The Baptism of the Lord - New Year's Resolutions

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.
Happy New Year!

How many of you made a new year’s resolution this year?

I did too, and I’ll share it with you later.

Earlier this week I was listening to a program on CBC about New Year’s resolutions.  I don’t remember what they said the statistics were, but it got me thinking about them.  It turns out that there are a couple of well-known studies about New Year’s resolutions.  The stats are available on the internet.

How long do you think most people keep their resolutions?

According to the studies, more than half of us keep going for more than a month.  One in four of us will give up in our first week.  Less than one in four of us will make it through the whole year.

If we do so badly at keeping our New Year’s resolutions, why do we keep making them?  And what does this have to do with our readings today?  Aren’t they about baptism?

Well, they are important and they have a lot to do with baptism; especially the baptism of Jesus.

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Why would Jesus need this baptism?

Baptism, for John, was a long-standing tradition in the Jewish faith.  They would be baptized to cleanse themselves so that they could return to the temple.  It was a ritual of new beginnings.  Jesus was baptized at the beginning of his ministry.  It was the moment when he gave up his former life as the son of a carpenter and took up his life as the Beloved Son of God, the Anointed One, the Salvation of the World.

That’s quite a new beginning.

Our baptisms were also new beginnings.  When we were baptized, we gave up the ordinary life of a blessed creation of God and took up a new life of promise.  We took up the promise to actively seek God’s kingdom on earth instead of waiting to find it when we die.  We took up the promise to look for God’s work in our lives, to listen for God’s voice calling us, to feel the pain of God’s creation being mistreated, to breathe in the sustaining incense of prayer and worship, to live as those who know that we are the beloved of God.

This is a big promise.

It is also one that we are bound to fail at over and over again.

This is where New Year’s resolutions come in.

I said earlier that New Year’s resolutions were important.  Here’s why: every time we make a New Year’s resolution, we are making a new beginning, kind of like a mini-baptism.  We are renewing some small part of God’s call to us.

The studies on New Year’s resolutions showed that less than one in four of us manage to keep them for the whole year.  This may sound disheartening, but there is a big silver lining.

While most of us won’t succeed in keeping our resolutions for the whole year, those who make resolutions are more likely to reach the goals that they set for themselves, even if they have many slips.  That one surprised me.  Even though we are setting ourselves up to fail, we still end up succeeding eventually.

So our message is to keep trying.  When we fail at our resolutions, don’t give up.  Instead, we need to look at our failure as a step on the way to success.  Make the resolution all over again, starting right away.  We don’t need to wait ‘til next New Year to start over.  Any time is a good time.

Another thing to remember is that you are not alone in your failure.  I am not alone in my failure.  We all mess up.  God does not stop calling us.  God does not stop loving us.  God does not stop expecting us to pull up our socks and try again.

I also said that I would tell you my resolution.

As a priest in this diocese, I have a long list of things that I MUST do.  There are always more things to do than there is time to do them.  I am very good at setting my priorities by doing what is easiest to do first and working my way down to those things that take the most of my energy.  This is a strategy that doesn’t work very well.  By the time I finish the easy things, I have very little energy left.

My New Year’s resolution is to set my priorities by what is most important, not by what is easiest.

This means that the first things on my list every day will be visiting, prayer, and worship, in that order.  Everything else I have to do will just have to wait if I don’t have the time or the energy for it.

Since I don’t live as a hermit, but as part of a community, I am asking for your help in keeping this resolution.  I’ve put one way that you can help me on the back of the bulletin today.  I’m sure there are other ways that you can support me as well.

I would also love to hear from any or all of you about what you are working on in your lives.  I will do all I can to support you in your resolutions, and I hope you will all try to help each other.

This is one of the promises we made in baptism and renew at every baptism that we attend.  We promise to support other baptized people as they grow into the full stature of children of God.  So we walk together with each other and God walks along with us.

Thanks be to God.