Beloved,

Let us not look back with nostalgia, nor ahead with fear, but around with awareness. I learned this blessing years ago from Fr. Ralph Carskeddon, an old friend and mentor, when he was serving as interim dean of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, where I worshipped weekly before going off to seminary. I can hardly believe it was twenty years ago.

That blessing was especially poignant for the cathedral community at the time. They were doing the hard inner work of reorganizing and healing after a painful pastoral transition. People were unsure, tender, and trying their best to keep faith in the present moment. As we begin a new liturgical year—Year A, the Matthean year—I hear echoes of that same blessing in the Gospel of Matthew.

Matthew’s Gospel was written for a community of Greek-speaking Jewish believers who needed to understand how Jesus fulfilled the hopes and promises of their ancestors. Matthew anchors Jesus firmly in Hebrew lineage, quotes the Hebrew Scriptures extensively, and draws deep parallels between Moses and Jesus to show that the Messiah they longed for had come. In a time when Matthew’s audience lived with both nostalgia for their past and uncertainty about their future, Jesus reassures them that he has not come to abolish their tradition but to fulfill it.

As we begin reading Matthew again, I invite you to imagine the lives of those first hearers. What was it like to flee one’s homeland and make a life in a foreign place? What was it like for children to grow up more fluent in Greek than in their parents’ mother tongue? What did it feel like to cling to Jewish identity while also embracing a new way of understanding the law of Moses? How did they come to see Jesus as the Messiah while living as a minority people in a vast empire?

Matthew speaks powerfully to such communities—and I believe their questions resonate with our lives more than we might expect.

Wherever you are on your spiritual journey, we all seek renewal. The work of bringing the kingdom of heaven close—right here on earth—is holy and never easy. As we begin this new Christian year, how might you stay awake to the present moment, faithful in the world as it is, and open to a renewed sense of purpose, understanding, and being?

May this season draw us not backward or forward, but deeply into God’s presence here and now.

With Love,

Fr. Andrew