Who are you?
Where I come from that question is not a simple one that
deserves a
The answer would be, of course, “Avoca Hopkins.” “William’s boy?” would follow. “No, grandson.” “Willi’s boy?” “Yep.”
“Your mother’s Pat?” “Yep.” “They live up there above the dike?” “Yep.”
And that might satisfy the person whom I had just met. To know who I was they needed to put me in
relationship with certain people and give me a geography. “Who are you?” included the question, “Where
do you come from?” and “Who do you belong to?”
“Who are your people?”
The Book of Revelation begins and ends with a
declaration. “I am the Alpha and Omega,
the beginning and the end.” God declares
it in chapter 1 and here again as we heard it this morning in chapter 21. We will hear Jesus say it two weeks from
today at the very end of the book, thus sealing one of the deals of Revelation,
that God and Jesus—the One who sits upon the throne and the Lamb who was slain,
are one.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Episcopal priest and one of the great
preachers of our day, talks about the importance to us of our Alpha stories,
the stories of our beginning, of our past, stories that define who we are and
whose we are.[i] Our Alpha stories are stories that have
already happened to us and so they are solid.
I will always be the son of Willi and Patti Hopkins. I will always have been raised in the rural
Southern Tier of Western New York.
If you go into my office, you can find out a lot about my
Alpha stories just by looking around.
There is my seminary diploma on the wall, from Seabury-Western Seminary,
for instance, and an award of thanks for my time as President of
Integrity. There are pictures of my
parents, my husband, my dogs, and places I have been and people I have
known. They all represent things that
are true about and that I cannot change because they have already happened.
The church is certainly known for being a big fan of the
past. As a community of faith we have
Alpha stories and they have what we call a “catholic” character, they are from
all times and all places. And it has
certainly been true that in many churches the Alpha story of individuals that
make it up have been important, churches that are formed along ethnic or racial
or class or denominational lines.
But all this attention to Alpha stories has had a dangerous
edge to it, and that dangerous edge has something to do with what I talked
about and, more importantly, what we did last week. What we did was baptize four children and
what I talked about was how those children belong to all of us as members of
this one family. You see, in the end, so
to speak, what we care about as a community of faith is not our Alpha stories
but our Omega stories. We care less
about where those children, and all the rest of us, come from, than we do where
they and we are going.
This is precisely what Peter is trying to get across to the
leaders of the disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem.
I’ve had this experience, he said, that has radically changed my mind
about just what is important to God, and it taught me that I can actually get
in God’s way, I can hinder God, because God is going someplace. And God is taking with him on the journey to
this place many more and different people than I ever expected, even than I was
taught.
In
the terms of Revelation, the Omega stories of the Gentiles trumped their Alpha
stories.
So
what we were doing last week was giving them an Omega story to grow up in and
towards. Now it is an Omega story so it
does not have the kind of solidness that an Alpha story has, because it has not
happened yet. We can still choose our
Omega stories and we get offered many different ones all the time. One of them we call “the American Dream,”
which is quite different, by the way, from the dream of Revelation.
The
worst thing that can happen to anybody is not to have am Omega story, to be
quite sure that your life is not going anywhere. The destroying angels of poverty, prejudice
and any sense of a positive purpose to your life let lose all kinds of sin and
evil and death.
So
we must choose our Omega stories wisely, and value them above everything else,
because they have the power to shape and re-shape our lives.
I
was talking to a guy who dropped in when the church was open this week. He told me he had never been baptized and he
wondered if doing that would change his life.
Not in any kind of magical way, I
said, but it can mean choosing a different path with a built-in support group. It occurred to me later, he was looking for a
different Omega story.
The
reading from Revelation this morning is a version of our Omega story. Whatever
you think of the Book of Revelation, these last two chapters are critically
important for us Christians, and one of the reasons is that provide the true
correctives to what some of our assumptions have been and are about the
Christian Omega story. Barbara Brown
Taylor notices three things about them that are vitally important in terms of
knowing where we are going.
First,
our Omega story is not about going up to heaven. It is about heaven coming down to us. “What we call the “end of the world” is not,
in Taylor’s words
[About] the earth [being] struck by a rogue meteor,
laid waste by aliens, destroyed by nuclear holocaust, or otherwise demolished
so that humans have nowhere to go but up, like steam escaping a cosmic forest
fire. That is Hollywood, not
Revelation. In Revelation, the same God
who created heaven and earth the first time is please to create them both
anew….and [this time] God comes too—joining humans right where they are.
The
radical implication is that our Omega story is not about getting into heaven,
but about co-creating a new heaven and a new earth with God. If you have trouble believing this just ask
yourself what it is that we pray for in the prayer that Jesus taught us? “Your will be done on earth as it is in
heaven.”
Second,
our Omega story is about a city. The new
paradise will not be a garden built for two but a city built for all who would
live in it, and whose gates are never locked.
Again, Barbara Brown Taylor,
Anyone who cannot get along with the neighbors now is
going to be miserable then, unless they let the vision get to work on them
ahead of time, softening their hearts and opening their minds to embrace all
whom God embraces.
Third, there is no temple in this story, no churches in the
New Jerusalem. We won’t need anything to
mediate God to us because God will be among us.
In essence, every place will
be temple, every place will be
church. Every place will be the place
you seek God and God seeks you.
Last week when we baptized, all of us rehearsed our
baptismal covenant. Think of the
covenant as our agreement as to what the rights and responsibilities of living
in this new city are and will be. They
are primarily about our Omega story. We say I will with God’s help,” not “I have been doing it or am doing
it.” It is a commitment to our
future. To say “yes” to this covenant
is, again in Barbara Brown Taylor’s words, to say “yes” to
A certain direction—toward full communion with God
and neighbor, away from evil and
despair; toward justice and peace
among all people, away from anything
that might persuade you to respect the dignity of some human beings but not
all.
Once you have decided to go in that direction [she continues], any
step away takes you away from your own destiny—though fortunately your vows
cover that too. If you ever look in the
rear view mirror and see your destination getting smaller behind you, you can,
with God's help, stop and turn around.
Sometimes you can even call AAA and the Lamb will send someone to pick
you up.
Hospitality means we welcome you whatever your Alpha
stories, and when we say that we do not mean that we do not care where you have
come from. We want to know, because it is who you are and if we are to love
you, we must love who you are. But once
we love you for who you are, we love you even more for who you will be, and who
you will be is not alone, but with us, the thirsty, who together receive the
water of life from the One who is not only Alpha and Omega, but our Alpha and Omega.
[i]
This sermon was inspired by, and the quotes are from, a sermon preached by
Barbara Brown Taylor at the Washington National Cathedral on All Saints’
Sunday, November 4, 2012. It can be
found at http://www.nationalcathedral.org/worship/sermonTexts/bbt20121104.shtml. It is available to there to be read, listened
to, and or watched.
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