New Beginnings

New Beginnings

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 1, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 2:13-23.

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s New Year’s Day. Well, at least out in the world it’s New Year’s Day. The new church year technically began on the first Sunday of Advent back last November. But most of us think of January 1 as New Year’s Day, so New Year’s Day it is. We so love to celebrate New Year’s Day, to celebrate the coming of a new year. Frankly, I’ve never quite shared that enthusiasm. I haven’t stayed up ‘til midnight or opened champagne on New Year’s Eve in years. Maybe that’s because I can be such a rationalist, or maybe it’s just that I think too much. I mean, January 1 is after all a totally artificial human creation. So is the way we number the years, supposedly from the birth of Jesus but actually probably wrong about that by a few years. There are lots of different calendars around the world that number the years and say when they start very differently from the calendar we use. Calendars are totally artificial human creations with no cosmic significance.

So why do we get so excited when a number in our artificial calendar changes? In one very real sense nothing changes but a number, a number that it usually takes me weeks at least to remember to change when I’m writing a check. January 1 is, in my experience, never significantly different from December 31 except that there used to be the big college football bowl games on January 1. Sometimes there still are, but not always. So what’s the big deal?

Well, I think the big deal is that we love and always need new beginnings in our lives. We always hope that the coming year will be better for us and our families than the year that just ended was. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t; but we always hope and pray that it will be. We all know that our lives and the lives of our families could be better than they are. We all hope that they will be better, and changing the year on the calendar is a good occasion to raise up and celebrate that hope.

So as I was thinking about a worship service for New Year’s Day, which we don’t do all that often, I was thinking about new beginnings. What new beginnings do I need? What new beginnings does the church I serve need? What new beginnings does our world need? What new beginnings does God’s world need? And behind all of those questions is a much bigger one: What do God and our faith in Jesus Christ have to say about new beginnings? Now, I have neither the time, the knowledge, nor the ability to answer all of those questions this morning, so I want to talk with you about that last one. What do God and our faith in Jesus Christ have to say about new beginnings? I think we get some answers to that question from our scripture reading this morning from Matthew. It speaks profoundly about new beginnings.

In the passage we heard this morning Matthew tells a story of the holy family fleeing Judea to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod and their return not to Bethlehem where they began in Matthew’s telling of the story but to Nazareth, far to the north in Galilee. That story is, among other things, a great metaphor for the human need of new beginnings. It starts with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in a place of great peril. Herod is out to find this newborn King of the Jews and kill him. King of the Jews was, after all, what Herod was. He sure didn’t want some Johnny-come-lately Messiah usurping his and his family’s throne and power. Joseph and his family needed to flee, and in Matthew’s story that’s exactly what they did. They got safely to Egypt, where Herod wouldn’t get them.

They got themselves safely out of Herod’s reach, but they pretty desperately needed a new beginning even in the safety of Egypt. They were safe, but they were in a foreign land. A non-Jewish land for the most part. They presumably didn’t understand Egyptian culture. They presumably didn’t speak the language. Unless they were in Alexandria where there was a significant Jewish population at the time, and Matthew doesn’t say where in Egypt they were, there was probably no synagogue where they could worship their God. Egypt was safe, but it wasn’t home. It wasn’t where they belonged. They needed a new beginning, they needed to go home. They needed to go home, but home was Bethlehem in Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth, and they couldn’t go back to Bethlehem because of fear of Herod’s son. So they went to Nazareth in Galilee instead, where Herod’s son was not the ruler like his father had been. It was a long and difficult journey from Egypt to Nazareth, but there they could start over. There they could begin again. There they could have a new beginning.

This is a story about people who lived a long time ago in a place far away, but it is also a story about us. The holy family was in the wrong place, and we’re so often in the wrong place too. Perhaps we’re emotionally or spiritually in the wrong place. Or maybe we’re in the wrong job. Or living with the wrong people. Or living in the wrong physical place. Or maybe we haven’t forgiven as we should, haven’t loved as we should. Maybe we’re trapped in an addiction we can’t seem to free ourselves from. Maybe we’ve held on to unhealthy attitudes—perhaps prejudice and bias against people different from us. Maybe we’ve refused to consider challenging new ideas. Maybe we’ve closed ourselves off from people in need and clung to a comfortable life rather than take a risk for peace and justice. There are all kinds of ways in which we can be in the wrong place.

We’re probably in the wrong place in some way or other, and to have a new beginning we have to get out of that wrong place just like Mary and Joseph had to get of their wrong place, out of Bethlehem. When we do we may have first of all to spend some time at a way station, an in between place, like the holy family had to spend time in Egypt. It’s not home, and we still need a new beginning, but it’s a first step toward finding home, toward beginning anew. Eventually, if we do the work to get there, we’ll get to Nazareth. We’ll get to the right place.

That’s God’s promise to us on this New Year’s Day. The God of the ultimate new beginning, the God of the Resurrection, promises us all new beginnings when we need them. And we always need them. God knows we need them even when we don’t know that. When we don’t know we need them God is there working to remind us that we do. Even more importantly than that, God is there to guide us as we discern what new beginning we need. And God is there to encourage, support, and guide us, to celebrate our accomplishments and forgive our failures, for we humans always have failures.

So in this new year that begins today, let’s be about new beginnings, shall we? New beginnings in our personal lives, new beginnings in our church’s life, new beginnings in our nation’s life, new beginnings in the world’s life. If we will be intentional and prayerful about new beginnings, God will be there with us. With God we can indeed experience faithful new beginnings. Thanks be to God! Amen.