From your Pastor's Pen...
It seems to me that it was just yesterday when we were fearfully and pessimistically facing the new millennium, and a decade has already gone by bringing us to the year 2010. Soon, we’ll hear the hackneyed expression, “My, how time flies when you’re having fun!” It is therefore good and healthy for us to hear once again the apostle Paul’s challenging words to the Ephesians: “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.” ( 4:14) The apostle’s understanding is that, if we are those who believe in the eternal promises of God and are confident in God’s faithfulness, we must reflect the steadiness that people of faith must witness to the world – like ships in a stormy sea that have anchors firmly placed in anticipation and preparation of a storm!
It is customary for pastors to write about the New Year in the January issue of their church newsletter, even though deep down we all believe that the only thing that is new about the new year is a numerical digit that changes from 2009 to 2010. In essence, the new year is just another year in our life-span. So let us try to be honest at this juncture of just another year, especially when we realize our vulnerability to dishonesty which tempts us to make a whole bunch of resolutions we don’t intend or even try to keep! Newness is not a reality which the calendar automatically brings into our life or our world, but a reality which we must embrace with our whole being, a frame of mind and heart which can invade our being at any time of life.
The first thing that the “new” implies is change, something we all seem to dislike and some of us passionately avoid. We spend a lot of time and energy to resist change, because we are anxious and fear the unknown which threatens us, or because we desire to maintain our present level of comfort. But change holds within itself a creative potential as God continues to create and human creativity cooperates with God’s creativity. Of course, not everything new is positive and good, but we know that nothing new is possible without change!
Another thing we notice about newness is that it is short-lived. What is new today is no longer new tomorrow, especially when one considers the unimaginably accelerated pace of change to which our generation is subjected. We therefore must think of the new as an ongoing, continuing process, and of change as its unavoidable companion. Naturally, this might make us feel even more unstable and insecure. That is why we often find religion, instead of serving as an agent of transformation of life, which it is, often used to resist change and to baptize that resistance with the legitimacy of our manipulated faith.
God challenges us to accept the new which God is continually creating - a new heaven and a new earth, a new covenant, a new heart, a new creation and a new life! In his second letter to the Corinthians (5:17-18) Paul says, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God ...” I believe that this means that the good and genuine new come only from God in Christ, and that it implies not only humanly induced gradual change, but the total embrace of divinely induced radical change! That indeed, the God who first created the heavens and the earth and everything in it, and saw that it was all good; can also make a new creation of you and me, and call it good! Our wishes for a Happy New Year embrace that blessed new life which God alone offers us in Christ. May God grant us the newness of God’s doing. JMS