Covenant New Year

by

It’s funny.  I wrote this comic in 2015, back when I was not looking forward to the presidential debates.  It still resonates with me as we’re entering 2021, though I actually believe there is much to be hopeful for in this coming year.  A vaccine is being administered to health care workers right now, with the promise that this pandemic will indeed have its end this year.  A less confrontational president is entering the office on January 20, and while this won’t fix all the problems in our country, my hope is that we have years of healing ahead of us now that our divisions have been so exposed for so long.

I’ve created a new playlist to start out your New Year.  I call it “Wonder,” because it’s full of songs that have inspired me this past year, songs that speak to my own journey of coming out through depression and anxiety and arriving to a place where I genuinely feel like a new creation.  I hope you get a chance to listen to it and enjoy it.

The early Methodists practiced getting together over New Year’s Eve for a Watch Night service.  It was a time to pray deeply together and to renew their baptismal covenant with this prayer that John Wesley created.  Often called the Wesley Covenant Prayer, this prayer is meant for Christians who want to go all in, who are willing to do great things for God just as much as they are willing to be “laid aside” for God, amounting to little in the eyes of the world.  As I enter the New Year, I do not place my hope in my own abilities, or in the world around me.  My hope is in the One who claims me, the Christ who died for even me, the God who works all things together for the good of them who love Him.  I hope to enter this year all in, diving headfirst into the expansive ocean of God’s love for me in Christ Jesus.

This week’s comic is inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (1830-33).  It has long been a favorite of mine, and visually sums up for me the excitement, the danger, the call to submission we find in our baptism.

Creator of the Wesley Bros cartoon, the Rev. Charlie Baber, a United Methodist deacon, serves at Highland United Methodist Church in Raleigh, N.C. His cartoon appears on United Methodist Insight by special arrangement.