1 Lent 2013
Father Adam Trambley
February 17, 2013,
St. John’s Sharon
“I am the Alpha and
the Omega” “I am the vine, you are the branches”
I am the Alpha and the Omega. I am the vine, you are the branches.
During Lent this year, we will be doing something special. We will be focusing on the theme of “Who is
Jesus?” Over the next five weeks, we
will explore different aspects of Jesus’ existence, life, ministry, and what
that means for us. Our launching place
will be some of Jesus’ own “I AM” statements about himself. Then during Holy Week, we will be invited to
follow Jesus through his passion, death, and resurrection.
This week, we are focusing on Christ as creator and
sustainer and how that same person of God who orders all creation has come to
us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
I am the Alpha and the Omega. The book of Revelation gives us this
statement of who Jesus is. Alpha is the
first letter of the Greek Alphabet, and Omega is the last letter, so this is a
way of saying that before anything else came to be, Jesus was. After everything else is finished, Jesus will
be. Between the beginning and the end,
Jesus is. These statements may seem
obvious if we have been hearing sermons in churches all our lives, but the
implications are pretty profound.
Jesus as Alpha and Omega is unpacked for us in our reading
from Colossians, which may be part of a great early hymn. Paul tells us that Christ is the image of the
invisible God and that in him all things in heaven and on earth were
created. Everything was originally created
through him and for him.
Understanding Christ as the agent of creation brings
together a number of threads in the Old Testament, and even in Greek
philosophy. In our first reading we hear
of Wisdom. Wisdom in later Hebrew poetry
is seen as a part of God that is not God in his entirety. Wisdom becomes the agent of God in the act of
creation and also enters the created order.
Wisdom is the fashioner of all things, does all things, renews all
things, and orders all things well.
Greek philosophy and philosophical Jewish thinking also develops
an understanding of the Word, also known as the Logos in Greek. The Greeks saw a need for an intermediary
between the unknowable God and creation, and they came up with a concept of the
Word as that intermediary. Usually they
understood it enough like God to be from God, but enough like creation that all
creation could come through him. Some
Jewish thinkers interpreted the word God spoke in creation in Genesis as the
Word understood by the Greeks.
Early Christians understood both Wisdom and the Word as
early religious intuitions of the Second Person of the Trinity. We know from John’s Gospel that Jesus is seen
as the Word, and that all things came into being through him. We know, however, that the Word by whom all
things were created, also entered creation as Jesus of Nazareth. The divine cosmic force that created us is
the second person of the Trinity who we know loves us because he became one of
us and lived and died for us. The person
of Christ in creation is the same person revealed to us as Jesus, so we know
that everything was created with love and a purpose. Everything was created through the action of
Christ because Christ decided its existence was a good thing. That everything includes every one of us.
Just as Jesus is our Alpha and our beginning, Jesus is also
our Omega and our end. Colossians says
that through him God was pleased to reconcile all things to himself, whether on
earth or in heaven. The same cosmic
Jesus Christ that created everything is also going to be responsible for the
new creation of everything. All
creation’s redemption and renewal is in the hands of the one who made it and
then came to die and rise for it.
Revelations draws on this understanding when is describes Jesus coming
as the light of the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem.
Once we know we were created with love through and for Jesus,
and that we are eventually going back to Jesus, we want to recognize how
important Jesus remains for our being even now.
As Colossians says, in him all things hold together. The letter to the Romans puts it this way:
“In him we live and move and have our being.”
As we hear in today’s gospel, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the
branches.” Two implications follow.
First, if we are alive we are living in the power of Jesus
Christ. We could see Jesus as the air we
breathe, or like the water surrounding a fish that gives it life. We might see ourselves as the melody of the
song that Christ sung to create the universe.
We might be ships sailing down the streams of Christ’s living
water. We are branches on the vine of
Christ. We only exist because the same
Jesus Christ who created all things continues to sustain it. No matter how broken, how sinful, or how
un-Christian we or others may be, the fact that we exist means we are somehow a
part of Jesus Christ.
Second, if Jesus is the vine and we are the branches, then
we have access to that creative, sustaining power of Christ. Jesus says that we are called to bear fruit
while we abide in him. We are not just
mindlessly swimming in the waters of Christ’s sustaining presence. We are called to draw on the nourishment that
comes from Christ to spread his power. We
are made to do work like he does, and he tells us to be connected to him. Jesus tells us that this work is keeping his
commandments, and his overarching commandment is love. We live in his love so that we can go out and
love. Love is the nourishing sap flowing
from the vine of Jesus into us his branches.
The deeper we ground ourselves in his love, the better we are able to
love others. We branches are made to
receive this love from Jesus and then to bear fruit that passes Jesus’ love to
others. We have access to that love
because Jesus Christ is love and he continues to sustain the universe.
Practically, what does this mean mean? It means we are able to tap into the power
that created the universe and is working out its renewal so that we can love
each other better. Think about
that. You can tap into the sugar sap
that ran during the seven days of creation and make a maple syrup to gladden
the hearts of a universe of starving pancake eaters. (Obviously I’m speaking metaphorically here.) More concretely, though, think about those
times when we are so frustrated by certain people in our lives and we decide we
have no more patience, that we can’t deal with them and that we have to write
them off. The truth is that we actually
do have access to a power strong enough to let us love them in spite of everything
they have done to us. When we want to be
extravagant with our time or our resources to help change someone’s life, we
are branches on a vine that can give us every nutrient we need to bear the fruit
of extravagant love. If we see all
sorts of suffering and war and tragedy on TV and want to help, but feel
powerless and stuck in our living rooms, we are grounded in Jesus Christ who
will prune away all the fears and barriers we surround ourselves with so that
we can bring his saving love to someone who is desperate for it. Everything we need to love like Jesus is
available, if we want to take advantage of it, and in the beginning Jesus made
us for nothing less.
We know the ways to ground ourselves in Jesus and his
love. Come to worship, confess our sins
and receive the body of Christ. Pray and
be present to God, especially by setting aside a certain time each day to show
up in prayer. Read the Bible, looking
especially for the inspiring vision of God’s love unfolding and renewing creation
in the Psalms and Isaiah and John and Revelation. Find other Christians and meet regularly to
talk about our own calls to love more deeply and the barriers we are stumbling
over to live into them. Right now, take
a minute and picture yourself as a branch on the vine of Christ, feeling his
love flow from him to you and you using it to make a large, plump, juicy cluster
of grapes. Then think of who God is
calling you to share that love with when you leave here today. (Pause for a minute or two.)
I am the Alpha and the Omega. I am the vine, you are the branches.
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