New Year — A Time to Reflect Upon the Past

In the minds of most Americans, New Year’s Day is a day for parades and college football. But the coming of the new year is also considered a time of new beginning–coming as it does a week after the busy Christmas holiday. This time of year, people are often in the mood to stop and reflect upon all the significant events of the past year.

The various news outlets and social media venues will spend much time this week recounting the names and faces of those influential figures and celebrities who have died in the past year. I am always amazed at how many of these people are already largely forgotten within a year of their death. Life is fleeting. News programming will broadcast a number of video montages of the significant events of the past year–from the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the threat of nuclear war, the huge cultural shifts and tribal political warfare now under way, the on-going effects of Covid-19 and lockdowns, to a host of other human tragedies and poignant moments. A great deal has happened the past year.

But that is not all we associate with the New Year. As is the custom, we are all supposed to make a series of New Year’s resolutions about what we will do better next year, or not do, as the case may be. If we break our resolutions within moments after making them, it really does not matter, it is the making of them that counts.

The combination of all these things makes the coming new year a great time to stop and reflect upon the events of the recent past, as well as our hope for the future. Such a time of reflection has been the historic practice of Reformed churches. Article 37 of the URCNA church order lists New Year’s Day (along with New Year’s Eve, Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost and Ascension Day) as occasions when the consistory may call the congregation together for worship, although, to my knowledge, New Year’s day services are not widely held in our churches except perhaps when New Year’s Day falls on a Sunday.

Henry Ford on History as “Bunk”

As with most things, the Christian take on the events of the past and our expectations for the future stands in sharp contrast to the non-Christians around us. One place where the antithesis (i.e., the stark contrast) between Christian and non-Christian thinking is most striking is in how we as Christians view the past and ground our hope for the future. Most Americans, I think, would agree with Henry Ford (the founder of the automotive company which still bears his name) who is widely quoted to have said, “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”

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