A New Year Whether We Want it Or Not
On Celebration as Defiance
New Year’s Eve is often amateur hour, a rookie’s party. It’s too often a holiday devoid of a true anchor, a celebration insisting upon itself. What are we celebrating?
If we are just supposed to celebrate because one year ended, I’d like to hear people lamenting because they know they are going to miss the old year. Maybe 2024 was really good for you, and you are more or less certain 2025 won’t be up to snuff. Maybe you had a lousy 2024 and you don’t know if you can expect much around the bend from 2025. Neither scenario makes you want to count down from ten with thousands of people, hearts warmed by alcohol and delusion at 11:59:50.
Look, 2025 might be your best year yet.
It might be your worst.
You’ll probably cry.
You might have a few laughs.
Your heart will still be just as fragile as it was in 2024.
Your body will most likely be more fragile.
You might experience unimaginable success.
You might feel unspeakable loss.
Resolutions kept or discarded will both likely be forgotten by July, but the need to celebrate something will remain. You will still grope blindly in search of something to celebrate. We all do. We all need a win.
Defiance is an unwillingness to accept a reality that has been constructed around you. Defiant kids don’t believe they have to live in the parameters their parents or teachers have set for them. Resistance movements started because a defiant group refused to accept that oppressive regimes could force reality on them. To celebrate in the face of uncertainty, to cling to a truth you feel is real when everything around you is trying to prove it false, is biblical defiance.
In Acts 16, Paul and Silas get locked up after disrupting a local economy built on fortune telling and soothsaying. The Gospel of Freedom got them thrown into the ‘inner prison’ (Read: thrown under the jail). At this point in his life, St. Paul has already been stoned, chased out of town, and mocked openly in multiple cities. Yet again, he is being told he is wrong, his gospel is false, and his hope is founded on a dangerous lie. Paul and Silas stay up all night singing songs.
Paul and Silas couldn’t keep silent. This wasn’t them singing songs of lament, feeling sorry for themselves or begging God to have mercy on their lowly state. Paul and Silas were celebrating. They were having a party praising God in defiance of what was being done to them and what was being told to them. They were convinced of a deeper truth than the world was telling them. They saw the cracks in the façade long before an earthquake broke their chains.
When we come together as believers, we are making an act of defiance. In 2025, everything will tell us not to associate with people who vote differently than us, but going to church alongside them is defiant. In 2025, we will hear countless news stories telling us how everything is going wrong, worshipping and celebrating our faith is defiant. When we take communion, it’s called a celebration for a reason. We are celebrating in spite of the messages of death and disaster around us. We are not oblivious to the pain or suffering of the world, we are standing in defiance of it, knowing that even in the midst of it we are with God. ‘The cure for pain is in the pain,’ because in the pain we have a God who experiences it with us, and who has been victorious over it while going all the way through it.
May we find 2025 as another cause for celebration—not because it is a clean slate, but because it has 365 opportunities to experience God. Because it has 365 days in which God will walk alongside us through our garbage and our mess. Because it has 365 days in which Jesus wants to be completely known by us.
Happy New Year. We are going to get 365 days closer to planting a church this year too.