NEW YEAR SERMON

Only a few short weeks ago - at the beginning of Advent - we thought about the start of the Church’s liturgical year. Today we stand at the start of a calendar year end, and this is - much more often - is a reflective time as people look back on the year and some of us make new year’s resolutions. And on this last Sunday of the calendar year the Church invites us to consider the Holy Family - Jesus, Mary & Joseph, their relationship and their model to us.

I wonder what sort of a year 2007 has been for you? The Queen was famous in one of her Christmas Day broadcasts the year of the fire at Windsor castle, for describing the year as an “annus horribilus”. How would you describe 2006? What was it like for you? Was it - as they used to say - a Curate’s egg - good in parts...?

Inevitably 2006 saw some friends and family change branches of the church from the Church Militant on earth to the Church Triumphant in Glory. For some of us this has been the first Christmas without a loved one. For others this has been another Christmas without a loved one.

For some of us it’s been a year of illness, or increasing fragility, maybe it’s been a time of changing identity - trying to work out who we are now... now that children have left home, or after a marriage or a divorce or the birth of children or a move of house or job or retirement or now that we haven’t moved on...

I hope also though that 2006 brought us some good things... those occasions of hope and joy - perhaps a new birth or a fresh start, perhaps a memorable holiday or pilgrimage, perhaps new responsibility or the opening of a new door...

In our gospel reading we see Jesus the spotty adolescent... He’s 12 years old and beginning to assert who he is and where he fits into the scheme of things. Losing a child in a crowd is every parent’s nightmare (Luke’s slight understatement has Mary saying “your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety...”). This - as you may be aware! - happens to us on a regular basis with Hannah, who is only a year younger than the child Jesus in this story...

But at the end of the story, when Jesus is found not just safe and sound but in the middle of amazing the learned teachers at the temple (in his “father’s house”), and Mary’s response is to “treasure all these things in her heart”.

At this formative stage, and I’m sure not for the first or last time, Mary reflects on her life and that of her son.

So there is a link for us here: the Holy Family - presented to us as a model - shows Mary pondering and reflecting, just as we ponder and reflect, standing on the cusp of the old year looking towards the new year.

The Holy Family is not shown as an unreachable and unrealistic paragon of virtue to which we can never hope to aspire, but as a unit with skills which are common to us and to which we can relate. Mary thought about her life and experience and treasured these things - I think we can be sure that these ponderings were offered to God as part of her spirituality.

Now here’s a confession: we were so wiped out that for us Friday (my day off) was a TV-fest of slobbing out and vegetating on the sofa most of the day... it was great! One of the first things we watched was the House Doctor with Anne Maurice (who to my ears sounds like a calmed down version of Ruby Wax), and a very nice but scruffy house that wasn’t selling in Bramber.

If you’ve never experienced House Doctor before, Anne Maurice is called in to help out people who have their houses on the market but can’t sell them. Usually she takes one look at them and spends a few hundred or thousand pounds sprucing them up, replacing carpets, repainting in lighter colours, blitzing the garden and - famously - de-cluttering the house to make it more appealing to buyers.

As a devotee of House Doctor it strikes me that this programme is actually very little to do with interior design and everything to do with psychology. In common with most of the sellers the couple this week were subconsciously sabotaging their chances of a sale... Anne Maurice’s advise is not rocket science - it is nothing more than practical common sense to ensure a sale - but it becomes obvious as she makes suggestions and the way in which those suggestions are met, that the couple often don’t want to move on. They may say they do, but their attitude towards their sale suggests that they are deliberately putting buyers off. And as the programme unfolds so we see some of the family situations behind the scenes and truths emerge and you begin to get a very different picture.

For a whole variety of reasons people cling to what they know - even if it’s holding them back, even if it’s destructive and negative, because they are afraid of the future. (“Better the devil you know!...” people say.) They know in theory that they must move on, but in practice they are reluctant to let go.

And this is a universal human truth that applies to changing jobs, to the clothes we wear, to relationships, to habits, and a million things beside moving house. It is reflecting and pondering on our experiences - treasuring these things in our hearts, as Mary did, which helps us to make sense of what is happening to us.

Tonight and tomorrow I suspect that many of us will make New Year’s Resolutions. I always resolve to give up cocaine, mugging old ladies and playing golf. And every year I am successful (because I’ve never tried any of those things before)...

Others of us will resolve to join a gym, or loose some weight, or eat or drink less, or read more or watch TV less or whatever.

But.. we can’t move forward without letting go of the past... Just like the people on House Doctor.

The New Year’s resolutions which are effective and lasting are those which come out of our honest self reflection - a determination to leave something behind something old, safe but stifling and embrace what is new, exciting and life enriching.

The art - which is perfected by pondering - is to work out what should be left behind... American born German pastor Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer sums it up very well:

God grant me the grace to accept with serenity the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference...

Fr. Andrew Perry
Rector, St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea