This Hallelujah Banquet Read online

  The statement “I make all things new” is supported by the identification “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” Alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet, and Omega is the last. When translated into our terms, Alpha and Omega comes out as “from A to Z.” God’s being includes all things. Nothing is excluded from his will and purpose, including time.

  It is all God’s time. He hasn’t reserved only the fifty-two Sundays of the year for his specialized attention. He will not be absent any day or any month. The whole of time is his. There is something more to be said, though, for “the beginning and the end” do not merely mean first and last. A belief in God that is limited to that literalism is too bare. God got things started and he will be around at the finish—most people more or less expect that. But this beginning and end have a more profound meaning. Here, beginning means source and origin—the basic substratum underlying all things.

  Theologian Paul Tillich has defined God as the “ground of being.”*3 Tillich was trying to get away from the idea that God is just off in the clouds somewhere or just the first thing that happened in history way back at creation. God is that out of which everything proceeds and exists. God is also the “end” in a more profound sense than that he will be around at the end of the world. The Greek word for “end” (telos)*4 means that he is the destination of all things. His being is the fulfilled purpose for which all things exist.

  * * *

  I can almost hear someone’s objection at this point: but I knew all that—I thought Revelation was going to tell me something about the future. All I can answer is, it has. It has taken the same gospel of Jesus Christ—that God is present with us to bring us to new life, to support us, and to fulfill us—and applied it to the future. There is no different gospel for the future than for the present or the past. There is no use casting around for some easier, magical way to live our lives this next year.

  On the other hand, the book of Revelation has convinced many people that there is no need to find that impossible, magical view of the future. It helps create room for faith. One theologian wrote, “God guides his children around many blind corners. He knows the way they must take. It is the devil who indulges men’s desire to see the whole road ahead; he hides only the precipice at the end of the road.”*5

  Every new year, we find a year ahead of us in which God will be making all things new. Of everything that is and of everything that takes place, he will be both the source and the destination. It takes great courage to believe that and great faithfulness to act upon it, for every newspaper in the country will be headlining a contradiction, and your own sin and rebellion will be turning in contrary evidence. All the same, let this word of God tear away the veil that obscures the presence and action of God in the days ahead.

  Every day will be a new day for God, creation, and redemption. It is only our blindness and sloth that keep us from seeing that openness in it.

  As G. K. Chesterton wrote,

  Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.*6

  This wonder brings us back to the throne, where he says, “Behold, I make all things new….I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”

  This is the end where we make our beginning.

  The end from which we start.

  * * *

  And this end brings us to the beginning of true thanksgiving. The art of thanksgiving is to give thanks when you don’t feel like it.

  It is easy to say thank you when you are filled with a sense of blessedness. It is easy to say thank you when your arms are filled with gifts and you are surrounded by the ones you love; it is, in fact, nearly impossible not to say thanks, to sing praises, and to laugh and make merry then.

  A few years ago, on a bright spring Sunday, I met a man I had not seen in years at the entrance to our sanctuary. He had once been an active member of our church but had dropped out years before. I was surprised to see him and said, “Jimmy, what in the world are you doing here? It’s great to see you, but how come you chose today?” He said, “I woke up this morning feeling great, and I just had to say thank you. My business is going great, my kids are great, and the day is wonderful. And I had to say thank you to someone—and God seemed the only one adequate to receive all the thanks I am feeling.”

  And so he did. He worshipped with us that day. He gave thanks. And I haven’t seen him since. I understand his wanting to be there that Sunday. But I also understand him not coming back. All of us know how to give thanks on spring Sundays when our kids are beautiful and our work is lovely and the Judas trees are blossoming and the dogwoods are in flower. It is the other times that are difficult.

  Giving thanks is one of the most attractive things that we do. Maybe the most attractive. There is something whole and robust and generous about the praising person. Even if we cannot give thanks, we like to be around the people who can.

  We like it when other people do it. We feel wonderful when we ourselves do it. There is a sense of completeness, of mature wholeness. Praise is our best work. A praising life is the best life of all.

  It is fitting that Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday for us here in America—the gathering together as friends and families in an act of gratitude, remembering our national origins in acts of thanksgiving. Giving thanks to God in acts like this one, whether of national gratitude or of Christian worship, shows us at our best. We feel it. We aren’t just offering our gratitude because our parents told us to do it or out of a vague sense of obligation. We have a deep sense that thankfulness is one of the best things we can do in order to be at our best.

  There are two books in the Bible that more than any other show the inner life of the person of faith: Psalms and Revelation. Both of them conclude in boisterous acts of praise.

  Psalms concludes with five great noisy hallelujah psalms, gathering all that everyone could feel about themselves and God—pain, doubt, despair, joy, rejection, acceptance, the whole bag of human experience—into praise.

  Revelation does the same thing. It enters imaginatively into the enormous range of experience that we get ourselves in for when we take the name of Jesus Christ as the definition of our lives, goes through the various depths and heights of dealing with God and the devil, and finally ends up in the same place: praising, singing repeated hallelujahs—in a replay of the Psalms ending. The last hallelujah song is sung as we are ushered into the great hallelujah banquet, the marriage supper of the Lamb that is spread in heaven.

  It would seem, on the basis of these accounts, that the way to be a whole person, to live at one’s best, would be to live a praising life. To say thank you a lot. To praise God a lot. But this cannot be a superficial thanks. There have, unfortunately, been more than a few people around who have told us to give thanks without first doing the work of honesty. It never seems to make things a whole lot better, does it? A beautiful discipline of the soul can become sappy, mindless counsel, if we divorce it from the biblical roots of honesty, grief, lament, and genuine celebration from which it originates.

  No! If we are to live praising lives, robust lives of affirmation, we must live truly, honestly, and courageously. We cannot take shortcuts to the act of praising. We cannot praise prematurely.

  If we are to live praising lives, robust lives of affirmation, we must live truly, honestly, and courageously. We cannot take shortcuts to the act of praising. We cannot praise prematurely.

  Take the psalms, for instance. The psalms, literally praises, are not, for the most part, praises at all. They are la
ments and complaints, angry questions and disappointed meditations. Occasionally there is a good day—the sun shines, no sheep wander off, nobody rips you off—and there is a wonderful song of thanksgiving. But mostly there are laments, complaints, cries of anger, and people fed up with life and wanting God to do something about it—and soon.

  Revelation is that way too. There are interludes of heavenly praise: harps and angels and elders throwing their crowns up in the air in jubilation (you can bet that they aren’t Presbyterian elders doing that). Yet the story line in Revelation also has to do with trouble: the mess we are in and the seemingly endless difficulties of ever getting out. The cycle happens over and over again—seven times, in fact, until we wonder if it is ever going to come to an end. And then it does: in exuberant rounds of praise, encores of praise, and then the marriage supper—this hallelujah banquet.

  It is absolutely essential that we take this pattern and sequence seriously. Premature praise is false praise. Praise is our end but not our beginning. We begin our lives crying, not smiling and cooing and thanking our parents for bringing us into this lovely world full of dry diapers and sweet milk and warm flesh. We kick and flail. We yell and weep.

  We have the popularization of a kind of religion that, instead of training people to the sacrificial life after the pattern of our Lord, seduces them into having fun on weekends.

  We have moments, it is true, when we give praise. But mostly we are aware of wants, of needs, of frustrations, of incompletions. We experience pain and ignorance. We are aware of inadequacy and rejection. In the midst of these poverties, we have moments when everything is wonderful, but that praise is not perpetual. Now, here is the biblical pattern: we don’t become praising people by avoiding or skipping or denying the pain and the poverty and the doubt and the guilt but by entering into them, exploring them, minding their significance, embracing the reality of these experiences.

  That is what is so distressing about the religious entertainment industry in our land. We have the popularization of a kind of religion that, instead of training people to the sacrificial life after the pattern of our Lord, seduces them into having fun on the weekends, with Jesus as the chief master of ceremonies—much like some sort of talk show host who’s here to interview those lucky people who have made it big with God, and the show is interspersed with some upbeat worship music to keep the audience (that’s us) from thinking too much about the awful people in the world who are killing and raping and cheating and making such a mess of things that there is really nothing left for them but the Battle of Armageddon.

  * * *

  We, all of us, want to be in a church or some kind of community that serves up the hallelujah banquet every week. Americans seem particularly susceptible to being seduced along these lines. In the nineteenth century, there were several utopian communities that were attempted by high-minded people, not unlike the communes that sprouted during the sixties.

  One of the famous ones was Brook Farm in Massachusetts.*7 It attracted some of the literary luminaries of New England. Among them was Nathaniel Hawthorne. The story of Nathaniel Hawthorne at Brook Farm is reflective of us. Hawthorne was a gloomy man, mostly. He knew the depths of human sin and probed the dark passages of the human condition. But he must have gotten sick of it at one point and wanted out. Brook Farm promised a way out.

  At Brook Farm there was no sin. It was conducted on the lines of rational enlightenment. At Brook Farm, people would be living at their best. No stuff of The Scarlet Letter or The House of the Seven Gables guilt. At Brook Farm, there were only joy and thanksgiving.

  But then George Ripley, the guru of Brook Farm, assigned Hawthorne the task of tending the manure pile. And Hawthorne didn’t like it and left. He wanted Thanksgiving turkey, not chicken dung. He came to Brook Farm to live with the songs of the angels, not the refuse of the cows and sheep.

  That’s us—wanting the glamour of an idealized life, then growing quickly disillusioned when reality breaks into our daydreams.

  The only way genuine, authentic, and deep praise is ever accomplished is by embracing what’s real. By accepting whatever takes place and living through it as thoroughly as we are able in faith. For in these moments, in these passages, we become human. We grow up into the fullness of our humanity and into the depths of Christ’s salvation that is being worked out among us.

  The only way genuine, authentic, and deep praise is ever accomplished is by embracing what’s real. By accepting whatever takes place and living through it as thoroughly as we are able in faith. For in these moments, in these passages, we become human.

  Jesus Christ did not arrive at the hallelujah banquet by successfully dodging all the evil in the world, by working out a careful strategy so he could avoid touching every unclean person of his time, and by developing a loyal cadre of friends who would be absolutely true to him through thick and thin. He didn’t do that at all.

  He went out of his way, it seems, looking for trouble, and when it came, he embraced it. He embraced other people’s trouble, but he also embraced his own. He took up the cross. He didn’t like it. He didn’t thank God for it. He didn’t sing a hallelujah hymn in the Garden of Gethsemane. He hated every minute of it. But he did it. He embraced it. Christ entered the jungle of pain, he explored the wilderness of suffering, and, in the process of the sacrifice, he accomplished redemption. For redemption is not a rescue from evil—it is a redemption of evil. Salvation is not luck but rather a courageous confrontation that is victorious in battle.

  And that is why praise is so exhilarating. It has nothing to do with slapping a happy face on a bad situation and grinning through it. It is fashioned deep within us, out of the sin and guilt and doubt and lonely despair that nevertheless believes.

  And, in that believing, becomes whole.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Editor’s note: This chapter was originally preached as a New Year’s sermon. Though I’ve retained Eugene’s language about the beginning of the calendar year, this teaching gives fitting context for the wisdom Revelation carries for any new beginning.

  *2 T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1943), 42.

  *3 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), 156.

  *4 Strong’s, s.v. “telos” (G5056), Blue Letter Bible, www.blueletterbible.org/​lang/​lexicon/​lexicon.cfm?t=kjv&strongs=g5056.

  *5 Editor’s note: While Eugene attributed this quote to D. T. Niles, the publisher was not able to independently verify its source or wording.

  *6 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, in Heretics and Orthodoxy (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2017), 220.

  *7 For historical context on Brook Farm, see Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Brook Farm,” www.britannica.com/​topic/​Brook-Farm.

  The Test of Our Love

  Human beings do many extraordinary things. Unlike the animals, we are not content to simply fill our stomachs, find shelter, mate, and frolic a little in the sun on occasion. We humans build splendid buildings. We construct titanic rockets and travel into outer space. We build computers that store and process and interpret information in mind-boggling ways. We train and discipline our bodies to athletic performances that are breathtaking. We paint pictures that penetrate through everyday reality so that the very inside, the true reality in things and people, is laid open. We compose and play music that lifts us out of the humdrum and launches us into ecstasy. We take bodies that are mangled and broken and put them together with surgical procedures. We grow enough food to feed the hungry of the world. We learn about people and cultures far removed from us in space and time and expand our personal worlds so that we are no longer confined and limited by the few decades of trial and error of our life span. And on and on.

  When we are living at our best, with all our energies focused, all our abilities alert and involved, doing what we w
ere created to do, we love.

  Our accomplishments are awesome. What do you want to be—athlete, scientist, artist, inventor? What is the best thing you can do with your life? With all the possibilities open and the vast array of examples, you would think that there would be a great deal of argument and confusion about what is best. In fact, there is a surprising consensus—all over the world and all through history. Not absolutely unanimous but very impressive. I think we can say overwhelmingly that the best thing we do is love.

  When we are living at our best, with all our energies focused, all our abilities alert and involved, doing what we were created to do, we love. Yet there is another aspect to this consensus. That no matter what else we do—no matter if we come home with the Olympic gold or make a million dollars or pioneer the exploration of space or move the world with some artistic performance or discover the cure to cancer—if we do not love, it is not satisfactory.

  No matter if we are responsible and work hard and do our jobs well and stay out of trouble and are respected, if we do not love, then somehow we have failed. If we live but do not love, we miss it.

  Notice that I am not reporting on what the Bible says or what Christianity says but what virtually everyone in the history of civilization says. This is the human consensus—love is the best thing we do, and it is not a luxury or an option but a necessity if we are to be truly human.

  With that quite incredible consensus before us, we are faced with puzzling questions: Why don’t we love more? Why aren’t we better at it? Why do we settle for so much less? Why do we get diverted and distracted from a life of love? These are the questions that John is putting to his congregations and to us.