Dear friends! Every year at this time - the penultimate Sunday of the Church Year - the lectionary presents us with biblical readings reminding us of endings, reminding us of our mortality, of the transitoriness of all things.

It's the perfect time of year for such ponderings, is it not? On the cusp of winter just a month away, the yearly cycle of nature is coming to an end. The leaves have fallen whose sweet smell fills the air and the sap has returned to the roots of the trees. Mirroring this mortality of nature all around us, the church remembers its departed loved ones. All Souls' and All Saints' days set the tone for the whole month of November. As the days grow shorter and the nights longer, we focus on those parts of the biblical message which deal with endings, mortality and transitoriness. So also today: the prophet Malachi and Luke's Gospel both proclaim a somber message, the coming of God's day which brings an end to the arrogant and the evildoers, a day of God's eternity in our time, a day long hoped for and yet also dreaded. Scholars call the passage we heard today from Luke's Gospel, "Luke's Little Apocalypse." It's the same type of literature, which we get en masse in the books of Daniel and Revelation. End times. It's not a pretty picture, which emerges from these readings. Is there Good News here?

The Bible always gives us the bad news first before proclaiming the good. Perhaps your first reaction to these readings is: I don't need it. I get enough bad news on the nightly news programs on TV. I don't need any more of it. I know of some people who have simply stopped reading newspapers or watching the news on television because they have just had enough of bad news. As understandable as that may be, the God of the Bible, the God of Jesus will not let us by-pass reality. God is never satisfied with human denial. The God of Jesus will not permit a shortcut to the Good News, which ignores war, or suffering, which turns a deaf ear to calamity, a blind eye to the marginalized and the disenfranchised. Jesus reminds his followers of the transistorizes of all things and he takes as an example the massive stone structure of the temple, a seemingly permanent edifice, which also - one would surmise - enjoy the status of being divinely protected. Jesus tells his followers, "The days will come when not a stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down." He then continues by exhorting his followers not to speculate about when "those days" will be. Dear friends, throughout the centuries it has been a recurring temptation of Christians to presume to know when "those days" will be. Sometimes such movements in the past have led to collective hysteria and to all kinds of destructive nonsense. Again and again there have been self-styled Christians who claim that the "end times" are upon us. Jesus is very careful, not to give credence to such mania; nor should we. We do not know - and cannot know - when the eternal God will intervene in time to establish - once and for all - that Kingdom for whose coming Jesus taught us to pray. Because we do not and cannot know that, we are challenged to act as if it were already here. We are to put justice and mercy into daily practice. We are to allow our faith to become incarnate in concrete acts of neighborly love, to neighbors near and far.

Dear friends, we at Epiphany are in an interim time. Indeed: in a sense, we are always in the interim between the first and second coming of Christ, are we not? The Good News of the Gospel is that God is not only at the beginning but also at the end, alpha and omega. We finite, mortal creatures stand in the interim between God's alpha and God's omega. Along with all living things, we too will one day come to an end. The Good News is God who is our true home, our destiny and our goal. The Good News is that this fact is not something tragic or unfortunate. Is it not profoundly true that only the transitory, only lives that in the light of God's eternity are mere episodes, having a beginning and an ending, are of utmost value; indeed it's precisely for that reason that our lives have value, dignity and charm? Our decisions are important only because we will not always be able to make other decisions or revise, let alone, reverse decisions once made. The decisions we do make will - here and now - have value because we are finite, mortal creatures. Thanks be to God for that!

On the first page of the Bible we hear the majestic fiat of God: Let there be light. On the last page of the Bible we hear words echoing the Gospel for today: "And there will be no more light, and they will need neither the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun. For the Lord their God will shine upon them, and they will rule from eternity to eternity. (Rev. 22:5) Rule in God's eternal kingdom. May it be so. Amen.