New Beginnings

 

Epiphany: Matthew 2:1-12, Journeying through the Bible: Numbers 27, Joshua 1:1-9, 3-4

So here we sit at the beginning of a new year. New years are funny, because things are no different on January 1 than they were on December 31. But it’s a new beginning nevertheless, because from where we started counting, the world is now 2025 years after the birth of Jesus Christ, instead of 2024. 

Actual new beginnings happen in our lives all the time, tangible shifts that redefine and redirect us, like starting college or a new job, retiring or moving to a new state, being given a new diagnosis or a new grandchild.  And then there are the new beginnings that become a new beginning because everyone treats it as one, like new years. So, happy new year!

Our culture would have us seize hold of this declared beginning; new year new you! It’s a new chance to take control of our lives, to start over where we’ve slipped in our self-improvement projects. To set new goals, buy new stuff and subscribe to new apps. There is nothing wrong with setting goals or using tools to help us meet them. But the story we are sold about what a good life is tells us it’s all about us, and all in our hands, and even newness must be managed and controlled. 

Who wants to hear about what we can’t control? We got the genetics we got, were born to the place and people where we started, affected by whatever is currently polluting the air or water or zeitgeist, and our lives are tangled up in larger systems and structures mostly beyond our say so. And we are each limited, singular humans, with only so much time, only so much capacity, only so much ability. But good grief, what kind of new year message is that? Being honest about limitations is zero fun. Being vulnerable, or needy? blech. So, let’s keep reaching for control instead. And starting over at it every year! Maybe one year we’ll master it all. 

All our scriptures today are new beginnings. And, surprise! They tell a different story about what a good life is, and who shapes our lives and the world. 

It’s Epiphany, so we meet again our regular new year’s visitors: Magi, traveling from afar, bringing gifts to worship God coming into the world. This was never in their life plans or new year’s resolutions. But they lived open to the direction of something outside themselves and responded when the call came. They ventured into the unknown, deferential to the uncontrollable, obedient to the call, and in the home of a peasant woman and her carpenter husband in a nowhere town 500 miles from home, they met God incarnate face to face.  

The magi departed from that place changed. They were set on a new path, with a new perception of the universe and everyone in it, and belonging to a new, small and very diverse community of those who had been in Christ’s presence, and who would now be watching together what God was doing in the world as ready and willing participants in God’s unfolding story. 

Next, we jump backwards 1400 years before the birth of Christ. Where we left off our journey through the bible, the people of God, called to be a blessing to the world, were living in the wilderness, learning to trust God to take care of them, and allowing their identity to be reshaped from slaves who existed to prop up the empire to the people of God called to be a blessing to the world.

We meet up with them today in a new beginning moment. They’re ready to enter the promised land and settle in the new home God has for them. We didn’t read the first story assigned to today, but it is depicted in our picture for the day, so it feels only fair to summarize it. As the leaders began planning for how land would be divvied up once they got to their new home, following the male family lines, 5 sisters with no brothers whose father had died came to them and said, why should our family line die out in the land because our father had no sons? We should be given land too. So, Moses brought their case to God, and God said, They are right. Change the law. When the people entered the promised land, they did so with a law that was more just, because these sisters spoke up, God heard them, and the leaders listened.

So now we come to the threshold moment, the old is ending and the new is about to begin. The people of God called to be a blessing to the world have been living in liminal space, neither here nor there, biding time, learning trust and being shaped by God. And now they will be going home. 

But to go from wandering to settled, they will need to cross the swollen, raging river. They will pass through waters of rebirth, waters of deliverance, waters that remake identity. For us, these waters are baptism. For them, the waters that had released them from the death of slavery and ushered them into new life 40 years before was the red sea, which had parted miraculously so they could cross over into safety in the care of God. This is the story that has shaped them, the experience of God’s saving hand of grace to the generation before them. Their own understanding of God and trust in God has been shaped by their parents’ stories of God’s faithfulness. 

Now it’s their turn. In front of their eyes, the water separates, and God makes a way where there was no way. 
And the presence of God and care of God is known not just in stories now but felt in their own bodies– their feet pressing into wet sand and slimy stones, the smell of the damp river bottom, the hot sun and wind on their faces, the astonishing sight of the water itself participating with God in their new beginning. 
God who has been faithful before is faithful now, and will be faithful again. When they came out of the waters they were changed, set on a new path, with a new perception of creation and their place in God’s order.  They were God’s people, called and led, who would now be watching together what God was doing in the world as ready and willing participants in God’s unfolding story. 

They mark the experience with a symbol, stones from the riverbed stacked up as a signpost, and Joshua tells them, “Your children will ask about these stones, and you are to tell them about God parting the waters here as God did at the red sea. Worship God always.”

Inside an ancient story, the same faithful God is always bringing new beginnings. They don’t come from our efforts or control. They come in our endings, our impossibilities, our stuckness, arriving in our places of death and loss that feel like they might define us forever. Sky and water, stars and rivers, strangers, babies, sisters, leaders, long, arduous journeys and staying still for long, long stretches all are part of God’s work. God’s beginnings surprise us, leading us into the lives of new people, like the watching, ready Magi. God’s beginnings use our vulnerability and voices to change the way forward for others, like the brave sisters. God’s beginnings bring us home with continuity and hope, like the children of God coming out of the wilderness into the promised land. However it happens and whomever it involves, God is always bringing salvation and healing, new life, hope and renewed belonging. Always. 

As we begin this new year, lots will be changing in our country and our government, in the global landscape and in our neighborhoods, in our work places and relationships, and in our lives and even our own bodies in ways we don’t yet know and can’t yet see.  

But hear the words of God to the people of God standing on the brink of a new beginning: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’

Maybe instead of naming all the ways we intend to be strong and courageous because we’re so self-guided and goal-driven and in control, we might admit we’re not really in control, and enter this new beginning honest with ourselves about our vulnerabilities and fears, truthful with each other about needing one another, and open to God incarnate who is with us wherever we go, who leads us where we might otherwise not go, and who will meet us face to face where we could never imagine. 

Maybe we enter this new beginning listening, open, watching and ready, helping each other remember and trust that God who has been faithful before is faithful now, and will be faithful again. 

God’s new beginnings are personal, but never individual. When redemption, hope and new life happen to one of us, other people are always involved, and even sometimes creation, and the newness impacts not only us but blesses the world. The Holy Spirit changes us, sets on a new path, gives us a new perception of the universe and everyone in it, and we are rooted more deeply in our belonging to an old, vast, and very diverse community of those who have been in Christ’s presence, who are watching together what God is doing in the world, ready and willing participants in God’s unfolding story. 

2025 years after joining us in person, how will this faithful God show up this year? 

I can’t wait to find out.

Replacing Resolution: Welcoming the New Year with a different kind of practice

The following is an article I wrote for the YF Family Blog, you can find it there.

After the Christmas season ends, right about when we’re pining for a fresh start, sweeping dead pine needles and New Year’s confetti from under the couch, the American holiday season of “Resolution” arrives. Lucky for us, beginning January 1, every diet pill, nicotine patch, organizing gizmo, life coach app, health club membership, lean meal plan, self-help book and storage container is on sale. It’s as though Baby Jesus came to earth to give us one more go-round at changing all the rotten things about ourselves! (At least until we pitter out sometime mid-February).

But the truth is quite the opposite. Baby Jesus came to earth to share this life with us. Christ joins our life and dies our death so nothing can separate us from God’s love. God is here with us now, as we are, however we are. And when we’re exhausted and disillusioned from the season, we might choose to observe a different holiday than Resolution: Epiphany.

Epiphany, which is traditionally observed on January 6, celebrates the Magi, the scholars from the East, who traveled for months on end led by a star and a promise to find the Creator of the world on the lap of a peasant woman. God has come for the whole world, and there is no going back.

Where Resolution begins with our fears and our failures, telling us to fix what’s broken with ourselves, Epiphany comes right into our pain and fears, bringing possibilities and surprises from outside us. It summons us to where we might never otherwise have gone and connects us with people we might never otherwise have known. When we’re open to epiphany we’re likely to be transformed.

One way to celebrate the season of Epiphany is to start out the new year with a “star word.” A star word is a random word that becomes a prayer guide, a focus, a way to watch for God. God can use anything to speak to us. There is nothing magic about a star word. But a star word begins as a mystery; typically you do not choose it. And so, it invites investigation, attentiveness, waiting. A star word orients you to watch for God in a particular way, to be receptive to the Spirit who is moving right now in the world around you.

My star word this past year was “music” – which, to be honest, I was pretty disappointed about. After having “stillness” (2022), and “determination” (2021-pandemic time!) MUSIC felt too concrete, and didn’t inspire me or seem to fit my life. But something has happened to me as I’ve lived with that word in my attention all year: music keeps finding me.

This summer on a trip to Europe I traveled with my ears. Music met me everywhere. In the early morning bird concert shouting through wide open windows, and the church bells tolling together all over the rooftops of Vienna. In the bike wheels of five hundred happy sunset bikers whirring by in unison. Melodies sang in the screeching of the train’s metal brakes and the percussive bumping of our suitcases over cobblestones in the early dawn light—our family’s cacophonous contribution to an otherwise quiet and empty street. I heard the cheerful clip-clopping of the hooves of horses pulling carriages of smiling tourists, and felt chills run through me at the drawn-out, mournful tones of an organ being tuned in the balcony of a 16th century cathedral. I was stopped still by a solo violinist playing on the banks of the Spree. The tones echoed off the tall, glass, modern buildings across the river and reverberated back in the vast, roofless concert hall. People slowed their walking to match his melody. And at a Chopin concert at a small salon in Warsaw, sitting next to my son who had recently mastered a Chopin piece himself, I watched the pianist’s fingers move at lightning speed across the keys, making one instrument sound like a half dozen. But mostly, I watched my son. The air felt still and holy as I soaked in my child’s raptness, perched both on the edge of his seat and on the threshold of leaving home for college. Where would the music inside him take him from here? Oh! How our lives are filled with music! Music I would otherwise have missed had I not been watching for it.

So often we race through life, striving and straining, pressing forward oblivious to the beauty of those around us, the wonder of the natural world, and the presence of God right here in it all, nudging us toward joy. We stumble along, critical and ashamed, measuring ourselves against an unseen ideal. But life is a gift from God. God comes in to love and claim us all. The Holy Spirit is active in the world, and epiphany awaits. In our willingness to watch and openness to being met, we might begin to notice how the God who comes to share this life is actually sharing in our life.

There is no end to the resolutions we could make. We could always muster up a goal and get cracking. But instead, why not receive a star word and start watching? What if, instead of Resolution, we start our year in Epiphany?

Suggestions for Receiving and Using Star Words:
To share star words in a congregation, print words on star cut-outs, or write them on star ornaments. Let people “draw” a word from a basket. In a family or small group, print several words on a page, cut in strips and choose one from a hat. Decorate a star ornament with your word. Hang your star word somewhere you can see it all year long. Pray with your star word. Or hold the word with you as you head into work or school. Check in with yourself and each other from time to time, journaling or chatting – how is God meeting you through your star word this year?

My congregation has compiled this list of star words that can be used with your family, church or small group.

Prayer for a new year

Image from a stunning collection by Clare Benson

Standing on the threshold,

all we’ve left undone smirking in our periphery,

all we carry with us a finger’s breath away, waiting, waiting.

Unfinished business clings heavy, disappointment,

pressure, expectations straining at the seams.

And what we would love to step out of

and leave behind in an unwashed heap on the floor

abandoning on tipsy tiptoe, light and free.

It’s all right here, balanced, but barely,

on the threshold.

One day is pretty much the same as the last. 

Let’s not kid ourselves.

One day is completely new and

 altogether different.

Anything can happen.

Anything.

We belong to you. 

(Pause and take it in.

It’s beyond taking in, really.

Just pause, then, as near the reality as you can stand

for as long as you can stand it).

You.

Outside time, but

entering all olds and news,

permeating every yesterday

and each today, inhabiting already all

tomorrows, before they come upon us,

unannounced but right on schedule.

You. To whom

we belong.

Meet us here, Holy One, on this threshold.

Holding for us what was, carry us into what will be.

Drawing from strength we’ve been steadily building

throughout the years,

exhaling the rubbish we’ve been steadily breathing

throughout the years,

taking in instead the clean, the fresh

timeless promises and bracing hope,

sucking them deep into our lungs,

with mouths and hearts wide, thrown open,

featherless, and trusting,

filling our strong bodies

and sturdy dreams, awakening

with gentle possibility and mighty grace,

meet us on this threshold.

For the considerable stumbling we have ahead, grace.

For the remarkable triumphs yet to come, grace.

For the hot tears and searing pain before us, grace.

For the unrestrained laughter on the horizon, 

and the astonishing joy waiting 

around the corner, ready to spring, grace.

And to love.

Oh, to love.

(To You, Love, we belong, after all).

For this we pray.

In all things.  All people.  However

we might, faltering and

faithful, trembling and

tenacious, May we

Love.

For this, then, 

Holy Love, eternal, entered in You,

for the new year and all it holds,

for the past however it persists,

for love brimming over and unrelenting,

and for Us

each one, standing 

here on the threshold of

whatever may be,

grace.

Amen.

 Kara Root 

December 31, 2012