New Years Eve
All time is in God's hands The pathos of the passage of time.
God can make all things new. The possibility of tomorrow.
From the very first time we as little children slip our arm into the sleeve of last years jacket and tug to find it too small we are confronted with the pathos of the passage of time. From the first time we hear a familiar tune and are swept away by the nostalgia of a first love we are confronted with the sadness of lost time. It's the day for reflection, assessment recounting and review how many news articles and magazine pieces have recounted the last years high points and low. How have our hearts been tugged by the visuals reminding us of those who have left this life in the past year? Time passes...
This is the day for "out with the old" "in with the new. On this night in a very secular way we acknowledge that reality. I suppose we should be happy that our celebrations are characterized only by excessive imbibing, noisemakers and merriment--for some ancient cultures the sacrificing of a life was standard practice on New Year's Eve. In Columbia an effigy representing the old year with all its regrets and sorrows is burned on the eve of the New Year. Out with the old and in with the new. Perhaps our forced frivolity is just a cover for the scarier reality that time passes...
This evening we gather, prior to that very secular celebration to remind ourselves and to contemplate what God has to say to us at this, the junction of 2005 and 2006.
The variety of our lessons gives us an interesting array of perspectives. Indeed the Bible has never presented a single clear succinct viewpoint and these lessons are an interesting testimony to that. The author of Deuteronomy reminds us that we have choices with our time. That time is in our hands, that we can make of our lives a blessing or a curse. Certainly a valuable thought as we prepare our resolutions. Queheloth, the cynic who wrote Ecclesiastes chides us to make the best of and enjoy the time over which we have very little control. We are responders, carried along on an ocean of hours and days and seasons. And then there's Paul in an exuberant proclamation to the Corinthians thrusting us forward to a great and glorious future. "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!" Three takes on the question of time and our response to it yet all begin with a single central conception. God embraces all time. God embraces all time and encompasses us in relationship to it. Our past, our present and our future are part and parcel of God's existence.
Process theologians speak of God as "responsive love." This means that our joys and actions matter in the divine life itself. Our values and achievements are taken up and endure in the continuing life of God. God is involved in time and is enriched by what happens in the world. Even what the world has passed beyond God receives and retains.
God integrates this reality in the divine harmony and, in light of it, continually offers redemption to the world. Over against the waste and tragedy in life, there is a renewing power at work. God's wisdom is faithful and creative ever offering us new possibilities. The past is both preserved and transformed in God's wisdom.
And so we believe that our days and our deeds, our creative gifts will be embraced in the future even if the particular use of these gifts may not be what we anticipate.
Teilhard De Chardin has passionately written,
"A thought, a material improvement, a harmony, a unique nuance of human love, the enchanting complexity of a smile or a glance, all these new beauties that appear for the first time, in me, or around me, on the human face of the earth--I cherish them like children and cannot believe that they will die entirely in their flesh. If I believed that these things were to die forever, should I have given them life? The more I examine myself, the more I discover this psychological truth: that no one lifts his little finger to do the smallest task unless moved, however obscurely, by the conviction that they are contributing infinitesimally ( at least indirectly) to the building of something definitive--that is to say, to your work, my God."
And so we say good-bye to a year, a day, an era, a life with joy, with relief, with sorrow with regret or nostalgia. We acknowledge the passing of time, our time assured that it is not lost, not gone but wrapped up and enfolded in God's time. And that God will use and renew our tattered offerings to make all things new.
Amen