John 1: 1-5; Revelation 1: 4b-8

“All my life’s a circle. Sunrise and sundown. “ Harry Chapin sings this song.  It all comes back around. Life goes in circles, doesn’t, friends.  Thanksgiving day I walked to the river.  It is the only day of the year you can see clumps of extended family walking along the walking path near the American river near our house.  When you pass them you can hear the conversations, some well-worn and familiar, others tense and restrained as they get into religion or politics or personal morals, again others carefully probing unfamiliar new acquaintances.  People come together because of DNA or because of love.  They stand there by the river and the familiar sights, smells and sounds, of the end of the salmon run.  Salmon are slapping their tails across the round rocks in shallow water as they go the last two hundred feet toward the hatchery.  Occasionally you see one jump.   The smell of rotting fish is unmistakable.  Turkey vultures wait patiently in the trees and the seagulls not so patiently.  The fish return with flawless GPS as they make their way back home.  Thousands of eggs are left in the river, waiting to be fertilized and the circle of the life in the American river will begin anew.  Friends, life seems to go in circles, doesn’t it?  It just returns to where it starts doesn’t?  Last week was the 33^rd and last Sunday of “Ordinary” time.  I always like that: ordinary.  Thirty three out of 52 Sundays are ordinary.  Only 19 are extraordinary.  Next week the Church year starts all over again with Advent.  This weekend we are in no-person’s land. It’s Christ the King Sunday, kind of a liturgical afterthought, a Christ bonus Sunday.  A Sunday when we reach the end of the cycle and come back into a new one.   The call to worship day is adapted from the Second Book of Samuel, from David’s last psalm.  There is an end to this soap opera of David’s career.  A career full of victories and betrayal and repentance.  Yet like the salmon in the river, out of the passing of Israel’s most powerful and successful king comes the beginning of the new and heavenly King.  In Isaiah it says: “Then a shoot will spring forth from the stem of Jesse and a branch from his roots will bear fruit.”  Jesse is David’s father and Isaiah tells us that the Messiah will come from the family tree of David, centuries later as a tender shoot.  So the old will gave way to the new.

In our verses of the week in the Book of Revelation, Jesus is known as the Alpha and Omega, the first and last letter of the Greek alphabet. It is a beautiful reminder that things begin with Jesus and end with Jesus, not just in the Church year, but in history.  In our Bible passages John declares in the first chapter that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.  Jesus is that word, present at the beginning of time.  That Word stands for the depth of God’s love, the depth of God’s suffering and sacrifice, the height of hope and peace.  The Word that is Jesus spins with the planets.

Friends, as we pay attention to the Bible texts, perhaps something dawns on us and that is that things perhaps don’t quite go in circles.  You see, as we go through the circles and cycles of life things happen, good things and bad things, bad things that look like good things and good things that look like bad things.  Perhaps the circles and the cycles are really a spiral.  When we look at a monster storm like Sandy we know now that things are changing, the jet stream is different because the ice is melting and we will see crazier. Things don’t just go in circles.  They spiral up or they spiral down. There was a program on PBS about poor kids in America, simply called “Poor Kids.”  It showed these children in their daily lives, moving from place to place, not quite getting enough food, struggling to fit in and mostly failing, angry, sad, heroic, loving and resilient.  It gives you hope, but also makes you deeply sad.  Their life goes in cycles, but really their life is more like a spiral, either it spirals up or it spirals down.  This is where we come in, this is where our presence and actions are crucial. Yes, life does go in circles, but can we, you and I, change the spiral?  Can you and I be the people who walk into someone’s life and change the spiral, push it upwards instead of downwards.   Some self-help guru I flipped by on the way to serious news on the TV said that five acts of kindness a week can make us happier.    Five acts of kindness. We do not know what these acts are yet but we also do not know what impact it will have on the lives of people.

Friends, we cannot escape the cycles of life, the cycles of nature and of history, but we can make an impact on which direction things spiral and spin.  What are our potential five acts of kindness this week , this month, this year.  It may be just a drop in the river, but what we do matters.  It is in Christ that God guarantees that in the end all things spiral upward, ever upward, to a great end. Thanks be to God.