New year - a time to ponder

New Year’s Day, 1st January 2023

Galatians 4.4-7, Luke 2.15-21

Revd Catherine Edenborough

Here we are, at the start of another new year. Happy New Year to you all! And extra brownie points for everyone here this morning a bit worse for wear after a party last night!

The new year has the feel of a new beginning. It can be like a blank slate, an opportunity to take stock and start again. Although with the fragile state the world is in at the moment, it can make us wonder exactly what 2023 holds.

The Roman god Janus, whose name is given to the month of January, looks in two directions at the same time – back at the preceding year and forward to what is to come. This time of year can offer the opportunity for a time of reflection – to review what happened in the past 12 months and to identify what we might like to be different in the year to come. I often take a notebook and have a set of questions I use to help me think back and notice things I might have missed if I hadn’t taken the time to stop now.

Some years starting this review is quite a positive prospect, when there have been good things happening and I feel OK with how the year has gone. Other times, it’s more of an effort to get started, but once I am into it, I always value what I discover in the process.

Today we mark the festival of the naming and circumcision of Christ and the gospel passage also looks in more than one direction. We continue the story of the birth of Jesus into a Jewish family, following Jewish traditions, and at the same time we get a glimpse into the future and of Christ being the saviour of the whole world, going way beyond his Jewish heritage. The twin tracks of his life start to appear.

We also see Jesus’ humanity, as he undergoes a regular rite of passage of circumcision for a Jewish boy and glimpse his divinity in the story of the shepherds’ visit and the name he is given. As instructed by the angels that appeared to Mary and Joseph, he is given the name Jesus – meaning ‘the Lord saves’ – a hint of what he would go onto do – saving not just the Jews but also the Gentiles.

Amid the surprise and excitement of the shepherds’ visit and all that was going on around them we are told that Mary, his mother, treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. Here is a woman whose last 12 months have been an alarming, strange and wonderful experience: being told she was going to give birth to the Son of God, her husband-to-be miraculously not calling off the engagement but staying with her regardless, having to travel miles in occupied territory to get to Bethlehem, then having her baby in a strange town without her family around her, being visited by shepherds who have told her that her child is the Saviour, the Messiah. It’s so much to take onboard, and Mary doesn’t say or do anything in response. We are told she treasures the words of the shepherds and ponders it all in her heart. It makes you wonder what exactly she was thinking.

Mary seems to have been a bit of a ponderer. Later when Jesus is a young boy and his parents take him to the temple in Jerusalem, lose him and find him after three days, we hear Mary “treasured all these things in her heart”, the Greek word ‘treasure’ meaning to keep safe or hold fast to.

This pondering or treasuring is perhaps the only realistic response to what she has experienced. I want to suggest that the act of pondering or weighing things in our hearts is something we can all benefit from. We may not all be mystics or contemplatives who can sit in silence for hours, but we are all invited to take time to notice and treasure the work of God in our lives. And perhaps this time of year offers us a good opportunity - thinking back over this year, or even the past week could be a good way to start.

Reviewing and reflecting certainly goes against the grain of what so much of life pushes at us. Society drives us to be seen to make progress and achieve. Our egos or false selves want us to get on with life and they fool us into believing that ‘doing’ is what it is all about – that achievement, performance and outward success are what matter. Being quiet and contemplating seem way down the list of priorities! We quickly lose sight of the fact that achievement and success only matter in the sense that they are an expression of God’s purposes in us, not a way to prove something to ourselves or to God, or to “earn” God’s grace and salvation.

And we can often feel resistance to the thought of taking the time to stop in this way: what if nothing happens? we say to ourselves… Or the opposite: what if when I actually stop and listen God asks me to do some big scary thing? These fears are all natural and normal, but they are just that: ‘Fears’, and ways of stopping us from actually doing it. That fearful, anxious voice is not how God speaks to us. God speaks with love, forgiveness, hope, grace, the promise of life. Sometimes putting a finger on something that needs to change and challenging us, but always as part of drawing us closer, not pushing us away.

Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Jesuits and created a prayer exercise called the Examen, where you review the day and look at where God has been at work in it with you, used to say that the Examen prayer was the one thing he wanted his novices to do, even if they had no time for other forms of prayer.

When we treasure the things of God in this way, they can start to act as riches for the future. The psalmist often talks of recalling God’s goodness at times when they feel down or far from God. These riches become a store of reminders of the truth of God’s goodness to us, for the times when it feels like God is absent, nothing is going on and we are tempted to give up on the whole thing. I wonder if Mary’s times of pondering helped her, years later, when she was standing at the foot of the cross watching her son die.

So as we think about what we’d like to be different in the year ahead, a good thing to try might be to be more like Mary: to spend more time pondering and treasuring the things of God in our hearts. To stop and notice where God is in our busy lives, rather than rushing on to the next thing. To marvel at his presence in the day-to-day run of things, as well as seeing the way to the glory that is to come. Amen.