Happy new year, Beloved Community!
As I think of each of you and hold you in the center of my heart today, I trust that you’ve found space for the gifts of Christmas to find you this season! Even if the holidays didn’t meet the expectations you had for them, I hope that the Holy has surprised you with grace once again – and will do so in this new year.
With the turn of each year, I find myself enjoying all the retrospectives of the year past – the best books, podcasts, and pictures of the year, the most captivating news stories, the snapshot of what has been. I’m a student of words, which means a retrospective I’m most eager to see is found in the words chosen to capture a year completed.
I suppose you could say these “2025 words of the year” capture the often-despairing, regularly-scurrilous year we’ve had. Merriam-Webster chose “slop,” nodding to the low-quality digital content flooding our news and feeds. Oxford University Press selected “rage bait,” all the headlines and news stories meant to spike your anger and earn your click. In a term new to me, Dictionary.com landed on “agentic,” which describes a certain form of artificial intelligence that can act independently of humans. Ah, what a year?!
To my eyes, these terms seem to capture the digital junkyard that millions of us traverse day in and day out, sometimes without even realizing the nature of the landscape we’re passing through. If these are the final words of a year gone by, I can’t say I’m left hopeful or curious … or marveling for that matter!
But in the life of the church, we reach farther back than the year gone by to words and Word more timeless and true than any other. It’s why words like hope, peace, joy, and love anchor our experience of Advent, representing the gifts of the Christ child to the world. And it’s why we’ll mark the turn of Christmastide into Epiphany, that season of revealing and light, with the gift of a “star word” to orient your year ahead. What starts as a shiny pile of words becomes for each of us a talisman, an intention, a hope for what will be.
Marvel was my 2025 word, and though my kids would want me to tell you that, yes, we did watch a number of Marvel movies this year, that wasn’t its primary revealing to me. For often like a nagging reminder, and often like a wondrous invitation, the chance to marvel was abundant for me in 2025, even in the digital junkyards of our making.
Because before and behind, bidden and unbidden, known and unbeknownst, God was with us in 2025 and is here with us in 2026 – in the words, the moments, the relationships, the happenings, the love of what lies ahead. And that is good news worth sharing.
Together in God’s work of Love,
Pastor Emily