The beginning of a New Year is traditionally a time for reflection. We look back over the year and assess our successes and failures. We gain some satisfaction over our successes, and we experience some grief and guilt over our failures. Each time we face a new beginning, we have hopes that things will be different and hopefully, better.
At the beginning of a new year, a high school principal decided to post his teachers’ New Year’s resolutions on the bulletin board. As the teachers gathered around the board, one of them was complaining, “Why weren’t my resolutions posted?” She was throwing such a tantrum that the principal hurried to his office to see if he had overlooked that teacher’s resolutions. Sure enough, he had mislaid them on his desk. As he read her resolutions, he was astounded. The teacher’s first resolution was “not to let little things upset her in the New Year”.
I don’t know how you are doing on your New Year’s resolutions. I do know something that is more important than resolutions, though. How do you see this New Year? Is it one that you approach with anxiety or with anticipation?
That may be why some of us come to church on this first Sunday of the year in the hopes that the Holy Spirit may fall afresh on us, and the future will be full of exciting new possibilities, positive changes, and new growth.
Thus, on this first Sunday of 2014, let us focus on a piece of good news from Paul’s first letter to the Ephesians 1:3-6. It says: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined us to be his sons and daughters through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. (RSV)
The apostle Paul was extraordinarily enthusiastic when he wrote the passage from Ephesians. In our Bibles, this passage is broken down into nice, neat paragraphs with proper punctuation.
In the original Greek version, however, it is a 220-word run-on sentence written by a man who was so excited. It is an English teacher’s nightmare! Well, St. Paul was so excited about our inheritance as believers in Jesus. Gift after gift and wonder after wonder from God passed before his eyes.
Listen to the extravagant language Paul used in this passage. He says that God “has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ”, and that He has “lavished” on us the “riches of God’s grace”.
And if that’s not enough, God has chosen us, and we have been given the Holy Spirit as a guarantee of an even greater inheritance waiting for us in heaven. Wow! Isn’t it something?
To Paul, this was exciting stuff — stuff he was willing to give his life. I am just wondering if by listening to this passage, it makes you excited as well?
Listen to the names God has called us in our lesson for the day. He has called us blessed, chosen, holy, blameless, adopted sons and daughters of God. He is saying that written into our very genes is an ideal script for an abundant life.
There are people who believe that God has a plan for their lives, and they seek to live out that plan. They believe that all things do work for the good for those who love God, and they look for evidences of God’s providence in every aspect of their lives.
Dennis and Barbara Rainey in their book Moments Together for Couples tell about one such person. She was a British missionary named Elizabeth Aleward who had two great sorrows as a young girl. The first one was that her hair was black and straight (when all of the popular girls had a head full of golden curls), and the second one was that while all her friends kept growing, she ended up short.
Years later, God called Elizabeth Aleward to the mission field in China. As she stood looking at the people to whom God had called her to minister, two things became apparent to her. First, each and every one of them had long, straight, black hair. And, secondly, each and every one of them had stopped growing at exactly the same moment she did. She said she bowed her head and prayed, “God, You know what You are doing!”
Corrie ten Boom was a modern-day saint. She had that same sense of destiny even though she had spent a very painful time in a Nazi concentration camp, and lost her sister in that camp. After World War II, Corrie Ten Boom traveled around the world, and spoke of her war experiences in Holland, and her imprisonment at Ravensbruck. She shared the story of God’s love in her life “even through the truly tough times”.
In one of her presentations, she took a piece of cloth with a crown embroidered on it. She held up the cloth with the lovely embroidered side showing all the threads forming a beautiful crown. She would describe it as the plan God has for our lives. Then she flipped the cloth over to show the tangled, confused underside illustrating how we view our lives from a human standpoint. There is a pattern to life, she would say, a pattern we may not see. Corrie ten Boom was one of those who believed there is a divinely-ordained plan for our lives.
We may have hardships, setbacks, failures, heartaches, but our faith contends that in the sum total of things, “Somebody up there likes us”, and if we trust God, life will work out.
Lastly, have you tasted baking soda? By itself, it is awful. Mixed into a cake, however, it is wonderful. That is the faith-filled way of looking at life.
We affirm that God is awesome, that somehow God will take the distasteful baking soda that comes to all our lives, and somehow blend it with some flour and sugar and some shortening, and out of it all will come something splendid.
We celebrate the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Through this sacrament, God made a promise that He will not leave us, that He will always be there to strengthen and to guide. If we choose to believe that all things work together for good for those who love God; if we choose to believe that even if we see only the tangled, confused underside of life God is weaving a beautiful pattern that will only be revealed to us sometime; if we look for God’s blessing in everything that we get, then I say with confidence and hope that, come what may, 2014 will be a great year for you and for me! Thanks be to God.
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Author’s email: sillimanuniversitychurch@gmail.com
