Freedom, Faith, and Failure

Pastor’s Epistle—January, A.D. 2018 B

New Year, new beginnings, new resolutions! I wish you the best of luck with all of them.

Of course, the only thing that’s really being made new is us. The earth keeps turning and the sun keeps burning as they always have, regardless of when we flip our calendars. It’s not even the turn of seasons, smack-dab as we are deep in midwinter. Yet new years, like new dawns, offer opportunity for us to turn, for us to change, for us to start our lives afresh. When we make our new resolutions and hang our crisp new calendars, we are resolving ourselves to be reborn, to try again, to turn back to our youth when the sap ran thick. Only this time, we’ll be better. We’ll be truer.

This is a very Christian notion—to die to our sins and rise to new life, over and again, as often as necessary, until that day when we rise in Christ to die no more. This is why the Church connects Confession so closely to Baptism, for in Baptism we were given second birth. And whenever we return to those waters of rebirth, we are absolved and forgiven, washed clean and arisen. Like Christ, whose Spirit dwells within us and whose Body we are, we die and rise for the life of the world, until all is made right at the last.

As always, we must be clear about the sequence of these sacred things. It is not that we resolve, then do better, then are proclaimed worthy of forgiveness. Quite the opposite! We confess our unworthiness, our brokenness, and we are forgiven freely by the grace and mercy and love of God—which frees us now to begin anew. We are not set free by stern resolution and self-improvement. We are freed at the first, thus free then to strive, to improve, to try again—and freed to fall, to fail, to screw things up. God does not free the worthy; God frees us from the burden of being unworthy.

So make your resolutions. Live free. Live true. New beginnings are the gifts of God. And if you strive and win and conquer your goal, hallelujah! Well done! And if you fail, forever coming up a day late and a buck short, well, that’s humanity for you. Welcome to the human race. The sun will set and the sun will rise and Christ will love and lead you just the same. There’s always a new beginning, a New Year dawning up ahead. Someday all will be light and life and glory, as God will be all in all. Until then, have faith that God knows what it is to fail—at least in the eyes of the world—and is somehow even closer to us in life’s valleys than He is at the peaks of our success.

Happy New Year. May Christ be with you through it all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.