Grace for the New Year
FROM THE RECTOR
Normally, convincing people to take a hard, honest look at their lives is a challenge. We don’t want to be reminded of our flaws. We don’t like thinking about all the ways that we have missed the mark. All our lives, we have been taught to cover up the shortcomings and accentuate the positives, and our culture reinforces that at nearly every turn. Grocery stores have a hard time selling blemished fruit even though it tastes just as good. We post on social media only the photographs that hide the pile of torn wrapping paper and our disheveled hair even though everyone else’s Christmas morning looks just as chaotic as ours. There is hardly a moment when we can let our guard down and be honest with ourselves and others.
The big exception is New Year’s. Though the church invites us to contemplate our mortality on Ash Wednesday, the secular world does that naturally at the beginning of each year. Commercials for exercise equipment and gym memberships help fuel this introspective season. After eating our way through the holidays, we admit to ourselves that we need to lose weight and may even dust off the bathroom scales to see how much. As the glitz of the last few weeks fades, we recognize our desire to deepen our connections with the things that really matter and decide to make a change. We resolve that this year will be different. We start walking, journaling, or praying every day. We start a new diet or stop drinking. Sometimes we take on new habits that stick, but more often we abandon them rather quickly.
This week, I spoke with a colleague about this New Year’s phenomenon and the gospel’s response to it. He was working on a newsletter article about how “perfect is the enemy of good,” and our conversation quickly turned to what our faith has to say to those whose lives are not as perfect as they hope. Thankfully, it says a lot.
A big first step in transformation is taking stock of the current situation, but, after that, once we recognize how bad things really are, what are we supposed to do about it? The secular version of this spiritual practice teaches us that the only answer is more effort on our part. If things are going to get any better, it is up to us. In fact, by selling us a falsely idealized image of beauty and success, the idol of consumerism asks us to believe that, with unwavering commitment, we can look like those people in the commercials—with teeth that straight and abs that sculpted. Anything less is a failure on our part. No wonder we give up so quickly. Truly, the path to hell—to hopelessness—is paved with good intentions.
The gospel tells us something remarkably different. It starts from the same place—a reality check which confirms that things are not the way we hope they would be—but the next step is the complete opposite. Instead of asking us to make things better, it begins with an affirmation that we can’t—at least not in ways that ultimately matter—and it then provides the life-restoring truth that God already has. In the Incarnation, God has taken upon the divine self the fullness of our imperfections and brokenness. In the Crucifixion, Christ has carried our wounds and scars all the way to the point of death. In the Resurrection, God has restored what was broken and has recovered what was lost in order to make us whole, even perfect.
As Christians, we believe that God has made us in the divine image and that, in Christ, God has restored that image within us, an image which had become marred by sin. In the only sense that really matters—the eternal, foundational, ontological sense—those who belong to God in Christ have already been made perfect. We do not become perfect by making and keeping those mythical resolutions. We are perfect—perfected in Christ—and any change we intend begins from that place of having already been restored to our best and fullest selves.
From that place, our intentions and efforts lose their futility and their damning impossibility and take on a new character of promise. How different those resolutions feel when we trust that, no matter what, God has already accomplished everything that needs to be done. How much more hopeful that work of honest introspection is when we see inside ourselves what God sees—a beloved, redeemed, restored creation. Then, we can take on the work of making our lives and the world a better place not with the fear of our own failure but with deep confidence in God’s faithfulness.
I hope you will take some time early in this new year to look deep within yourself and search for what God sees. Because of what Christ has done, you have been made perfect through and through. No, that does not mean that our lives are perfect. We still need to pursue those things that help us and those around us live into our best selves, but that best self is not something we attain on our own. Because of Jesus, it has already been given to us. That is where this new year starts. May this year be a time for each of us to see it, believe it, and pursue it more fully each day.
Yours Faithfully,
Evan