Church newsletter pastoral column for St. Peter Lutheran Church, Greene, Iowa, for January, 2019.
New Beginnings
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
– 2 Corinthians 5:17
Do you ever think about why we celebrate New Year’s Day? It’s really just another day, so why is it so important for people to mark a date change on a calendar?
I suspect it’s because a new year offers a new beginning, the chance to start fresh. There’s a reason January is the most important month of the year for gyms and diet programs, because it seems like a fresh chance to start again, to improve yourself. It seems like a natural time for beginning something, which is why lots of people make New Year’s resolutions (whether they stick to them or not is another story!).
The Christian life offers lots of opportunities for fresh starts, for changing what we’ve been doing or beginning to live differently. Each week in worship, we begin with a time of confession where we admit what we’ve done wrong. We admit to God and to each other that our lives are not perfect, that we’re not living the way we ought to live, that we’re doing things we ought not do and failing to do things we ought to do.
Then, immediately after confession, we hear God’s response. We hear the good news that because of God’s forgiveness, because God loves us, we all get a fresh start. Psalm 103:12 says God has taken our sins away from us “as far as the east is from the west.” The slate is wiped clean. We don’t need to carry the weight of our sins or guilt with us any more. We are forgiven!
And then we run into the next week (or maybe just the next day…or the next couple of minutes!) and it doesn’t take long before we sin again. It doesn’t take long for us to forget about what God has done for us. We take the burden Jesus has taken from us and we pick it back up and start trying to carry the weight of our own sins again. But we always have another opportunity to remember God’s love. God never gets tired of forgiving us!
In The Small Catechism, Martin Luther said we ought to begin each day in this way:
“In the morning, as soon as you get out of bed, you are to make the sign of the holy cross and say: ‘God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit watch over me. Amen.’ Then, kneeling or standing, say the Apostle’s Creed and the Lord’s Prayer…After singing a hymn, or whatever else may serve your devotion, you are to go to your work joyfully.”
You don’t have to wait for a new year to have a fresh start. Each day offers the opportunity to wake up and remember that you are a baptized child of God. You have been claimed, redeemed, and set free by Jesus Christ. After hearing the promise of forgiveness and absolution in worship, we continue the only way we can, by together giving joyful thanks to God in song and by learning more about God’s grace and love for us by hearing God’s word. See you in worship!
Your servant in Christ,
Pastor Daniel Flucke