Six small seedlings growing in a row in dark earth.

Fresh Starts

When people ask if I like my job as a minister of a church I usually point out that I’m being paid to sit upstairs in my flat and read books and think deep thoughts – and that’s a pretty fortunate sort of a job to have. But not all deep thoughts are comfortable thoughts and one of the tricky subjects that I find myself coming back to again and again is how we humans come to terms with our failures, our having done wrong in life. Christianity offers redemption through the death of Jesus Christ – but whether such a doctrine speaks to us or not as Unitarians – we still, I think, have to live with ourselves and with one another – in an imperfect world where we all continually make mistakes – be those deliberate or not.

That story we heard earlier on of the Magic Peach Seed – tells of a thief who turns his life around, through his own deep thinking. He asked the king and all his courtiers if any of them could honestly say that they had never committed a wrong or made a mistake. Did it remind you of the story of Jesus forgiving the woman caught in adultery and saving her from being stoned to death? Such a simple but powerful command: ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’. We’ll never know what happened to the woman after that. But Jesus’ intervention saved her life that day, gave her another chance, the possibility of a fresh start.

And fresh starts are being offered to young people and students of all ages all around the country this autumn as new school and college years begin. Stepping into a local stationery shop nearly induced a shopping frenzy in me the other day – the sight of all those stationery items designed to bring order to our lives – new pencil cases, new pens, new files and folders – all displayed in honour of the new college and school year.  For me these items represent hope – the hope that I will learn how to file things in a way from which they can be easily retrieved, hope that buying a new set of folders will bring order to the chaos of paper work which threatens to engulf my desk.  There’s a different message for all of us I suspect.  I liked school when I was young and so September still holds a positive feeling for me even today.  A friend who hated school described how the trip to buy a new satchel, pencil case or new item of school uniform filled him with dread at the end of each summer holiday and how September has left him feeling anxious ever since.  I wonder what meaning a new year has for you.  Do you remember a particular favourite pencil case or pen, do you remember, with joy or fear perhaps, opening up a new exercise book with all its pages as yet unwritten on?

One of the deep thoughts that I return to periodically is such a simple one – and it’s that life isn’t easy. It’s really quite demanding being alive. No wonder then that we humans look for ways to bring order to the chaos so that we have some sense of where we stand.  We create times in which we can stop and reflect, look back at where we have been and forward to where we want to be going.  In our culture we have our new year celebrations on January 1st, the Chinese celebrate their new year on the full moon that falls at the end of January or early February.  The Jewish

New Year festival of Rosh Hashanah festival occurs in the early autumn.  This festival celebrates the creation of the world and marks a time of judgement by God.  That is why Jews make their new year a time for remembering the hurt that they may have caused family and friends, or their community.  They remember and they do their best to make amends, to heal fractured relationships, to restore and re-create.  Rabbi Steven Katz writes this about the Jewish New Year: “at Rosh Hashanah we are encouraged, urged, mandated to play back the video of our year’s contact with family, friends and community and to express our honest regret, sincere contrition for the times we failed to reach our own expectations of moral conduct and those of our tradition”. For Jews this is a time of reflection and repentance in which all relationships are to be considered, including the relationship with one’s self and with one’s world. Rosh Hashanah represents a wake-up call, a time to disrupt the ruts that we may have slipped into, a time to reflect honestly and start anew.  That’s why traditionally the rabbi sounds the ram’s horn or shofar to awaken people from the slumbering ways that they may have slipped into during the year that has passed.  Rosh Hashanah marks the start of a ten day period of atonement in which Jews seek to make amends for any wrongs they have done in the last year. This 10 day period is known as The Days of Awe – a name that suggests the seriousness with which it is regarded and it ends at Yom Kippur – the most sacred day of the Jewish year.

In the life of our world community, it would probably be very healthy if we could create a new year and a new page, wipe the slate clean, come to the world’s issues refreshed once more, with new eyes and ears and ideas.  But the world, as they say, is always with us – all we can do is to keep rededicating ourselves to the tasks of making things better as best we can.  That’s why it helps to be guided by inspirational people, people who are seemingly able to rise above the messy complexities of life and remind us of the hope and possibility that come through commitment and determination.  Back in the eighties I met the South African archbishop Desmond Tutu when he was touring Europe to gain support for the campaign to end apartheid in his country.  What a warm and loving man he is, able on a grey November day in Sheffield, in a small and dingy community hall, to bring the campaign against apartheid to life for us. He convinced us that it was worth boycotting South African fruit and vegetables, worth writing letters to our MPs, worth demanding that the world community take action against a regime based on a frightening belief that some people deserve to be treated differently from other people.  And Archbishop Tutu has never stopped campaigning for one cause or another. He spoke recently, as did the pope, Pope Francis, against a military intervention in Syria. Tutu said that the crisis in Syria can only be resolved by ‘Human intervention not military intervention’ and that ‘we need to talk to avoid further bloodshed not to fight’.

In the face of such major global crises it’s easy to feel despair – to give up almost. I think the challenge for us is to hold the possibility of a fresh start always in our hearts and minds. We may have little influence over world events but we have a great deal of influence over our own lives. Each of us has this potential to view each moment as a new beginning – Arnold Bennett writes that

‘The chief beauty about time

is that you cannot waste it in advance.

The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you,

as perfect, as unspoiled,

as if you had never wasted or misapplied

a single moment in all your life.

You can turn over a new leaf every hour

if you choose.’ – Arnold Bennett

 If we can hold this possibility for ourselves, then we hold the possibility for the whole of humanity and indeed for our entire world. May each moment be a fresh start for us all and may our world experience a Happy New Year.

 Rev. Sarah Tinker 

Sermon – 8th September 2013