‘What’s New About the New Year?”
John 3: 1-8
The Rev. Dr. Roger O. Douglas
I’ve said it – you’ve said it – dozens of times in the past few days. We’ve used it as a greeting – a farewell – a hope, and maybe an unexpressed longing. ‘Happy New Year.” What are we saying? What does it mean to celebrate a New Year? What’s new about the New Year?
Let’s start with the word “new.” A friend of mine said: “It’s one of the most overworked and misused words in the English language.” He has begun to wonder if anything really is new. We, as a people, are highly susceptible to the lure of newness. You need only put the word “new” across a label and we’re sure to buy it. Several months ago, I was in a bookstore and the clerk told me an amazing thing. If a book on a “new diet” was mentioned in the paper, you could bet it would be sold out within hours. I have a colleague (who will remain nameless) who always has the latest gadget (even before I do!) 1 know people who are always looking for the new way to do things, the New Age, the new hope, the new cure, the new politics. We are fascinated and often seduced by this allure of the “new.”
Yet there are some dangers in seeking the new and we ought to face those dangers as we celebrate the New Year. The first and foremost – to quote Thomas Wolf s advice – is that “you can’t go home again.” Much as we would like it, we can’t roll back time to start our lives at an earlier age – to the age of beginning again. The New Year cannot be like it used to be. There’s a deep and pervasive longing in each one of us to start our life all over again – to return to an earlier age – the age of innocence – the age when things were right. But you can’t go home again.
Myron Madden, the author, tells of a minister who broke mentally under the psychological, social and vocational pressures of the priesthood. In the mental hospital, he went around without any clothes. Insisting he was the old Adam before sin entered the Garden of Eden, Madden says: ‘He not only moved himself into a space where the pressures were no longer relevant – he went back before time began to the beginning where it was all new.” That may work in a mental hospital, but you can’t roll back the years in today’s world.
The second danger in our celebration of the New Year is that in seeking “newness,” we think we can eradicate our past. ‘Newness,” for many people, signilies that somehow the past can be uased – all the wrong turns, bad Choices, darkness in our lives – can somehow disappear and we can start life over again.
This is part of the Great American Myth. You don’t need to think of the past – or build on it. Everyt:hing can begin again, just by declaring it to be “new.” For then, the New Year is like starting a new page in a book. We barely aclknowledge that the present is what the past has shaped.
One commentary put it very well: “Americans believe in a doctrine of “discontinuous selves.” The metaphor the writer uses is of roasting marshmallows on a campfire. You stick it on the fire, it burns – and then you peel off the skin. Eat the outside – presto – you have a new marshmallow. The writer condudes by saying: ‘The myth of “newness” is the image of the diminishing marshmallow – or the diminishing American. By discarding layer after layer, you have something that looks new, but is getting smaller and smaller.” “Americans,” he tells us, ‘by seeking newness, have lost touch with history – and are diminished as a people.”
It’s interesting to note that the first major heresy the early church confronted was with someone who had become fixated on the ‘New.” Marcion, the church leader of the second Century was so preoccupied with the love of Christ found in the New Testament that he advocated dropping the Old Testament. Happily, wiser heads prevailed. They understood that the Old Testament (the past writings) were the seedbed for all that was contained in the New Testament.
The third danger is just the opposite of the second. It is the danger of not being willing to give up anything as we seek the new. Too often, we seek the “new,” but want to hold on to all the old at the same time. Let me put it boldly – when you seek the new, there is a cost. And many of us are not ready to pay the price.
Many of you on Friday night or Saturday morning went through an ancient custom of setting out some New Year’s resolutions. If you’re anything like myself, you will break many of those resolutions within the first week. Have you ever thought about why they get broken so easily? My guess is that we’re not ready to pay the price. We want to hold on to what we have (to keep life the way it is) and still add the new. Life doesn’t work that way – there is a cost to making a real Change. We have to give up something in order to get something else. In the cllurch, we talk about dying and new births. So this morning, I would raise the question – What in us needs to die in ordu that somet:hing be born in us in the New Year?
The question – the dangers – the issue of “newness” – is a very common one for Christians. We are specialists in New Age thinking. As someone said recently, we are a bunch of New Age junkies. Every Sunday we celebrate the breaking in of a New Age.
The patron saint of the New Age is an old man named Nicodemus. You’ll remember he comes to Jesus in the dead of the night (11:59 on New Year’s Eve) and asks what he must do to have eternal life. “You must be born anew,” Jesus says. Being born again is a powerful metaphor for seeking the “new.” Many people in American Christianity claim to have been born again and I’m glad for them. But I often wonder if this is simply a religious way of saying, “I’ve become a new person.” in the back of my mind, I recall a line from a Walker Percy novel that goes: “If the born again are the twice born, rm going to wait for the third go around.” Yet in spite of the controversy that often surrounds ‘being born again,” I would direct your thoughts back to Nicodemus. A lot has been left out of that dialogue between Old Nick and Jesus. But this much we can read into it – in order to be born again, Nicodemus didn’t have to go badkwards in time – (or as the Gospel puts it, to come out of his mother’s womb a second time). Neither did Nick have to deny his past. He was what he was and this was acceptable. But Jesus does imply that he has to give up something. Old Nick had to give up some of his old certainties and absolutes. Only when he could move away from the old “have to be’s,” and can’ts and musts and won’ts and nevers. Only when Nick is open to the winds of change can “newness” break through and he can be born again.
But that’s Nicodemus – our patron saint this morning. And what about yourselves? is 1994 going to be any different than 1993? Can we expect to be born again in 1994 – or is it business as usual?
So Happy New Year, good people. A New Age is dawning – the age of the Spirit. So with the Spirit’s help, let’s show “welcome” to the New Year – and pray that each of us may be born again in 1994