It’s Advent again.  Happy New Year!

Yes, it’s a time of preparation for Christmas, for the High Holy-Days of the Nativity of Our Lord, when we rejoice in the Word become flesh in the baby of Bethlehem, through the Twelve Days of the Feast of Christmas.  But, it’s also a time of reflection about where that baby went when he grew up, and what his death and resurrection have accomplished, what has begun in him never to be reversed.

This New Year’s celebration on the Christian calendar reminds us that although God loves us and the whole wounded creation just as we are, God is not content with swords/guns/bombs and spears/planes/missiles.  God is bound and determined – and has begun it with unstoppable momentum in Christ Jesus – to change the world, the whole creation, into a place where God’s shalom truly reigns forever.  No need for swords and spears, the literal kind, or the other kinds which we fling at each other with dismal regularity.

Perhaps Advent is a time when we might better say, Happy New Creation!

Thanks be to God!