...And Everything In Between--May 2, 2025

...And Everything In Between--May 2, 2025

"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. (Revelation 1:8)

Just to be clear, God isn't just the starting point and the end point; God runs all the way through.  If we don't understand that, we're going to miss what's being said here in this verse, which many of us heard as part of our second reading in worship this past Sunday.  God isn't claiming ownership or lordship over merely the first page of the book and the last page, but of the whole story.

We might easily make that mistake when we read the Bible--of mishearing its figures of speech in binary ways when a whole spectrum of continuity is really in mind.  This verse is a good example.  For those who haven't brushed up on their Greek lately, the words "Alpha" and "Omega" are the first and last letter of the Greek alphabet--the alpha roughly like our letter "A" and the omega (literally O-Mega, as in "Big O") make a long "O" sound.  But it has the feel of our English expression of saying you know something "from A to Z."  When someone is described as understanding a certain subject "from A to Z," it is meant to be all-encompassing; this person knows, not just the first basic information but also the last of the last on the subject, and everything in between.  Saying "from A to Z" is not a reference to two separate things (a thing called "A" and a thing called "Z") but rather the whole of something, from beginning to end, with all the middle parts included too.

English is full of examples like this.  We use expressions like "from head to tail" or "from top to bottom" or even "from dawn to dusk." They all imply the whole of something, all the way through, not just the start and the finish.  And it turns out that the Bible does this a fair bit as well: things we sometimes hear as binary pairs or actually references to a whole spectrum. For example, God makes the day and the night in Genesis, but that isn't meant to rule out the in-between times of sunrise or sunset.  God makes fresh water and saltwater, but that doesn't mean God was uninvolved with marshes and estuaries where the two meet and blend.  God makes plants and animals, but strange and wild creatures like leaf sheep (look them up--they're a kind of sea slug) exist that both act like animals and also photosynthesize like plants, or lichens, which are hybrid organisms when a plant and a fungus thrive together as one.  (That's not even to get into the complicated ways that many organisms have not just two genders, but a surprising variety of combinations of gender, or the ability to biologically change from male to female or the other way around if there are no viable mates in their habitat--that's a biology lesson for another day.) All of this is to say that repeatedly in the Bible, the language is of a continuum, but our ears sometimes mishear it as a two-pointed binary.  We might mistake "Alpha and the Omega" as only a reference to a beginning point and an end point, when the real thrust of the language is to say "...and everything in between, as well."

To call on God as "Alpha and Omega," or in English letters, "the A and the Z," is really to say, like Paul says in First Corinthians, "God is all in all."  At every point along the way, including E, F, G, and W, X, and Y, God is present.  The whole shootin' match is God's jurisdiction and God's realm.  In other words, from the Christian vantage point, it's not that God is a character within the flow of history, but rather that history occurs within the being of God.  It's not that God exists as a point within the universe (even the center point), but rather that the universe exists within God.  God isn't going through the flow of time with us with just a very long lifespan, but rather God's being is outside of and beyond time, so that every point of our existence is immediately present to God.  That's part of why it makes perfect sense that the divine name God reveals to Moses out of the burning bush is "I AM" and not something like "I've Been Around For A Long Time" or "I'll Meet You At The End."  God isn't just a character in the saga of the world's history who pops in on the protagonists from time to time like Gandalf or Tom Bombadil in a Tolkien story, or the good but mercurial Dumbledore in the Harry Potter stories, or Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, whose disembodied voice just turns up at key plot points.  Rather God is present to all things at all times, because all things and all times actually find their existence within God's Being, not the other way around.

Okay, so why does any of this matter?  Why should I care that God isn't just the Alpha and the Omega, but also the Beta, Delta, Sigma, and Upsilon as well?  Well, for one, it's a way of saying God is faithful, ever-present, and always available.  The promise from God is not merely, "I met you at the start of your journey, and then I'll be there at the finish line, but you're on your own for the twists and turns in between," but rather, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear, because you are with me."  Jesus' final words (but not parting words, apparently) in Matthew's Gospel are not, "Meet you in heaven--good luck 'til then!" but rather, "I am with you always, even to the end of the age," precisely as he has sent them scattering out in all directions to "go into all nations." That's because God isn't confined to one spot on the map or one point in time, but is ever-present to all of it, the whole space-time continuum, because all of it exists within God's being.

A second implication is that the whole of history matters to God, not just getting everything to a happy ending at the conclusion of the final chapter.  Sometimes Christians have been so focused on how to "get people saved" so they can "get to heaven when they die" that we end up acting like the sufferings and sorrows of this life are unimportant or irrelevant. And even worse, sometimes the church's position has been to say, "We don't worry about whether children get enough to eat or refugees have a place to sleep--we just care about getting 'em into heaven!" and then we have shrugged in confusion or indifference when the suffering do not immediately want to hear what we have to tell them about the afterlife, because they see our apathy over their present-day life.  But if we recall that whole of history, and the entirety of the world matter to the ever-present God, then we can't ever separate our talk of heaven from our actions on earth.  We don't get to ignore the needs of the planet we live on in the hopes that God will just "get us a new one." We don't get to turn away from the needs of neighbors simply because "there won't be any sickness or death in heaven." And we don't get to reduce the Gospel into mere fire-insurance for the afterlife, rather than a way of life we walk today as well as beyond death.  If God is not just at the beginning and the end, but all along in between as well, then everything matters to God, and all of our existence is within the scope of God's concern and God's reign.

And maybe most importantly of all, especially to remember coming from this book of Revelation, is that the One God who is before the beginning and after the end is always in character with Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified and Risen One.  In other words, there is no bait-and-switch where Jesus the itinerant rabbi who taught us to love our enemies gets subbed out and a conquering Christ of unrelenting wrath tags in.  Sometimes we slide into that kind of sloppy thinking and bad theology if we picture God as just Alpha at the beginning and then reappearing at the end as Omega. We talk about Christ's coming in glory as though it were completely disconnected with the character of Jesus of Nazareth, or as if Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, were the exception, and the fire and brimstone of the early Genesis and late Revelation scenes were what God is "really" like.  But that just ain't so.  The God of all time and space is the One revealed in Jesus.  There is no point at which Jesus' cross-bearing, enemy-loving, poor-blessing, opponent-reconciling kind of love is not God's character.  There is no last-minute costume change for the final act, and there is no change of the rules just because we get to the bottom of the ninth inning. God remains faithful, constant, and present, of the same character that looks like Jesus, through all our lives, and throughout the story of the universe. That's what we can count on, even when everything else in our lives seems like it is thrown up in to the air and changing.

Today, then, it is worth remembering that ours is the God, not just of the neat-and-tidy endings or the ancient origins lost in the mists of memory, but of this present moment.  In fact, all of our moments, and all of what we call past, present, and future, are all caught up in God's eternal NOW. So this day matters, and what we do with it matters.  This world matters, and how we take care of it--and its inhabitants--matters.  And this moment brings with it the presence of the God who is not just there from before our birth or after our death, but is here for us in everything in between, too.

Lord God, open our eyes to your presence in this moment, and enable us to use this day in ways that reflect your care and your character.