New "normal"

Huw Williams | 16.45, Friday 8 January 2016 | Turin, Italy

Christmas and New Year have come and gone, and now Epiphany is over, Christmas really is done and dusted. Epiphany is a much more significant festival here in Italy than I had been used to the UK and this twelfth day holiday truly marks the end of the Christmas season quite elegantly.

This was our fifth Christmas here in Italy and we are now becoming familiar with some of the Piemontese traditions and rhythms of the Christmas season, in fact we find that some of these traditions suit us better than those of the UK. (Whisper it, but I'd much prefer agnolotti al ragu over roast turkey for any Christmas dinner...)

those things which were so strange to foreigners start to become the new "normal"

I suppose that that is how acclimatisation to a new culture works, slowly but surely those things which were so strange to foreigners start to become the new "normal". I don't imagine that we will ever feel completely "Italian", but it's certainly good not to feel completely alien.

And that thought coincides with something God has been putting on my heart recently. I have been struck again, reading through the New Testament recently by how utterly radical it all is - the extraordinary love of God which comes to us in His beloved Son, the death of God the Son on a cross for utterly underserving people like us, his resurrection from the dead, the death and resurrection of his people with him to the new life of the Spirit which is so completely different in values from the surrounding culture those first new believers found themselves in.

what are the ways in which we have all become so immersed in our surrounding culture that it has become the new "normal"

And I am challenged by how "non-radical" so much of our contemporary spirituality is. It makes me wonder what are the ways in which we have all become so immersed in our surrounding culture that it has become the new "normal" for our churches, homes and other relationships. How have we domesticated those radical, upside-down values of God's kingdom (which so quickly turned the world upside down in the first century) into a moderately tweaked, polite, anaemic "spiritualised" form of Western secularism? I imagine that we do it countless times a day.

Maybe this is the year we will all get out Bibles out again and rediscover God's "new normal" of life in His Spirit who teaches us to die to sinful nature and "set our hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God." (Colossians 3:1)