Rejoice

Happy New Year!

It is such a time of hope, the new year.

I find that in my own life it is the love my husband and I share that is the most important source of life and hope at the new year. Every year now we joke we should toast it early and pretend—“it must be the new year someplace!”—and every year we sit by the fire and listen to music until the magic hour. And then we toast the new year. We wake up to music from Vienna on our favorite radio stations and then we work on our hoppin’ John and collards and corn pones (my husband grew up in the south).

As I give thanks for the love we share, I remember that there was a time in my life when I could not have imagined that I could be married to a man. I recently shared in an online forum that back in the day it wasn’t so much that I was in the closet hiding, it was more that I didn’t know what it was or that it had a name or that it could actually “be.”

LGBTQ people all have some version of, some variation on, this sort of story. For many there is not so much a muddle as the face of oppression and the search for the dimension of love, in which it is blessed to be who we are, created as we are in the image of God, who after all, is all, who is love.

No wonder we enter each year with hope of the fulfillment of the realization of the manifestation of our own creation as God’s LGBTQ heirs.

And so the hope we carry all of our lives is rooted in the love with which we were created and nurtured, it is borne with the love that is in our hearts, it is the hope of the fulfillment of creation. The New Year is a good time to look forward, with hope.

In the church this year this Sunday is the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, which means roughly “God is salvation.” It is this idea, that the manifestation of salvation eternally is being born among us, because after all, love is our salvation and love is our creation and love is all eternity within and through us. In Numbers 6 God teaches us that blessing comes from joy that love brings into our lives. In Galatians 4 we are reminded that we are heirs of God’s loving creation. And in Luke 2 we have the continuation of the story of the shepherd’s on the hillside tending their flocks when the angels appear to tell them of the birth of Jesus, who is salvation come among us. We forget these shepherd’s were at work, at night! And yet the story is full of the forward motion of the action of their response to the angels’ news—they went to Bethlehem, they saw, they proclaimed what they had seen and heard, and then full circle they returned to their work where they loved and rejoiced—they carried salvation with them in their loving joy.

Christmas is the certainty of the hope of God’s love for all of creation, The new year is a reminder to manifest, to fulfill, to realize, to see, then to “return,” to “proclaim,” to “rejoice,” to love.

The Holy Name of Jesus Christ (January 1) RCL 2023 (Numbers 6: 22-27; Psalm 8 Domine, Dominus noster; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:15-21)

©2023 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.