We're a "January People"

January

Have you ever wondered why it is that some of the months of the year have the name they do? Well, like most things to do with language and particularly the English language, it has to do with history. You see, our language is quite the hodge-podge. There is a bit of Germanic at the root of our language. Sprinkle in with that a little Norse. Then add to that a heavy heaping of French. And then drop in some ancient Latin and Greek and you’ve got modern English.

And the months of the year and the days of the week reflect this. Of course today, Sunday, is the day of the Sun. But what about Thursday? Well, that is the day of Thor, the Norse god of Thunder. And that’s just the days of the week. But if we go to the months of the year we’ll see another heavy influence from our Latin, that is ancient Roman, ancestors.

Take the month of January for instance. We equate this as the first month of the year in our calendar. And so did the Romans. But why? Why not July named for Julius Caesar or August named for his heir Augustus Caesar?

Well, it has to do with the namesake of the month itself. You see, the month of January is named after the Roman god Janus. In Roman mythology, Janus was depicted as a two-headed god with one head looking forward and one head looking backward. Therefore, it was appropriate for the first month of the calendar year to be named after this two directional god.

Isn’t it the case that often what we do in January is take the time to take a good look backwards to see how things went in the year past? We celebrate our successes and lament our failures. But then, we must look forward to the future. Maybe this is the year things come together for us. Maybe this is the year we get fit, lose weight, earn more money, be more generous etc.

Resolutions

And of course I’m talking about New Year’s resolutions. People take this time as a sort of goal-setting time. They want to do things differently this year than they’ve done in the past. They want to start fresh and do more. But we all know that in maybe a few days, a few weeks, or if they’re really persistent, a few months, these goals often go by the wayside and people are living in the same way they did before.

Why Resolutions Fail

So, why do New Year’s resolutions fail? Simply, it is because of the amazing power of habit. Habits control our lives to the point that we can’t even see that they do. The way we get up in the morning, the way we brush our teeth, the way we take out the trash. All of this is made possible by the amazing power of habit.

So, habits can be amazingly good. It helps us automate our everyday lives and how we live them. But this strength of habit can also be the downside too, right? What about those habits that aren’t so good? Take me for instance? I am perhaps the world’s best procrastinator. I know that I am very good at working under pressure. And so big projects like papers and the like often get put off until the last possible minute. But this habit also causes some problems like stress that pushes me towards other bad habits like stress-eating and the like.

Habits and Christianity

Folks, Christianity in large part is a religion of habit. We are a people of discipline. We talk about things like spiritual disciplines right? We talk about reading the Bible regularly and praying regularly. We have guidelines and boundaries in our faith. We have guiding principles that should shape our behaviors that often take the form of questions like, “will this help me love God and my neighbor more?”

And, as our name implies, the people called Methodists were originally distinguished from other Christians by the very methodical way in which they lived. They had a discipline of prayer and praise, fasting and feasting that made other less serious Christians poke fun at them. Originally, the term Methodist was an insult, just like the term Christian was in the early church.

Covenant

So, in Christianity, we are people that should be guided by positive habits. We should be known as people who do acts of piety, that is the private and public worship of God through spiritual disciplines. And we should be known as people who regularly do acts of mercy, acts of charity for individuals and groups of people.

But all of these habits are ensconced in the concept of boundaries and a system of order that we believe permeates our relationship with God. And that brings us to the concept of Covenant. Simply stated, a covenant is a sacred agreement that exists between two parties. Other words for this might be contract or treaty.

And all throughout the Scriptures we see God making covenant with God’s people right? God made a covenant with Abraham to make from him and Sarah a great nation. That nation, Israel, was given a covenant that allowed God to dwell in their midst. That covenant is better known as the Law of Moses or the Mosaic Covenant. At the center of this covenant are the Ten Commandments, something of a covenant charter for Israel.

Covenant Renewal

But we humans? We have a difficult time with rules and boundaries, don’t we? We often become forgetful and fail to keep parts of our agreements and duties. Or, perhaps in reality, our bad habits have gotten in the way of our obligations we have made. We made an obligation to pay this bill on time but our habit of waiting until the last minute means our credit reports show several late payments. And that is a relatively benign example.

Friends, our lives are filled with examples of what happens when people break their covenants. Marriages are shattered. Businesses fall apart. Countries go to war. What then can we do to prevent this from happening?

Memory

Friends, what we can do is to remember and renew. We can remember the covenant obligations that we have placed ourselves under in life. We can review the terms of our agreements and compare the letter of the law with how we are living it. That is one function of the Bible after all. It, at least in part, gives us some guide-rails in life for how to live so that we can compare the way we are living to the way modeled in Scripture. Am I loving God and my neighbor well?

But what happens when we fail? What happens to folks who break covenant but want to mend their relationship with God and neighbor? Well, for those of us that wish to do so, we can renew our covenant.

The Covenant Renewal

For Israel, God promised a day through the Prophet Jeremiah that God would make a New Covenant. And not just a covenant written on stone tablets, but a covenant written on human hearts. Friends, that New Covenant is the New Covenant sealed by the blood of Christ on the cross. That is the covenant of which we are all a part.

And John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, took the idea of renewing the Covenant and developed a service for us Methodists more than two hundred years ago so that you and I, and all the Methodists around the world could take a Sunday every year, pause, reflect, and then recommit our lives to God and to the New Covenant.

Part of this renewal is enacted each time we celebrate communion. We proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes again. This is the means of the New Covenant, right? But in this service, we reaffirm our faith and our commitment to following Jesus into the world.

January People

In this way, friends, we live as January people. We look backwards at the year past and see God’s faithfulness to us. But we also take stock of the ways we have failed to live up to our side of the covenant. But not allowing despair to rule us, we once again approach God with boldness, asking for grace to move forward with eyes fixed toward next January until we do this again. We live as people with an eye to the past, thanking God for God’s mighty acts of salvation but at the same time we live as people with eyes forward with hope for the coming year in which God will do amazing things in and through us.

Will you join me now as we pledge ourselves anew to God in Christ by renewing our covenant with God at this January season? Amen.