Genesis 1:1-3; John 1:1-4

Beginning once more

At the start of each year each of us give ourselves a brief chance to think about where and how we have been in the last 365 days.   News media do the same for us in thinking about our world.  At this time, even though it is largely artificial, the human condition seems a little bit more palpable, a little more touching and a little more fragile. We talked about the lonely fifteen-year old Guatemalan boy who is about to be dropped off in the desert to try to make it into the US on carpet slippers.  What suffering he is leaving behind and what danger awaits him?  Perhaps there are people with that history right next door us at the Guadalupe church this very minute.

Genesis talks about beginnings in the ancient primordial soup that was to be our world and the writer imagines how it all might have happened so long ago.  The writer acknowledges the power of God in that creation.  Then we jump to the text in the Gospel of John and there is another beginning, not of the World, but of the “Word.”  Jesus is the Word that was always part of creation, but comes into the world as a human being, to live as human, to love as a human and to suffer as a human.  So today we have the two main texts in the Bible, one from the Old Testament, the other from the New Testament, that are all about the word beginning.  Of course there are many new beginnings in the Bible, think of the stories of Abraham and Moses and the return of the exiles, and the beginning of the church in Acts. In fact you could you say that the whole message of the Bible is about new beginnings.

Friends, new beginnings is also what we humans crave.  We don’t like having to do things over again because we haven’t done it well or we failed, because that makes us and others think badly about us. But we do like the idea of clean slate, an empty palette to write or paint on. This we do like.  We have so many words for beginning again: refreshing (as in internet use), rebooting (as in computer hard drives), recharging, re-boosting.  When it comes to our faith we are more used to the word” recommitting,  as in “recommitting our lives to Christ,” or “reaffirming our vows.”  We love the idea of new beginnings.  We like to have new “start-ups” in our lives, it makes us feel young and gives us a sense that much of life is ahead of us.  We embrace stories of new beginnings.  Not long ago there was a movie called Begin Again about a young woman musician who goes through a break-up with a rising star.  She connects with a failed music producer and together they create a new album with musicians in public places, reaffirming what music was all about in the first place: a way of making spirits soar instead of a huge money making business.  They offer their album for free on the internet. It becomes a new beginning for her and her self-confidence, for him and his sense of self-confidence and for music. It still doesn’t make it a good movie, but it does have a good message about beginnings.

The art historian Robert Hughes wrote a book about the convict past of his native Australia entitled “The Fatal Shore.” In May 1787 a ship sailed from Southampton in England by way of islands in the Atlantic, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope, arriving in Botany Bay, near present day Sydney in January of 1787.  It was a ship full of petty convicts, part of what the English considered the “criminal class,” which they considered a separate species of human being.  These were people who had not been more than ten miles of their home and they suddenly had to make their home in a world of eucalyptus tree, strange animals and intense summer heat.  They had no idea what beginning again in this land would mean.  In the years since the founding of a convict nation, Australians have tried to distance themselves from their convict past.  Unlike Americans trying to trace their roots to the Mayflower, Australians wanted to do the opposite: begin their history again and wipe away the past.  Ironically Australia is now one of the most law-abiding nations on earth.

Friends, you and I live in the tension between having a past and a history and wanted to begin again.  In a great immigrant nation as the US beginning again is a great sport, that’s what we are apart.  Yet sooner or later we realize we cannot escape who we have been, for better or for worse.  So here is a question: “as you look at your life a little more deeply during these first days of the year, what parts of yourself are you at peace with and which parts of yourself do you want to improve.”   And related to that: in which area of your life, especially your spiritual life do you want to “begin again.”  This question we can pose to our this congregation too: where lies the challenge for this church to begin again?  May God give us wisdom.