Day 35 - Saturday, January 1
NEW YEAR’S DAY
Title: DEPART IN PEACE: A SONG OF THANKSGIVING
Scripture: Luke 2:29; Psalm 116:12-19

“Lord, Now You are letting Your servant depart in peace.”

What shall I render to the Lord
For all His benefits toward me?
I will take up the cup of salvation,
And call upon the name of the Lord.
I will pay my vows to the Lord
Now in the presence of all His people.

Precious in the sight of the Lord
Is the death of His saints.

O Lord, truly I am Your servant;
I am Your servant, the son of Your maidservant;
You have loosed my bonds.
I will offer to You the sacrifice of thanksgiving,
And will call upon the name of the Lord.

I will pay my vows to the Lord
Now in the presence of all His people,
In the courts of the Lord’s house,
In the midst of you, O Jerusalem.
Praise the Lord!

Poetry:
The Dancing
by Gerald Stern

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee
     pots
I have never seen a post-war Philco 
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop—in 1945—
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—
oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

THE TIME IS NOW + DEPART IN PEACE

Denise Weyhrich’s installation could be a portrait of our lives this past year. Look at the black tombstone–there’s been death. Look at the old light bulbs crammed into a clock case--there’s been burnout. Look at the chains of old wrist watches–-instead of time moving forward in progress, it’s stopped, and many of us feel stuck.

A little more than a year ago my husband of thirty-seven years died suddenly. He had been diagnosed with stage four gastric melanoma, had responded well to treatment, but took a sudden downturn and was gone in a week. During the nine months of his illness and my subsequent year of mourning, time, either going too slow or too fast, did not run as I had expected.

But Advent tells us that for believers, time is going at the right pace. Jesus was born, died, and rose again at a particular point in time, at just the right time. Jesus will come again, though we do not know the time. These truths imbue all our moments with meaning.

Because of that, we can travel through our lives without dread. The art we are reading, listening to, and viewing today is all about the point in time when we experience departure, farewell, or ending. It’s January 1 and we are all leaving the old year behind. The poet Gerald Stern and his parents were celebrating the end of war in Europe. Simeon was anticipating his death.

How can Simeon, an old man close to death, speak of departing in peace instead of raging (as another poet has said)? How can “precious” be a word associated with our own experiences of death? How can we give thanks to God for “loosing our bonds” or breaking our chains when we may still feel so stuck?

Our reading from Psalm 116 gives us some answers: we must remember that we are God’s servants, not masters of our own lives. And we must remember his benefits, including the salvation of our souls. The song for today gives us another answer: we must look at the face of our Savior Jesus.

Of course, there is a “now, but not yet” element to these answers. Simeon is part of a group who’d been waiting for centuries for prophecy to be fulfilled and Jesus is just a baby when Simeon sees him. The poet’s family have escaped pogroms in Ukraine and holocaust in Poland and Germany, but they still live in a “filthy” and “evil” city. The psalmist has escaped death for long enough to write his psalm, but he, like all of us, would die one day. We look to Jesus, but sometimes his face is veiled in darkness. We are saying goodbye to one year, but the year ahead offers no guarantees of being better.

So, we must fix hope in our minds, perhaps with today’s song. Let it become our prayer whether we’re leaving the old year for a new one, leaving a church service to go into the world, ending a vacation and going back to work, or going from life to death—and then new life with Christ.

Prayer:
May we leave behind the despair that fills us when we look at the world, with its pogroms, holocausts, pollution, and ruthless billionaires, or when death, so prevalent in the world, touches us personally. May we experience peace because our eyes are fixed on our Savior. May we live in God’s now. May we know that his saving grace brings the light of life to us and to the whole world.
Amen

Devotion Author:
Dr. Kitty Purgason
Professor Emeritus
Department of Applied Linguistics and TESOL
Biola University

For more information about the artwork, music, poetry, and devotional writer selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.