The year 2024 is over. It was a good year in many ways. We enjoyed camaraderie and common ground with friends and strangers. There were experiences of joy and fulfillment.
For Fellowship Church there was the grand occasion of the erection of the Dr. Howard Thurman Commemoration Street sign at his former residence and the 80th Anniversary celebration/Howard Thurman Convocation. There was also pain, disappointment, and loss. Death deprived some of us of dearly loved friends and family. If we could, some of us would like to go back and change things: prevent the deaths and disappointments, take back something we said, that we regret saying, take back an action that was out of our primary character. For me personally, it was a year of physical challenges like nothing I have ever encountered. It was a year of accepting patience and expressing gratitude. The reality is that we cannot change anything that happened last year.
"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."
-The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
That’s definitive. The past is the past. Lady Macbeth with tortured soul and a ravished mind informed us that: what is done cannot be undone. Yet our entire past has prepared us for now, the present with all its possibilities and ugliness. We indeed have some difficult days ahead. For some they will be devastating days. The past has nurtured us for the present, building not only resilience and resistance but visions of what can be and what cannot continue to be. What we have gained from the past, the memories and strength of those who touched our lives in some ways are available to us and long to guide us if we would but trust life. Those jewels of insight and experience call us to ourselves, to pay attention to our lives, to live fully while there is life in us.
We stand at this very moment, with this breath, on the boundary of the present and future – the present, with its now time, the future always with its advent time and circumstances. It would be helpful for each of us to pause and contemplate what our intentions are (not our resolutions) for this year of our future, which could be the last year of our future. What is it that we would like to become? Who is it we want to be? What type of world would we like to create as our legacy to the Life-Giving Force that calls us forward? Perhaps, you (we) would feel a bit more motivated and inspired if I said we were on the frontier of the future rather than a boundary between the past and future. Although that word certainly has negative connotations, it is motivational for me at least. For it means uncharted possibilities, freshness, exploration. A frontier is territory beyond what is settled. It is inviting, alluring, as an opportunity, a place for discovery. But, just as the frontier of the United States of America was exploited as well as appreciated, our frontier future can also be appreciated and exploited. What it shall be is up to us. We bear personal responsibility. You and I bear responsibility for our future.
Yes, I will scream with you that this world is sorely messed up. That is abundantly clear. In the words of one of my seminary professors: it “stinks in the nostrils of God.” However, the Psalmist puts it: “We are marvelously made” -- and made of the same substance as star dust, and moon light, the warmth and movement of the sun, the great black holes, and the initial fire blast.
We feel overwhelmed by society and by our ability to be effective. So, we place our lives in the hands of those elected to Congress, the Executive Branch, or appointed to the Judicial System, the ones responsible for our downward spiral to deal with our woes. We indeed are heavily taxed. Taxed with a society that is not working for the masses of people. Yet, we who have been called forth into newness have responsibility for the nation. Many of us have long given up on the government and capitalism. Yet, we are called into civic engagement if we are to negotiate a frontier that holds tremendous potential to bless the earth and all those that dwell therein.
The great preacher and pastor of Riverside Church, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, used an illustration in one of his sermons that certainly has meaning for me and hopefully, for you as well. “The North wind made the Vikings.” I have some problems with this quotation, for the Vikings did a lot of raiding. But what Fosdick was attempting to convey is that the North wind prepared them for hardship, made the Vikings tough, and therefore able to stand and surmount difficulties. He explains:
“There is a Scandinavian saying which some of us might well take as a rallying cry for our lives: The north wind made the Vikings! Wherever did we get the idea that secure and pleasant living, the absence of difficulty, and the comfort of ease, ever of themselves made people either good or happy? Upon the contrary, people who pity themselves go on pitying themselves even when they are laid softly on a cushion, but always in history character and happiness have come to people in all sorts of circumstances, good, bad, and indifferent, when they shouldered their personal responsibility. So, repeatedly the north wind has made the Vikings.”
The North wind had toughened them for the rigors of freedom and had developed back bone and courage for the facing of wintry trials. It steeled them against defeat, creating in them a longing for life, life in its fullness. When liberal white teachers journeyed through the South after the Civil War establishing what we now call the Historically Black Colleges: Fisk, Morehouse, Tougaloo, and Hampton, they found willing students eager to earn their places as responsible citizen of the nation.
If we want to have a good nation, we must have good people. If we want to have a responsible nation, it is essential for us to be responsible people.
So, as we look forward to this new year and new nation, we must become new people.
I will sing a new song.
I must learn the new song for the new needs
I must fashion new words born of all the new growth in my life--of my mind--of my spirit.
I must prepare for new melodies that have never been mine before,
That all that is within me may lift my voice unto God.
How I love the old familiarity of the wearied melody,
How I shrink from the harsh discords of the new untried harmonies.
Teach me, my Father, that I might learn with the abandonment and enthusiasm of Jesus,
The fresh new accent, the untried melody,
to meet the need of the untried morrow.
Freedom, what is it?
You and I are not slaves. Yet, we too often act in slavish ways, as though current plantation masters (political leaders, economic machines) are invincible. They often appear to be Armadas; but they have weaknesses.
Gandhi without any hesitation said: “Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”
In the eighth century before the common era there lived a young man. One who had benefitted from the leadership of King Uzziah. But, with the death of that just monarch, when security (social) and prosperity were threatened (fiscal cliff), with the increase in poverty and no social net, when what was a progressive nation (Judah) became a disastrous one, there was a young man, an aristocrat who entered the temple and saw within his imagination and soul the devastation on the threshold, he uttered the word. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. I came into the vision of the Lord. I experience common ground with the Lord. High and Lifted up" . . .The words, calling, challenge came to him. Whom Shall I send who will go for me? Isaiah initially answered by commenting on his own problems and the problems of the world. He stated: “I am a man of unclean lips.” I am not worthy. My own life needs cleaning up. And I dwell within the midst of a people of unclean lips. I live in a dirty society. One not to be trusted, one that is oppressive, exploitative, bad.”
He blames himself first, then society. Finally, when he hears God calling within saying: what are we going to do about it, this corruption. We hear him say: “Here am I, Lord. Send me. I will go. It is not right for me to merely complain about the world going to hell in a handbasket.” I must, as Fosdick and Thurman say, shoulder my responsibility to and for Life. I must become a responsible participant in the affairs of the world. Thurman: I must choose the things for which I shall stand and work and live and the things against which I shall stand and work and live. Not to do this, he said, would be to abdicate his responsibility to all other units of life.
The North wind is calling us. You and I must take responsibility for our society with all its difficulties, its pain, its compromises, its greed, its treachery, its politics. It is toughening us for the wintry seasons of battles ahead, giving us the strength and flexibility we need to be the people of God in quest of the Glorious Golden City pictured by the seers of old.
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