Happy New Year!

'Behold, I make all things new!' is what God is saying right at the end of the Bible in Revelation 21.5 and there is that vision of a new heaven and a new earth and the 'new Jerusalem' coming down out of heaven. It's a vision of God rebuilding everything and starting again. It's not about patching stuff up, making repairs or improvements to what's already there. It's a completely new beginning, an entirely new project.

We think of starting again and renewing at New Year. We hope, pray, long for and dream about a better life, a better world than what we've experienced up to now. How often have we seen in the soap operas on TV, characters in the Christmas and New Year episodes getting in a taxi and riding off or just walking off to a new life because things haven't worked out or got so bad they are intolerable in their present life? And then years later they might turn up again, completely made over.

Oh that it was so simple! Somehow, real life doesn't often work like that. We can't just walk off or press the reset button as we might on a smart phone or computer and reboot our life. Unlike the soap opera characters, we have a real investment in our own lives and in the lives of others, real connections that breaking will do more harm than good. So we have to look for renewal in all that's less than perfect in our life and carry on with the life we've got.

Yet right at the heart of Christianity is the idea that we can start again. God's incarnation in Jesus was a new start. For us as Jesus followers, baptism, at any age is seen as a new start, slate wiped clean. St. Paul said that 'if anyone is in Christ they are a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come.' (2 Corinthians 5.17) This is no patching up or improvement on the old, it's something completely new.

And in the Church, we use the sacraments of repentance and confession as a way of renewal and starting afresh; at any time. Indeed, we do it regularly at the beginning of most acts of worship in church. Coming to God in worship, knowing that we are always falling short in some way, we claim this way of starting again. And are granted it.

This is not very far removed from what goes on in the secular world of work with annual, monthly and weekly reviews of goals and objectives. Regular assessments are made of performance and things adjusted if goals and objectives aren't met. Shortcomings and shortfalls are faced and action taken on them. It's the way the business world works. It's entirely the same as the way God works with us.

But thanks be to God because he doesn't fire us if we fall short, he forgives, wipes the slate clean and if we treat the process with the respect and the sanctity with which it's meant to be taken, on we go again, renewed, a new creation.

I recall a phrase from an Eastern saint, whose name I can't just remember who said that 'God doesn't judge us for the greatness of our sin, but for our failure to repent'. Which really means something like being judged for not looking at ourselves squarely and owning up to our faults and failures and then taking the opportunity to be become again a 'new creation'. God offers us the opportunity of a new start out of love for us. And that opportunity is open and ongoing all the time throughout our life. We don't need a New Year to wait for it.

But it's always good at this time, at the start of a New Year to think especially where we stand in our relationships with others and ourselves and with God and not just to hope and pray and dream of a new start, but to act. We don't need to hope or dream or pray for what God has already given us in forgiveness and what he continues to offer us in every second of our life.

May you have a blessed, happy and prosperous 2018!