From the Book of Revelation:
“I am the Alpha and the Omega”, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Rev. 1:8 (NRSV) – December 9, 2013.)
First, a confession: I’m not fond of the Book of Revelation. Although it has occasionally brilliant passages and some incredible metaphoric imagery, it is probably the most abused and misused piece of scripture in the entire Christian canon! I remember hearing or reading at one time that, during the formation of the canon, bishops in what is now the Eastern Orthodox wing of the church opposed the inclusion of this book. If that had been the way things went, it would have been relegated to that collection of interesting historical literature which includes The Shepherd of Hermas, The Didiche, and the Letters of Clement. But it wasn’t, so we have it and we have to take it seriously. (When dealing with the Apocalypse, it is well to remember the meme about Episcopalians, though: “We take the Bible too seriously to take it literally!”)
One of the thinkers whose work was formative of my theology is the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He postulated the evolution of the universe in the direction of ever increasing complexity and ever growing consciousness. The supreme point of complexity and consciousness he dubbed “the Omega Point” (with reference to this verse, I wonder). He theorized that the Omega Point is utterly complex and completely conscious, transcendent, and independent of the universe; in fact, according to Teilhard, the Omega Point is the cause of the universe’s growth in complexity and consciousness. In a sense, it “invites” the creation to grow toward it. Teilhard argued that the Omega Point is equivalent to the Logos describe in the prologue to Gospel according to John, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself.
Most Christian theology focuses on God as the creator and source of all existence, the Alpha of this verse. As a result, we think of God as somehow “behind” creation; creation was perfect at the beginning, “fell” into brokenness, and now must somehow (through the grace of God) get back to that original state. But Teilhard’s thought invites us to focus on God as the goal and summation of all existence, a perfection to which we are evolving through God’s invitation.
There is an intersection between Teilhard’s thinking and another branch of theology that I found of value in my earlier studies, process theology derived from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. One of the premises of process theology is that God does not control the universe, nor any individual in it, but rather influences our creaturely exercise of universal free will by offering possibilities. Note the plural! Possibilities! In other words, there are different ways to approach (getting back to Teilhard) the Omega Point.
Advent is the season of possibilities. One of the most powerful images of the season is Gabriel’s message to Mary, his communication to her of God’s invitation to be the mother of the Messiah. It is a moment fraught with possibility — she could have declined . . . . Sandro Botticelli’s painting of that liminal moment is poignant; the look on Gabriel’s face is one of almost-fear that she will refuse. Of course, she didn’t . . . and it would be an understatement to say that her life became one of increasing complexity!
As we look on that painting, as we consider God who is Alpha and Omega, both source and ending, who invites us into ever-increasing complexity and ever-growing consciousness, what are our possibilities? Where do we have opportunities to say “Yes” or “No” to God?
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Like everyone who was even marginally grown up or conscious on that day, I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when it happened. It is one of those moments in time that are surreal in their clarity. 
I’m following a thread on a friend’s Facebook page about the future of the “institutional church,” by which I think the various participants mean their several denominations. (We are Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc., all of whom seem primarily to identify as Christians and only secondarily with the variety of polities, theologies, liturgical styles, and so forth we each prefer.) I suggested in the discussion that creating institutions is in the very nature of human beings; we create them, criticize them, tear them down, reform them, and recreate them, but we never escape from them. Another participant in response said, “I do not create community.”
We are stepping out of the “common of time,” away from the progression of lessons assigned for the Sundays of Ordinary Time, and instead celebrating the Feast of Michaelmas, known variously as the Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel or as the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael, or as the Feast of the Archangels, or as the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels (the latter being the preferred Anglican name for this commemoration). The only reason we are doing so is a personal conceit of your rector; Michaelmas, the 29th of September, just happens to be my birthday. Today I am celebrating the 30th anniversary of my twenty-eleventh birthday. I’ll get back to that in a moment, but first . . . a word about Michaelmas.
Are you familiar with those visions of the afterlife in which the dearly departed, clothed in flowing white robes lounge around on fluffy, white cotton clouds playing harps? I have to be honest with you that I cherish a very dear hope that such visions are 100% absolutely wrong! I cannot imagine any existence more boring than an eternity of cloud-floating and harp-playing, and if my ten years of knowing Charlie Stehno have given me a clue of anything about Charlie it is that he would most likely feel the same way. If he has gotten to the Great Hereafter only to find himself fitted out with a flowing white robe and issued a harp to play and cloud to lounge upon, I suspect that he is (as my grandmother would say) “fit to be tied.”
It’s Good Shepherd Sunday . . . the Fourth Sunday of the Easter Season is always Good Shepherd Sunday. Every year, regardless of which of the three years of the Lectionary cycle we are in, we hear some lessons which mention shepherds or lambs, and we recite the 23rd Psalm as the Gradual, and we sing every “Shepherd hymn” in the hymnal. I’ve been preaching Good Shepherd sermons for 25 years, so I pretty much thought this was going to be one of those Sundays when I could just “wing it” and preach extemporaneously. 
Several years ago, shortly after my mother died, my step-dad’s business partner also passed away leaving my step-dad to run the business they had created together. Now it is no insult to my step-dad, Stan, who had never before been a business owner, to say that he knew little or nothing about running a business. He’d been a tool-and-die man most of his working life with a brief foray into sales, but he’d never been in the “front office” and he’d certainly never been a manager or executive of any sort. Stan didn’t know accounts receivable from fish, and inventory control was a foreign language to him.
Leslie Dixon Weatherhead (1893-1976) was an English Methodist Minister who served at the City Temple, a Congregational Church in London. He served there from 1936 until his retirement in 1960. In one of his several book, The Christian Agnostic, he wrote, “When people said to me, ‘I should like to be a member of the City Temple, what must I believe?’ I used to say, ‘Only those things which appear to you to be true.’”
Well! Here we are . . . just a few days ago I mentioned this text in regard to another lectionary reading. I am attending a conference on “emerging Christianity” this week and this text (having come up in that meditation) has been on my mind. There are many among the participants in this conversation who are quite passionate about the “emerging church” movement; they are definitely not “lukewarm”.
“I was ready to be sought . . . I said, ‘Here I am, here I am’.” Almost more than anything else in Scripture, these words speak to me of God as not just wanting but needing to be in relationship with creation. I have written elsewhere about my understanding of God as the God who communicates; here is the God who seems almost desperate to be in relationship with his people. God speaks and everything comes in to being; in the beginning was the Word. But what good is speaking, what good is a word, if no one hears it, no one answers it? “Here I am, here I am” seems like a plea to be heard, to be recognized, to be answered. But in our modern society, very few people seem to be answering. Many claim to be seeking, many claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” but few are finding God in the traditional faiths and faith communities.
