Eternity Sunday
I had a sense before this morning that this Eternity Sunday service is an important service in the life of this congregation, but now because I have been present I know it to be true.
When we participate in this basic and powerful ritual we open ourselves to memories, to the past and to the present, and to the feelings that surround us in the present when we remember someone that we have loved and who loved us. Those feelings include grief, but also possibly things like warmth and joy and a special closeness with the people we are remembering that may be difficult to put into words.
And we do this on a Sunday we name Eternity Sunday.
How are these things linked or related, remembering those we have loved and lost, our particular grief, and Eternity Sunday?
I am the Alpha and the Omega, says our God,
who is, who was and who is to come,
the Almighty.”
The notion of Eternity or the Eternal one, the beyond, that which we may never fully comprehend, even in its mystery, has the potential to provide a context for the particularity of our love and loss.
And in this sermon I’m going to talk about what we might possibly “know” about this eternal reality we call God. But before we talk about God, let’s talk about our personal experiences that we touched this morning as we remembered our loved ones.
There is no question that we know the reality of our own particular losses in a way that only we can. No one knows our loss and what it has been like for us like we do. After all, we are the ones who lived it and experienced it with each of our five senses whether we wanted to or not. We saw it, touched it, heard it, tasted it, and probably even remember the smell of it.
The look in the eyes,
The feel of a hug or the touch of a hand,
The sound of a voice,
The taste of an important meal or simple morsel of food,
The smell of the room.
Our loss is ours and is sacred in its particularity. Our feelings and experiences exist in time and space and all of this comes to us through our senses.
Eternity, or the Eternal one, on the other hand denotes a reality that we think of as beyond or greater than time and space and we may not know it with our senses, so can we know it at all?
I am the Alpha and the Omega, says our God,
who is, who was and who is to come,
the almighty.”
What we strive to know and how we do that
We human creatures are creatures who long to “know” things. If I start counting at kindergarten, I have spent 26 years of my life connected to some kind of institute for formal education, just one of the ways I have striven to know a few things. My guess is that that number probably doesn’t even touch the number of years some of you have spent involved in formal study of one sort or another. Should I pause here and let you try to add them up? And what about all the learning we do by reading, thinking, reflecting or discussing the things we care about with others? Many of us strive to know many different things and in some ways, depending on how you look at it, we are moderately to remarkably successful. Recently, I heard a lecture entitled “the physics of innovation,” delivered by a Dr. Richard Epp, a physicist who works for the Perimeter institute in Kitchener Waterloo.
In a remarkably accessible way for a layperson such as myself he outlined the ways in which levels of pure scientific research, theoretical physics, from Newton through Einstein, Steven Hawking and beyond have led to ever increasing knowledge of the mystery of the reality around us. He says it’s a little bit like a video game, where there are increasing levels of understanding and complicated game play and power to do things. Even partial knowledge of the mysteries of the laws of the natural world around us has empowered human creatures to innovate and to build things as complex as cell phones and computers and much, much more.
However unlike a video game where you know ahead of time there are ten levels and that when you get to level ten – “you rule”, right now though we are at some level of understanding we really have no idea how deep the mystery of the reality of the universe actually goes. The number of levels could in fact be infinite. Epp suggests that we should not let ourselves be fooled into thinking that creative geniuses like Albert Einstein answered all the questions.
Epp would say that Einstein just opened up more questions about the mystery of reality than most.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, says our God,
who is, who was and who is to come,
the almighty.”
The God who knows us.
In the book of Revelation, our key text for today, John from the island of Patmos, where he has been banished for proclaiming God’s word and bearing witness to Jesus, has a vision while in the Spirit. This vision is a vision of Christ, the one who was crucified and the firstborn from the dead, and sovereign of all the rulers of the earth. And in this remarkable vision John receives a message that he is supposed to share with seven churches.
As I read through the messages to the seven churches as part of my preparation for this sermon, I was struck by one phrase, over and over again,
The One who is the first and last, the Living One, the one who lives forever and ever says to each of these churches “I know ….”
To the first church: “I know your deeds, your labours, your patient endurance….
To the second one: “I know your hardships…
To the third, “I know your faithfulness,
To the fourth, I know your works, your love and faith…
To the fifth, “I know your conduct, the reputation you have…
To the sixth, “ I know all about you…
To the seventh, “I know your deeds, I know that you are neither cold nor hot…
Do you think the churches wanted to be this well known? Do we want to be this well known?
Early in my life, I experienced this kind of knowing from the Eternal One as a fearsome thing, as a negative judgement of my life and then at some point, I entered a new level of understanding, thanks be to God, where I began to realize how much this knowing of me, of us as a church, is steeped in love. It is a knowing that reveals all – good and bad so that the good may be embraced and the bad may be forgiven or as necessary refined by fire. This knowledge steeped in love is the kind of knowing that keeps Christ standing at the door knocking.
In the 21st verse of the third chapter of Revelation at the end of the direct messages to the churches, we read these words as from the mouth of Christ himself,
“Here I stand, knocking at the door. If any hear me calling and open the door, I will enter the house and have supper with them.
Whoever has ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.
Maybe it’s less important to know all there is to know about the mystery of God than to be known by God.
And yet the very fact of Revelation means that God also seeks to be known. So, let it be accepted as a certain level of understanding, the Eternal God, the Alpha and Omega, the one who is, who was and who is to come, the almighty is the context or the container which holds our particularities; the particularities of the losses we remembered today and the particularities of being the church here at 1774 Queen Street. Theologians keep trying to describe this reality. In Paul Tillich’s words, God is described as the Ground of our Being. In Detreich Bonhoeffer’s words God is the ‘beyond’ in the midst of our life. And in my understanding of these texts in Revelation today, God is a Reality wherein all that happens to us happens within the context of a Divine Being who knows us, an eternal being whose eternal reality longs to reach out and touch us and
our more confined sense of reality. And in Revelation these are the words that describe this Being.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, says our God,
who is, who was and who is to come,
the almighty.”
Here I stand, knocking on the door. If any hear me calling and open the door, I will enter the house and have supper with them.
If the book of revelation is our guide, which it is today, then the most fitting response to God described and known in this way, a God who knows us in all of our particularities and a God who longs to be known, our most fitting response is to open the door and to bow down and worship.