Many years ago in Youngstown Ohio, while rummaging through an attic, a neighbor discovered an old negative. It was of a church building that turned out to be the previous structure on the site of First Church, which I was then serving. The image was haunting, like Scrooge's ghost of Christmas past, it harkened to days gone by, but with a certain skeletal forecast of the future.

The detective in me began to probe. It was a grand time for it; it was winter and there was an awning to the street. With a magnifying glass to the sermon board, you could determine the preacher, Dr. Herbert Hudnut, contemporary to Harry Emerson Fosdick, Alexander McGaffin, and Paul Sutphen. The sermon title was Some New Things. And on the corner of the lawn, a sign, "Three Hundred and Sixty-Five New Opportunities."

What year was it? Perhaps 1923 when December 31^st was on a Sunday and a whole year was spread ahead. Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon at first Presbyterian Church in New York entitled, Shall the Fundamentalist Win? And our own playhouse settlement facilities were determined to be inadequate requiring $50,000 dollars to be raised that year for what would become Karamu House. To put that into perspective, allowing for inflation, I might say to you today that we need to raise 54 million, 18 thousand dollars for mission this year.

Or perhaps the year ahead would be 1934, when preparations were being made for the Republican National Convention to be held at the Cleveland Hotel. During that coming Advent season, the star first appeared on the McGaffin Tower and Dr. Bird's Armistice Day sermon led to the formation of the Cleveland Peace Committee. He is reported to have said, "There have been so many rumors of serious war clouds that in certain quarters it is considered silly or even disloyal to be dead earnest about peace."

Or perhaps it was 1940, when among the elders serving were Henry Bourne, Oliver Upson, and Douglas Handyside. Then again, perhaps it was 1950, when Harry Taylor formed the Student Christian Movement because of our proximity to Case Western Reserve University and within that year, the first African American, Mr. J. Harold Brown, the music director of Karamu House, would join this congregation. Not without debate to which Taylor would reply, "If there is ever any official action to exclude anybody, you will have to find a new minister." Isn't it amazing how that, which has gone before, influences the future and sounds so familiar to the present?

In 1950 it would have been too late for my photo, but all the same, the message "365 New Opportunities." What resides ahead for us? Could any preacher imagine the events? What about the individual lives of those first hearing that sermon? What about our lives as we look forward from this day? We will celebrate December 31 on a Sunday again in 2011. Where will the world be by then? How many of us will know for a fact if there is something after this life? 365 new opportunities, new adventures, is that what they will be?

Two passages from scripture in juxtaposition; perhaps they are the perfect poles of perspective for this day. Ecclesiastes says, "For everything there is a season. Nothing new under the sun." There is some truth to that given our remembrances from this morning. We work and scheme and climb life's ladders and for what? The permanent population of Cape Cod used to be 80% female. All the men would retire from Wall Street only to die within the next year or two. "Sunrise, sunset, soon are gone the days."

If the Ecclesiastes is correct, it means there is little freedom. We are not masters of our lives, simply puppets on a string. And how many live that way? A tragedy comes, "It's God's will." What kind of God would "will" sorrow on any child? Or how many fall into life's ruts without testing their aging wings. I overheard a man in a restaurant say; "I haven't taken a day off in 22 years." He was bragging, not complaining. "My family can go on vacation; I'd rather work." How sad!

Fred Buechner writes,

"We can escape a little from time to time. We can leave the paper unread and the tube turned off. We can get away for a day, but not for long. Because we carry around 'who we are' on our backs like the bed roles our ancestors lugged off the boat when someone first tried to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge.

We've had our good times, loved a few along the way and with luck been truly loved. Every once in a while, we've been kinder than we thought we knew how to be and occasionally word was given back. On a scale of nations, more than once we've seen a terrible war give way to a tenuous peace. Beggars can't be choosers. Maybe civilization will squeak through. But what would it be like to be truly free?

Now and then, we've had a vision of it, of the people we might be. Suppose we could step out from everything past that weighs us down like the great stones of the pyramids. All the things we've done or failed to do. To dream such a dream," writes Buechner, "is all but to weep, because, in one way, it seems so possible and yet, in another it's further away than the most distant star. Enslaved by old ways, shackled by old habits, we don't know how to get the hell out. Which is precisely what hell means. Hell is that place you can't get out of." (1)

That is one view of life, but then that old sermon title said "365 New Opportunities." Which moves me to the scripture from that day's sermon in 1933, taken from Revelation, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, I make all things new."

What would you have this preacher say to you as we again look dimly into the glass of the future? Again writes Buechner,

"Out of nothing, God creates something. Out of the end, God creates the beginning. Out of selfishness, we can grow by grace toward selflessness, and out of that final selflessness, which is the loss of self all together, 'eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of humans what marvels God will bring. Out of the old self that dies some precious essence is preserved for a new self that is born." (2)

Ceryle, Bishop of Jerusalem, lecturing new Christians in about 300 AD, reminds them that they are reborn for new deeds.

"There is a paradox," he says, "Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time to be born and a time to die; but in your case, there is a time to die and a time to be born. In fact a single time to accomplish both."

There are 365 new opportunities waiting for you and me and this church, this community, this city, our nation, our world.

Here is the problem, to affirm the wisdom writer is to say that Jesus Christ never broke through history. So let us say with the poet, "I am a new year. I am an unspoiled page in your book of time. I am your next chance at the art of living. I am your opportunity to practice all you have learned during the last twelve months."

There are 365 new things spread out before us. No one knows what each day will bring, but we people of faith have a choice in how to face our days. All we need to remember is that we believe that the "Dwelling of God is with us, Emanuel," and so, with God we have the chance to make ourselves and everything else new!


1) Frederick Buechner, Now and Then.
2) Ibid

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