an apocalyptic vision of the future
Advent 1C | Luke 21:25-36
Happy New Year, everybody! Today we celebrate the church’s new year. Which, if we’re counting, goes alongside the new years we celebrate with the Gregorian Calendar on January 1st and the multiple school calendars that depend on what school you or your kid are in or which one your church is next to, so it could be after Labor Day or late July—who really knows? So the church gets its own calendar. But we don’t always follow it that closely because we still have to contend with all of the other calendars in our lives. So this is a kind of a “more-the-merrier” kind of deal. What’s another reason to celebrate? Jesus is kind of the “we need more reasons to party” sort.
Above the world’s ordering of our lives, the church uses this Sunday, marked as four Sundays before Christmas Day as the beginning of the church year. And like all good new year’s days, it is an opportunity to reset, to begin anew in a life that needs annual renewals. That we get to do new again, begin again. That it gets to be new and also familiar. All of that comes as new creation and also that all that came before still remains. This is why we can hear again the stories we have heard a thousand times and make them both new and familiar. This is part of the process, part of the design of a fancy concept called anamnesis, which, in the church, is essentially to make something real by remembering it, like communion, memory, love.
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