December 16, 2007
Isaiah 9:2-6
Matthew 28:20

The Rev. David A. Davis
“Everlasting Father” 

            Very few rituals are more sacred than a young child’s bed time routine. Those precious moments before sleep; lasting memories are formed, relationships are shaped, a prayer life can be born, a future can be imagined there in a room kept from darkness by the nightlight over on the wall. Sleep habits are created that will follow the child long after she has grown up. There are songs to be sung, conversations unlike any other between parent and child. Or the nights when dad falls asleep in the kid’s bedroom only to wake up hours later and stumble to the other room. And then there are those inevitable nights when sleep never seems to come. It’s not hard to picture. Parent in the rocker. Baby now in the crib. Lullaby music has long since stopped. Child seems calm, must be asleep. Parent moves oh, so carefully up in the chair, prepared to crawl out of the room if necessary. The dreaded creak comes from the rocker even before the weight has shifted. And with that slightest little movement from the chair, a head pops up in the crib, with eyes wide open and a smile that melts, with a wakefulness that far outshines what the bleary eyed parent can muster. And the look, you know the look. The child just wants to know that you are still there, that you’re present, that you won’t ever leave, not now, not when sleep comes, not tonight, not ever.
            Ever. Everlasting. It’s not all about time.
            On Thursday past, in the midst of all that weather, our church family went to the cemetery and then came in here to witness to the resurrection. We gave thanks for the life of Jill Vincent. Her baptism now being complete in death, we offered her back to God We proclaimed our hope in the Risen Christ and we celebrated that victory over death. Earlier in the week, Lauren and I had the chance to listen as the family laughed and cried their way through some memories. At one point Jill’s children told us how she picked them up after school every day when they were young. “It wasn’t that we weren’t allowed to ride the bus, or that we shouldn’t walk, or that there weren’t options for a car pool,” they said. “It was that she wanted to be the first one to hear about our day. When we came home, we had tea and a snack, together. It was only a few minutes. Then we moved on.” There’s a memory those children long since grown up won’t ever forget.
            Everlasting isn’t about time.
            My freshman year at Harvard, our first road trip in football was to Princeton. Freshmen had their own team back then and our game was played on a practice field out behind Palmer Stadium somewhere. It was Saturday morning and the rain was horrendous. At one point in the game I was on the bottom of a pile and my face was under water. That’s a lot of rain. Freshman game. Driving rain. Saturday morning. There weren’t many fans that day. There on the sideline, wearing a garbage bag for rain gear was my father. No doubt cold soaked to the bone. The rest of my family will tell you that my dad and I, we would push each others buttons, and sometimes we did it on purpose just because we could. But I will never forget the image there on that field, some twenty five years ago, of my father watching me play.
            Everlasting is not just about forever.
            It was one of my first funerals after coming to Nassau. The daughter of the church member who had died stood here in this pulpit and offered some remembrances of her father. Of the many things she said about her father and family and growing up in Princeton and life in Second Presbyterian Church, one thing has stuck with me. It was a very practical, everyday life memory that she described. She explained how as a child she knew and experienced her father’s love. “The closet in our home where we kept all the coats, it was on an outer wall. With the door shut, it would get very chilly inside. Very early, every morning our father would take out coats that we would wear to school and he would lay them on the radiator in the dining room. So when we headed out the door, our coats were all warmed up.”
            Everlasting is not just about time.
            “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father…”  It’s an Old Testament kind of word, really. Everlasting. Everlasting covenant. Everlasting joy. Everlasting salvation. Everlasting righteousness. Everlasting God. “From everlasting to everlasting you are God.” (Psalm 90) If you sit down at your computer and crank up the bible software, or even if you pick up a good old fashioned concordance of the scripture, if you do a word search on “everlasting”, every one of the scripture texts referenced comes from the Old Testament. The word “everlasting”, at least in English (and in the New Revised Standard Version), it never appears in the New Testament. In the New Testament, the word is “eternal”.  And when you do a similar blast on the word “eternal”, all but a handful of the citations come from the New Testament. Eternal power. Eternal glory. Eternal fire. Eternal life. Eternal life. Eternal life. Eternal life. It is almost as if, eternal is a New Testament word, and Everlasting is an Old Testament word.
            Eternal. The connotations seem easier to comprehend. Forever and ever. Time that never stops. The song that never ends. The march that goes on and on. Eternity; it has that linear quality to it. It starts here and heads that direction, it just goes. Eternity has a sense of time and a sense of space. From here to eternity. It has a feel to it. You and I, we don’t necessarily understand it, but we’re more comfortable with it. Eternity. It’s a New Testament kind of thing. But everlasting, it wants to feel a bit different. It’s not just about time. 
            When God made God’s covenant with Noah, it was a promise that God would never again bring waters that would flood the whole earth. The rainbow in the sky was to be a sign, so that God would remember the “everlasting covenant”. The promise itself could not be taken away, or destroyed, or recanted. It was everlasting.
            Isaiah sings of the glory of the Lord; “arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you….The sun shall no longer be your light of day, nor for brightness shall the moon give light to you by night; but the Lord will be your everlasting light.” The sun shall be no more. The moon shall withdraw. For the Lord will be your everlasting light. The light will be sufficient, and magnificent, and piercing, and intense, and sure. It will be everlasting.
            Jeremiah describes God’s relationship with and God’s faithfulness to God’s people. “I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be my people. Thus says the Lord: the people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest the Lord appeared to [them] from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have continued my faithfulness to you.” (Jer 31) The love God has, it is constant and nourishing and replenishing and incomparable and quenching and life-giving. It is everlasting.
            Everlasting. It is so much more than time.
            In his very little book Christ the Center, Dietrich Bonhoeffer expounds in a very big way on his understanding of Jesus the Christ. “It is the nature of the person of Christ to be in the center, both spatially and temporally” Bonhoeffer writes. “The one present in Word, Sacrament and Church is in the center of human existence, of history, and of nature.” Christ is at the center. Bonhoeffer goes on to argue an essential, theological, non negotiable point. That one who stands there at the center, the one at the center of human existence and history and nature. The one at the center of the Church and at the center of creation, he stands there for me. Bonhoeffer uses the Latin, pro me. Christ for me. At the very center, it is not simply God, but God and you. God in relationship to you. Jesus being Jesus. Christ being Christ. Not just for himself, not just as the Son of God, but for me. It isn’t something he does. It isn’t something that just oozes from him. It is part of his very being, part of his essence. That Jesus Christ, the one at the very center of all that is, he is pro me. For me. The fulfiller of the Law. The liberator of creation. The great intercessor before God. The center of history. The center of nature. He who is the end of the old world and the beginning of the new world of God. He is pro me. Or to put it another way, he is everlasting.
            God in Jesus Christ. A promise that can never be taken away, or destroyed, or recanted. God in Jesus Christ. A light to the world. A light that is sufficient, magnificent, piercing, intense, and sure. God in Jesus Christ. God’s love made constant and nourishing and replenishing and incomparable and quenching and life-giving. God in Jesus Christ. With the first touch of God’s grace, the endless reach of God’s love, the unmerited feast of God’s salvation, you and I find ourselves drawn into the very center. God for us.

Everlasting. It’s so beyond time and space. Everlasting father.
In his book Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian, Tom Long tells of visiting a friend of his on the weekend before Christmas. The friend was in hospice care, dying from cancer. The visit, as Long describes it, was one mostly of silence; “not an awkward silence but more the stillness of old friends content to sit and say farewell with quietness.” The silence of the visit was interrupted by some rustling downstairs. The choir from church had arrived to sing Christmas carols. “What carols to you sing in that kind of situation?” the author admitted to wondering.
            “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming” is what they sang as they came up the stairs toward the bedroom door. Like they were singing to “to show God’s love aright” Long observed. He goes on to write a bit about the members of the choir. They had been singing the faith together for a long time. Hour after on Wednesday nights learning texts, counting notes, reliving old tunes and experiencing new ones, living Advent and Christmas and Lent and Easter up their in the choir room year after year. They had been “trained in the language school of the church”. But somewhere, deep down, they all knew they couldn’t climb those stairs singing something cheery and upbeat, triumphant or even glorious. Long concludes that “they knew they need to sin both truthfully and hopefully, to lament as well as to rejoice, and so they sang of God’s love coming “when half-spent was the night.”
            God’s love made known when “half-spent was the night”. That’ not eternity. That’s everlasting. It’s so much more than time. Everlasting Father. In life and in death. On the occasion of a joyful celebration and on a lonely holiday day of countless hours that never seem to end. When watching your child sing in a holiday concert in the school gym and when praying long into the night that God would bless you with a child. As you hold the hand of your lover and celebrating 65 years of marriage and as you hold the hand of your lover now lost to a world of his own and so prone to wander to away. When your in the zone at work and know your God-given gifts are being used to their fullest and when you dissatisfaction doesn’t begin to describe a day at work or a season without work. On the day you watch your grandchild graduate from college or on those endless quiet mornings when you pray that he will come from Iraq. Whether the email from the admissions office is accept, deferred, or rejected.
            God’s promised presence in all of life. God’s love made known. God with us. God for us. Christ the center. Christ for me. The mystery of the Incarnation. That’s the fancy words from the tradition. Virgin Birth. Fully God. Fully human. Angels singing. Mary knowing. You know that part; you know it up here (intellectually).
            But when you and I, when we know and experience the presence of God in here (the heart) and in here (in the room) and out there (in the world), now there’s a mystery of grace. Go tell that on the mountain. In here, in here, and out there. That’s everlasting.
            Jesus said, “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” That’s not just eternal, that’s everlasting!

         

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