Luke 23:33-43
I was reminded by a mentor from my fellowship this week that today is the New Year’s Eve of the church calendar, a threshold between the year behind us and the new year ahead of us. This is the last Sunday of Year C, and next week on Advent 1 we begin the 3-year cycle all over again with Year A. The way we mark time has real consequences, as those of us still adjusting to the end of daylight savings time know well. Those who measure their lives in workweeks or pay periods or semesters experience the world differently than those who measure their lives by travel schedules or sports seasons or quarters of the fiscal year. Some of us measure our lives by the space between doctors’ appointments or deployments or growing seasons. Some of us measure our lives by the sleep-wake cycles of colicky babies or the sound of teenagers staying up late. Some of us mark time with pill organizers and smartwatches and our preferred nightly news program. Some of us don’t mark time at all anymore, maybe because we no longer have to, maybe because we no longer can. All of it affects how we think, how we feel, how we view the world around us and the world within us. All of it changes throughout time, throughout life, our internal clocks falling back or springing forward or even at times stopping as if the power has been cut, leaving us flashing the same time even as the world continues to turn around us and life races on ahead of us.
I’ll admit that this year, after so many losses and setbacks in my family’s life, I have been counting down to January 1st as if by some magic, I will be able to leave behind everything hard in 2025 and start anew in 2026 with a clean slate. I know I am not alone, and I know that all of us have had years like this, years that seemed to go on forever or years that sped past us, anniversaries that we dreaded for months but still somehow snuck up and surprised us when they arrived. Imagine my relief when I was reminded by that mentor that I don’t have to wait for January 1st, that a new year is already upon me, an opportunity for renewal and reflection. As many people begin pulling out Advent calendars and Christmas decorations, the church is ringing in the New Year, and our countdown lasts an entire week.
This is a relief to me, and maybe to some of you as well. Now that Thanksgiving decorations are already on the clearance racks by Halloween and the Black Friday sales begin weeks beforehand and people are seemingly sick of Christmas music and twinkle lights by December 26th, it is good to take a moment to reframe the passage of time. The liturgical Church is the one place that is not running the race to the next opportunity to consume. The liturgical Church is not shaped by Federal holidays or election cycles or the whims of Wall Street. Our months are not named after emperors like Julius and Augustus, but for ways God reveals Godself to us- Advent, Incarnation, Epiphany. The Church calls the longest season of our year Ordinary, a beautiful if unintentional reminder that this is the place we most often find God- in the ordinary things of life. Our church year resists the linear march of time, rejecting the idea that what’s next is always more important than what is past. The liturgical calendar turns over on itself in a circle, an ever-widening spiral that expands to contain all that came before and all that is yet to be. It is a gift, this starting over, because it does not come with a blank slate. It names our history, all of it, and insists that there is still more to us than what we’ve done before. The liturgical cycle holds within itself an image of our relationship with God- always the opportunity to be born again, to be resurrected, not into an entirely new being but as more entirely ourselves than we were before.
As we end the three-year cycle of the lectionary, the schedule of readings assigned for every Sunday and Major Feast of the church year, we find ourselves at the foot of the cross. The crucifixion, like our new year, is an ending that is also a beginning, a threshold between what has been and what will be possible with God. We have journeyed for three years with Jesus from his birth through his ministry to his death and resurrection, the cycle starting over again every year on Advent 1. And at the end of these three years, we are here again, on Golgatha, as Jesus is hanged and mocked and humiliated. It is the worst thing. It is the thing we resist, the part of the story we rush through when we can and romanticize when we can’t. The crucifixion is ugly, and violent, and devastatingly sad. An innocent man is executed by an oppressive regime for the crime of being fully himself in a world ruled by hypocrites and imposters. We know from other Gospel accounts that the women he loved were there, and so was his best friend, and the most they could do for him was to witness his death, to not look away even when every instinct screamed otherwise. It is an unfathomable loss, it is the day they surely never forgot for as long as they lived. It is the worst thing.
And next Sunday, we will begin the holy work of preparing a place in our hearts and in the manger for the baby Jesus to recover from the ordeal of being born. We will begin again, anew, with the cries of an infant God. We will reenact the resurrection by remembering the birth, the tomb replaced by a womb. We will be reminded that, no matter how we might feel or what the world might threaten, the worst thing is not the last thing. The hardest thing is not the end. Even endings are not final, because God has promised us a happier one. Frederick Buechner (Beek-ner) once wrote, “The worst isn’t the last thing about the world. It’s the next to the last thing. The last thing is the best. It’s the power from on high that comes down into the world, that wells up from the rock-bottom worst of the world like a hidden spring. Can you believe it?”
The best part is, we don’t have to believe it, because it is always true. This crucifixion is the next to the last thing. This death, this loss, this grief, is the next to the last thing. The last thing is the best, is better than anything we can imagine. Marking time by the church year gives us infinite chances to practice imagining the best thing. Following the rhythms of the liturgical calendar instead of the rhythms of the market or the school year or the news cycle helps us remember that we can always start again, and we don’t need to buy anything or build anything to do it. As the colors on the altar change, our hearts can reset if we let them. I hope we will.
Mother A Writes 