THE SUNDAY OF THE EPIPHANY
January 3, 2021
“Happy (Blessed) New Year!”
The much-anticipated 2021 has arrived, and the much-despised 2020 has passed into history. Do you feel better now? Or different in some way? Maybe you’re more optimistic, more confident, more forward-looking than you’ve been for the past most-of-a-year. Poor old 2020 — what could the number of a year possibly “do” to be labeled as such a terrible period of time? And then there’s 2021 — talk about pressure to perform! It’s asking a great deal of a date on a calendar to bring us a fresh, new start after we’ve struggled through one stressful event after another.
I’d suggest we let this new year off the hook, and don’t expect anything miraculous from it. We can just be grateful that we can refresh our perspectives and feel more positive facing the future. We could think of the expression of “Happy New Year!” not as a command to celebrate, but an expression of hope, encouragement, and even faith that there will be happiness in the year to come.
We don’t generally consider the words happy and blessed to be synonyms, since we use them so differently. If you think of a person as happy, you’d describe them as cheerful and optimistic, as well as grateful and content. Of course, as you get to know someone, you realize their happiness isn’t the result of having an easy life or never having to deal with problems or loss. Getting through the hard times is part of life, but those times don’t have to define us.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans: “ . . . since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ . . . knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit . . .” (excerpts from Ch. 5:1-4) So how does being blessed connect to all this happiness and hopefulness? All are gifts from our Father in heaven, freely given in love. We don’t earn or deserve these gifts, but are to accept them gratefully, and then put them to work in sharing the good news of God’s grace and love. Being blessed is not a passive experience; rather, it is strengthening and empowering.
The use of blessed and happy in the Psalms caught my attention, thanks to a very efficient reference book. Happy is used to describe behavior: “Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord; those who take refuge in him; who fear the Lord; who keep his decrees” are just a few. When we look at the use of blessed, we see that the psalmist is praising God, his power and steadfastness: “Blessed be my rock; blessed be the Lord, for he has heard the cries of his people; may all nations be blessed in him.” As God’s people, we are blessed with a deep and profound happiness in our relationship with our heavenly Father.
This meditation isn’t intended to go in circles, playing around with words, but hopefully will provide some thoughts for a new year, looking ahead in hope, happy and blessed as God’s people.
Blessed, happy and hopeful,
Your friend in Christ,
Mary Rogers