Purposeful and Intentional – A New Year reflection

This sermon was preached on January 7th, and is a reflection on the following texts: Gen 1:1-5; Mark 1:4-11. You can find those here.

We are at the beginning of a new calendar year, and for many this is a time to review the year that’s past and setting intentions for the year ahead. This transitional time offers us a space to pause and reflect. Perhaps to celebrate some wins and to consider what we might learn from mistakes and failures. Perhaps to adjust expectations or to re-evaluate our priorities in the light of our most recent experience. And all of those are good ways to attend to the new year, whenever you choose to begin it.

But in preparation for this Sunday, my bible reading over the past week or so has included a passage from Matthew’s gospel where the Pharisees are quizzing John the Baptist about his credentials. Who are you? They ask him.

Are you the Messiah? they want to know. He tells them plainly – I am not. I’m the one preparing the way for him.

As I reflected on this reading, I noticed John’s clarity of his purpose and his intention. And I felt drawn to it.

I wonder if you have a sense of your purpose for the year ahead?

Do you have a sense of your intention? If you reviewed the year that has past, would that speak of your purpose or intention for your life?

I wonder this in part because we have stated that as a community of faith, our mission – our purpose and intention – is to grow in love by grace.

Have you grown in love? What story might you tell about that? Have you found or deepened practices that have nurtured and supported your faith? How have you experienced and shown grace in the past year and what stories can you share?

This is not just a mind game or a navel gazing exercise – this is an essential, very practical part of listening to the voice of the Spirit guiding you – guiding us – on the journey of life and faith. Otherwise, we drift through our days on auto pilot, and the days become weeks and months and years, and then you die.

So the turning year gives us one place to pause and take stock so we can be purposeful and intentional about the year ahead, and make some conscious choices about how we want to show up, and what we want that to look like.

John had obviously decided what his sense of vocation meant for his wardrobe, dietary and lifestyle choices. These reflected his purpose and intention – his calling and commitment in light of his understandings of society, culture, politics and economics. These also reflected habits that formed him for his particular mission and ministry – a ministry that included baptising Jesus the Christ.

In today’s reading, we see two significant things happen at Jesus’ baptism.

Firstly, as he is coming up out of the water, the heavens are torn apart, and the Spirit descends on Jesus. This signifies a momentous opening, like the veil in the temple’s holy of holies being torn in two at Jesus’ death.

Divisions that seemed set in stone are being torn down. God, ineffable creator, source of all that is, takes on human form and limitation. Heaven and earth are joined. The sacred and the common are united, holiness does not want, need or mean separation.

In Jesus, and through his life, God demonstrates again and again that our divisions are meaningless, and that is because God’s desire is to be together with us. This is the good news. The sacred is intertwined in the mundane and unfolding in everyday happenings.

The second significant thing that happens is the voice Jesus hears promising God’s love and blessing. You are mine, says God, my beloved…no matter what.

Love and blessing are given freely, before Jesus begins his ministry.

Love and blessing are given because Jesus, the man, needs to hear this, same as you and I need to hear it. Love and blessing are given freely because divine parental love tears down separations and declares that nothing can come between us. Whatever depths we sink to, whatever trouble we cause or experience, whatever loss we suffer, God’s love will go deeper, broader, and more tenderly to reach us.

And so, we come back to our review of our practice of faith, our habits of prayer and worship and service, since these are some of the ways that we signal to God our desire to be reached.

All of our habits form us, one way or another, and good habits form us by keeping us aware that in our everyday, utter ordinariness, we are in God’s presence.

Our routines of prayer and worship can help us as good habits, and they can also become empty rituals when routine become rote. You might think that freshness and change would help to keep that awareness of God’s presence alive for us.

If I can just bring something new in my sermon each week. If the band can just bring new songs, or new energy, or if there’s more creative ways to pray, more opportunities for us to respond to God – then we’ll be assured of lively worship, inspiring prayers, insightful preaching, meaningful services …

But God must be found in the mundane and the ordinary, not just in the highs of delight and transcendence, because otherwise it will seem that God is missing in most of your life. Our practices must help us discover that God can be found in the everyday, the familiar and the boring.

So we pause at the year’s end and new beginning, perhaps to review how much we’ve been going through the motions.

Perhaps to review what we have put in to our relationship with God. Because the life of faith, the whole relationship with God is a two way relationship.

I know you have heard this before, so I wonder what that means for you? What does it look like for you? What best brings you into an awareness that you are in God’s presence, and what helps you to stay in that awareness?

One of the things we are often told as a way to stay in God’s presence is to pray – to pray by talking to God as if you were talking to a good friend.

So that doesn’t mean bringing a bunch of news headlines to God and telling God what needs to happen. It doesn’t mean asking God why this or that has or hasn’t happened or even listing things you are thankful for or appreciative of.

When you talk to a good friend, you say what is happening for you, what you are anxious about, what you are longing for, what you are confused or angry about, what has brought you joy. You share your highs and lows. And your good friend listens, and makes encouraging noises to you and watches your face as you talk, and holds you if you need to cry. This is the two way relationship which God is offering you. Jesus, your friend who will listen, nod, smile, and who you can trust to hold you.

So if your pause and review leads you to recognise you’d like to be more purposeful and intentional about your relationship with God;

If you’d like to have more stories of love and grace to tell at the end of the year, perhaps you could make this the year of talking to God, of listening to the Spirit’s whisper and of trusting Jesus to hold you.