Steve Blow nailed it for me this past Friday morning when he started his column with these words,  "Well, at long last here we are:  Counting down the final hours to a New Year, a New Century, a New Millennium and let's hope, a New Subject."  ("Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves," The Dallas Morning News, December 31, 1999, 29A)  Who wouldn't say "amen" to that?  But, now that the New Millennium has arrived, what do we talk about?  Especially since nothing all that eventful happened.  Last Sunday my fear was predictability.   Today, my fear is the anti-climactic.  Except that, now that Y2K has come and gone, maybe we can focus on what should have been the subject all along.

For quite some time now the focus has been on what the future held for us.  And, I suppose that will always be a subject of curiosity.  Blow went on to point out that, in 1979 when people were predicting what the year 2000 would be like, in the same magazine in which Sanger-Harris Christmas ads featured "new-fangled products called 'VCRs' and 'telephone answering machines' - for $900 and $270 respectively," someone actually had the audacity to predict that this year we'd be zipping around Dallas in "space" cars.  Like the Jetson's, I suppose.

Well, maybe sobering reminders of our past failures in accurately predicting the future ought to do more than just make us cautious about spending too much time and energy making many predictions for what lies ahead.  Maybe they ought to sober us, as well, about the fact that what the future is bringing to us is never as significant as what we are bringing to it.  That the heart of the matter is really a matter of the heart.  If I had one prediction I would make, based on good past evidence, it would be that, when this century's history's is written one hundred years from now, it will ultimately have to be written along the lines of how men behaved more than along the lines of what they invented.

The apostle Paul could not have known, when he wrote the words we read this morning, that he was penning them near the beginning of what we would now call the first millennium.  It would be several hundred years before what we know as the Christian calendar would be established.  What he did know was that the church was in its infancy and facing a very uncertain and extremely unpredictable future with the exception that, eventually, Christ would return and consummate His redemptive work in this world.  He needed to give the church some kind of focus for the mean time.   And, he did so, not by trying to spell out in clear detail what the immediate future held, but simply by saying that our responsibility is the character we bring to any given moment, not what the moment brings to us.  That true wisdom is not found in one's ability to see into the future as much as it is in one's willingness to conduct himself as though He would meet God in the next moment.

Now, I admit this is my summary of what Paul said.  There are other ways of seeing it.  It is just that these themes keep presenting themselves over and over in his writings.  Reaching back 2,000 years, I find them incredibly relevant.  And, what they say to me is that the substantive issue before us is not in speculating what this century may bring to us but in whether we are willing to take responsibility for the only thing we can affect, the character of our hearts.

Richard Mabry and I have been conversing over these past three months about many things related to Cynthia's death.  And, one issue that has kept presenting itself, as it always does in grieving, is "why" this happened.  Those of you who knew Cynthia must have wondered, along with Richard, why someone so young and full of life had to leave so quickly.  As Richard is finding and we all eventually find if we outlive those we love most is that logic does little to comfort the wounds of the heart. 

One day when we were discussing this, a thought occurred to me.   I'll admit it didn't just come out of nowhere.  It certainly came out of my own walk through the valley of the shadow and the things I learned there.  It almost certainly came out of time spent with others in grief and time spent in God's word.  But, nonetheless, it occurred to me to mention to Richard that, in terms of the Divine, we may never know "the reason" for Cynthia's death.  That maybe our only concern now can be "the reason" we give it.  And, it has been given much reason.  Memorial gifts to charitable causes in multiple thousands of dollars that will enrich lives for generations to come.  And, at least one physician we know of, remembering Cynthia's faithful witness, has now made a profession of faith in Christ.  Cynthia's death and the response of Richard and others to it has been a marvelous example of what I think this text is about.  That the heart of what matters is not what may come to us in any given moment but the heart we bring to that moment and, therefore, what we do with it that ultimately matters.

So, based on Christian witness that has stood the test of two millenniums, it seems to me that facing the twenty-first century with a heart that is Christian means at least two things.  The first, learning to love.  "And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you."  The words themselves imply it.  All the loving those first millennium Christians needed for what they faced they did not yet have.  The prayer is, specifically, that it would "increase."  From my own experience, all the love I need I don't yet have.

Some loving comes naturally enough to me.  I love my dog Beau more than I care to tell you and for all the reasons you love your dog.  But, mostly because he is soft and furry and has big brown eyes and is always thrilled when I come home and he demands very little of me except a rub on the head now and then.  I have told him that his only responsibility in life is to let me spoil him rotten and he has obeyed marvelously.  Loving some of you is like that, too.  So far, at least, you seem to love me no matter what I do and you haven't demanded too much of me except a pat on the head now and then I find myself wondering when the other shoe will drop.  And, I find myself wondering because I know that really loving someone will eventually demand far more than just patting them on the head now and then.  It will mean stepping into their world and loving them at my expense.  And, that is the part of loving that does not "increase" naturally.  And, that is why Paul didn't assume his first millennium friends already had all they needed when it came to really loving others and why he specifically asked God to do something about it.

Like loving the man who came in off the street the other day who "wanted to see a minister."  I brought him into my office to listen to his story only to find myself holding my breath because he stunk so badly.  I was sitting on the sofa in my office and he was five or six feet away in a chair and I could not breathe.  And, I'm not exaggerating.  The odor was indescribably putrid and not like anything I'd ever smelled.  He said he only wanted twenty dollars.  And, that would have been much easier to give him than what I know he really needed.  What ruined my day was not that he wanted something I wouldn't give him, twenty dollars.   What ruined my day was in knowing that I couldn't hug him.   I never found it within myself to take three steps and just give him a hug.  Jesus loved lepers and prostitutes and the naked and the hungry and people who'd been in first-century prisons.   I'm willing to bet they didn't smell very good either.  And, quite honestly, my inability to hug that man worries me far more than anything doomsayers predict about the next one hundred years because Jesus made it quite clear for which of those two things I would ultimately be held accountable.

By the way, a word of caution.  You might think carefully before you pray that God would "increase" your love.  My experience has been that the only way I learn to love others is by being loved first.  And, about the only way I have learned the love of God for me has been on the other side of forgiveness.  You might be surprised what God has to put you through in order to make you more loving.  So, be careful.  But, don't let it stop you from praying.  Jesus said, "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."   (John 13:34-35)  One hundred years from now they may know how intelligent this generation was because of technological advances we made or how astute we were because of how well we managed the greatest economic boom in recorded history.  But, tomorrow morning, if that stinky man comes back for help he will know whether this is the church by whether or not I love him.  I'm just wondering what God may have to put me through to get me to the place where I can give a smelly street person a hug as easily as I do my dog.  A twenty-first century heart, to be Christian, must be loving.  And, it must be a heart of integrity.

My trees are budding at home.  They think it's spring.  Their only calendar is what things feel like.  So what, if our calendar reads "January" if the thermometer registers 80?  When it's warm, the sap rises because it doesn't know any better.  It's sad.  Sometime about mid-February a front, cold-blue, will blow through and snap the tender blossoms dead.  They just thought it was spring.  Jesus, on more than one occasion, said that we should not be so easily fooled.  That regardless of what things may appear to be we must learn to watch for what God is up to in them.  And, the only way to really do that is to live as though this is the day in which my fruit will be examined.  So, that, "at the coming of our Lord Jesus," our "hearts in holiness . . . may be blameless before our God and Father."

"Blameless" hearts.  Well, beyond the fact that I find myself lost in trying to figure out exactly what that means, I know it means this much.  It means a heart of integrity.  It means that, in the center of my deepest self, where I dream and hope and plan and choose, there is nothing I would not want God to see.   Again, this prayer was prayed for Christians.  People we would call "saved."  Yet, people who, as with love, still had some work to do.  People who had something to learn about honesty and integrity.

And, the list of possibilities as to exactly what that kind of integrity means is endless.  Surely it means telling the truth even when, or especially when, it hurts.  Surely it means nothing to hide so that what you see is what you get.  Surely it means fewer and fewer hidden sins as the days go by.  Surely it means saying what we really believe instead of saying what we think others want to hear us say, a danger of which we run particular risk in the church.  I'll give you but a few examples.

If we say that we believe that Christ is the Lord of salvation and that in Him, and only in Him, do men have hope of eternal life, shouldn't we be telling someone else that besides each other?  If we say we believe in racial equality in this church, how is it that we are we so Lilly white around here?  If we say we believe in the equality of women in ministry why is it that is has been twenty years since we ordained one to the ministry?  Are we just saying we believe these things or, do we really believe them?  Either way, we better say what we really believe and then behave accordingly or, we run the risk of coming to the end of our lives only to find that we left our integrity somewhere along the way.

And, we will come to the end.  We just don't when.  And, we better not be fooled by how good things may or may not feel on any given day.  When Paul said, "at the coming of our Lord Jesus," he was assuming so much that seemed immediate to him that we tend to just ignore.

In my seminary days I had a friend who told of growing up in the country.  She said her house was about a quarter of a mile off the main road and that there was a winding dirt road that led from the main road up to the house so that you could always see when someone was coming at quite a distance.  On occasion, her mother would leave to go to town and tell the children to have the house clean before she got home.  Instead of cleaning, however, the kids would play until the last possible moment.  Someone always stood watch.  And, when they saw mom driving up the road the kids would go into action.  They didn't have enough time to really clean house at that point.  But, they did have enough time to shove everything into closets so that, when mom walked in the house, it looked clean enough to pass the first inspection.

The scriptures make it clear.  Jesus is coming to call us to account.  The only way to live with integrity is to do our loving now and to clean our closets out now.  We almost certainly won't see Him coming in time do anything more than present ourselves as we are when He gets here.

Maybe those trees that are blossoming aren't so dumb after all.   What if they know something we don't?  What if it just looks like winter but it's really spring already?

What if?