November 26, 2006

The Alpha and the Omega
 

by Rev. Dr. Jim Carlson

Revelation 1:4-8

Have you ever been in a situation where something really bad was happening, something which was making you miserable, but you couldn’t seem to do anything about it? That feeling of frustration when the person ahead of you in traffic makes you wait for a second red light because he or she wasn’t paying attention and failed to go through on the green light?

Or how about the person you work with, the one who has that annoying habit which distracts you and keeps you from doing your job right? What about the family member who year in and year out makes terrible choices in their lives and those choices make life miserable for everyone else in the family?

What do you do in t hat kind of situation? You can’t make the person in front of you at the light get off the phone and drive. You can’t necessarily quit your job. You can’t kick someone out of your family. What do people do when they’re really frustrated and can’t seem to find a way out?

I read a story this week about a man in Iran who had a noisy disruptive neighbor. "Every night, my neighbor had parties and invited badly-veiled women.” You see, in Iran, women who attend parties have to cover their hair and bodies with clothing of some kind.

Police often raid homes where parties are being held and punish folks for not obeying the laws. This neighbor and his guests could have been fined or even flogged.

"I had warned him several times but he did not listen," said the 24 year old man. Apparently this man wasn’t getting any cooperation from his other neighbors or the police. So out of his frustration, he set his neighbor’s $40,000 Nissan sedan on fire.

I figured that might stop the partying except that this guy is facing a possible 3 years in jail. You can imagine how quiet and well covered everyone will be in the big house.

This story raises the question of what people do when they feel powerless. How do people deal with their frustrations? And from a religious point of view, when a person is faced with a situation which doesn’t look as though it will get any better in their lifetime, how does he or she begin talking about God’s role in things?

These days we usually say something like, God is on our side and all of us who are like minded must band together to stop this terrible situation. Especially in our country, being that we have the most powerful army in the world, we tend to think that our military ought to enable us to solve just about every thorny problem in the world.

But what if you don’t have the biggest army in the world? What if you’re the little guy, and you feel powerless to stand up against the big guy? For the early Christians the way you dealt with those kinds of frustrations was by telling stories and writing books like the book of Revelation.

This book contains images of God overpowering the Roman empire and sending Israel’s enemies to eternal punishment. Rather than trying to fight against an undefeatable army, Christians talked about their God taking vengeance against their enemies. Certainly their God was more powerful than the Roman Empire.

This book arises out of the frustration of a Christians in modern day Turkey who probably had been harassed by Roman leaders at some point because they were Christians. We have letters dating about 20 years after this book which detail the interrogation tactics of the Roman governor in this province when someone was accused of being a Christian.

Obviously we don’t know exactly what went on or what these people suffered. But it’s very clear from Revelation that they were suffering, and that the author expected things to get worse before they got better.

Revelation is really aimed at helping these folks cope with what must have been a very discouraging situation. How do you help people get through this kind of oppression and terror? In Revelation, the author constantly tries to reassure the readers that none of what goes on in their lives is outside God’s control. God knows everything that is happening, and eventually God will bring their Roman oppressors to justice.

Here’s how he does it in this passage. The beginning of Revelation is in the form of a letter to these churches. He greets them on God’s behalf, reminding them that God always did exist, still exists, and always will exist. In other words, long after the Roman government is a distant memory, God will be there. If that’s true, then God is certainly greater than the Romans.

He also refers to God as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. As you may know, those letters are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. IT was a symbolic way of saying that in God, all things begin and end, not the other way around.

This was the most reassuring thing he could have said to these people because after they had suffered so much, their belief in God was all they had. It was the only card left in their hand. The belief that God would avenge all these terrible crimes committed against them was the life raft which helped them ride out this storm.

If they didn’t have that, they had no hope, and their lives were meaningless. They may as well go to the Roman governor and say, “Fine, I’ve given up my Christian faith. I’m going to go back to the beliefs I used to hold.” IT would have been safer for them renounce Christianity than to hold onto a God who can’t or won’t stop the Romans.

The author tries to give them further encouragement by reminding them of what Jesus did for them. Remember that at the time they were in a land conquered and ruled by Rome. They really didn’t have a lot of control over their lives and didn’t’ have the opportunity to influence the direction their society was taking.

In contrast to that sense of powerlessness, the author reminds them that Jesus has made them a kingdom of priests. Back then the priesthood was a respectable position in society. He’s using OT imagery of Israel as a nation of priests and he’s trying to give them some sense of dignity.

Finally he reminds them of the promise which goes back to Jesus himself. Jesus promised that he would return riding a cloud and that everyone in the world would see him. There would be no more argument as to whether or not Jesus really was the Messiah at that point.

Again, this imagery is borrowed from Daniel 7 when Daniel has a vision of a man going to heaven and being given all authority in heaven and earth. That idea is being applied to Jesus as a way of giving these people hope. Their only hope for deliverance from their sorrows was their expectation of Jesus’ return.

Now that sounds very encouraging. And in many ways I can understand why this would have been helpful to those people, given their background. But when we look at this same passage almost 2000 years later, we have to admit that it raises serious questions for us.

First, the casual observer would be completely right in saying, “This author is giving them false hope. He told them Jesus would return and Jesus didn’t. He told them the end of the world was coming soon, and it wasn’t. He’s offering these people spiritual snake oil. What a huckster.”

People who say that do have a point. But I think they miss the larger picture here. Keep in mind that Jewish people had been talking about God using these kinds of images for 500 years by that point. And after Jesus died, Christians began talking about Jesus with these same images.

While we do have to concede the smaller point about Jesus coming back, on the bigger point, the point about God always being sovereign over the world, John was right.

Keep in mind that Christians stood in a long tradition of Jewish religious ideas concerning the role of God in history. The way they dealt with one terrible calamity after another throughout history was by talking about how God had been present with them all the way.

They couldn’t prove or disprove God the way we prove scientific theories today. But what they could do was talk about their experience. And in their lives they could always look back at the course of events and say, “Yeah, I can see where God was with me on that one.”

This imagery of Jesus coming back on a cloud was really jus another way of talking about God being present. Remember that throughout history the Jewish people were oppressed by lots of big mean armies. They suffered under the Egyptians, the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Medes, the Greeks, and the Romans.

As a people they had seen empires rise and fall, but their experience of God was constant. So why would they expect the Romans to be any different. And just as John said, the Roman Empire eventually did crumble.

So what does that have to do with us? Well, I think it’s important as we go through life to keep this kind of perspective. Lets face it, we’re all going to encounter peaks and valleys in our lives.

The job we love today may be agonizing next month. The family member we get along with so well may be a thorn in our side in the future. The body part which works fine now may end up needing a transplant somewhere down the line. The child who seems so well-behaved and obedient now may end up having a very hard time as he or she matures.

Our nature as human beings is often to get so caught up in these crises that we fail to see the bigger picture. And that bigger picture is of the universe with God at the center, not ourselves, not our problems, not our hopes, not our fears, but God at the center.

And when we get that right, life becomes more hopeful, we get less upset with temporary nuisances, and we ourselves become a lighthouse of stability to people who are being washed around by the waves of life.

This past week saw a horrible act of violence carried out in Lebanon against a Christian leader who was known for his criticism of Syria’s meddling in Lebanese affairs. Pierre Gemayel was leaving church last Tuesday when two cars pulled up to block his car.

Before he knew what hit him, gunmen shot him right through his car window. He was the fifth anti-Syrian leader to be assassinated in the past two years. You can imagine the Lebanese people going back and forth between wanting revenge and wanting to avoid anarchy on the streets.

There were quick calls by some folks for retaliation. But his church was insistent that no retaliation should happen. His father insisted on the same thing. His father, the former president of Lebanon said the greater tragedy would have been to have people going out committing more violence trying to get revenge.

Part of the reason why they insisted people not retaliate is because of their faith, because they realize that God is bigger than this temporary struggle between Syria and Lebanon. Regardless of what happens, they trust in the mysterious but unmistakable justice of God.

Now that perspective ought to be an example to us. In this life, storms will come and go, troubles will arise and go away, but none of them can take away from our experience of the presence of God in our lives. And none of the people who mistreat us in life will escape God’s hand of justice.

The reason why we know that is because we can look back at our own lives and, if we really think about it, recognize the hand of God alongside of us all the way.

Do we live a charmed life? Maybe. It may not feel like it all the time. But whatever we do, wherever we go, whatever we suffer, whatever we celebrate, whatever happens in the world as long as we’re on it, all of it is subject to the authority of the God who made it. And if that’s so, then we’re always in good hands.