Will The New Year With The Best Blessings Please Stand Up?

 
 

Good Morning Friends,

 
 

This year New Year’s Day falls on a Wednesday…one week after Christmas. And frankly our celebration of the New Year is not secularly and spiritually unified. Today we have fiscal years and calendar years and church liturgical years and school years, and they are, more often than not, starting on different days and dates that do not mesh with our Religious Holidays. In fact, the January 1 date is really a bit of bad news for Jews historically. The ancient Romans originally dedicated New Year’s Day to Janus, the god of gates, doors and beginnings for whom the first month of the year, January, is named. Janus had two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward. This is credited as being the source for the custom to make an accounting of the past year and to make resolutions for the coming one. It is a celebration of cycle of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and the circle of life converging. However, the Hebrews had multiple New Year Days just as we do today but not on January 1. They kept a lunar calendar, so the feast day dates changed if one was keeping track of the number of days and not weeks. Interestingly Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year is also a day of judgment, and a time at which it is thought that God determines our future in the year to come. It all makes one wonder why if Christ the King Sunday, is the culmination of the liturgical year and Advent is the beginning of the New Year for the church, why we continue to celebrate this pagan holiday of January 1. Maybe we should be wishing each other Shana Tova… eating apples and honey with our Jewish friends. Maybe we should be celebrating it with the Passover and Easter but that too has turned into a pagan holiday. So, I wonder, Will The New Year With The Best Blessings Please Stand Up?

 
 

Scripture: On the first day of the seventh month you shall have a holy convocation; you shall not work at your occupations. It is a day for you to blow the trumpets, and you shall offer a burnt offering, a pleasing odor to the Lord: one young bull, one ram, seven male lambs a year old without blemish.

 
 

Numbers 29:1-2 (NRSV)

 
 

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

 
 

2 Corinthians 5:17 (NRSV)

 
 

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

 
 

Revelation 21:5 (NRSV)

 
 

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and their entire multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

 
 

Genesis 1:31-2:3 (NRSV)

 

So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

 
 

Luke 2:16-21 (NRSV)

 
 

Then he said, “I am God, the God of your father; do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make of you a great nation there.

 
 

Genesis 46:3 (NRSV)

 

Message:

 

Message: Whether you have just walked through the greatest year of your life, or are incredibly glad to see 2019 almost over, one truth still rings clear amidst it all. We are not alone. Not ever. Whether we celebrate the beginning of the Word made flesh or the Annunciation or the Advent of Christ into the world or the Resurrection, it really does not matter for God is continuing to create new things each and every day. And the beauty is that God is with us in the process. Interestingly, uniformity and order seem to have won out for the choice of January 1 as the first day of the year. It is now almost universally celebrated. But it has not always been that way. Of course, the Chinese had their own calendar with the New Year being closer to the First Day of Spring, but in the Western civilization it was around 46 or 45 years before Christ’s birth that, Roman emperor Julius Caesar established January 1 as New Year’s Day. But why I am not so sure. It was probably political. Unfortunately, Caesar celebrated the first New Year’s Day by ordering a major attack on Jewish forces in the Galilee. Eyewitness accounts say that blood flowed in the streets. Caesar was killed the next year. Sometime later, Roman pagans began marking December 31 with drunken and immoral gatherings. It is noteworthy that during the early medieval period, that most of Christian Europe regarded Annunciation Day (March 25) as the beginning of the year. It is also of historical note that after William the Conqueror became King of England on December 25, 1066, he decreed that the English return to the date established by the Roman pagans, January 1. This move ensured that the commemoration of Jesus’ birthday (December 25) would align with William’s coronation, and the commemoration of Jesus’ circumcision (January 1) would start the New Year, thereby rooting the English and Christian calendars and his own Coronation.  William’s innovation was eventually rejected, and England rejoined the rest of the Christian world and returned to celebrating New Year’s Day on March 25. But that did not last either. And the history gets more convoluted for Jewish New Year is celebrated in the seventh month. According to Jewish tradition God completed the creation of the world on Rosh Hashanah which is a good thing to celebrate. Every year on this day God takes inventory, an annual accounting. A true day of judgment. Our lives are in the scales. The central feature of Rosh Hashanah is the blowing of the shofar, the ram’s horn and recalls the near sacrifice of Isaac and the test of Abraham’s allegiance to God. This apparently all happened on Mt. Moriah – the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and took place on the first day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei – the future date of Rosh Hashanah. Therefore, by blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, God is reminded of the allegiance that our spiritual forefather Abraham displayed, and in that merit, God will seal us for a year of blessing. We are to have faith in God’s provision for those in the promise regardless of when we celebrate it.

 

And So, The New Year can often bring a mixed bag of emotions and memories us. Some may have just experienced the best year ever and look forward to an even greater one looming ahead. Others may have just trudged through one deep struggle after another. The fresh calendar year brings desperate hope for things to be better, with an ache for the still-fresh wounds to slowly begin their process of healing. Why we celebrate it is perhaps more important than when. But, when, is important too, for we celebrate it on the heels of the celebration of the birth of our King Jesus and that reminder has the power to carry us right into a fresh, new year. He is Immanuel, God with us. And though things and people around us shift and change, our God continues on. So, let’s end today’s message on this thought of connecting it all through a relationship with Jesus. The Bible year always starts with the spring holiday of Passover. Interestingly both Isaac and Jesus carried wood on the journey to a place of sacrifice. Both walked with their father so that they had someone to be with them. Perhaps this central act in the history of the world is the one that should mark our cycle of life. But then it is based on a lunar calendar and that has been given up a long time ago. But still I hope we seek the blessings of our family of faith as heirs to the promise as we look forward to the new year. We have lots of questions about what will happen. Thankfully we have been adopted by God and have the hope of a new year filled with opportunity. It does not get much better than that. We will take a year-end inventory and judge how we have done financially. We will commit to being more productive relationally. Maybe some of us will take time to make peace with the past and others to add something new to their lives. But maybe it would not hurt us to be more like a child of God this new year and happy enough to realize that we do not know what tomorrow is going to bring, much less a full year. So, we must have faith that it will work out. So, we are on the eve of the first day of the new year, but the celebration of Christmas is to endure in our circumcised hearts. The Spirit is to live on. So, treasure it in your hearts as Mary. Dream on with Joseph to nurture the greatest gift ever into adulthood. Conceive of a relationship with God that honors the families of God. Friends, God has a plan and you are in it. A family reunion is being prepared by God. And just as God planted the Old Testament Joseph in Egypt to prepare for the survival of his family so too the New Testament Joseph echoes this memory as God has planted Jesus on earth to prepare us all for the greatest reunion of all. Friends, a year with Jesus is a very good year however we count it.

 

Pray we walk with God into the New Year. Pray we remember to thank God for what is provided. Pray we rejoice in the making of all things new. Pray we allow our past to be our past so we can focus on the presence of God in our lives now. Pray the Holy Spirit would lead us each step of this New Year. Pray that the doors that need opening will be opened and the doors that need to be shut remain shut. Pray we be filled with wisdom and the strength and power to glorify God. Pray we would be lovers of the truth. Pray we make a difference in the year to come. Pray we realize that our efforts at improvement are only perfected when we allow God to guide us on the journey. Pray that during the next twelve months we practice the art of living with new skills and spiritual insights. Pray we discover the path to prosperity by believing in the promises of God. Pray we realize that each day can be a new creation, refreshed with the presence of God’s love in our life. Pray we be unafraid to live in love. Pray we realize that indeed God does make all things brand new. Pray we have a happy, prosperous and faithful new year. Pray we be unified, together as one people, so we might bring about a year of blessings for others. 

 
 

Blessings,

 

John Lawson