January 3, 2021 | Worship

It’s a new year, and I think I can speak for many of us when I say Thank God! Right? Gotta love a fresh start, and with a rough year behind us, it was unsurprising that people were dusting off their old superstitions and traditions to usher 2020 out and timidly welcome 2021 in. Maybe it’s the living-in-glass-houses nature of social media, but I noticed a huge uptick in the sharing of the different ways people celebrate the new year. Maybe it was something stirring in our collective subconscious that we needed to find the right combination of actions in order to make the new year more survivable. A nod to the sobering fact that many did not make it.

Some of the traditions I learned about this year are regional. I had never hear that one should eat black eyed peas on the first of the year for good luck. Apparently this is a Texas thing. I also read that one friend chooses a word (or rather, lets a word choose her, as she is a poet) and she likes to see how that word plays out each year. Another tradition I heard about for the first time is that you shouldn’t do any laundry on the first of the year or you’ll wash a year of good fortune down the drain. Another friend likes to make sure she does something on New Year’s Day that sets an intention for the rest of the year, so say if she wants to be outdoors more, she’ll have already arranged to go hiking on January 1.

If you’re hearing this list and thinking, “Oh no, I really messed this one up!” I’ll just say this—you’re not alone. With no black eyed peas in my pantry, a load of towels already in the wash, and last year’s word stinging in the back of my mind—mine was “resilient” and I found myself midway through the year wondering why I chose something with so much implied hardship, I really was not equipped to begin the year on the right foot. As for spending the first day of the year in a way that sets an intention, man, I really blew it there. I woke up to a phone call on January 1^st telling me that a member of my household had a positive covid test. So this is our fresh new start, eh?

But still, beginnings are refreshing, especially when things are hard. I think it was tempting for many of us to hope that with a new calendar year, the problems we’ve been mired in would just disappear. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way, at least not from what I can tell. We continue to have little to no room in our hospitals, we miss our loved ones, or worse, in some cases we cannot find common ground any longer with loved ones because we live in a highly polarized political climate. That’s a different kind of missing.

Our readings today all speak to our current state of affairs, but none so boldly as our Gospel. In our reading from John, we are offered beginnings, or to be specific, THE beginning.

In poetry that echoes the poetic verse of the creation in Genesis, John describes the beginning of all things. This is no “new year, new me” kind of beginning, this is much bigger than that. In our reading, we hear and read that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Words are powerful things, but can also be used cheaply, hurtfully, or in deliberately falsified ways. When we think of words in our context, this kind of use is rampant. Even though “fake news” has reached a point of no return when it comes to eyerolling-overuse, it is unfortunately part of our relationship to words. In this way, in our world, it is easy to assume words cannot be trusted.  

And then I think about my friend, the poet, who allows a new word to find her each year as part of her New Year’s ritual. Poets rely on words to bring their messages to life. Words must be trusted if we are to allow ourselves to experience the lush landscape of poetic verse. Verse like what we read in John.

We are not confronted with mere words, but with The Word, capital W. The Word is beyond a string of letters with spaces and punctuation. The Word is this expansive before and after, the Word is Jesus, but in a more nuanced and flowing way than we can reach by just slapping a nametag on it and moving on. And there is interplay with God, the Word, and the light. Our words take on more meaning than something typewritten and something to illuminate the text.

God, the Word, and the light are co-creators of the world, they are different and yet the same, the newness they bring defies all neat and tidy classification. You know who has trouble with things that messily refuse to be divided into classes or put into boxes? Huuuuuumanssssssss. That’s right, the same humans who hope that if we just eat enough legumes and ignore the growing hamper of laundry we can plop our circumstances into neat and tidy bins, much easier to deal with. We don’t deal well with ambiguity or duality at all.

This isn’t a new thing, it hasn’t just cropped up as a result of a two party system and all the us vs them thinking that goes along with it. The book of John was written in about 90 CE, and it was written for a community that was struggling with the differing ways that they viewed Jesus. There were rifts in this community that felt impossible to resolve, some believed that Jesus was divine, the messiah, and therefore not fully human, others believed that he was fully human, a teacher without divinity. John aims to puncture this binaried thinking, this either/or, and show people that this is a “yes, and” situation, where thinking in these rigid, divided ways are not just an impediment to full communal life, but also keep us from the abundant, expansive nature of God. The Word.

The creation we read about today is one that invites God closer to us. It moves the nature of God—which is impossible to completely know or fully understand—out of the ether and into a tangible form. The world did not know its creator. The world was too busy looking for one thing or the other, couldn’t see God, the Word, and the light in everything around them. Even after Jesus lived among people, it was still so hard for people to grasp the many natures of God. It is not a thing to be grasped. While words have definitions we can look up in the dictionary, The Word is not so easily defined.

Knowing what we know about the community that it was written for, I think I understand why John started from the beginning—the very beginning. When we get so stuck in our thinking that we cannot accept multiple truths that can coexist at once, it is helpful to go back to beginning. To start from scratch. John brings his community around by setting them up for a complicated, complex savior that has been inviting us into new life from the beginning of time. To remind us that along with God, we have the promise of the light that shines and not only illuminates the darkness, but cannot be overcome by the darkness ever.

It can be helpful for us to return to these beginnings as well. To know that even though we forgot to add black eye peas to our shopping lists ahead of new years day, or even if we receive difficult news in the first waking moments of the new year, the true light, a light that enlightens everyone, came into the world. A light that doesn’t care if we did a load of wash, but does fret over whether we are living abundantly, giving the love we have received from God, the Word, and the light, back to the world.  Today’s readings help us to understand that Jesus isn’t calling us into a hyper-individualistic new year, new me way of living, but instead we are invited into a poetically created new life in relationship with the complex Divine and by extension of God’s love, one another.