A New Year: A New Covenant
Deuteronomy 31:9-13

There was an article in Time Magazine about a month ago about the new and innovative things that people were doing in Christian education. There are some churches that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building theme park like structures for children so that they can compete and draw families into their congregations. Now we haven’t planned any hundred thousand dollar structures here, so don’t shake in your shoes. In that article they mentioned the rotation Sunday School model, which started in the Midwest, and has spread across the country in which children learn more by rotating between different learning stations. They can learn in a way that is not only creative but engaging and makes them want to come to Sunday school. After a year of preparation Lou and her team were able to put together our first rotation model. For December it went really really well. I’d like to tell you the children are downstairs preparing for you to come down and to see their rooms after church this morning, so I want you to be sure that you do that. One of those rotations is a drama section, and they are going to share a little bit with you what they are learning in video today. I want you to watch this:

(Video starts)

If Sunday school were that much fun when you were a kid you probably would have gone, too. Today we are going to be using John Wesley’s Covenant Renewal Service, which he borrowed from some Puritan somewhere along the way, and as a reminder to us that as we approach a New Year, that it’s time to look at where we are and where we might be going. I’m often reminded as we look at the book of Deuteronomy that for the children of Israel, that the covenant was the central thing which held them and bound them to God. And if you were to ask ‘well what covenant’ it would have certainly been the one from Mount. Sinai. There they received 700 and some laws and rules about who they were and what God had called them to be. And from there their story was woven into the future. We see in this passage in Deuteronomy that once every seven years on the Jewish New Year, they had to gather. And they listened, as the whole Torah was reread. That’s Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Now you want to talk about tedious and boring religious education. It’s nothing like you just saw a few minutes ago. But they listened and heard that covenant reread in their sight so that they and their children might remember the story. What it was that bound them to God, so that they might know God’s presence and know God’s love in their living. I always thought it was neat that Christmas always falls within a week of our New Year’s. Because we are Christians, the covenant, which binds us to God, we seek principally through the coming of Jesus into this world. It doesn’t hurt as we are looking at an old year that is passing and moving into a New Year that is coming, that we are reminded of that story. And reminded that, somehow, who we are and what we are about is bound to God though the birth of that child.

My Christian education professor use to say to us that if he could develop Christian education like he wanted to that he would develop it around what he called the doors in our lives. All of us are on a journey, and there are certain doors, which we have to open, which come naturally and there are others that come in times of crisis. But as we come to each of these doors in our life, we have to stop and take an accounting of whom we are and where our life has been up to that moment, because we know once we pass through that door that will change. That somehow a blending of our past with our present will bring us to our future. What are some of those doors? Well, getting married would be one of those doors. Having a child, having children grow up and leave home. Another door might be retirement. Those are all positive doors in our life. But there are other doors. Doors like divorce; a door like chronic illness that takes away the quality of our lives; a door like losing a job. Whether those doors are good or bad, whether they give us joy or a sense of crisis, when we come to that point in time, we must take a recollection and a reminding of where we’ve been, so we might know where we are going.

Now there is a lot that has been said about New Year’s resolutions already. I’ve seen it in the media, and I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. What I do know is that New Year’s is kind of a ritualistic time when we open one door and go into it. It gives us a natural time to stop where we are and to think a little bit about what has happened in the year past. I was talking to a friend on the phone the other day, he said ‘you know there is so much overwhelming in my life right now that I need to just sit down with a piece of paper and write out what is most important to me. So that in the months to come I can live my life intentionally and not just in a way that it has been, where I’ve been so caught up that I haven’t really had time to organize my thoughts and center my life on the things that really matter to me.’ What I want to say to all of us is, as we go through this old Wesleyan ritual of re-covenant it might symbolically remind all of us, that God is renewing a covenant with us as God surely did with the Children of Israel in the past. That as we re-bond with the story of Christmas we are reminded of its central place in defining who we are in relationship to God, with one another and with ourselves. We might look to our past, to a year which has almost left us, and be reminded of both the good and the bad, and where God was with us in the midst of that year. And as we move into the coming year, that we might ask God’s presence, not only to be with us, but that it may move us to do God’s will and not ours. Let’s bow our heads now for a word of prayer