Happy New Years’ greetings have been ringing in our ears as January 1st rolled round. For those of us who live out our lives in the Church and by its calendar we will already have had a month head start on the new year which we began with Advent.
Time is an incredibly arbitrary thing. In the ancient Roman world the year began on or about April 1st. When the calendar was changed to starting on January 1st, April Fool’s Day was derived from those who insisted on continuing to call April 1st as the start of the year. We, also, know that the Mayans, the Jewish community, the Chinese and others all observe a different New Year’s Day and marker for the count of the current year.
All this variation only occurs within the limits of creation and finite beings trying to grasp how to mark the days of our lives. We seem to have some need by which to impose a sense of order onto the experience of past, present and future.
God, whoever, or whatever we mean by that, has no such problem as the Alpha and the Omega, the one who was, who is, and who shall be. For God as we confess God in the biblical name of “I am” everything is present at once. For God omnipresence is not just a concept of being present in all places but, also, in all times. How can this be? Because time itself is a creature. In fact, it is a creature of the first day in Genesis 1 when God creates light, separates the light from the darkness, a first day.
Now why is all this important? It is important because it assures us that God is present with us; present all the time, wherever we go. God is there. This concept was a huge discovery for the people of the ancient world. Often it had been expected that gods were limited to particular areas and particular lands. To be away from that land was to be away from that god.
Israel’s God, however, traveled. He met Abram/Abraham as a wandering herdsman. God sent Joseph into Egypt and then went into Egypt to bring Moses and God’s people back out of Egypt to the Promised Land, this God traveled with the people in the wilderness with a tent for a home and was perturbed with David and Nathan when it was proposed to build God a home, the Temple. In time God sent the people into exile and the people who had forgotten about God’s presence with them in Egypt thought it was no longer possible to sing songs to God in a strange land. Again and again this monotheistic God was so much more than they could understand.
Our attempts to define and express God today are little better than the ideas of the ancient peoples of Israel. We, too, want a sense of where God is rather than simply accepting a belief that God is. We attempt to capture visions of the world that mark God as inside or outside of creation. We create mathematical models not just from anthropocentric or geocentric views of creation, nor solar centric or galaxy centric, and not even universe centric understandings. Every time we lay out a plan that seems to define the totality of creation either in its greatness in time and space or in the minuteness of the micro scale of quarks and beyond, there is always something more, bigger or smaller. We want a theory of everything. Then we can include God in or out like the ancients.
I doubt, however, whether God will be so defined anymore than God stayed within the limits of the temple or the Promised Land. Wherever we go God will go with us because God made us and we are God’s creatures.
As we enter this new year or whenever we as finite human beings arbitrarily think it starts let us go believing and trusting that God goes with us. Knowing that God goes with us let us not find any kindness too small to extend to our neighbor nor any pursuit of justice too big or too far that we cannot accomplish it with God’s help. God is the Alpha and the Omega and all of creation is God’s temple.