[Note to subscribers: this is different from most of the sermons on this site, in that it is very specific to the congregation where it was spoken.]
Revelation 21:1-6
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.He will dwell with them;they will be his peoples,and God himself will be with them;he will wipe 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.’
And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.
Well, we made it.
Pretty much!
We have a couple of days to go still, but we will be changing our wall calendars very soon. Goodbye 2024, hello 2025! Even the way our agendas are stacked with activities at the end of the year, as Halloween leads into Thanksgiving, which leads into the winter holiday season, creates this manic rush to the end, and then we have the opportunity to pause and consider what comes next.
It’s an honor for me to share these moments of meditation with you, in this final Sunday of 2024.
Since we are almost at the end of the year, it’s appropriate that we read from almost the end of the Christian Bible. Pastor Choi actually picked this text and the sermon title for today. The beginning and the end. Let’s talk about beginnings and ends. And middles too.
What does it really mean to say that we are approaching the end of the year?
On December 31 at midnight, the calendar will change, and will say 2025 instead of 2024. Instead of December 31, it will be January 1st.
What does that really mean? On one hand, it doesn’t mean anything at all. January 1st will be a day much like December 31. We will wake up, some of us will go to work, we will go through the day, and eventually go to bed again, and it will be January 2. And so on. In one sense, a day, is a day, is a day. Time always moves forward, in a straight line. (As they say, “time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”.)
But since the beginning of civilization, we have also marked time as a cyclical thing. The main reason for that was the seasons of the year: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and then Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter again. Time to put seeds on the earth, time to take care of the plants, and time to harvest and get ready to plant again. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.1
So, our calendars pay attention to the cycles of the world. And this is a useful way of organizing our lives, even if we are not making our livelihood dealing directly with the land. So it is that we pause at the end of the calendar year, to take stock of what happened and what we accomplished this year, and make our plans about what we want to achieve in the next cycle.
Our church also has a liturgical calendar, which operates in parallel with the secular calendar. As we live through the last month of the secular calendar, we have just finished the first season of the liturgical calendar: the season of Advent. There are other calendars too, from other cultures, and there are financial calendars, all with different starting points. So as you can see, beginnings and endings are arbitrary. When you end, depends on when you begin. And the end is also another beginning.
For many years after I became a Christian, I used to read the whole Bible during the year. There are several systems to do that, but the simplest one, which I used the majority of times, is just to see how many pages your Bible has, divide that by 365, and then read that many pages every day. If we were doing that, we would be getting to the end now. Perhaps we would have read the same passage we are studying today.
So, what about that last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation?
Revelation was the first part of the Bible that I read. Here’s the story:
When I was maybe ten or twelve, my family was not going to church. My parents, both raised in the Presbyterian church, were going through an unchurched phase. My brother and I slept in the same room, in bunk beds. (I got the top one, of course, because I’m the older one.) Above my top bunk bed, there was a set of shelves containing books that were not in daily use, but which my parents didn’t want to get rid of, including several bibles. By standing on my bed, I could just reach them. There were other interesting books too, but I was very curious about those bibles, because I had heard that the last part of the Bible is about the end of the world. So I picked one up and proceeded with my research. Mostly, I learned that the end of the world will be very weird and freaky, but there was very little there that was actually useful in that sense. It was all about beasts coming out of the sea and beasts coming out of the earth, grasshoppers wearing armor, horsemen, and all sorts of strange stuff.
My mistake, and I think I see people today making the same mistake, was to think of the book of Revelation as a kind of documentary about what is going to happen. Instead, I’m learning to understand prophecy more as a kind of poetry. Even the prophetic visions in the Bible are really a kind of visual poetry. And like many songs which Bob Dylan wrote, for example, poetry may be difficult to understand and sometimes impossible to understand completely.
Today I see Revelation as a poem about faith and hope. I don’t read it anymore to look for information on what is going to happen, but I read it for clues on how the early Christian community dealt with the challenges of their time. And maybe, getting a better understanding of their emotions, we may be better prepared to handle what the universe will throw at us.
Revelation literally means removing the veil, removing what is blocking our vision to see, not the future, but how things really are. Revelation is this unveiling, so that with the eyes of faith, we are able to see what is really happening. And what is really happening, is that God is moving our universe according to his purposes and according to his care for us.
Revelation was written in a difficult time. But it is proof that our brothers and sisters did not lose hope that what God had started in Israel, and continued through the ministry of Jesus, God will finish. The world renewed, with Justice and Light, where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. A world where Heaven and Earth come together and become the same.
When we think about where we are going as a country, there is much to worry about.
We just came out of a bitterly contested election, and we are a deeply divided country. About half of us will enter the new year with exultation, and the other half with fear.
A good illustration of this is the cover of the January 2025 edition of Mother Jones, which features a drawing of the President-elect standing by the Fifth Avenue street sign holding a smoking pistol — a reference to what he said, in January 2016, in a campaign rally in Iowa: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” This statement has come back to the public attention because, for the first time since the American Constitution was written, the Supreme Court has given its opinion that the President is not subject to the laws as we are.
And the new Administration will have a lot to deal with. There is technology that is changing quicker than we can follow, to changes in the global weather, energy challenges, inflation challenges, increasing disparity between the “haves” and the “have nots”, a world at war, a costly and under-performing public health system, and the ever-looming possibility of a new pandemic, just to mention a few.
And how is our world faring? Not very well.
Global warming has passed the point where it can be reversed — the best we can hope for now, is to mitigate its consequences.
2024 has seen an unprecedented surge in warfare, marking the highest number of global conflicts since World War II: with 56 active conflicts involving 92 nations across borders. The war in Ukraine will soon enter its third year. Tomorrow, the genocide in Gaza will have been going for 450 days without stop. These are perhaps the most serious conflicts in the world right now, and they have resisted all the efforts of dedicated people trying to end them. But they are by no means the only ones. Worldwide 110 million people are refugees or internally displaced. The economic cost of warfare in 2024 was almost 20 trillion dollars, or about 14% of the size of the global economy.
The Doomsday Clock continues to be set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been in its 77 year history.
I don’t know who first said “think globally, act locally”, but that sentence carries a lot of wisdom in it. As we look at the challenges that our nation and our world will face in 2025, we will not allow fear and gloom to control our lives. We will continue to work to promote the Kingdom of God here where we live.
Here are a few things that we did, as a congregation, and we hope to continue doing in 2025: (Thanks to Pat Sovonic, Mark Manzi, and Mary Mecker, for this information)
We have started celebrating services and communion once a month at Colony Park. The speakers have been lay leaders of our church, and the services are well received.
Also at Colony Park, Marge and Pat have led English as a second language classes two times a month, and have led a craft class. In 2025, the craft class will become a book club.
The international Zoom class of English as a second language has been going strong for two years.
Every Saturday morning, we offer citizenship mentoring and English as a second language, specifically targeted at helping immigrants pass the citizenship test to become American citizens.
Our food pantry was able to feed more people in 2024 than previous years, and we have more tables and enhanced storage for the food.
We have also increased the number of sandwiches made for our sandwich ministry for homeless veterans, and are planning to increase some more in 2025.
We had the second largest grossing Corn Fest, in its 52-year history.
The Green Team of pre-Covid days has been revived.
Our youth planted flowers on Earth Day.
We continue to financially support various ministries around the world, sponsored by our denomination.
So where are we? Where do we stand?
We live in a complicated world.
We learn daily about difficult situations.
Our resources are few.
But our heart is in the right place.
Instead of despairing, we embrace hope.
With the eyes of faith, we see in the end of things, a world transformed by love.
There is a Jewish text from about two thousand years ago which says:
The day is short, and the work is plentiful, and the laborers are indolent, and the reward is great, and the Master of the house is insistent. It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.2
And that’s what we will do. We will continue to dedicate our energies to showing how the Kingdom of God is already in our midst. Like the song says, we will keep our hands on the plow. I don’t know if you have ever plowed. I haven’t. But I have been told that you start at the beginning, and then you keep going. That you keep your eyes on the earth in front of you, and your hands on the plow. That the way to get to the end is by paying attention to what’s in front of you.
The way this works, is you sing the chorus with me:
Hold on, hold on, keep your hand on the plow, hold on.
I got my hand on the gospel plow,
and I wouldn't take nothin for my journey now.
Keep your hand on that plow and hold on.
Hold on, hold on, keep your hand on the plow, hold on!I’m gonna make sandwiches and work on the pantry,
Gonna feed the hungry as best as I can,
Keep your hand on that plow, hold on.
Hold on, hold on, keep your hand on the plow, hold on!I’m gonna teach English, gonna teach the law,
gonna help my neighbor no matter the cost,
Keep your hand on that plow, hold on.
Hold on, hold on, keep your hand on the plow, hold on!I’m gonna share the Word, gonna share the hope,
Gonna share God’s love wherever I go,
Keep your hand on that plow, hold on.
Hold on, hold on, keep your hand on the plow, hold on!I’m gonna plant flowers, gonna love our Earth,
I’m gonna value what God has made,
Keep your hand on that plow, hold on.
Hold on, hold on, keep your hand on the plow, hold on!The only chains that we can stand
are the chains of hand in hand
Keep your hand on that plow, hold on.
Hold on, hold on, keep your hand on the plow, hold on!The only thing we did was right
was the day we started to fight.
Keep your hand on the plow, hold on.
Hold on, hold on, keep your hand on the plow, hold on!
And so, when we arrive at the end, we realize that the end is the beginning. Midnight of December 31 is zero hour of January 1st. Every day is the first day of the rest of your life. Like Mary Oliver wrote, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Look around you, the world is calling you.
The end is the beginning, because God is our beginning, our end, and our everything..
To the thirsty, he will give the gift of water from the fountain of life.
Stay thirsty, my brother!
Stay thirsty, my sister!
Ecclesiastes 3:1
Pirkey Avot 2:16, 17