Quick Summary:

On this first Sunday of the New Year, we continue the celebration of Christ's birth—God’s great leap from the scale of the infinite to a scale of size we can understand. As the New Year dawns, our hopes often rise with it…or try to.
• Maybe this will be the year we reach our weight goal, or pay off our credit card debt.
• Maybe this will be the year we find our soulmate, or the year we finally reconcile with our estranged sibling.
• Maybe this year we’ll find the health or happiness that’s eluded us.
• Maybe this year will be the year…(fill in the blank.)

This morning’s gospel reminds us that the God who became flesh in Jesus came into the muddle of all it means to be human. Came into a world where New Year resolutions are often unmet, where the old material from personal lives keeps asserting itself, and where the power-mongering of nations has us living through the same tired scripts once more.

Living as we do in the midst of such a world, God’s gift to us isn’t one more idea or philosophy, but God’s own presence, made real and tangible and accessible in the child of Bethlehem.