2019 is going to be a double new year for our nation in the sense that it will be a new year for a new government. But what is going to be the package in it for us all as participating citizens in its successes?
Alfred Tennyson writes in verse:
‘’Ring out the old, ring out the new
Ring out happy bells across the snow.
The year is going let him go.
Ring out the false, ring in the true.’’
Man’s love of newfangled is natural.
Everything new is expected to be fine like new fashions, new models and new ways of doing things even new phraseologies etc. Sometimes they are really worse than fine.
The book of Ecclesiastes is deeply pessimistic in tone; it has been called a Treatise on the illusion of life. The word vanity (which might be better translated nothingness) occurs forty times and is the keynote of the whole book.
” Vanity of vanities says the preacher. All is nothing’’.
The theory that all life is just one endless repetition has often been put forward in the history of thought and notably in the most spacious days of Greece. The operative word of the great Greek thinkers was not the word ‘progress’(as with our forebears in the nineteenth century) but the word ‘cycle’. Vastly improbable as it may seem to us, there are certain things still worthy of serious attention which lend plausibility to the view that all history repeats itself.
It would be untrue to assert that all life is mere repetition, but a great deal of history has a way of repeating itself and nobody is likely to deny that there is a certain sameness about our individual lives; a dull monotony, a lack of freshness that becomes at times almost unbearable.
Whether or not the Greeks were right about their ‘cycles’ or the moderns right about their progress no one can deny that our own life repeats itself; that one week is remarkable like the week before ,and that in its broad outline each year is very similar to the last. The coming new year is not likely to be an exception to the rule.
Eat! Work! Sleep! .The same old routine over and over again. We can only have life on the terms on which it is offered and sometimes we think they are not very good terms. In day’s of extra depression or satiety we are inclined to say with the author of Ecclesiastes: ‘’There is no new thing under the sun.’’
But let us look at another text in Revelations 21: 5 ‘’He that sits on the throne said‘’ Behold I make all things new’’ It is taken from John’s great vision of the holy city. In its apocalyptic sense we do not use it today.
Yes God can make all things new. He can give you a new world with new delights and new comforts, and new hopes and new ends. No! not by changing you.
We cannot promise you in the coming year a new set of circumstances. Indeed we anticipate for ourselves and for you difficulties and disappointments and obstacles and some pain-for that is life. No year has dawned which did not contain them and if such a year did come it might be debilitating to the soul. But in the name of him who sits upon the throne we promise you that if you will receive him unto your heart and if you will submit to his hardship over you, you can have a new heart. Paul said: ‘’If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things are passed away; behold they are become new.’’
We ask you to remember the power of our Lord to change society as well as persons. He can make all things new. We have to work with him not only for the salvation of individuals but for the Christianizing of the social order too.
Go forward into the New Year with courage. His transformation begins inside us and there isn’t one of us-however mature we are in the faith- in whom he could not work some change.
Ask him to do it. Let us pray together for that very thing. We wish you a happy new year.