The Bishop of Oxford and the Bishop of Buckingham share their reflections on 2023 and look ahead to 2024.
Bishop Steven
Welcome to another new year. I hope it’s a good one for you and for your family and for our all our communities across Oxfordshire and beyond.
This is the time of year when we package our hopes into new year resolutions. If I may, I want to suggest a couple to you to think about in the next few days and to build into your own life.
Lots of people will be wondering about taking more exercise or joining a gym. Personal trainers talk about doing exercise to strengthen your core: the centre of the body which can help and support everything we do. That’s great but we are not just physical bodies: we have a different inner core – a spiritual heart – which needs to be mended and strengthened.
So here are two resolutions to strengthen your inner core.
The first is a resolution to go deeper in prayer and worship. The last few years for many people have been challenging and difficult. We need to draw more deeply on God’s strength. The best way to do that is to take time at the beginning of each week, Sunday by Sunday to worship God and draw on God’s strength and grace. Reconnect with your local church. Get back into the habit of worship. You’ll find a warm welcome, friendship and a time for rest and renewal. Try to take some time each day to pray. Pray the Lord’s Prayer. Pray for your loved ones. Pray for the world. Build up that inner core. It may feel a bit daunting to cross the threshold – but for many people it’s more than worth it for the strength and hope and joy you’ll find in Jesus and in Christian faith.
The second is to reset your priorities once again at the beginning of the year. Remember what’s important. One of the stories I will be reflecting on this year is when someone came to Jesus and asked him which is the most important commandment. Jesus replied like this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and you shall love your neighbour as yourself.”
Remember in this year that you are deeply loved by God and God calls you to this way of love.
Lent begins this year on Valentine’s Day, 14 February. All across the Diocese of Oxford we will be reflecting on this way of love, the two greatest commandments. I’m praying that many people from the wider community will join us this year as we explore this way of love. You can find details on our website, Come and See.
My God bless you and our city and our county in this brand new year and take us deeper in that way of love.
“Almighty God
We thank you that you have made the world in love
And that you call us into love for you and for our neighbour
We dedicate this new year to you whatever it may bring
Strengthen us in our inner being to know your love more fully
To know you better and to live this way of love
Through Jesus Christ our Lord
Amen”
Bishop Alan
These are dangerous disturbing times. Someone said to me recently: “It’s all broken now, isn’t it?” She told me how discomboulating she found the rising cost of everything, her dwindling savings, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, her children not being able afford to live anyhere near, and a husband on a seemingly endless hospital waiting list. "These," she said, "are dangerous disturbing times."
But then they always were. 100 years ago, Big Ben bonged out the New Year for the first time on radio, as everyone looked back to good times before the Great War, and everything seemed to be grinding to a halt with spiralling poverty and destitute ex-soldiers on the streets. Wars and revolutions raged abroad, fallout from the war. Leaders seemed way out of their depth.
In November 1923, US President Warren Harding had a heart attack and died. Power passed to Calvin Coolidge. People said what he was very good at was effectively doing nothing. In 1933 Dorothy Parker, told that Coolidge had died, remarked, “How can they tell?”
100 years ago Britain also had a new Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. His big slogan was 'safety first'. Do as little as possible and hope things right themselves, while we all look back to the Good Old Days.
The truth is we can’t stop the world and we can’t get off. We don’t have a magic wand to fix things up Harry Potter style. In troubled times we all need wisdom, courage and hope. The Bible says when people need them most God gives “a spirit not of fear, but of power and love and self control.”
In Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the heroine spots a pin-up of Stanley Baldwin in her head teacher’s office over the words safety first. Miss Mackay retains him on her wall, says Miss Brodie, because she believes in his slogan 'safety first'.
"But safety does not come first. Goodness, truth and beauty come first. Follow me!”
In that spirit, may the God of wisdom give us the power, love and self control we need to survive, and even, sometimes flourish, in 2024. Happy New Year!
Bishop Olivia
I wonder what this new year will bring. Some people will face into it with optimism and joy. For others, there is more of a sense of dread and anxiety. And for many, it may feel like just another day, month, year as life moves on and we grow older. One thing which we are not generally very good at is living in the present moment.
How often do we find ourselves thinking about the future, planning, catastrophising , making lists, rehearsing what we are going to say or do? Or going over the past, replaying our conversations, regretting the things we have done, wishing that we had taken that opportunity or avoided that pitfall?
The thing is, we don’t know what will come our way this year. It might be a year full of good things, happiness, satisfaction, achievement, progress. Or it might bring illness, bereavement, disappointment, broken relationships. Not all of this is within our control.
So what can we control? We can control the way we meet with whatever comes. We can try to be our best selves, to show up, to be present in the moment and to assume that everyone else is doing their best. It isn’t always easy, because we are not angels. But we are people who are deeply loved by God, whoever we are, and whatever sort of life we live. So if we trust God to be with us, alongside us, within us, and if we make a point of turning back to God each time we mess us, then we have a very good chance of navigating this year with joy and becoming more and more fully who God has always wanted us to be.
Here are some words from a well known poem by Minnie Louise Haskins, written at the beginning of the last century:
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
"Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown".
And he replied:
"Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way".
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
May you find the hand of God in 2024, and may you know God’s blessing in every part of your life.
Listen to New Year's Day messages on our Soundcloud channel.