Thoughts at the End of the Year

You will see beneath this post one that just has a capital T. Such are the vagaries of working with a laptop (brand name I won't mention) that does weird things with the cursor should your hand inadvertently wander around in the vicinity of the touchpad. (If you own one of this brand, you probaby know exactly what I am talking about.) The capital T was as far as I got with this post...then it decided to post, and nothing could stop it or delete it. Be careful what you write on the Internet!

Thoughts at the end of the year...

I am still recovering from surgery, not as quickly as I would like. I am an energetic person, and this forced incapacity does not sit well with me. I want to get back to work and play and all the things I normally do. It is a humbling experience to have to ask someone to take out your garbage because you can't drag that big can down your 200-foot driveway. Midlife is an adjustment; old age is going to be really, really hard.

I have been working on a sermon series for January. I generally work from something called the Revised Common Lectionary, which is a selection of scripture readings for each week of the church year; it runs in a three-year cycle. This is year A. Each week's readings include an Old Testament lesson, a passage from the Writings (generally a psalm), a reading from the Epistles (New Testament), and a Gospel lesson. For the first four weeks of January, I'm going to preach a series on "New Year, New Life." New life in Christ, that is. These passages for the next month have so many references to hope and newness and God's promises. One of my seminary professors was always talking about "God's radical newness" and I am unashamedly borrowing the phrase for one of my sermons. It is so easy to think of the Bible as a dusty old book with nothing new to say to our modern day world...or to be so frightened by a world that is changing rapidly that one insists that the text have only one meaning, only one way to look at it, and that God has nothing new to say to us.

God's promises are new every morning. There are new discoveries, new insights to be found in scripture even today, if one will only be open to them. There is still that strange dimension to reading scripture that we call the Holy Spirit, which scares the hooey out of a lot of folks in my denomination because it tends to defy control and definition. But we do believe that the Spirit -- also known as the breath, or ruach, of God -- inspired the people who wrote the Bible and inspires the people who read it, even today.

The first chapter of Genesis says that when God began to create the world, the spirit, or breath, of God moved across the waters. That's the Hebrew word ruach. The Greeks call it pneuma. When Jesus talks about sending the Spirit to the disciples in John's gospel, that word is pneuma. Powerful thing, that Spirit of God, and not to be ignored. Maybe more on that later.

A new year is coming. In many ways, January 1 is going to look a lot like December 31, I predict, but in other ways, it can be a time of newness, if we will only let it.

Pastor Kathy