Time is pushing us onwards

Happy New Year!

Pushing time in the New Year It鈥檚 funny how we invest this time of year with so much hope, and lament, and desire, and celebration and even anxiety.聽 It is, after all, an almost randomly chosen date for the start of a new year taken from a calendar that was formulated by a group of Astronomers, under instruction from Pope Gregory, in the 1600s and only really adopted across the west in the 19^th Century.聽 Admittedly we鈥檝e had the 1^st January as the start of the new year since about 45BCE when it was introduced by Julius Caesar, but when January 1^st occurred shifted each year.

But time is important to us. We human beings are 鈥榗hildren of time鈥� and time bounds our lives and guides every part of every day. We are situated in a particular time and place and we share with every human being on the planet the same allocation of time each day. The same number of seconds, minutes, hours are available to each one of us, rich or poor.聽 Time is, perhaps, the greatest leveller, none of us can stop it, cheat it, store it or thwart it 鈥� no matter how hard we try.

As we constantly push onwards into and through time, we mark the important things 鈥� births and deaths, relationships, beginnings, endings, celebrations, family, friendships. We try to remember anniversaries, birthdays and celebrations. We mark special times and we observe those things which, though we move forward through time, come in cycles: festivals and feasts, harvests, light in the darkness, holidays and community celebrations. Being in this time and place is important, and celebrating where we are is important 鈥� and I say that as a recently landed immigrant who has found a welcome and a home here in Victoria at this time. This place has become home, and this time feels like the right time to have made this move.

The Christian faith teaches that God is beyond time and place as we know it. Yet at the same time God is intimately involved in this world. God is so involved in this world that he made himself human to share in this experience of time and place which is being human. God is not distant and distinct from humanity but wrapped up in our everydays and in all that we do, all that we struggle with, all that we celebrate. God embraces this world of time and place.

One of the questions that is often asked, including in the musical 鈥楯esus Christ Superstar鈥� is why God would have chosen the time and place God did to be incarnate, in a relatively unknown outback of the Roman Empire and in relatively obscure, pre-rational, pre-technological times. It鈥檚 not something I could answer here in depth, but my take is that as we are still talking about Jesus, and encountering the reality of faith two thousand years later all over the world then something about that time and place was right! God took flesh, made Godself one of us, and shared our human life in order that somehow we might see and share in something of the reality of God in our own time and place.

May you know the God who is with us all in this season, and throughout the year.聽 May the God of time and place, the God who is with us be a reality for all of us this year and may the God whose love keeps him/her intimately involved in this world be your companion and your friend this year and always.

Alastair McCollumis a West Country boy (south west England, that is) who has been an Anglican Minister since the mid 1990s in England - London, Rural Cambridgeshire and Rural Devon. 聽He recently started serving as Rector of St John the Divine Anglican Church in Victoria and has moved here with his wife Jo and two young children. 聽He has a passion for the Gospel, motorbikes and bike culture, worship, philosophy, theology, guitars, single malt whisky, real ale, cinema and all things French.聽