SERVICES
SUNDAY AT 8:00 AM (2nd & 3rd Sundays)
SUNDAY AT 10:30 AM (every Sunday) 
WEDNESDAY AT 6:00 PM (in Chapel)

Christ the King: Happy New Year's Eve!

 

When you come to church this Sunday you might be surprised to see that the green is gone, and has been replaced by our festal white. What happened to the “Long Green Season”??

 

In the Church’s calendar, the new year does not begin on January 1. For us, January 1 is the eighth day of Christmas and the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, but it’s not the start of anything in particular. The Church’s New Year’s Day is actually the First Sunday of Advent – the time of the year when we start everything all over again. Our lectionary cycle starts back at the beginning, our Daily Office readings re-set, and as far as we are concerned it is already 2026, and we are ready once again to tell the story of Our Lord’s coming into the world.

 

So if the First Sunday of Advent (November 30, this year) is New Year’s Day, that makes this coming Sunday New Year’s Eve – the last Sunday of the year, the time when we say goodbye to the old and get ready for the new. This Sunday is also known as the Feast of Christ the King, as a way of acknowledging the place of Jesus as King and Lord of all times, all places, and all seasons. As we move from one year to the next, we pause to remember under whose gracious lordship we have experienced all the blessings and joys of this past year.

 

Along with the many blessings, we acknowledge our sorrows – those that have happened to us, and those that have happened to others. We can stand on a hill and look back at the road we have traveled this year, in our parish, in our families, in our lives as Christians and as members one of another. We take all of what we see – the good and the bad together – and we submit it all to Jesus, the one who is King of kings and Lord of lords, “entrusting one another and all our life to Christ,” as we say at Evening Prayer. If Jesus is our King, then we can release those worries to him and trust him to heal us.

 

As we move from one year to the next, we also mark the passing of time. Christians recognize that time itself is a creation of God, and will cease one day to exist as all creation is folded back into eternity. St. Paul puts it this way: “The creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21) Time is our “enslavement to decay,” the unstoppable disintegration of all things as they age and die.

 

Eternity is not never-ending time, but rather existence that is beyond all time. Eternity is existence that is no longer bounded by time or its relentless march. When we call God “eternal” we don’t just mean that God is forever; we mean that God’s whole Being experiences a kind of life that is outside what you and I know and experience. In eternity, all times are experienced at once. I don’t know about you, but my brain breaks a little just trying to understand that! I have no frame of reference for anything that isn’t bound by the steady progression of time, because time is all I have ever known. Sometimes we might have flashes of what it means to exist beyond time. When we receive communion, for a few blessed moments we are dipped in the waters of eternity. When we are deep in prayer, we can feel eternity pulling at us then. Sometimes at the edges of extreme emotion – deep happiness or intense sorrow – we might feel a bit unmoored, as if time no longer made sense. That too is a window into eternity.

 

What we are about to celebrate, at Christmas, is the moment when eternity broke into time. The Eternal God became a human being, bounded by time, and union with him is a bridge for us that lets us step across into eternity – after our death, but also right here and now, because in eternity, there is no “not yet” but only “right now.”

 

Thinking about eternity is for me like thinking about the expanse of space and the universe. My little brain can’t quite take it all in, and that’s okay. Trying to understand eternity is like trying to grasp nuclear physics, and I’m still stuck on basic algebra. But I don’t have to try to understand it; I just have to trust. My King and my Lord holds me by the hand, and I trust in him.

 

This Sunday is really all about trust – we trust Jesus to be our King, and to lead us to places and dimensions that we can’t even imagine, knowing that we are safe in him. So this Sunday, let us rejoice in Jesus our King, the one who leads us across time and space and into eternity, into the joy of the forever now.