Alpha and Omega

Isaiah 44:4-6
Luke 4:14-22


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer


April 29, 2007

So. So here we are. So here we are about to start something. Start something new.

Boys will remember from the elementary school playground that those words “start something” were often fighting words. “Hey, Hey you, ya trying to start something?! You wanna start something?” and the idea of starting something was a fight.

So often our response is: “Naw, no I’m not trying to start nothing! Don’t pick a fight with me. Leave me alone.”

Now obviously, as far as I’m concerned I came down here to start something. While no playground bully, I didn’t come down here to leave you all alone! I came down here to start something. And I figure that’s also what you all had in mind. “Let’s start something, something new, and let the forces of evil, faithlessness and boredom beware because we are here, and here we are together, and we’re fixin’ on startin’ something new!” So “Amen” to that! But, we have our fears, fears of something new.

For one thing not everything new is good. A dear older church woman once said to me “What’s wrong with history, what’s wrong with tradition?” I share her inner answer: nothing is wrong with history and tradition. I believe in what old people still remember and what young people still need to know.

But, even if all that was new was good, it isn’t always good news to start something. Let me count the ways!… The new, the truly new is truly fearful, really awesome, full of awe. Hence we’ve turned to scripture to start this sermon: A remarkable, short, imperative from the prophet Isaiah, “Fear not – Fear not – For I am the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega.” But, Mr. Prophet Isaiah, how does your Alpha and your Omega stack up against out fear, our fear of the new and our greater fear of starting something new?

Now Emily Cooke here has introduced me as, among other things, a scholar. So its time for me to show off some scholarship! Greek. The Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet starts with the letter A, “Alpha.” It is from the Hebrew alphabet that we get our word “Alphabet,” because the second letter in the Hebrew alphabet, like our “B” is “Bet.” Hence “Alphabet” is the Greek version of the first two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Pretty scholarly so far, huh?! Well now here’s the esoteric part. While the Greek alphabet is called “Alphabet” after the Hebrew, it has its own last letter, the Omega. So you can see that Isaiah is saying that God is the beginning, like the Alpha, and the end, like the Omega. I myself would like to see this theology on “Sesame Street” and just say that God is like, well, “God is like A to Z and that’s good enough for you and for me.”

I hope I haven’t tarnished my scholarly image here, and I would remind you that I have failed the Greek language in some of the finest educational institutions in this country, and more over I have even refused to take Hebrew in several top-line graduate schools!

So, let me turn to biblical scholarship for a moment since that’s all in translation. Why is it in chapter 44 of Isaiah that he is having God served up in this alphabet soup for the soul saying God is the Alpha and the Omega, fear not? Well, because just a few chapters earlier Isaiah has been saying to the ancient Hebrews, that God is doing a new thing, God is creating and presenting a new servant.

In chapter 42, just before our fear-not-A to Z passage Isaiah has God saying, “Here is my servant…my chosen, in whom my soul delights..” and further “he will bring forth justice to the nations.”

Well, so of course they’re afraid – there’s a new servant on the block and he is going to be changing the neighborhood, bringing justice to the nations, which we can assume would be as new and upsetting then as it would be now. Bringing justice to the nations would involve bringing the nations to justice! And that would be new, that would be good, and it would definitely be a change! So, if God is about to start something, something new, the prophet Isaiah wisely follows with reassurances, promises and hope: His A to Z presence! Some scholars say that this new servant is actually supposed to be the Hebrew people of God themselves, that they are the new servant of God to and in the world! Now that’s an upsetting idea! Think of the changes people would have to go through if they were actually to be God’s servant in the world, bringing God’s spirit, and God’s justice, God’s beauty, and God’s goodness to this world! Just think of how they would have to change, become new, somehow.

Other scholars, in our own tradition, see this promise of the new servant to be the fore-shadowed – definition of the Messiah Jesus Christ. The New Testament itself picks a passage from Isaiah (told in Matthew 12:15) to say that Jesus is this new servant. In, Luke 4, which we just heard, Jesus himself picks another passage from Isaiah to say that he is the fulfillment of the messianic promises, and will himself bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed.

Great promises, great hopes, new life with his arrival! His presence! The new beginnings of God’s great promises, fearfully, wonderfully made new, scholarship – and then I’ll get off this scholar kick – scholarship however, just to correct any subliminal messaging here, does not say that “Duncan Newcomer” is that new servant, nor that ”Rockville United Church” is that to be God’s new servant to the world either! But there are limits to scholarship, are there not? And we can hope can’t we? Hope that while we may not be the messianic promise of God’s new life, we can be a part of it. And that is why we too might be afraid and might need the consolation and the encouragement of the A to Z God.

I should mention that the original inspiration for this sermon came from my first visit with you all in March when I looked up from this pulpit to the brick wall in the back seeing those two significant letters in Christian iconography up there. Those haunting and mysterious letters, Alpha and Omega, followed me all through my Presbyterian childhood. I’ve never seen them in a UCC church – although they could be displayed. As a child these two odd angled and bent letters were holy and strange to me and they created my first visual theological idea: God was A to Z; beginning to end. God was two all inclusive letters in the space of God’s eternity. To this day, I love to color-in ancient Celtic figures or letters which similarly figure God as they twine and entwine, coil and recoil, into endless images with really no beginning and no end. Can you picture in your mind’s eye a Celtic stain glass window with fire flames and rose petals all knotted and woven in outline and in lines?

So, this sermon began in me in early March looking at those Greek letters, anew, on your back wall. And so also now we have our fears of new beginnings. We celebrate the new, the Alphas, and want to start. And we lament the struggle and the loss and want to hold on to what seems familiar and unchanging. We celebrate, and we lament, new starts.

How we can live with this tension – celebration/lamentation – about starting something new, this anxiety and this fear? It required, from Isaiah, so many divine promises and spiritual hopes, just to get them to consider spiritual renewal, a new start with his new servant.

Since here we are starting something new, and since that raises fears and hopes we too can take courage from the prophet Isaiah. His vision after all became Martin Luther King’s dream. We can also renew out faith in Christ who embodies, on earth, Isaiah’s heavenly vision of mighty flowing streams of justice, of uplift to the poor, freedom from our captivities, and new sight for our old, old, ways of looking blindly at things.

Out of the promises of Scripture, we can renew our spirits and we can be lifted up by the visual images of Alpha and Omega, or those endless entwining of opposites found in Celtic illuminated texts, drawings of endless inspiration.

And so, thus renewed, the forces of evil, faithlessness and boredom had better be on notice!
40 years of RUC is just a beginning!

This church was one year old in 1968 – the most cataclysmic year of the second half of the 20th century. Was it ready for what was new, what was starting? I was 7 years out of high school and the whole world was exploding. From the point of view of Isaiah there were then great new servants of God’s will bringing justice to the nations: one was women – who would no long be in second place! Freedom from captivities. Another was black people, God’s renewed servants bringing justice and freedom, no longer willing to be second-class. Another new servant of God’s will was the peace movement – forcing common sense and truth upon the American empire then run amok in Vietnam. This church was one year old when music “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts-Club Band” – art, science, and technology, were on the brink of starting something new! What will we do as we go from year 40 to year 41 in a world made new by global warming, global terror, global economics and provincial religions. With our A to Z God, how will we shape and respond?

Now it is also an act of faith simply to awaken to a new day, to each new day, and there is a logic to the life of faith. Life in the Spirit is not just a promise of hope made in scripture, in Isaiah and in the Gospels. And Life in the Spirit is not just inspiration from visual images – the icons of Alpha and Omega, even endlessly in twined in ancient Celtic and other images.

There is a logic to our life of faith here, our willingness to renew and to be renewed. The logic of the spirit is as intellectually respectable as any other logic; it is the logic of paradox. In the words of a poet, “What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning.” (Little Gidding, T. S. Elliot). Having made an end in my life to make a beginning, those words speak to me. The poet goes on discerning the logic of faith: “In my beginning is my end…houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended…in my beginning is my end. Now the light falls across the opened field….and in that open field if you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, on a summer midnight, you can hear the music of the weak pipe and the little drum and see them dancing around the bonfire. The association of man and woman”…(East Coker, T. S. Elliot) That would be us, you and me in the open field of beginnings, hearing music, pure music, the weak pipe, the little drum, all we, together, in a dance, around the fire.

And so, in this paradoxical logic of beginning that are endings, where A to Z are different, with God’s abiding spirit, in our hopes and fears and with this promise of God’s presence, “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time…and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well when the tongues of flame are in-folded in to the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one.” (Little Gidding, T. S. Elliot). Amen.