Imagine this for yourselves: you go to the skin doctor because you have had this tiny growth on your cheek that just has not gone away. At first you applied lotion to it, thinking that it might disappear on its own. Then you tried something stronger, hoping to dissolve it. But, it seemed to be getting a little bit bigger, and it began to itch. So, after several weeks, too many weeks, you fear, you go.

The doctor looks at it, and turns to the intern following him that day and says something in Latin. You think, either the kid is studying for the priesthood or the doctor is giving a diagnosis. He turns to you and speaks in plain English. “It’s cancer, but it is a little one. Did you spend a lot of time in the sun while you were growing up? I am going to nick off a little piece of it and send it to the lab. It will take a few weeks before I can confirm what kind of cancer it is. But don’t worry; it’s a 95% chance that it’s the simple kind. We can get rid of it, and it won’t come back.” And with that, he begins to freeze the growth for cutting the sample.

He sends you home with bad news – a cancerous growth on your face. But there is good news – it’s 95% certain that it will not kill you. And you spend the next two weeks obsessing on the 5%. Hey, you are only human. You think: “I’ve never won anything before in my life. It would just be my luck to ‘win’ this one. 95% that it is okay, and I am going to come up with the ‘lucky number’ that puts me into the 5%.”

You spend the next two weeks trying not to think about it, but you think about it all the time. It is as plain as the nose on your face. In fact, it is not far from your nose, just over here on your cheek. Every time you look in a mirror, it lights up as if a neon sign is advertising, “Cancer, Cancer.” It seems to be growing. It is itching more and more.

The eternity of two weeks is up, and you go back to the doctor. He keeps you waiting, and then he whisks into the room, not even looking at you, and you think, “This guy has the bedside manner of a turnip! He is going to tell me that I am going to die, and he doesn’t even look at me.”

But, he does not tell you that you are going to die. He says just the opposite. “I'm surprised, but it is not cancer at all. It is benign. Here, use this ointment on it twice a day and come and see me again in three months.”

And you try to make sense of it. “Not cancer? What do you mean? I already have made plans – thought about changing my will, figured out how to retire early from work, thought about what I would say to the family, even fantasized about what my obituary would say, and you are telling me that I’m not dying?”

And then you think again, “I’m not dying, at least not from this right away! I have been to the brink in my own mind, I have looked over the edge into the abyss, but now instead of falling in I can step back.” You try to find something to say to the doctor, but he already has left the room. “That turnip!” you think. “But, I am free to go. I am free . . . to live.”

That afternoon I am scheduled to go to a memorial service at our Annual Conference, a time to remember all of my clergy colleagues who have died in the past year. I sit there as someone reads the roll call, and I sob. Others look at me and must think how sad I am. But to tell the truth, I am happy! I am ecstatic. I have a second chance, a new lease on life. I have been born again.

That is the truth to which Jesus testifies. It does not need a diagnosis of skin cancer, real or imagined. It does not take a near-death experience behind the wheel, or a near-birth experience of having a child born to us, or a new job, or the forgiveness of a loved one, though all of those circumstances can dramatize the truth. Simply, in Jesus Christ, God is telling us loudly and clearly that we are set free to live this day with new vigor. We do not have to despair over the past or dread the future, but we can exult in the glories of this day, as commonplace as it may seem. No day alive is commonplace.

Jesus said, “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the beginning and the end. I have turned that around in the sermon title because today on the liturgical calendar is the end of the Christian Year. Next week, with the first Sunday of Advent, we start up again with our eager anticipation of the birth of Christ. So, on this day peculiar from other days, Jesus Christ is the Omega and the Alpha, the end and the beginning, the end all and be all of God’s gift of life to us.

He is the “end all,” the purpose toward which life moves. Not necessarily marking the “end of life” chronologically. Some people talk about “end times” as if the whole of creation will explode and disappear in a fast-approaching moment (think of the new “Apocalypse 2012” movie here). But it is even more suggestive, I suggest, to consider this the time when we are challenged to figure out the meaning of life, the purpose of things, why we are here, that meaning of “end.” Jesus Christ is Omega, the one through whom meaning is revealed.

And Alpha. He is the “be all.” We sometimes are better at doing than being. Just being can be intimidating because what worth we have as a person most often is determined by what we do, not who we are. We go to a holiday party, and someone asks us, “What do you do?” And we have an answer for that. But if that person asks, “Who are you, really?” you think, “I’m at the wrong party! How do I get out of here?”
Jesus Christ, the Omega and the Alpha.

Pontius Pilate could not figure him out. That is the bit of the Gospel of John that we read together a few minutes ago, Pilate interrogating Jesus. We usually hear this interchange on Good Friday as the prelude to Jesus being crucified by the Roman government. The issue in question is, “Jesus, are you a king, or not? If you are, then you are a direct threat to me and civil order and must be put to death. If not, then why do your people treat you as one?” We in this society do not have much to do with kings. We did away with them in the 1770’s. Today traditionally and internationally is called “Christ the King Sunday.” We soften that to refer to “The Reign of Christ.” We have a cultural aversion to kings.

But here Jesus wants no part of a showdown of earthly powers. Yes, he is a king, he admits, but “my kingdom is not of this world. If I were a king like you, Pilate, my followers would be battling your army out in the public square. But, I did not come into the world to challenge your power but to testify to God’s truth.”

The truth is what reigns supreme in Christ’s kingdom, the reign of truth. And what is the truth? Actually, that is the question Pilate asks Jesus in the very next verse after where our reading stops today. Let us add verse 38. What is the truth?

Jesus does not answer Pilate directly. He simply must let it sink in. The truth is all that Jesus has preached, all that Jesus has done, all that Jesus has been over the public years of his ministry.

There is a little verse that we sing from our hymnal supplement. It is #2219 in The Faith We Sing, which is a prayer from An African Prayer Book that is dear to Bishop Desmond Tutu. It is this:

Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate;
      light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death.

That is the truth of Christ’s kingdom.

Imagine, Desmond Tutu and all of those who struggled for freedom all of those decades in South Africa being told by the kingdoms of government and industry and dominant culture and racial prejudice that the truth is, all of you rabble-rousers, that evil will win, hatred will triumph, darkness will eclipse the light, and death will reign supreme. That is the truth still of the world today, our world. Look around us, read the papers, listen to the hatemongers on television, watch the missiles drop, the marketplaces blow up, the children be sold, the vulnerable be abused, the starving go unaided. The truths of the kingdoms of this world are killing us.

But in the face of that, and this is his crowning glory, there is another truth, one that stands apart from this world in order to bring life to this world. It is a truth that insists that goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, and life is stronger than death. Jesus, who embodies this truth, stares directly at the face of death itself, Pontius Pilate, and lets it sink in.

The reign of Christ is one of goodness, love, light, and life. That is the end of all things, the purpose of our existence, the omega point. And that is what gives us life, new life, a rebirth, the alpha point.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” he says, or as we order it on this last Sunday of the Christian Year, the Omega and the Alpha. Because we can see the end, then we can celebrate the beginning.

Have a good Thanksgiving time this week. Give thanks for this life, here and now, the beginning and the end and all this is in-between. And then, let us reconvene next weekend and begin our anticipation of what possibly could be. It just might be what the doctor said, “You are not going to die, at least not right now from this. You are free to live.” Amen.