As The New Year Unfolds...

Text: Galatians 4:4-7
Theme: “As The New Year Unfolds…”
1st Sunday After Christmas/New Year’s Day
January 1, 2012
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

IN THE NAME OF JESUS

4 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.[b] 6 Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba,[c] Father.” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.

Over the last few days I had opportunity to drop by at my former place of employment. I did work for a number of years at Nasr Brothers Jewelers here in Denton, and, every now and again, I like to stop in and see how things are going in the world of high-priced rocks and metals. It’s no surprise that they sell watches there – or “timepieces”, as they’re called in the industry. Most of the timepieces on display have two things in common. First, they have what is called a Swiss movement. In the world of watches, the Swiss are the folks who know what they are doing. Secondly, the watches have a sapphire crystal. That means that it’s almost impossible to scratch the face. These watches run by battery, or, in the case of an automatic watch, they run by movement. If you have a swiss movement/sapphire crystal watch, you’ve got a quality product. What drives the price is the brand name (think Rolex) and also the “bling bling” that is added to the watch. Some have 18kt gold inlays in the band and on the face. Others have diamonds. The least expensive watch at the store runs around three hundred dollars. But then, for the ladies, there’s that diamond crusted Piaget evening watch. If you’ve got eighty thousand dollars lying around, it can be yours.

All but forgotten in the world of expensive watches is what they are built to do – that is, to tell us the time. Time is something that we can lose track of. When we’re going through a difficult period in our lives, time seems to go on forever. If we’re having a great day and things are going supremely well, it seems to be over in a flash. Why is that? Either way, we mark time; we live in time.

Late last week, on the 30th of December to be exact, my morning meditation spoke of marking time. In Psalm 90, Moses prayed to the Lord: “Teach us to number our days rightly, so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Numbering our days means keeping track of time. I have a friend at the gym where I work out that will celebrate his 70th birthday in calendar year 2012. He is in incredible physical shape. He has the body of an 18 year old athlete. “Age,” he says, “is just a number.” He doesn’t pay attention to it.

But then again, it is a number. It’s something you count. You count the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years, the decades. It all adds up. You keep track of time. We take pictures to capture moments in time. We write journals to remind us what we did, or thought, at certain points in time.

Now our Lord has no need for a watch or a timepiece. We are told, in Scripture, that with the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day. Think about that one for awhile. Mary and Joseph, it seems, were keeping track of time. They had their eye on the calendar. It says in today’s Gospel that “When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him (meaning the baby Jesus) to the Lord.” There in the temple in they met a man named Simeon. He held the baby in his arms and exclaimed: “Lord, now you let your servant depart in peace – according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation.” Then we heard of a widow, Anna, who was eighty-four years of age, we are told. Eighty four years. As we reckon it, that’s a lot of time. She, filled with God’s praises, went on to spend time telling of Jesus to all who were looking forward to redemption.

We, too, spend time; measure time; keep track of time; quantify time. We have calendars and appointment books and smartphone apps to help with this. We even describe time – as in “quality time” or “wasted time”. Some of us punch a time card, or clock-in, or clock-out. In today’s sermon text, the apostle Paul speaks of the “fullness” of time. Our Lord didn’t just choose a random date out of a hat. Rather, says our reading, “When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.”

In the time that we have had to live, we’ve all felt the pressure of the Law with its standards and its demands. To use the language of the reading, we’ve been enslaved by it. The standard that God demands is full obedience to that Law. 99.9% success won’t cut it. It won’t do to act like a broken watch and to claim, before God, that we at least get it right twice a day. All of us have fallen short of that standard and have disregarded the demands time and time again. The last thing we need is encouragement to try harder. Moral re-armament, no matter how good that might sound in this evil world, is not the solution to our predicament. Neither is the alternative of lying to ourselves and throwing all notions of right and wrong out the window and living only to please ourselves. If you live only to please yourself, you are a polytheist; you worship at the altar of your instincts.

Now, what we desperately need is what we cannot – in any way, shape, function, or form – do or get for ourselves. We need redemption. That’s the entire Bible in a nutshell, my friends; it’s one great, grand story of redemption! We need to be bought back. We need an end to our slavery in whatever form we name it, in whatever way we experience it. We need, as we mark time in the form of a new year, to know that we are dearly loved children of God.

That’s the starting point for the new year: not as a slave, but as a child. 2012, like all the years of time preceding it, will include, as Charles Dickens once wrote, “the best of times and the worst of times.” There will be highs; there will be lows. There will be deaths; there will be taxes; there will be births. There will be random acts of violence; there will be random acts of kindness. We will pay it backward – and thus serve ourselves. And we will pay it forward – and thus serve others. As we mark the time, as the year unfolds, we will have our moments of boredom. We’ll be challenged at other times. We may become sick; we might recover. We may become poorer; we may become wealthier.

At this precise point in time, the new year is just that: new! The next 365 days are shrouded in mystery. We can predict and prognosticate and speculate all we want. We can give our friends and acquaintances every good wish for the new year. We can set forth new year’s resolutions that we intend to spend time trying to keep. We can endeavor to keep our expectations low and our hopes high. We can do all of these things – and so much more! – in the year sprawled out in front of us.

But here’s the question, dear friends: are we going into this new year as a slave or as a child? As the new year unfolds, are we going to consider ourselves silly putty in the hands of fate, or as children held in the warm, strong, safe arms of a loving God? Are we going to give in to the counsels of arrogance and cynicism that continually try to sink their talons yet deeper into our society, or are we going to believe that good word from God we heard this morning that we have the Spirit of Christ in our hearts crying “Abba! Father!”?

Here is that heaven-sent beginning point – indeed, the foundation! – for our new year. No matter what happens, we are children of God with all the appertaining rights and privileges that come along with it. They can take a lot of things away from you and from me. But this they can’t take away: we are children of God. As a new year unfolds, take comfort in that.

And finally, we add a bonus. If we are children of God (and we are!), we are also heirs. Here on earth, some children can be written out of a parent’s will. But the child of God never can be written out of God’s will. You are an heir, a recipient, an inheritor of all God’s gracious gifts and promises. It’s all yours because God’s Son was born of a woman and born under the law to redeem you and make you not a slave but a child. And what joy it is this morning to receive our inheritance yet again at this table. Here Jesus gives us all of Himself; He gives the “trust fund”, if you will, of His body broken and His blood shed for the forgiveness of our sins.
New Year’s Day, in the church year, is called “The Name Day of Christ.” I close with a bit of verse that mentions this:

The Name Day now of Christ we keep
Who for our sins did often weep
His hands and feet were wounded deep
and His blessed side with a spear.
His head they crowned with thorn
And at Him they did laugh and scorn
Who for our good was born
God send us a happy new year!

Amen.