Friday, 1/1/16
Today is New
Years Day, and an odd thing about this feast, is that all peoples of all
religions celebrate New Years. Most of those ancient peoples follow different
calendars. Korea, where I spent twelve years as a young priest, celebrates its
New Years five weeks from now on our February 8. China does the same.
In celebrating
New Years, most ancient peoples throughout Asia and Africa are actually
celebrating the creation of the world. That’s not a bad idea. We too could use
this day for thanking God for giving us this wonderful world of ours.
But when those
other peoples celebrate creation, they don’t commemorate God’s making
everything out of nothing. Rather, they believe that there was always wild
chaos here, and creation consisted in the gods bringing order out of the
original chaos.
That might
sound weird to us, but out Bible actually starts out in the same way. The first
sentence of the Book of Genesis says, “In the beginning when God created the
heavens and the earth the earth was a formless wasteland.” The original Hebrew
for “formless wasteland” was tohu-bohu which sounds like clothes being
flung around and around in a dryer.
An odd thing
about the New Years celebration for all primitive peoples is that with each
ancient people it consists in their acting out their own creation myth. All
those people believed that heaven showered the world with blessings on the day
of creation. Their myths all then follow up with a story of how the first
people did something awful; the way in our creation story Adam and Eve ate the
forbidden fruit, causing God to turn away from them.
When primitive
peoples dress up as animals, and then act out their creation myths, they are
trying to make their gods think it is creation time again. They are trying to
trick the gods into returning with the same favors they showered on mankind at
creation time.
We don’t
believe any of that, but it is still a good idea to make this a day when we
thank God for creating out world.
Our wild New
Year’s Eve parties are a holdover from those ancient legends that saw the world
in chaos up to the moment the gods brought order into the world.
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