Hilton Head Island, SC – December 30, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Leviticus 23:15-22; Leviticus 23:23-36
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And the Lord said to Moses, “Say to the people of Israel, in the seventh month, on the first of the month, you shall observe a day of solemn rest, a memorial proclaimed with blasts of trumpets, a holy convocation.” – Leviticus 23:23-24 (RSV)
People who make their living from the land have a totally different concept of the passing of the seasons from those of us who don’t know a twelve-bottom plow from a Holstein cow. City slickers, suburbanites, and people who live on barrier islands may be aware of weather patterns and average daily temperatures, but they don’t affect us the way they affect people whose livelihood depends on rainfall and sunshine and the proper temperatures to make crops or herds or orchards produce to the maximum.
In a similar way, while most of us are remotely aware of the movement of seasons by observing the weather, we don’t sense the passing of seasons that way. Actually, with the temperatures we have had throughout December, it is very hard to believe that New Year’s Day is only two days away. We tend mainly to know what the date is by looking at the newspaper or a cell phone to us what the date is. Not so with farmers or shepherds. They intuitively know what the season is by having the words of the old English hymn etched into their bones and into their minds: “How beautiful the march of days/ As seasons come and go;/ The Hand that shaped the rose hath wrought/ The crystal of the snow.” But on barrier islands in South Carolina, you can’t even count on the crystal of the snow to know what the season is.
The word “holiday” came about by yoking two words together: “holy” and “day.” Linguistically, a holiday technically is a holy day, a day observed with religious rituals.
In western secular societies, however, such as the United States of America, we have more holidays that aren’t holy days than holidays that are holy days. Is Presidents Day or the Fourth of July or Labor Day or Veterans Day holy days? Not particularly. You could say that Memorial Day is a holy day, and on the Fourth of July or Labor Day or Veterans Day there might be a prayer at public gatherings, but while these days are holidays, they aren’t really holy days.
The biblical Israelites did not follow a solar calendar. For them, the sun did not determine the seasons. Instead they had a lunar calendar, in which the moon decided which month was which. But in a lunar calendar, there are thirteen months. Therefore the solar seasons get somewhat skewed through the passage of time. But about that I shall say no more, because it is only of academic interest, if it is even that, and not of theological interest.
In the 23rd chapter of the Book of Leviticus, God told Moses that the Israelites were to observe four divinely-determined holidays each year. In the first month of the Hebrew lunar calendar, on the fourteen day, says Leviticus, they were to celebrate Pesach, or, as we say in English, Passover. Passover always occurs in the spring. Fifty days after that they were to observe Sukkoth, the Feast of Weeks, or in Christian terminology, Pentecost. Sukkoth usually comes in late May or early June. Then, in the fall, on the first day of the seventh month, they were to celebrate what both Jews and Christians know as Rosh Hashanah, the New Year. Then, ten days after that, they observed the holiest of all four of the great holidays, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
When I was planning this sermon, I called my friend Brad Bloom. Brad is the rabbi here at Congregation Beth Yam. I wanted to be sure I said what I should say today, and that I didn’t say anything I shouldn’t say. Brad told me something I had never heard before. Each of the four major festivals of the Jewish calendar is, in one sense, a New Year’s festival. That is, it reminds people that a year has passed since the last Passover or Sukkoth or Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. However, it is never exactly a year in the lunar calendar from one holiday to the next. July 4, Christmas, and New Year’s Day in the solar calendar are always July 4, December 25, and January 1, but the dates of the Jewish holidays always vary from year to year in the solar calendar. Nevertheless, each of the four festivals (feast days) is like another New Year’s Day, Brad told me.
All that is by way of introduction to the question addressed by today’s sermon title, Is New Year’s Day a Religious Holiday? It is certainly a secular holiday, even though that term is technically an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. My saying that is not going to alter what the word “holiday” now means, however. A holiday is a day when most working people don’t go to work, and in which they celebrate something or other in one way or another.
On New Year’s Day in the USA, millions of people, many but probably not all of them willing participants, will watch football games. I can assure you that at our house we will be doing that for several hours. In one particular game I will be rooting for the unranked team which enters the Rose Bowl with the worst won-lost record for that bowl game in many years, and perhaps ever, at 8-5. The Wisconsin Badgers will play the Stanford Cardinals at 11-2, ranked No. 8 nationally. But does this, or any of the other bowl games, make New Year’s Day a religious holiday? Should Wisconsin win, it will be a miracle, but will it be religious? I don’t think so. Incidentally, I will be talking about similar issues in the upcoming OLD Philosopher lecture entitled, The American Obsession with Sports. Come and hear more.
When people think about New Year’s Day, or especially when they think about New Year’s Eve, they normally are not swept away with religious ecstasy. Many decades ago, many American churches had what were called Watch-Night services on New Year’s Eve. They went out of fashion about the same time as high-button shoes. When I was on the staff of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago forty-five years ago, some staff member --- not I, I can assure you --- suggested it would be a good idea to have a watch-night service. It wasn’t. Lots of preparations were made, including food and proper Presbyterian drink for scores or hundreds, and almost no one came. Of those who did, over half were church staff members who were there with as much enthusiasm as for a visit to the dentist for a spiffy root canal.
On New Year’s Eve, 1963, my wife and I happened to be staying at a small inn in the Cairngorm Mountains of northern Scotland. The Cairngorms are the best ski area in Scotland, but one cannot count on snow there when one wants to go skiing, which we, or at least I, wanted to do. However, it happened there was a lot of snow right then, so much that it was impossible to make it up the mountain to the ski lift. So there were a lot of initially unhappy revelers on that New Year’s Eve, who nevertheless became happier as the night wore on.
When we arrived in the village of Aviemore late that afternoon, there was almost no room in the inn. The only room we could book was a leftover one adjoining the main public room in the small hotel. Of all the peoples of the world, the Scots are perhaps the most enthusiastic of New Year’s greeters, but 75 years ago they didn’t even have Christmas as a national holiday. But the Scots make every effort to make the turning of every new year into a memorable occasion, except that many of them unfortunately are rendered incapable of remembering any of them. We went to bed about 10 PM, having driven many twisting miles that day. Through much of the night until dawn, which in that northerly latitude on January 1 comes at about 9:30 AM, people were knocking on our door and saying, “Mr. and Mrs. Miiiillller, come on out and join the party!” We didn’t need to. We could hear the joyful celebrating with no difficulty at all, as though all of them were right there in the room with us.
In my second life as well as my first, I have never been thrilled with New Year’s Eve parties. It isn’t, you should pardon the expression, my cup of tea - - - or any other kind of drink, for that matter. But because of football bowl games, New Year’s Day has always been a great pleasure. Well actually, because of the bowl games, some New Year’s Days have been considerably less than pleasurable. We shall soon see how it turns out for 2013.
But is New Year’s Day a religious holiday? We have established that it is a holiday in the ordinary understanding of that word, but is it a holy day?
Dr. Hugh Thompson Kerr was pastor of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the early part of the 20th century. He wrote the text to what I consider one of the greatest and most consoling of hymns of all time.
God of our life, through all the circling years,/ We trust in Thee;
In all the past, through all our hopes and fears,/ Thy hand we see.
With each new day when morning lifts the veil,
We own Thy mercies, Lord, which never fail.
Somewhere along the line of human history, or at least American history, a tradition developed for people to make New Year’s resolutions. I suppose nobody knows who started it. It is at best a very good idea, and at worst a means of convincing all of us we are hopelessly fallible, because probably no one ever observes New Year’s resolutions for the rest of their lives without at least occasionally falling off the wagon.
It seems to me it is far more important for people of faith to use each New Year’s Day as the occasion for reflecting on the goodness of God in bringing us to another year. With all the physical ailments and maladies that can afflict us, it is astonishing that anyone lives beyond age two, to say nothing of three-score-years-and-ten or even by reason of strength fourscore. We ought never to take the passing of years for granted. Each new year is a gift from God. Surely that is why God commanded our forefathers in faith, the Israelites, to observe the four major festivals each year. Back then life was far more tenuous than it is now, and the religious feast days were four annual reminders of the reliability and goodness of God. Ultimately, who can live without God’s grace? No one, including those who ignore or negate both God and His grace.
Each New Year tells us once again that, as the poet Robert Browning said of God, “Our times are in His hand.” For people of faith, we believe that life is impossible without God, and therefore we praise Him for His gift of another year to us. We do not and cannot know what the coming year holds for us, either individually or collectively, but we trust that God will be with us in it, no matter what we shall face. For some, 2013 will indeed be a happy new year, and inevitably for others it will have many obstacles and challenges. For millions of people, the economic downturn of the past five years has not improved for them, and the coming year may be no better. For others, children will be born, grandchildren will graduate from college and launch successful careers, new businesses will be started, exciting new vocational positions will be offered. Life is good, as the bumper sticker proclaims; life is good. And even when it is not so good, and is clearly a sore trial, God is still there, and that is our greatest comfort and consolation.
I have been reading a book about the early 16th century called Defenders of the Faith. It was the time of Martin Luther, Henry VIII, and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. But it was also the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sultan of Ottoman Turkey. He was probably the most powerful and majestic monarch in the whole world at that time. In 1526 Suleiman conquered the Balkans, and then laid waste to much of Hungary, including Buda and Pest, which at that time were two separate cities on opposite sides of the Danube River. In late 1529 Suleiman returned to Christian Europe in an attempt to conquer Vienna. Had he come six weeks earlier, he might have succeeded, but he didn’t, and he failed.
The great Turkish sultan considered himself the true defender of the true faith, and the Austrians and other Christians arrayed against him considered themselves the true defenders of the true faith. Had the Christians not turned Suleiman back to Constantinople, today we might be Muslims rather than Christians. The successful defense of Vienna was that crucial.
Who can judge the importance of events or individual people or the passing years ahead of time? We can guess, but we cannot be certain. But the advent of a new year gives us a natural chronological opportunity to review what God has done for us, and what He shall certainly continue to do for us. We cannot expect everything always to turn out well, but we can expect it to turn out, because our times are in God’s hands.
Is New Year’s Day a religious holiday? It is; by God’s grace it is. With all its ups and downs, this past year has been better than it might have been, and no doubt worse than it needed to be. Surely the same will be true of 2013. We determine much if not most of what happens in our lives, but God is there in the midst of all of it, guiding, chiding, protecting, and upholding us. To God be the glory; great things He has done.
God of the coming years, through paths unknown/ We follow Thee;
When we are strong, Lord, leave us not alone;/ Our refuge be.
Be Thou for us in life our Daily Bread,
Our heart’s true Home when all our years have sped.