It’s the fifth day of the New Year. According to the unofficial cultural calendar, the Christmas “season” started sometime back in early November, Christmas lasted one day, and the “holidays” hung on for another week until the ball dropped in Times Square and champagne corks were popped to raucous cheers of “Happy New Year!” On television, Ryan Seacrest asked Carrie Underwood what New Year’s meant to her. She said, “It’s a clean slate – anything can happen!” Nice sentiment, but hardly the truth, nor would we want it to be. If you wipe away everything troubling about the old year, you’ve also erased its blessings.
As one immersed in the Christian year, I have a different understanding of the passage of time and what it means. Today is the twelfth and final day of Christmas, the eve of Epiphany. The year began about six weeks ago with the first week of Advent, which bid us to reflection rather than revelry. We pondered the meaning of God’s Incarnation in Christ – the promises of hope, peace, love and joy despite the troubles of our world. We transitioned from Advent to the celebration of Christ’s birth by lighting a candle in the dark, remembering that the Light of the World cannot be extinguished. We’ve been challenged by the biblical stories of Christ’s birth to put away all fear and claim God’s good news of salvation. We’ve been inspired by how lowly shepherds and faraway stargazers were summoned by heaven to find the Messiah born in humble circumstances.
This coming Sunday, we turn to the story of Jesus’ baptism. We remember the meaning of this event for each of us and all of us together and are invited to renew our baptismal vows. We are not given a “clean slate” but the promise of continual renewal and redemption. We serve a God whose mercies are new every morning, whose steadfast love never ceases, and whose creativity yields a perfect economy where nothing is wasted. That means God takes all our experiences, even the ones we’d rather forget, and transforms them. God uses it all for good.
