During the Dark Ages in
England,
Anglo-Saxons would gather at night in a mead hall
to keep safe and warm by the hearth.
The halls were large
one-room stone buildings with windows
high up for ventilation.
In those days, one Anglo
Saxon said,
“Our life is like a bird that flies in through one window
of the hall and then through another
back out into the night.
For that brief moment, we see it.
It comes and just as suddenly it is gone.
We do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”
It flies in from the
darkness of the unknown,
then back out into that darkness.
The Anglo Saxon who
compared life to the night bird said
that if this new Christian religion can tell us something
more,
give us some sense of things, some hope,
then we should listen to them.
Where do we come from?
Where do we go?
The German theologian,
Karl Rahner, said
these are the two great questions:
the whence and the whither?
“Whence comest thou?
Whither goest thou?”
Where did the universe
come from?
“The Big Bang,” we say.
But where did the matter
and energy that blew up come from?
And where is the universe
going?
It has a story. It has
evolved into an orderly cosmos,
produced life, intelligence, creativity, art -- even
religion.
What is the universe
becoming?
What are we becoming?
The ultimate source of
things, the ultimate source of our lives,
is as mysterious as a moonless midnight
on the moors of 7th Century
England
– the darkness from which the night bird came.
The ultimate destiny of
our lives and of this universe
is just as unknown and unknowable.
The great whence and the
great whither.
Our reason can give us
hints about our origin and our destiny.
The miraculous and wonderful
order of creation
tell us that there is some rhyme and reason to it all.
The direction of
evolution from inanimate slime to amoebas
and on to greater and greater complexity, creativity,
and intelligence
– that trajectory says something about our destiny.
But we cannot prove our
origin or our destiny with facts.
When it comes to the big
questions, the whence and the whither,
all answers are matters of faith.
Faith is a belief we
choose to accept.
It’s a decision we make
in our hearts.
It’s the attitude we take
toward the mystery
from which we come and to which we are going.
Karl Rahner said that our
name
for the whence and the whither of life is “God.”
Calling the mystery “God”
is a way of saying we trust it.
We believe the mystery is
friendly,
that the unknown which made all this
will not abandon its creation.
We believe the mystery
loves what it has made
and will bring the universe to a good end,
will bring us to a good end.
As wonderful as this
world is,
we know it isn’t what it ought to be.
There’s so much
disappointment, so much sorrow,
so much pain.
Most of all there is
death.
We lose the ones we love
and knowing our own death is sure as the sunset
makes us wonder if our brief lives even matter,
wonder if we will be forgotten
so we might as well have never lived.
If we think that our
destiny is death,
then we are apt to feel despair.
St. John the Divine lived
in a time of despair.
Christians were being
slaughtered wholesale
by the Emperor Domitian.
Even Nero had not done
anything like this.
The Christians who
survived were selling out the faith
to save their skins.
So the religion, to which
John had devoted his life,
stood on the brink of extinction.
Now he had been exiled to
the lonely island of Patmos
where he lived as a hermit in a cave.
John was likely on the
verge of despair
when he had a series of visions.
His visions swept through
his consciousness
like a night bird flying through an Anglo Saxon Hall.
His visions were images
and words from the Hebrew Bible.
They were a mix of
something old and something new.
They weren’t all happy
thoughts.
Many of his visions were
nightmares.
Who wouldn’t have
nightmares given the horror
of the persecution?
He had dreams of war,
famine, and disaster.
But then came the final
vision he describes in today’s lesson.
After all the death and
destruction, John saw a new heaven and a new earth.
The God who created
heaven and earth in the first book of the Bible
did it again in the last book.
Only this time he made it
better.
The creator had not
forgotten the blueprint of life.
He had not forgotten the
design of beauty.
He had not forgotten us.
“See the home of God is
among mortals.”John heard a voice say.
“He will dwell with them.
. . and . . . be with them.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and
pain
will be no more,
for the first things have
passed away.”
“The first things have
passed away.”
This life we are living
is a rough draft.
This world is rough
draft.
The real life is yet to
come.
That is our destiny.
Then in John’s vision,
the Lord says,
“It is done. I am he Alpha and the Omega, the beginning
and the end.”
God is the whence and the
whither, our source and our destiny.
We came from God. We
return to God.
And what is the God?
We must not say too much
because God is a mystery
dark as a moonless midnight on the English moors.
But God is not a cold and
barren darkness.
God is not a lifeless or
a killing darkness.
The God John met in his
visions
is the same God revealed in the man Jesus
– a God of life and love, of healing and mercy
– a God who does not cast us out,
but redeems and embraces his children.
Brothers and sisters, we
have to pay attention to the things of today.
As one of our closing
prayers says, we have to do
the work God has given us to do.
But as we live in the
here and now,
we need to know where we come from
and where we are going.
It’s like driving through
Ely.
To know which way to
turn,
it makes a difference
whether you are coming from Caliente or Lund,
and whether you are heading for Elko or Tonopah.
To live well in the here
and now,
we need to know where we come from
and where we are going.
We believe the God of
love, hope, light, and beauty
is our Alpha and our Omega,
the beginning and the end.
Glory to God whose power
working in us
can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.
