Isaiah 63:7-9, Matthew 2:13-23, Hebrews 2:10-18
So we come to the end of one year and the beginning of another. There’s something carthartic about sweeping out the old and bringing in the new. We can take a break and start over again. We think things through, see what went well and what didn’t, and figure out how to improve – to make things better – as much as it is in our power to do so. We do expect each year to be better than the last. Is it? Us oldies must be getting pretty good at it by now! Are we? Can we even remember what was in this year?
We’ve celebrated Christ’s coming to earth, God with us, and we’ve been reminded again to keep expecting his return. What does that do for us?
We’re about to celebrate New Year. That will be exciting. But three days later it may just be a memory of fireworks and little else.
God is still with us in the coming year as in the going year. We need to remember that as we put the old year behind us and welcome in the new.
Exile and all that
Jesus was driven into exile by a king who wanted him dead. He lived in Egypt for a few months until he was able to go back to the land of his birth, not to the town of his birth but to the home town of his parents. Jesus didn’t choose to leave his homeland, he was taken there for his safety by his parents who were fleeing tyrrany. They were also very happy to return home as soon as it was safe to do so. While we love to travel and visit other countries we also like to come home again for most of the time. None of us think that being forced to live somewhere else is a good idea.
There is another kind of exile that saddens me greatly. What makes me sad is the way so many people, including many of those I know, are choosing exile from God, are choosing not to know their Creator, don’t want to know the One who made them and reject His love for them. It saddens me – it saddens God much more – because God loves them all, is wanting to receive them back from exile, forgive their waywardness and make life good for them. So many people have the notion that life couldn’t be any better. It’s not actually that great and they will sometimes admit that. They will even tell people like me that we live in fantasyland, but we know from experience that God makes life so much more liveable. In fact unbelievably better. We talk about things like freedom in Christ and they just don’t get it. O to be wise.
Wise men
Wise men visited Jesus and, although we have no idea who they were, it is easy to see why they were called “wise.” They were wise because they were not distracted at all by Herod’s wealth and power and lies. They were wise because despite the humble circumstances in which they found Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, they recognized that this baby, rather than the man wearing the crown in Jerusalem, was the true king.
The way of the wise is to not be taken in by mere appearances, not to take things only at face value, not to judge a book by its cover or its movie, not to judge a person’s character by his/her clothing or the level of education or the size of the home or the flashiness of the automobile or the amount of money.
More than twenty centuries have come and gone since the wise men, being warned in a dream not to report back to Herod, decided to go a different route and return to their country by another road. But the way they went, is still the way to go.
We can do no better than to not be taken in by the many Herods of this world: those people who seek power, who cling to power, who worship power. It may even be said that, in going out of their way to avoid Herod, the wise men were the first to follow the way of life that Jesus himself was later to spell out in all that he said and did.
Remember how Jesus admonished his followers to pray in secret and fast in secret and give alms in secret? How he advised them to follow the secret way of believing in what is right and doing what is right, rather than just doing things for show or to attract the favor of fashionable people? We do well to be like the wise “people” from the east and those whom Jesus praised as his followers. We are not flashy people. We are not people who exist to just put on a show for others. We are people who really believe in doing what is right and upholding one another in Christian love.
We cannot know the full extent of what our church accomplished in 2013. It might be nice to go down the list, thank everybody and celebrate all the accomplishments of the congregation: the work of the op shop, the donated bread, the Sunday gatherings and so on. But we don’t know it all: the personal growth, the overcoming of difficulties, the encouragement of one another and so much more that has gone on quietly, in the background, without fanfare. Every church has these people and we thank God that there are those in every generation who quietly serve the Lord in so many ways, without fanfare, and without expectations of even a word of thanks, let alone worldly fame and fortune.
The wise men didn’t all live and die twenty-plus centuries ago, nor did they all come from the East. There are wise people everywhere. They live in our community.
There are wise people who know the way that leads to life, the way of Christ, and the roundabout way of love. There are wise people sitting right there, in our church, every Sunday morning.
Dawn Chesser, GBOD, United Methodist Church (USA)
God’s plan
Have any of you, this or any previous Christmas, received a gift you really didn’t
want? Has anyone given a present and felt that the recipient didn’t like it or want it? What did that feel like?
Jesus, who’s birth we’ve been celebrating these last weeks, is God’s greatest gift to us. How does God feel when people say, “I don’t want Jesus!”? John tells us that that is exactly what happened when Jesus arrived the first time. God’s special people, whom he loved and cared for over thousands of years, refused to accept His Son, Jesus. (John 1:12,13) And, as I said earlier, people continue to reject Jesus, to their own detriment.
New Year resolutions
This is the time for new year resolutions – a time for taking stock and committing to do better in the new year than in the last. What resolutions are you making and how are you going to ensure that they last more than a week? Does God play a part in your plans? Do you need to get on board with God, or back on board? To stop avoiding him and get up close and personal? God can help you build new patterns into your life so that you make long term changes. It’s good to get God’s leading on what the most needed changes are as well as the best ways to implement them. Life is so much more liveable when we know our Maker personally.
Let’s take a minute to reflect and pray on these things.