Dear Friends,
I hope that you are settling into 2025 as smoothly and gently as possible!
I always perceive January to be a very long month. I know that it has 31 days, just like many other months of the year, but January somehow manages to make it feel like 131 days! Well at least for me anyway. I wonder if some of that is because it comes after such a busy and built up December. There are so many things going on – so many opportunities to gather together and socialise. Anything after that feels, flat, routine. But then we add on the pressure of New Year, New Me with well-intentioned resolutions aiming to transform our lives in some way.
And January is for most churches a time of renewing our Covenant promise – realigning our focus to God.
The thing is the 'big' things in life, the celebrations, commemorations, events of all kinds, they all have a big build up and expectations surrounding them and then they happen and we enjoy them (or not) and then we are in the "what next?" stage.
The gospel reading for this week is John 2:1-11, the wedding at Cana, credited with being the place of Jesus' first miracle or sign. We are told that it 'revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him" (v11). And that is where the lectionary passage finishes.
But there is one more verse in the chapter, v12. "After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers and his disciples; and they remained there for a few days."
Can you imagine the conversations as they travelled home? The requests for an explanation, the banter and the questions. Jesus had already begun to be living a different life to the one they were used to him living. Perhaps this really highlighted to the family the calling that Jesus was setting out on – one that they would not understand, nor at that point, accompany. But it was also a space where the ordinary, everyday things were happening – they had gone home back to the routine and yet it wasn't the same. The sense of change would have been tangible but what that would mean and how it would play out was unknown at that stage.
It was a January time.
We spend a lot of our energy gearing up for the big things in life – we do this in our mission work and outreach too – but we also need to give some time and energy to what happens afterwards in that downtime, allow the space for questions and reflection and consider how we sustain the sense of purpose beyond the big, public event or action. How do we continue to grow our belief in the mundane times as well as the exciting!
As we note that our world in its politics and governance, through natural disasters, through the engagement and interaction between people for good or bad, and for the more personal and individual experiences of change, we offer this time of change and uncertainty to a holy and powerful creating God.
Every blessing
Rev Karen
PS. The week of Prayer for Christian Unity runs from 18th -25th January – look out for any events connected with this near you!