We will shortly be greeted by 12 crisp new pages hanging on the wall of life. As well, we will be greeted with some 365,000 more days until the beginning of the next millenium.
    And life moves on. Day after day. Week after week. Millenium after millenium. "Sunrise, sunset," sang the old man Tevye from the peasant town of Anatevka. "Quickly the years go by ...I can't remember growing older." He milked the cows every morning--every night, one day like another. So the years went by--children, married, his dream of becoming a rich man never realized--at least not the way he wanted it to.
    He was born, he married, he had children, and he died. So it is in the book of generations according to Genesis 5. We cannot today predict what will fill in the squares between the sunrises and sunsets of the days ahead. This new year, as every year before, and to come-- is like the cavern. It is dark and unexplored. It lies before us, into which every step is a step of faith.
    I don't want to make this night sentimental or nostalgic. Nor do I want to just toss a HAPPY NEW YEAR! Or Happy New Millenium out like a two street mummer or a drunken reveler! But I do have a word for tonight. It is a word that spells assurance, confidence, joy, peace and power--and whatever else you might think of that can make this new millenium happy with whatever it might bring.
    It is a word that has become the most important word of faith in the English language--or any language. One Word: JESUS--the name of him who came as Word made flesh. JESUS--that's the word, Jesus. He's the Word. God gave him his name and God has given us his name.
    At the center of our faith is Jesus. At the center of the Christian Church there can be nothing, nothing but Jesus the Christ. At the center of any true and durable human justice, as its source and its purity, must be the love of God made manifest in the Lord Jesus Christ.
    At the center of our worship: Jesus. At the center of our ability to maintain love by the healing of forgiveness: Jesus. At the center of our lives: Jesus. And for our lives everlasting: Jesus the Christ.
    The Bible is an account of God's action for the sake of humanity. The principal character of that action is Jesus, God's Son. Therefore, at the center of the Scriptures is Jesus. It is not the other way around. The Bible cannot be the center of our faith since it declares him in whom it begs us to put our faith. The bible is not served--it serves. The Bible contains the words of God, but the Word of God is the one through whom all things were made, the one in whom is life and light, the one who became flesh in order to dwell among us.
    At the center of the fulness of divine revelation is Jesus. At the center of our right relationship with God, is Jesus. It is Jesus the person and work he has done. It is he, not some teaching of his. Not his model for our living and behavior. Not his poverty. Not his meekness and lowliness of heart. Not the symbol someone makes him for some other thing. Jesus.
    If a church presents anything other than Jesus as its primary proclamation-as its definition, purpose, and major offering to the world--that church is no longer Christian. "Feel good about yourself' may draw an audience, but it does not make Christians. And "self-esteem" except it begin with the esteem in which Jesus holds us, is worldly not divine. Remember that the primary sin has always been esteeming ones self above all others.
    Entertainment does not require a church. Entertainment, in fact, stands directly in the way of the centrality of Jesus Christ, by making the audience and the audience's pleasure as central.
    In my fifty years of life, I have heard sermons of energy and talent in which Jesus was not the central message. We were. Our niceness was. Or perhaps it was about how we can use our natural means to access the divine. Or the central message was about the necessity for justice. Or it was the American need for morality. Or family values was. But not Jesus. Jesus was, in fact, shanghaied to support what the preachers chose as their greater truths.
    I don't blame those issues. I am not troubled by people's commitment to them. In themselves, they are not bad. But neither do they save. Let them arise from our commitment to Jesus Christ, as he is the source of all that is good in life. The reversal is spiritually dangerous. First it will distort the meaning of Jesus in our eyes. In the end it will dismiss him altogether. If we love even good things more than we love Jesus Christ, those good things will become the Lord of us. And they will demand our following them in perfection. And we cannot.
    In traveling around, you, too, have probably visited monuments to human achievement in the churches. Enormous parking lots with marvelous strategies for moving vehicles in and out of them with ease between the services. Vast choirs. Expansive electronics. Buildings of lightness and space, fitted like theaters.
    And at the core of all of this is not the cross, neither the humility of Jesus, nor the humility of those who live at its foot. Neither the death of Jesus, nor the beatings of those who "rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name."
    At the core, rather, is triumph. "Don't worry. Be happy." Easy, so easy to neglect our Lord, even under the assumption of remembering him. But at the center of ALL that we do: Jesus.
    The center and motive of our every act. The motive and endurance of all our relationships. The delight with which we arise in the morning. The peace we enter into every night. Our going and our coming. Our sitting down. Our rising up. Our walking by the way. Jesus. The Lord Jesus Christ. That one. Him. Alone.