapter 21:6 we see it again, right after the claim that God has already made a New Heaven and Earth, and God’s life-giving presence will dwell with us. Then we get the mic drop that connects everything in between. In 22:12 we are assured that God will bring about justice and in v13 we are reminded that God is both the origin of all things and the one who gives us our purpose and meaning.
God is the Alpha – not in the dominant predator kind of way, but more like in the way Paul described in Act 17:28 to the people who hedged their bets by worshiping an “Unknown God.” Interestingly, he quoted the Poet Epimenides when he said that “God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being,” but that’s also what it means to say that God is the Alpha.
God is also the Omega – not in the sense of a thing that comes to an end, but more in terms of purpose. The Greek word used for “end” is “telos,” which means something more like a “reason for being.”
I don’t want to bore you with a lecture on Greek words or try to impress you with fancy speech, but I think it is important to note that the people who wrote these texts were all influenced by some fundamental ideas that we still wrestle with. Whether we are aware of it or not, we just can’t get away from the influence of that early Hellenistic Philosopher – Ya Boy Aristotle.
If we are going to talk about God as both the ground of all being and the One who gives us purpose and meaning, then it also raises some questions about what we are, how we came to be, what makes us unique, and why are we even here in the first place? (aka Aristotle’s Four Causes).
Fortunately for us, all of these questions are answered in John 15:1-8. In John 15:1 we are told that Jesus is the “true vine.” In sort of a Platonic revelation of forms, we can trust that Jesus is the essence of God’s love, which is the real substance – the stuff of life. God is the vine grower, so God is the cause behind all causes.
In 15:2,3 we learn that God removes the parts of us that don’t bear fruit and makes way for the parts that do. I’m sure that you could read this as God getting rid of people that don’t “bear fruit,” but I can tell you that my experience has been more about realizing that there are some things that I do that are less likely to demonstrate love, and God tends to affirm the things that do demonstrate love. What’s really great about that is the assurance that those who follow in the way of Jesus have already been cleansed (or pruned) by the word of love and forgiveness that is Jesus, and we can be assured that we will bear good fruit if we just attend to the love and forgiveness that we have received!
Likewise, 4-6 we are told to abide in Jesus so that we may bear fruit (live into the purpose of loving) or realize that without love our lives will lack purpose. Then finally, in 7-8, Jesus tells us what he really, really wants – and what it means to bear fruit. If we truly align our hearts with Jesus, then what we want is what God wants, and what God wants will come to be. What God wants – and this is truly our “why” – is that we bear fruit and be disciples.
Now, bearing fruit seemed pretty easy before he tagged on that discipleship thing, right? Up till then bearing fruit was like: be nice, forgive people, take care of others – but discipleship? That’s a word that tends to make people uncomfortable in certain circles, and possibly for good reason.
There’s this guy named Carey Nieuwhof who is a Christian author and motivational speaker who talks a bit about things we sometimes get wrong about discipleship. He’s not particularly Reformed in his theology, but I think he makes a faithful attempt to be guided by scripture. Anyway, and I’m paraphrasing him and editorializing a bit, he says that discipleship is linked to evangelism. The base code of discipleship is not to go to Sunday School or sit around reading your Bible (although that’s certainly part of it). Discipleship is about putting faith into practice in a way that encourages others to believe.
He has more to say about it than that like we’re in it with Jesus and we often get things wrong but grace abounds, but the big takeaway is this. We do what we do because love compels us to do it. We do what we do as followers of Jesus because we want what Jesus wants.
Sarah Jackson wrote about her experience of realizing what Jesus wanted for her life in the book, The House that Love Built: Why I Opened My Door To Immigrants And How We Found Hope Beyond A Broken System. It’s a compelling read, and I tell you about it because the word that she keeps coming back to is a word that we have often wrestled with, and that word is “philoxenia,” which means “love for the stranger.”
That is a word that we have used to describe our “why” as a congregation, and it’s one that we are always trying to live into faithfully. In the end, our trust and hope need not be in our ability to show that love, but instead in aligning our hearts with what God is doing in our midst.
If and when we do that, we will find that we are also, as one of our hymns proclaims, building a house where all are welcome – even you, and even me.
One last thing on these two banners, you’ll note that there is a similar twist of white fabric that is not a part of the Alpha, the Omega, or the Vine. That bit was included to remind us of the Holy Spirit of God. It is an intentional interruption to remind us that God is active and present and in our midst. Let us give thanks for that and pray.
God, in whom we live and move and have our being, bless these banners as symbols of hope, as the promise of your never-failing love, and as a reminder that you are the source of all things, the One who gives life meaning, and the presence of love in our midst. Help us to grow ever more faithful and bear good fruit that is pleasing to you and life-giving to all. Amen.
God, in whom we live and move and have our being, bless these banners as symbols of hope, as the promise of your never-failing love, and as a reminder that you are the source of all things, the One who gives life meaning, and the presence of love in our midst. Help us to grow ever more faithful and bear good fruit that is pleasing to you and life-giving to all. Amen.
Comments