New Year 2025: Respair and Big Naps

 

As we said good riddance to the sufferings and fears of 2024 - and wished happiness and health and peace to friends and family at the turn of year - 2025 began broken with its own terrors, violence, and chaos.

 

However today, this first Sunday of the New Year, you have made a choice. You have chosen to start the New Year gathering in faith community. Coming to a place where the broken is accepted, the broken is redeemed, the broken is loved, the broken is found, and the broken is washed in grace.

 

I invite us to start fresh and for a moment let go of the beginning of 2025 (breath in and loudly breathe out)

Let us BREATHE and start fresh.

 

Instagram content creator Worry_lines, posted this week: “to have big plans, you have to have big dreams, and to have big dreams, you have to have big naps.”

This is what it is to start the New Year gathering as a faith community – we come to hear God’s big plans – to as a community embrace big plans and have big dreams; plans and dreams that contain hope, love of neighbour, welcome of stranger, belief in kindness, faith in commonwealth and the possibility of peace.

While some of us do take naps during the sermon, being here, we all take a big nap from the world and the garbage the world inundates us with. Napping from the world is respite.

Big naps mean big dreams – the kind that are life changing and world changing.

 

You have probably heard the phrase, “In times like these” –

In 1943, Ruth Caye, who was a mother of 5 and a pastor’s wife in Pennsylvania, was deeply affected by the news from the front of WWII, the casualties of war and the seeming lack of progress, the rationing of food making life difficult, and the general malaise among people. After reading 2 Timothy 3: 1 In the last days perilous times shall come…She took to writing down a few thoughts and a tune came to her. Her hymn was later made famous by George Beverly Shea and the Billy Graham crusades. Her words were:

In times like these we need a Saviour/ In times like these we need an anchor/ In times like these we need the Bible/ in times like these O be not idle

Be sure and very sure. Your anchor holds and grips the Solid Rock – Jesus is the rock.

 

Ruth could have stuck her nose into various passages in scripture that speak of last days and perilous times.

I particularly think of the prophets. Jeremiah being a good example. Jeremiah, known as the ‘weeping prophet,’ spends 5 decades speaking big dreams into the doom and gloom of idolatry, social injustice, and the moral decay of his day. He faced opposition, imprisonment, and personal struggles. He must have taken lots of naps, for he had a hope that went beyond human understanding. In the middle of a war, with the enemy army invading and destroying, displacing people and exiling them, he buys a piece of land at full price. Believing God’s big dream of settled living, with abundance of produce, peace among people, love of neighbour, love of God; where everyone has enough, no one has too much; foreigners are welcomed, and the land is respected. That’s a big dream.

 

“In Times Like These” is a phrase older than Ruth Caye. Nellie McClung, a Canadian author, politician, and social activist wrote a book in 1915, titled: “In Times Like These.” This was during WWI. Her chapters: The War that Never Ends, The War that Ends in Exhaustion Sometimes Mistaken for Peace, What Do Women Think of War (Not that It Matters), and War Against Gloom. Before writing her thoughts on the war against gloom, I think she took a big nap, so she could dream big, so she had something to offer that she did not find in the world around her. She wrote an eloquent poem prayer, so suitable for the beginning of a New Year in times like these:

 Not for all sunshine, dear Lord, do we pray-  We know such a prayer would be vain;

But that strength may be ours to keep right on our way, Never minding the rain!

 

The Oxford Junior Dictionary is a condensed dictionary used mostly in schools. Words are chosen for the dictionary as words that the editors think all students should know. Every few years the dictionary editors review the words, removing some and adding others. In 2007, 40 common words of natural things (like dandelion, fern, otter) were left out, and replaced by virtual things (like blog, bullet-point, voicemail). This disturbed author Richard Macfarlane enough that he wrote the book The Lost Words. Using 20 of the 40 words he created a spell-book of sorts to bring magic and mystery and curiosity to the 20 natural item words; to provide a place to dream and imagine an acorn, a wren, a dandelion. Richard must have taken a big nap before putting the book together, to dream of the power of words. He believed that if you don’t have words for something, then it ceases to exist in the imagination.

 

God must have started with a big nap. God certainly rested after the creation of the world, before dreaming again. The opening of John’s Gospel sets before us the mystery, the beauty, and the vastness of creation, of God’s imagination and big dream, of the presence of the Word, woven in, around, and through everything.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s son, full of grace and truth.

From his fullness we have received, grace upon grace.

 

I have taken a nap or two over the past week. My dreams have been filled by one word, RESPAIR.

Respair is an old English word that means new hope; a recovery from despair.

In times like these I believe we need respair. In times like these I believe that new hope and recovery from despair are a big dream, a dream that is dreamed and comes to be by resting here, in faith community, in the Word, in prayer; or in other words taking a nap with God.

In times like these, you have acted boldly coming to a place where we dream big – a place where the broken is accepted, the broken is redeemed, the broken is loved, the broken is found, and the broken is washed in grace upon grace.

This year let us read and listen to poetry – whether a bit from the prophet Jeremiah or the beginning of the Gospel of John, Nellie Mc Clung or Ruth Caye; let their dreams and the Word woven in the writing fuel life and beauty and mystery, and respair.

Take big naps so you have big dreams – and can live out God’s dreams.

And remember to BREATH.