Rejoice! Embrace another year of grace
We finite human creatures are inextricably tied to time, times, seasons and cycles. We can’t escape – our romantic, adventurous notions of time travel, “worm holes” and molecule-scrambling transporters a la Star Trek notwithstanding.
It seems to me that an integral part of our “hours-and-days-and-years-and-ages” nature (as New Year’s hymn #443 in the Christian Reformed Church’s Psalter Hymnal puts it) involves a year’s end/year’s beginning reflection on where we’ve been and where we’re going.
That’s what I feel the urge to do; and the common notion of New Year’s resolutions tells me that my reaction is part of a universal human impulse. The fact that the hymn I quoted was written in the 18th century by a Dutchman, to a Moravian tune, is another clue to the universality of an annual urge to reflect, accompanied by a yearning for renewal.
For us Christians such thoughts must surely include re-evaluating the state of our faith: Where am I on the road to sanctification? Have I, asking God’s help, moved further down that road in the last year? Am I trusting him more and more, in and for all things? And are all of us Christ-believers communally doing the same?
I find that I tend to carry on such reflection throughout all of January — which is why I’m posting this here on Jan. 17. It may, and often does, take the whole month to get my thinking re-ordered and to relinquish bad habits and attitudes, and even to readjust my worldview so that it remains (or becomes) as biblical as possible. The Lord knows I can be a stubborn case!
It strikes me that the first act resulting from our reflection should be repentance. Another New Year’s hymn acknowledges that: “Greet the swiftly changing year with joy and penitence sincere” (Ps. H. # 444, 16th c. Slovak text). Though redeemed, we are a fallen people living in a fallen world and disobedience to God comes all too naturally to us (cf. St. Paul’s “the good that I want to do I do not do…” Romans 7:14). It is instructive that this hymn phrase links joy and repentance. Repenting of sin is a Spirit-prompted reaching out to be put right with God, and God always welcomes and re-welcomes us with open arms when we plead for his mercy. What could bring us greater joy?
Exceeding the volume of our needs
Both of the hymns cited relay other biblical truths. Part of our penitential joy comes from reflecting on how Christ shed his blood for us, says the Slovak hymn. His broken body reveals his profound, description-defying love for us. In short: Jesus came to “end sin’s war” – granting us peace. If we had somehow forgotten, the hymn prompts us to recall that such love “far exceeds the volume of a whole year’s needs.” Did we have a prosperous year or did we lose a job or even our home? In any circumstance, if the Lord is leading us “what need we fear in earth or space in this new year of grace”?
There are more deeply biblical elements in this hymn. It urges both exultation and thankfulness.
Whether in joy or sorrow, prosperity or want, with every stanza we agree to “Rejoice! With thanks embrace another year of grace.” And then, acknowledging again that the new year is ours because of his grace, we give God the glory that is rightly his (echoing the angels’ song), and we ask his blessing as Triune God on our new year.
Despite God’s grace surrounding us and upholding us moment by moment, it is not hard, given our “old nature” of sin, to fear what is to come in a new year. If that is true in our personal lives it is certainly more true when we look at the increasing dangers for, and persecution of, Christians in the greater world. But the author of “Hours and Days and Years and Ages” reminds us that despite danger threatening to overwhelm us, despite raging sorrow, despite the ages moving swiftly as shadows and our own lives dissolving into “fleeting pages,” despite evil circumstances that seem to clamp us in their grasp, and even “though all friends on earth forsake us and our troubles still increase,” time’s marching on will not – cannot – “decide our end.” We know who does decide our end (and beginning, and middle, and every second of each year he gives us till we draw our last breath): “God our Father will remain, always changeless, come what may.”
St. Paul puts it this way:
In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither life nor death, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate use from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:37-38).
So: “Rejoice! With thanks embrace another year of grace”!
A slightly altered version on this meditation will appear as a column in Christian Courier, Jan. 23, 2012.
