Of course, while many are embracing change in this season of the year, the idea of change can be as much of a source of worry, concern, and even grief, as a reason for celebrating. To change means to step into the unknown. Change involves either the world shifting around you or you shifting to be someone different within it, and, therefore, involves the world changing into something unknown around you or you changing into one unknown within it. I don’t need to tell you that the unknown can be worrisome and unsettling. What’s more, change can bring with it loss. To do, be, or become something new, one must give up some old way or another. For those who perpetually are drawn to appreciate how things have been before, losing the old ways, even for beneficial and necessary changes to the good, can be a source of real grief. Change is inevitable, but even changing for the better can be lamentable and it is almost never easy.
As people of faith, though, change is something that we are called to embrace over and over again as part of the will of God for our lives. Many Lutheran leaders like to throw out the Latin term perpetua reformata (which means “always reforming”) to describe this aspect of our faith lives and the life of the church. I and others laugh at this sometimes because Lutherans often seem like one of the slowest denominations to embrace change! Still, I appreciate that there is at least theological recognition of the need to embrace the new in our denomination, even if we fail to live up to it in practice. God declared through the prophet Isaiah, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:18-19). God commands us to forget the old and pay attention to the new. The Creator who first set wildernesses and deserts in our path, will form new paths for us through them. It is a powerful paradox when you think about – God creating impassable obstacles like deserts in our path, and then doing a new thing by later creating a way through them for us. Perpetua reformata indeed! God will form new pathways for us to navigate through and around problems of the past, even if all we see is desert and wilderness before us.
May you embrace the new in your life, and may the new things be good and Godly.
In Christ,
Pastor Seth