Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

The Lord said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites: ‘On the first day of the seventh month you are to have a day of sabbath rest, a sacred assembly commemorated with trumpet blasts. Do no regular work, but present a food offering to the Lord.’”

• Leviticus 23:23-25

“‘On the first day of the seventh month hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. It is a day for you to sound the trumpets.

• Numbers 29:1

In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth of the month, in the fourteenth year after the fall of the city—on that very day the hand of the Lord was on me and he took me there.

• Ezekiel 40:1

To make sense out of the Scriptures, Rosh Hashanah means head of the year, or the first of the year.  This is followed by Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, about a week later.  This is in late September or early October in the Julian calendar.  But Rosh Hashanah only appears once in the Hebrew texts, in Ezekiel 40.  This use was a different start of the year, the start of the ecclesiastical calendar, before the Passover in the Spring.  Ezekiel was a priest.  But the Leviticus Scripture and Numbers 29 that begins the summary of the days of celebration, New Year is punctuated by the sounding of the horn.

I looked that up to illustrate the God wants us to keep up with certain days during the year.  And celebrating the first of the year was a noisy endeavor.

But, what did I do this morning?  I have no idea since I wrote this a couple of weeks ago.  I have watched very little of the Rose Bowl Parade.  My wife was marginally interested, and the boys were not interested in the parade at all.  A couple of years, the parade was on the television with no one watching.  Sad, it had been a tradition when I grew up, but then again, with two or three television channels, living in a dry state (no alcohol), what else was there to do?  My children had the internet and then video games as they got older.  No one was impressed that the exterior of the float had to be totally covered with flowers, seeds, or something else natural.

But to be honest, these days with the media and California pushing an agenda that most Christians would find abhorrent, do you want to even turn on the television?  Since most of the bowl games are on television channels that I cannot get, I may listen to music instead.

My wife made a slight modification to the Southern Style New Years Day meal.  The traditional meal that I grew up with was Ham Hocks (or some other less used portion of the hog), cornbread, some sort of greens (mustard greens usually, but maybe turnip greens), and black-eyed peas.

My wife’s twist on the old tradition was that she made a hopping John (rice, bacon, and black-eyed peas).  Then we had the cornbread and turnip greens.

The point was to humble ourselves before God as the year began so that God would bless us throughout the year.  We should do that daily, but that was the idea.

Did I stay up to ring in the New Year?  No, even when I had someone to ring in the New Year with, we felt sleep was more important.  Now, getting up to go to the restroom about midnight…  That’s a possibility.  Waking up due to the neighbor’s fireworks getting too close to the house, as in using my house as their target?  Even a higher probability than the restroom thing.

But otherwise, it is just a new day that the Lord has made.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.