If you asked me to rank my favorite Church holidays, last week’s Feast of Epiphany would be toward the top of my list.
Part of my love for Epiphany is its excuse to keep the holiday lights burning just a little longer. The VanderVelden household has never been too quick to take down the Christmas tree and unplug the yard lights. Epiphany is, after all, a festival of light. And what better beacon to guide us toward Easter springtime than the Light of Christ. Amen!
Part of my advocacy for Epiphany surely stems from its association with the gift-bearing Wise Men. That great vision-quest of Matthew’s Gospel – heavy-laden with gold, frankincense, and myrrh, cast with Herod as the heavy-handed villain – has been a favorite since I was a little. Amen! to the nurturing gift of childhood faith-formation!
Part of my attraction to Epiphany is the capstone it lays upon the Christmas season. From December 25th to January 5th, the Church celebrates 12 days of Christmas. Then on Jan. 6 falls Epiphany, the making available of sacred space for “treasuring and pondering in your heart” all these things of Bethlehem. So it is to be. Amen.
In light of Epiphany, my heart is treasuring and pondering a lyric from a contemporary holiday favorite, which declares that the birth of Jesus “draws the line between the days of hope and the days certainty.” That biblical truth is nowhere-better affirmed than in the New Testament’s book of Revelation. We’ll be spending the next month-or- so of Sundays in the pages of Revelation, and here’s some helpful understanding for our journey.
“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near.” (Revelation 1:3) I am reading to you from the book of Revelation. Let the time be now – by the power of the Holy Spirit.
John to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, [the Beginning and the End] who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty. (Revelation 1:4-8)
Let’s not hear John’s talk of “apocalypse” as permission to think in terms of unthinkable catastrophe or dreaded terror.
This word “apocalypse” that kicks off the book of Revelation with such scary-sounding terms actually means an “unveiling” or a “revealing.” My friends, John explains in the form of a letter, what follows is an unveiling and revealing of Jesus Christ. It is revelation in the sense of realization, the seeing and understanding of who Jesus really is, and what that means, not just for the future but for right now, too. Whatever the shroud covering God’s Son, Jesus, the book of Revelation lifts the veil to reveal a clear and precise portrait of the Christ.
John stands tall upon a faith so strong that, in Christ, he foresees a day when knowing Jesus will not hinge on having the eyes of your heart opened by grace – will not only depend on letting your heart prepare him room. John anticipates with every confidence the coming day when knowing Jesus will be as easy as just opening your eyes. Period! End of discussion!! John claims a day when faith will become obsolete, because everyone – even those who signed Jesus’s death decree and hammered nails into his hands and feet, even they will see Jesus coming on clouds of glory.
If our Christian faith is true, then at some point the same faith will be clearly true for everyone. If our claim that “Jesus is Lord” is anything other than a pious wish or a self-righteous fantasy, then it represents reality. And that reality will, ultimately, be undeniable to everyone – even to the loudest of skeptics and the most vehement of doubters. Amen!
Some say that only the past is inevitable and that the future is wide open – your future is that what you make of it. Or the future is unknowable – because it is not yet present. Well, maybe. But in the book of Revelation, John loudly cries foul and quickly tosses the red flag of hearty disagreement.
OK, so yes: Maybe we must account for a certain amount of dumb luck and random chance to influence future events. And perhaps we can faithfully hedge that claim by saying that it is the Creator himself who designs the universe to include some degree of fate and coincidence, which then allows God to intervene and work together unto good in re-establishing the justice of divine will.
Even so, we cannot and must not – if we are to claim ourselves Christians of Spirit-inspired integrity – believe that the future is unknown to the Lord God Almighty, that future is filled with anything but the fullness of God’s goodness, grace, and peace. Among those many other things, heaven most-assuredly knows that, sometime in the future, Christ is coming again. The One who was – the One who is – is so also without question the One who will return. Amen!
Right now, of course, we live by faith, not by sight. Right now, however much the Spirit convicts our joyous hearts to the Gospel’s truth and the present reality of Jesus, we cannot prove such things according to the rigorous standards of logic. We cannot empirically demonstrate any part of our faith in ways that would satisfy the methodology of science.
Again, however, if what we believe in our hearts is right, then the day will come when the reality of Jesus will surpass the human desire for precise data and hard evidence. The day surely will come when we no more need to prove the truth of Christ in our midst than today we must verify the earth under our feet and the sky above our heads. Everyone will just see it!
So it is to be. Amen.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message during worship on Sunday, January 11, 2026, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. It is the first installment of a short series on the New Testament book of Revelation that will continue until the start of Lent in mid-February. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Scott Hoezee and Christopher C. Rowland inform the message.