New Year’s Day is a curious thing in the liturgical calendar. We don’t really celebrate it most years; it’s only when it falls on a Sunday that most Christian churches worship on that day. At the same time, however, January 1, because it is the eighth day after Christmas, is commemorated in another way. Traditionally called the Feast of the Circumcision, in more recent times, it has come to be known as the Holy Name, because according to Luke, it was on that day that Mary gave Jesus his name.
We are still in the liturgical season of Christmas, we will be until January 6—the Feast of the Epiphany—but already our culture has gone beyond Christmas to think about other things: New Year’s Day, the Rose Bowl, and the NFL playoffs, to name only three of the biggest. Still, it’s rather odd that we don’t make much religious observance of New Year’s Day—Christianity may be one of the only religions of the world not to make a fuss of it. In most, New Year’s Day is quite a celebration, with everything from religiously sanctioned parties to reenactments of the story of creation. For us, we leave it to the secular world to observe. Our New Year’s Day, the First Sunday of Advent, is focused not on the changing year but on what is to come: the birth of Jesus Christ.
We pause today, continuing to ponder, with Mary the significance of Jesus’ birth as we remember his circumcision and naming. Only Luke records Jesus’ circumcision. For him, it is part of his overall concern to depict Jesus as fulfillment of prophecy and in continuity with Jewish tradition. We see his parents keeping Jewish commandments concerning birth. Every good Jew had his sons circumcised, and every good Jewish mother presented herself at the designated time for purification in the temple. Luke records each of these events carefully, drawing our attention to the continuity with the past even as he makes the case that with Jesus Christ, something quite new, a new age, has begun in the world.
The Christian tradition has a conflicted attitude toward time and the passing of the years. It used to be quite common for theologians and Christian thinkers to make a sharp contrast between how time was conceived and understood in the wider ancient context, and indeed in the world’s religions, and the Christian perspective. One way of making that distinction was to contrast two different terms used for time in Greek—chronos, from which we get such words as chronology. One can think of chronos as sequential time—the passing of the days and years. By contrast, kairos is the irruption of something new and different into that sequence, an opportune moment. In Mark 1:15, the gospel writer uses kairos when he records Jesus preaching: “The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.”
There is some truth in this distinction between kairos and chronos, and our liturgical calendar, which begins with Advent and culminates in Easter preserves something of that sense. On the other hand, each year we repeat that same sequence and our celebration of the new breaking in on the old, Jesus Christ coming into the world to make all things new, seems to fall back into a repetitive sameness.
We want all things to be made new, but we experience time and our lives, especially as we grow older, as a constant circling of the years. We want all things to be new, we want to change, and that’s why we make new year’s resolutions: we promise to lose weight, get more exercise, to eliminate bad habits, or to learn new things, but as we all know, those resolutions too often end up broken within a few weeks or months. And it’s not just us. It’s our whole society. One need only to visit a gym or fitness center in the first few days or weeks of the new year to see evidence of those resolutions. A return visit a month or two later will show how few of those resolutions were kept.
It’s a frustrating thing, but quite human to want to change but to find the strength to change difficult or impossible. And so it goes. Time passes; the years circle around, we make resolutions and break them, and we seem stuck in the same old, same old.
In this recurrent cycle, we believe Christ does enter to make all things new. It is that we celebrate in this season of Christmas, when God takes on our flesh, comes into our midst, and gives us new perspective, new faith. But even at those times when such newness seems quite far away, our faith proclaims that God is among us, that God is the ruler of history.
We see evidence of that faith in our reading from the Hebrew Bible today. It is the familiar, magnificent Aaronic blessing:
The Lord bless you and keep you.
The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you
The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
It appears at a crucial moment in the history of the Hebrew people. Following their escape from the Egyptians and the crossing of the Red Sea, the Hebrews make their way to Sinai where they receive the Law, the Torah, and spend almost a year. Finally, as they break camp, Yahweh instructs Moses to bless the people. In other words, this blessing, or benediction, is both an ending and a beginning. It completes the time at Sinai, and is meant to accompany the Israelites as they make their way through the wilderness. Yahweh instructs Moses to tell Aaron and his sons to begin each day with this blessing. The final word of the instruction explains what is meant by the blessing—with the words of the blessing the name of Yahweh is put on the Israelites, and through those words, Yahweh blesses the people.
We don’t often think about what it means to “bless” or to “be blessed.” In the biblical tradition, blessing refers to or bears witness to, the work of God. It refers to gift we have from God that benefits individuals or communities, whether that gift be physical, material, or spiritual. It encompasses all of God’s activity, from creation to redemption.
To bless in that way is to see ourselves and our lives in God’s hands to recognize that God rules all, time, history, the changing years, and ourselves.
To bless in that way is to put our lives and our life’s changes, in God’s hands, to release ourselves from the burden of wanting to change and not being able to, to put ourselves in God’s hands. To bless in that way also means, and this may be more difficult to understand and accept, that God is working God’s purpose out, in the chances and changes of our lives, and in the chances and the changes of the world.
But perhaps Isaac Watts put it best, in his hymn “O God our help in ages past:
Time like an ever-rolling stream,
bears all our years away;
they fly, forgotten, as a dream
dies at the opening day.
Preaching Grace on the Square 