Rev. Joseph Boyd
This is the day. A day in our life. It’s been cold outside – chilly. We’re getting the deep freeze the earth has been craving. This day is not like yesterday, though it may look and feel very similar. I was in New York City when the New Year was ushered in, crowded in an Irish pub up in Queens surrounded by people I’ve known through many different days, different years. The windows were fogged up from the cold and all our breaths getting trapped on the window. A young man walked by the fogged up window on the street and wrote a clear message with his finger – Screw you, 2017. Except he didn’t say screw. Many of our friends expressed this sentiment – good riddance, 2017. Glad to get you over with. Jennifer reminded me that this what people were saying at the beginning of 2017 – screw 2016. 365 days done away with – good riddance.

The more I thought about this, the more sad I became. It was sad to me that so many people were feeling grateful for one year of their life to be over. And then I thought about it some more, and I understood that this was a way of having the last word.

After a year of so many people feeling hurt and screwed over, it was time to celebrate and not let the year have the final word. And the final word for many was “screw you” – I’m leaving you, you’re not leaving me. You’re not breaking up with me – I’m breaking up with you.

Days are funny- not haha funny, but unpredictable. They can start with reading the news which leads to the audible inner sigh – oh boy. There was violence, there was a gunshot, it somehow involves the government. We go to the movies or to church to get a different message – the English army just won the war. Good defeated evil, and all is well again. Our days usually start mundane and then take on a life of their own. Waking up, having a smoke, a cup of coffee. Taking the bus or driving our car to work. Scraping off the ice accumulated on our windshield. Letting the engine run to defrost the night it experienced. Driving and getting lost in a daydream about some day, a day that is alive, colorful, and full of both pop melodies and grand orchestras. Full of both John and Paul.

We can imagine a world full of real love. Or if we’re less ambitious we just imagine simple pleasures.

We go away through our imaginations, and the melody of the day kicks back in to reclaim us and remind us that regardless of what we think, the day, this day, has its own beat and rhythm. And some of us spend our day either trying to line up with the beat, or stubbornly living the day off beat.

I think the beat of our heart, the way our blood beats, tells each of us which way we go. Sometimes it may go with the beat or be gloriously off beat. And the truth is we need both. We often can’t read our own heart without being provoked by something that inspires or breaks it. And oddly the same event can do both. First it breaks our heart, and if we have the ability to stay with it long enough, and let it work on us, it can inspire. But honestly who has the time? And who is willing to stay with the tenderness of a broken heart?

The day can hurt. In fact, if you pay attention close enough, this almost is a guarantee. And here is where the beat comes in. The beat is there to keep us steady as we improvise, as we risk and try our best to live this day.

And that’s what I think we’re doing here for the most part here at church- discovering the beat on this day, in the new year. It has certainly been inspired by the days that have come before, in fact in may pre-date our ability to count off the days, but yet there it is. The eternal beat evolving and creating, destroyed and created again day after day.

Each day is a birth and it holds within it the promise of a death – of something that will come and something that will go. It can be tempting to waste this. To say, screw you. I don’t like your terms. So I’ll gladly let you leave as you go out the door, and I wait with drunken and hazy eyes toward a year I know I can’t fully anticipate. But I will wait here. I will wait for you. I will wait for real love.

Every year carries the possibility of real love – of a connection that bring us back to the beat, the beat at the heart of this day that we can feel in our own skin. And maybe that’s the foundation of this real love. It lets us finally be in our own skin, in our own seat, in our own car, in our own job, with our own problems and daydreams.

The day comes to us and gets under our own skin, and instead of shirking or cursing it, we let it live in us – close to us, in our own skin.

Real love is not often what we imagine or even what we prefer. It’s reality is persistent and often ignored. It comes to us this day. It’s the only day it comes – this day.

I don’t know if I can even say what real love is, but I’ll hazard a guess. John and Paul both wrote songs that they weren’t satisfied with. So they decided to put both of these songs together, and let the listener live in the tension between these two moods and realities. They called it “A Day in the Life.” There is a tension between where we’ve been and where we hope to go, between our hopes and reality that that we experience. There is a tension between our sense of truth and justice and what the world insists is fair and accurate. I think that tension is real love. In the tension. In tension is the place of real love. Don’t curse the tension. Don’t banish it or wish it away. Don’t try to seek comfort and temporary pleasure at all costs hoping the tension will one day go away. It won’t. It comes to us on this day with a promise of real love if we’re willing to live in tension, intentionally. This tension comes to us this day. Let’s not waste it.