Holy Name + January 1, 2017
M Campbell-Langdell
All Santos Oxnard
(Numbers 6:22–27; Ps. 8; Gal. 4:4–7; Luke
2:15–21)
Happy New Year! Today is a day
when many of us think of how we want to live in the coming year.
Maybe we want to do more
exercise or a project or graduate from a school program and we sit down to make
those plans around now, when the year feels fresh.
And these goals are good ones.
But I would like to say that none of these goals matters if we don’t focus on
who we serve. When you think about your goals for the next year, do you focus
on serving God? Do you think of this question: in whose name do you serve? Because
we are called to serve in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. And today, in
addition to the New Year’s Day of the calendar, we celebrate not just when
Jesus was given a name and circumcised, since Mary and Joseph were good Jews; but
we also celebrate the day on which we remember in whose name we live.
Because all of our efforts
should be in Jesus’ name.
I read an article a week ago
that discussed the author’s fears that we are entering into a difficult
political situation and one of the first pieces of advice was that we not act
in fear in anticipation of what might come. He said: “In times like these,
individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and
then start to do it without being asked.”[1]
This is to say that, if you are concerned about the current political climate,
we should not act of out of fear in advance or start anticipating what our
other Americans will say, or we may lose track of who we really are. This is
even more important to us as Christians because we know that nothing that can
happen in this world can truly hurt us, that by coming into this world, Jesus
has defeated death and the powers of evil. While we may rightly be concerned
for our country, our planet, or any other situation in our lives, we must
remember that since Christ is in our lives, we should not be afraid.
God came into this world in the
totally vulnerable form of a baby, and yet we know that God has overcome death and
evil ultimately. So we must not fear in advance, but rather be valiant in
advance, when we remember in the Name of whom we serve.
Thus, for our New Year’s
goals, may we dream big. A video that someone shared with me this week said
that airplanes are actually more dangerous on the ground than in the air,
because on the ground they rust and begin to fall apart. They were built to
fly. And we are the same. We have to have big plans. [2]
Plans
to serve the whole of creation. That show we are people that live in the Name
of Jesus, the Lord of all Creation. May our goals not just be focused on
ourselves, but on something bigger than us.
Now how on earth can we do
that? If that sounds too big, just think moment to moment. We live out faithful
living in this way one day at a time, one moment of remembering who we truly
are in Christ, at a time. Each time we act out of love, not fear. This is true
whatever concerns us this New Year, whether it be the political climate, the
global environmental situation, or the relationships in our lives that are not
where we would want them to be.
And this can connect with our
new year’s resolutions. Speaking about the passage from Galatians, the Rev.
Napoleon Brito mentions that we must remember during this New Years’ time whom
we serve and not be enslaved by the “gods” of the world. He says, “Many things
enslave us in our social life that separate us from God: the desire to have the
latest model car, the luxurious mansion that would compete with that of
millionaire, this year’s cell phone, the current fashion… in sum, many things
call to us, and St. Paul tells us very clearly that we are free from all of
this; that God placed in our hearts the Holy Spirit of his Son, who calls to
God calling him Abba, or Father.” [3]
And that is true. The only one we truly serve
this year is not the god of the perfect body, nor the god of wealth. But we are
called to serve Almighty God, and to serve in his Son’s name. And we should not
be afraid this year, or at any moment. Because God came in the form of his son.
In the most vulnerable form, he came, and he conquered. His small light grew to
encompass the whole of creation. May we follow him this year and may we care
for this creation of his and may we find more ways every day and each moment at
a time as we live and serve in the Holy Name of Jesus. Amen.
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