Happy New Year’s Eve!

Yes, you read that right. Before I explain, how about a little anthropology refresher? We humans are inescapably calendar-shaped and calendar-shaping creatures. Even long after we abandoned agrarian society for the industrial, we still habitually mark the seasons: civic year, school year, sports and leisure, and just about everything else we do. They say history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. We can’t help but to settle into a sort of cyclical annual rhythm, building traditions that build us in turn, creatures of habit that we are. And we’ve always been this way – think back to the Hebrews, with the calendar of feasts God gave them when he delivered them from the Egyptians and their own yearly rhythms of pagan worship. What about Stonehenge and all the other ancient agrarian artifacts that testify to human wonder at the turning of seasons on the wheel of time?Christians, too, have a historic calendar, a way of remembering and rejoicing together at God’s redemptive activity in space and time. It begins each year with Advent – usually the Sunday following Thanksgiving – as we begin to count down the days, (long after Macy’s gets their early start), to Christmas: the high holy day for our celebration of the incarnation of God. But the Sunday prior to the beginning of the year is the final Sunday of the year, which for a long time was simply the Final Sunday of Ordinary Time, and has since come to be known as Christ the King Sunday.On Christ the King Sunday, we celebrate the triumphant climax and conclusion of our hope, just before we set our hearts to remembering anew His humble beginnings in a manger. We gather together to picture Christ seated upon His throne, reigning and ruling over the restored universe with perfect justice and peace, having put down once and for all the dark rebellion that so tenaciously clung to the world from its foothold in our hearts.By great serendipity this feast day does coincide for us Americans with our civic day of Thanksgiving. And how appropriate it is that we look with gratitude both backward over a year of plenty and forward to our great Hope on His throne, like the two-headed Janus, for whom January is named. So again, I say, happy New Year’s Eve! I hope you can celebrate with us this weekend as we conclude our study in Philippians, a book that so perfectly captures these themes and stirs our affections with a joy unspeakable.-Josh