[AI translation] My Christian Brothers and Sisters!Now, on the last day of this passing year, I am reminded of an old experience. I was standing on the bank of a large river, at a place where the riverbed suddenly curved, and beyond the bend the shimmering water soon disappeared behind the willows that lined the bank. I looked into the water and wondered how much the current was carrying away. Decayed wood was carried and carried on by the waves. Flower petals, bits of paper, scraps of cloth floated past me. Scraps of boards, abandoned, rickety boats, animal carcasses were washed downstream. Some bad piece of furniture, a pot, a basket, a remnant of a basket, floated in front of me, it had its own story. Each one has a piece of someone's life, someone's fate attached to it. I felt that those things in the water were a piece of history. They all went downstream, and at the bend they all disappeared from my sight.
And so the mighty river of time carries with it the many, many memories of the passing year. And here we stand at the bend, looking with the shuddering pain of farewell into the fast-flowing stream of time, as it carries a piece of our lives away with it! It would be nice to stop this river now and then, to pick out one or another piece of memory that has fallen into it - but we can't! The mighty river takes its course, it is about to reach the bend, and then it disappears forever! Let us at least see what it takes with it! Or in other words: what is it that will pass away with this year?
There has been much joy, much happiness, many happy hours in your life this year. You may have had some successes, moments when you were celebrated, surrounded by smiling faces. Many a merry laugh echoes through the days even now. New memories come and go. Precious experiences they are, happy experiences, of how good God is: how much our supplications He has heard, how mercifully He has dealt with us, how much love He has lavished on us, how much sin He has raised us from, and how many sins He has not even allowed us to commit! In the great burning forest the flames have not yet reached our nests, our cities and houses are still intact. This is one of the most precious proofs of God's grace from the past year. This expired piece of grace is floating there - oh, how painfully we say goodbye to it now! Oh, how good it would be at least to lift it out of the great river, and keep it still! The tide is taking it!
The tide also carries sad experiences. For example, a dear, pale face, a dear dead one, a father or a child, a brother or a sister. It's so hard to look after the dear departed figure, as if a piece of our heart had been broken off and is now being rolled away by the tide. Time also carries many, many a bitter tear - remember - shed at a sickbed or a funeral pyre, or fallen from our eyes when the pain of a disappointment or regret has made our hearts very tight! But even sadder and more bitter are the tears that have fallen from the eyes of others because of my unloving or hurtfulness. Harsh, harsh words, secret or revealed sins, emerge from the waves of time. Then good deeds undone, prayers unsaid, precious opportunities unused come and go. Many divine calls and commands uttered in vain, many empty hours wasted, countless ripe fruits, large and small, on the tree of sin. Oh, if once the great river could be turned back, and much could be made good in it! Oh, if we could cleanse our vanished time from all this bitter black waste! The tide is taking it!
Sweet and sad memories, happy and unhappy days, Tears and happy smiles disappear around the bend. These are the things that go with the year 1943! We had to talk about them so that we might understand all the more clearly the Word that speaks of what remains! It says: "Now therefore remain faith, hope, charity, these three; and the greatest of these is charity." (1 Cor 13:13) Not everything is carried away by the rushing tide we call time, and we are not left completely bereft, with only the memories of past experiences in our hearts. There is something that time has no mastery over. This passing year can take away our pain or our joy, it can take away peace, prosperity, the smile on our face or the tear in our eye, but it still leaves us with these three: faith, hope and love.
1) So faith remains. Our faith that the Trinity is an eternal God who holds this world, past, present and future, in the hands of one eternal God. Our faith is that not only did he create this world, not only did he wind it up like a clockwork to let it run according to the laws he has laid down in it, but that he personally thinks of everything in it, holds us to account, controls all destinies, without his will and knowledge not a sparrow falls from the tree or a hair falls from our head.
So He has been the Lord and the mover of every hour of the last 365 days. Nothing that has happened has happened by chance, not by blind fate or by some fate playing tricks on us, but everything in your life and in mine has happened exactly as God had decreed in advance, as He had decided in the Council of Peace before the creation of the world. You can look back on every day and every event of the past year as a full-fledged, already realized, visible stage of divine predestination! Joy and sorrow, tears and smiles, cradle and coffin, every little and great thread of events, are woven in beautiful order into a wonderful heavenly design, of which we now see only a tiny fragment of the back of it, and therefore do not understand it, but whose sublime grandeur we behold there, amazed from face to face! This is our faith that remains!
2) And with it comes hope! Christian hope always concerns the life to come. Not for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or the next century - but for the great future, the one that begins beyond the grave. The content of our happy Christian hope is that death is not the last word, but that there is eternity, A happier, higher, more glorious life, opened for us by Jesus Christ in His death and resurrection. And we who belong to Christ are moving towards this heavenly glory.
Our hope now, on New Year's Eve, is that every day and every hour of the past year has brought us forward to heavenly glory. So not only has God orchestrated the events of the past year, but He has orchestrated them in such a way that they all mature us for eternity! As the apostle Paul says, "But we know that those who love God have all things to thank him for, as those who are called according to his purpose." (Rom 8:28), i.e., qualified for heaven! So you are free to look at experiences that fade away in the course of time as experiences by which God has educated you. You have passed another class in the great school of eternal life, and God has brought you nearer to the end of your destiny! Even in the midst of these experiences, submerged in the price of passing time, we have the hope that every happy hour, every suffering, every trial, has served our salvation in God's wonderful ordering. Even our sins could not frustrate this gracious plan of God, for he has the power to turn even evil to our good, to bring good out of Satan's work!
3) Along with faith and hope, love remains, as the Word teaches us. It is not, of course, human love that is primarily at stake here, because that too can only endure if it is in contact with the eternal source of love, divine love. Only the love of God is eternal and unchanging. It was this love that once carried Jesus to the cross for our sins, because it could not bear to see us cast into damnation! This is the love you can count on for the life and death of Jesus Christ!
This is the divine, fatherly love that has watched over you every day of this past year! Looking back over the memories of your toast, God wants you to see that everything there speaks of His infinite love for you. Thou hast not lived in vain, if thou seest now that all this past year is a clear and loud proof of God's love for thee! For all the omissions of the year that has passed, for all the sins of the year, for all the tears that others have shed for thee, for all that makes the passing of the year so bitterly perilous: for all this the Lord God has answered by forgiving, by blotting out even from memory! For someone else has already paid the price you owe: Jesus Christ! This is the love that remains, that you can count on, that remains yours!
Many things will pass away in the year that has passed, but faith, hope and love will remain, these three; and the greatest of these is love. It will remain for the coming year, and it will remain forever!
There are two things you must do, and do them before this year is out: kiss with unspeakable gratitude the hand of God, your Father, who guides your destiny towards heaven, - and with great and deep repentance ask and receive forgiveness for all the sins of the past year!
Amen.
Date: 31 December 1943.
Lesson
Zsolt 90,1-12