”So shall it be! Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Revelation 1:8)

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among brothers,

To make music in the heart.

So that’s Christmas done for another year. Is it just me or does Christmas seem to come round faster every year? And here we are at another new year. 2024. When I was little I wondered if I’d live to see the millennium and here we are nearly a quarter of a century on. I’ve gone from being the Dad of a wee 5-year old boy to the father of a man of nearly 30 in that time. The years cycle. Winter becomes Spring, Spring becomes Autumn. Autumn becomes Winter. In the Church we have left Christmas behind and have moved into the time of Epiphany. Then will come Lent, then Easter, months will pass then we will begin, again the journey to the manger during Advent and the eternal worry of whether you sent Christmas cards to everyone.

The years cycle and we leave Christmas behind. But not entirely. As the poem says, the work of Christmas goes on. The work of the Church goes on. The work of doing all those things it talked about but, more simply, bearing witness to the love of God in the world. bearing witness to the love of God for everyone including - perhaps most especially - those who are broken and those who are most easily forgotten in this world.

The love of a God who is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. The eternal God. The God who came into this world of time and all the other limitations we have, to assure us that he is with us in Christ always, as Jesus assured his followers on the mountain in Galilee. To assure us that  neither nor season nor the ups and downs of life can separate us from the love of God.

Which, of course, it can’t. At least not on his part. We gather here in the presence of the God who is the alpha and the omega. The eternal God. Now see that word, “eternal”? That’s a mind-bending idea to try to get your head around. I’m going to try to explain it but you’re not going to get it. It’s like when I was teaching quantum theory. Kids wouldn’t get it and I’d say, “Of course you don’t. Nobody gets it. There’s nothing in our experience that can let us get it.”

I don’t get eternity either, but I’m going to do my best here. For God to be eternal means he’s outside time. Time has no meaning for him. He is the alpha and the omega - both the beginning and the end - but, from his perspective, the beginning and the end are the same place and so is everything in between. For God this is the last day of 2023, and of 1453 and of a gazillion years BC and of however many years the universe has to go. He hasn’t just loved you since you were born but has loved you since, perhaps, the beginning of time and will love you beyond its ending.

OK. That’s the tough stuff done. But I wanted to say it because what makes it hard for us to understand God as eternal is that we aren’t - at least not in this world. This is a world of time and change, of cycling seasons end ever more quickly recurring Christmases. This is a world in which it can seem that too many things fade away too fast. A world in which there are too many partings, too many final farewells. A world in which things can seem to change too fast and the certainties we have clung to pass away. A world in which beloved places close and we visit them again like childhood homes that are sold as we move away.

So way has the eternal God made us this way, as creatures of time? Because time offers us one sweet gift - the possibility of change. Sure, sometimes, perhaps often change is hard or difficult or painful but it’s only because there is change that there is growth. It’s only because there is change that we can grow - you and me - and be better people than we have been. It is only in change that there is hope - hope for a better world; a kinder better world where the lost are found, the broken are healed, the hungry are fed, and the nations are rebuilt.

And who will bear witness to that world if not you and me and the Church, the body of Christ on Earth? In a wee while these doors will close perhaps forever. This building perhaps may never open again. It’s an end. But also a beginning for all of you. God is the end and the beginning - those two places are the same for God. From today you begin a new journey in your life of faith.

Faith? Of course faith. Faith isn’t bound to time or place. It goes with you wherever you go. It is meant to inform your action and your choices wherever you go. It is meant to echo in your words and the way you vote in a ballot box. It is meant to be in your voice and face and touch when you let others know that they matter.

This place is a building. It’s not the Church. You are the Church. Out there is a big new world in which to do the work of the Christmas

Eternal Father, however things may change may we ever bear witness to your love for all your children

Preached at Dalton Parish Church

Complete service