Pastors E-Letter 1/1/21
Happy New Year!
We made it, can you believe it? 2020 is over! Cue the dance music, balloon emojis, and “Auld Lang Syne.”
2020 has been a rollercoaster of a year, hasn’t it? I’m sure you, like me, are tired of the words “unprecedented,” “unimagined,” “unusual,” and “interesting.” I did not imagine when I set my New Years Resolutions for 2020 (to work out more and be more balanced) that I would be offered a few months working from home, online worship, losses in our congregation, and the rewriting of allll of our plans for the year. Yet, each day offered a new beginning as we journeyed through 2020, and we pushed on *hoping* that the year would end in a better position than we found ourselves on January 1, 2020, or on March 15, 2020, when the world began to flip upside down. We have been waiting for the number of that year to flip over, maybe more than we usually do.
But we’re here. You’re reading this. The year number is one more than it was. Yet not much is different from just 12 hours ago, is it?
I’m struck by that inconvenient truth each time the ball drops, marking a new calendar year, or each year when I wake up on my birthday. I am still… me, after all. The world is still itself. Life is still life. And moments of transformation rarely happen when the ball is dropping, or your age ticks forward another year, or 2020, the “unprecedented year” ends.
True transformation is sneakier.
It happened when you gave generously this year, even in the midst of a pandemic.
It happens when you say yes to Jesus, again, after all these years.
It happens when you allow your mind to be changed.
It happens when we listen to our brothers and sisters who are marginalized, and try to be less racist in our daily lives.
It happens when we feed the hungry (like you can on January 6th with Daily Bread!) or love the unhoused with blankets, or donate to a cause that needs our monetary resources more than ever.
It happens when you keep getting up, day after day, as you mourn the loss of your spouse, sibling, child or friend.
It happens when you decide to get treatment for a mental illness.
It happens when you decide to forgive someone, even if they will never accept that forgiveness. It happens when you decide you won’t touch the drink, or the drug, or the affair anymore.
It has nothing to do with the date on the calendar.
So in all honesty, 2021 seems a little too much like 2020. I’ll be wearing masks and socially distancing on vacation this coming week, despite scribbling in my planner, “Surely we’ll be done with this!” multiple times throughout the year. (How that alone did not ultimately change the trajectory of the pandemic, I do not know.) I do have a New Years Resolution, but I’m aware more than ever that I can’t plan what 2021 has for me. Only God knows that, and I learned this year that despite my best efforts, I can’t engineer what only God can see.
This Sunday is traditionally “Epiphany Sunday,” while Epiphany itself is on January 6th and closes the Christmas season. At Epiphany, we hear of the Wise Men, who started out on an very ordinary journey to follow a star. They were professional star-gazers, after all, and this would have been just another week in a star-gazers life. But the journey was one of extraordinary transformation as they turned away from Herrod’s evil plans and “went another way” after meeting Jesus. Their encounter with Christ, relatively unnarrated, changed the way they saw the world. They were transformed without a ball drop, without an increase in their age, without a New Years resolution. Their decision reminds us of the biggest grace of our God, and the hope of this 2021:
Every day is a new opportunity for us to be transformed by the love of God.
Lamentations 3:22-23 says,
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
Great is God’s faithfulness, no matter the date on our calendar. We made it. Happy New Year!
Peace,
Pastor Allee