What an odd time of the year this is! We have concluded the season of Advent, the first Sunday of which is the New Year’s Day, the first day, of the Christian liturgical calendar. And we are now only a very few days away from New Year’s Day, the first day of the secular calendar.
It is a kind of in-between time. The excitement of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day has largely come and gone even though we continue in a residual kind of Christmassy spirit. We look ahead eagerly to the excitement of that one last tick of the clock in 2025 and the first tick of the clock in 2026.
I find that this in-between time is a good time for thinking more deeply about my life, about my family, and about our culture and our times. I think of it as a kind of “time-out” when our schedules slow down and the slower pace makes room for deeper thoughts about who we are and who we might want to be.
The Jewish people to whom Third Isaiah prophesied were in a kind of in-between time. The first returning exiles had left Babylon after six decades of captivity in Babylon, and later exiles would have spent even more time in that alien land. They were returning to a city that had been smashed, literally, with very little, if any, of the city’s buildings still standing. Read more…