Comes now a smiling New-Born Year

• The seasons of our lives

In western North Carolina along I-40 between Hickory and Asheville – in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains – there is a town of 16,800 people established in 1784. It’s called Morganton. On December 26 there my family made a rest stop and there I picked up the local newspaper. A music columnist – a pensive, wistful middle-aged man and local DJ – wrote:

• Life at a practical level

[Next week on New Years Eve, together we’ll raise a toast to another year gone by and sing Auld Lang Syne.] Perhaps there’s a lot to look forward to in a new year, but it’s the kind of song that reminds you that while we are letting go of the struggles, we are also letting go of the joys, too. Turning the pages of our lives is the mixed blessing that we are getting older and that time continues to roll on by. I can never tell if I’m sad or if I’m celebrating. . . .

We all join in together singing so strong, but we know that the passage of time makes us vulnerable to life and to ourselves. In a few days, we’ll sing it again and toast ourselves right on through the transition into a new year. We’ll toast the days gone by when we sing, and we’ll admit that we can’t let go unless we hold onto each other:

And there’s a hand my trusty friend!

And give me a hand o’ thine!

And we’ll take a right good-will draught,

for auld lang syne. [1]

Like the Old Testament writer, Ecclesiastes (the practical philosopher), this music columnist has a melancholy streak and desires to see life as it is, “life under the sun,” life at a practical level [2]. Among the observations of Ecclesiastes is a poem set to music by Pete Seeger in the late 1950’s. When issued by the American band, The Byrds, this song (now titled Turn! Turn! Turn!) reached #1 on the Hot 100 chart on December 4, 1965. Ecclesiastes noted:

      For everything there is a season,

      and a time for every matter under heaven:

      . . . a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

      . . . a time to break down, and a time to build up;

      a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

      a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

      . . . a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

      (Ecc 3:1,2b,4,5b ESV)

 

• Life at an all new level

Yes, life has its seasons. Yes, life exhibits melancholy – the struggles and the joys. And, yes again, life is about each other and “a little help from our friends.” But the music columnist is forgetting something really important, and fortunately it was pointed out by a second man in another column in the same newspaper on the same date. Six and a half years ago, in a public ceremony, the second man was described this way: “He’s been an icon in our community for decades. He did so much for civil rights in this county [Burke County, NC].” [3] As you can tell by his participation in the civil rights movement, this second man has also experienced the seasons of life, the struggles and the joys, life in community, and “a little help from our friends.” And, interestingly, this second man has written for this small town newspaper for 62 years! From the vantage point of a long life, this is (in part) what he said:

We live in a common bundle. We do carry with us the capacity to help or to hurt. . . . Let me call your attention to the life of Jesus. He lived and suffered as we now do, and died while he was still a young man. His friends betrayed him. The officials lied about him. He suffered just as we suffer, but he bravely faced his death, and in the process, he won the victory for you and me. . . .

You need not troubled by the storms. . . For Jesus paid the price for the sins of the world. He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, and by his stripes, we are healed. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through the Son. Jesus washes away all our sins. [4]

God has come and met us in the seasons of life, in our melancholy, in our struggles and in our joys, in our attempts at life in community and in our seeking a little help from our friends. He has come through the humanity of Jesus. God the Father now calls us to a life truly worth living through his Son, Jesus Christ the Lord: forgiveness of sins and failings, help in our struggles, lasting joy in our happinesses, and eternal friendship with God our Creator who has now become God our Savior.

• The life of Abraham Lincoln and his seasons of faith

How does an eternal relationship with our Creator and Savior work out in the seasons of our lives?

A Sunday evening address by F.W. Boreham wonderfully captures how the search for eternal relationship with Christ finally ended in fulfillment in the life of Abraham Lincoln [5]. Boreham sees three stages in the development of Lincoln’s faith and describes each with a biblical metaphor. First, Lincoln climbed Mount Sinai with Moses. It began at a revival-style camp meeting that had gone on for several days with increasing fervor. At the final meeting the kneeling multitude sprang to its feet and broke into a chorus of shouts. A young man and a young woman separately leaped up and started singing the same song. A week later they were married and eventually became the parents of Abraham Lincoln. His father had the sad task of burying his mother when Lincoln was only nine. And father and son carried the coffin from their desolated cabin to its lonely resting place in those woods. But during those nine years his mother had a lasting impact on him. Says Boreham:

He never forgot that mother of his. ‘All that I am,’ he used to say, ‘my angel-mother made me!’ And the memory that lingered longest was the thought of her as she sat in the old log-cabin teaching him the Ten Commandments. Many a time afterwards, when he was asked how he had found the courage to decline some tempting bribe, or to resist some particularly insidious suggestion, he said that, in the critical hour, he heard his mother’s voice repeating once more the old, old words: I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before Me [Exodus 20:1]. He treasured all through life her last words:

I am going away from you, Abraham, and shall not return [she said]. I know that you will be a good boy, and that you will be kind to your father. I want you to live as I have taught you, to love your Heavenly Father and keep His commandments.

      ‘Keep His commandments!’ It was thus that, in infancy, Abraham Lincoln climbed Mount Sinai. . . . As a result somebody said of him that he was the most honest lawyer west of China. . . . This phase of his spiritual pilgrimage was augmented; it was obliterated. Christ comes into the soul not to destroy, but to fulfil, the law. Lincoln’s earliest impressions imparted to his character a severity that contributed materially to its grandeur. [6]

Second, Lincoln climbed Mount Carmel with Elijah. On Mount Carmel, Elijah learned that his loneliness in the midst of unscrupulous foes mattered little as long as the God who Answers by Fire was with him (1 King 18). Lincoln learned the same lesson when, in 1860, he left his home in Springfield, Illinois as President Elect to travel by train to Washington, DC and assume the presidency. At that time, Lincoln received an American flag from one of his admirers. On its silk folds, beautifully worked in, he read these words:

      Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life. As I was with Moses, so shall I be with thee. [from Joshua chapter 1.]

Lincoln traveled that train with two great missions in mind. The immediate mission was to preserve the Union; the remote mission was to abolish slavery. For both causes he was prepared to die. He learned of plots to assassinate him before he ever reached Washington. Says Boreham:

      But he never wavered; the words on the flag were constantly in his mind. At every wayside station [along the train route] crowds gathered to greet him. And [spiritual biographer] Dr. Hill points out that, in addressing each of these groups, he declared emphatically that he was going forth in the name of the Living God. . . .

      In accepting the Presidency, Lincoln was very sure of God. It meant two things to him. It meant that he would be protected, sustained, directed, and prospered in his lofty enterprise . . . But it meant more. He was intensely, almost painfully, conscious of his own disqualifications and disabilities. He was a back-woodsman on his way to the White House! But he believed that —according to the promise on the flag—God was with him. Like Moses, he would be clay in the hands of the divine Potter; and, by those Unseen Hands, he would be moulded and shaped and fashioned. [7]

Last, Lincoln climbed Mount Calvary with the Apostle John and, along the climb, Lincoln passed through Gethsemane, the Garden of Anguish. Boreham notes:

Mr. H. C. Whitney says that, during the war, Lincoln’s companions would leave him by the fireside at night and find him still there—elbows on knees and face in hands—when they came down in the morning. ‘Father,’ he would moan again and again, ‘Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me!’ [Matthew 26:39] . . . . The greatest grief of his life was the death of his son. As the boy lay dying, Lincoln’s reason seemed in peril. Miss Ida Tarbell has told the sad story with great delicacy and judgement. When the dread blow fell, the nurse and the father stood with bowed heads beside the dead boy, and then the nurse, out of her own deep experience of human sorrow and of divine comfort, pointed the weeping President to her Savior.

      The work that this private sorrow began the public sorrow completed. Lincoln had long yearned for a fuller, sweeter, more satisfying faith. ‘I have been reading the Beatitudes,’ he tells a friend, ‘and can at least claim the blessing that is pronounced upon those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.’ He was to hunger no longer. A few days before his death he told of the way in which the peace of heaven stole into his heart. ‘When I left Springfield,’ he said, not without a thought of the flag and its inscription, ‘when I left Springfield, I asked the people to pray for me; I was not a Christian. When I buried my son—the severest trial of my life—I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg, and saw the graves of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ.’ From that moment, Dr. Hill says, the habitual attitude of his mind was expressed in the words: ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner!’ [Luke 18:13] With tears in his eyes he told his friends that he had at last found the faith that he had longer for. He realized, he said, that his heart was changed, and that he loved the Saviour. The President was at the Cross! [8]

President Lincoln lived to see peace, Union and emancipation become triumphant. In the words of Frank W. Boreham:

His last hours were spent amidst services of thanksgiving and festivals of rejoicing. One of these celebrations was being held in Ford’s Theatre at Washington. The President was there, and attracted as much attention as the actors. But his mind was not on the play. Indeed, it was nearly over when he arrived. He leaned forward, talking, under his breath, to Mrs. Lincoln. Now that the war was over, he said, he would like to take her for a tour of the East. They would visit Palestine—would see Gethsemane and Calvary—would walk together the streets of Jeru——!

      But before the word was finished, a pistol-shot—the ‘maddest pistol-shot in the history of the ages!'—rang through the theatre. And he who had climbed Mount Sinai with Moses, Mount Carmel with Elijah, and Mount Calvary with John, had turned his pilgrim feet towards the holiest heights of all. [9]

Footnotes
[Title]
Comes now a smiling New-Born Year

To fill to-day with goodly cheer—

        An infant hale and lusty.

Upon our door-sill he is left

By Daddy Time, of clothes bereft

        Despite the season gusty.

If he be Churl or doughty Knight,

A Son of Darkness or of Light

        No man can tell, God bless him!

But be he base or glorious

Time puts it wholly up to us

        To dress him!

—John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922), “The New-Born Year,” The Cheery Way: A Bit of Verse for Every Day (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), p January First.

[1] Jonathan Henley, “The vulnerability in another ‘Auld Lang Syne,’” The News Herald (Morganton, NC), December 26, 2014, pp D1-D2

[2] Minos Divine, Ecclesiastes or the Confessions of an Adventurous Soul (London: Macmillan and Co., 1916), p 27: “The melancholy man is always in danger of missing any good which redeems the ills of life. . . . This book [of Ecclesiastes] is a story of triumph over temperament. . . . There is an unmistakable note of joy in all the ‘still sad music’ of this book.”

[3] Julie N. Chang, “Gospel fest named to honor the Rev. McIntosh,” The News Herald, posted Monday, October 6, 2008. http://www.morganton.com/community/gospel-fest-named-to-honor-the-rev-mcintosh/article_373d18f4-0a5b-5569-841a-315397b1b716.html?TNNoMobile

[4] W.F. McIntosh, Jr. “Who can you trust in today’s society?” The News Herald (Morganton, NC) December 26, 2014, pp B1-B2.

[5] F.W. Boreham, “Abraham Lincoln’s Text,” Chapter 2 in A Temple of Topaz (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1928), p 22-32. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009977820

[6] Ibid., pp 26-27.

[7] Ibid., pp 28-29.

[8] Ibid., pp 30-31.

[9] Ibid., pp 31-32.

The pics were taken by the author at Biltmore Estate, Asheville, NC on 12/27/2014: Cedric's Tavern in Antler Village; Christmas bow and wreath near Cedric's Tavern; walkway with lights, Antler Village.