At a wedding I attended 50 years ago, the bride's brother sang a love song, "At Dawning." I was the groom, and have since forgotten the lyrics. But even the words of the title have a nice sound.

Dawn is a gorgeous time of day. Drenched in pastel beauty, mist, and quiet, it comes very softly, even as the freeways begin their hum of first traffic. For ships at sea, it is a time to do important navigational work. Sailors call it "morning twilight."

And though the twenty-first century is still a few heartbeats away, there's a feeling its dawn has already begun. Already we are standing at the edge of tomorrow looking steadily across a narrowing divide.

When Eugene Carson Blake was a chief spokesperson for Protestant Christianity in the early sixties, he made a trip to Korea where he visited a number of congregations in a gesture of spiritual solidarity. His mission accomplished, he met with a few local leaders the night before his scheduled return to the United States. They suggested a 5:30 a.m. "prayer meeting" as a send-off before catching his plane to fly out towards the morning sun. Blake thought it was a fine idea, though was surprised that the location for the gathering was an outdoor athletic stadium. He expected maybe two dozen to show up. That morning, as the sky began to change color, 9,000 Christians met to sing hymns and to express their gratitude for his coming.

There is, of course, something timeless about the agenda of preaching. But as 2000 A.D. comes ever closer, the end of a millennium appears to call for extraordinary reflection. It demands new thought about what is going on in history. It requires fresh perspective on what this both tragic and exciting century, now ending, means within the Greater Scheme, and on what new priorities the new age, about to be born, deserves.

In Thornton Wilder's Prologue to The Eighth Day (1967), there's a splendid fictional description of what went on in Coaltown, Illinois, around midnight on December 31, 1899. People gathered in front of the courthouse clock to cry, and sing - not "Auld Lang Syne," but "Our God, Our Help In Ages Past." And how once the community welcome of 1900 was over, Dr. Gillies, town physician, acknowledged to be the wisest man in town, met with a small group in the local tavern and responded to their questions. There's too much of what he said to be quoted, but a few of Dr. Gillies' "answers" send the mind on journeys.

Acknowledging a need for optimism, he said, "It is the duty of old men to lie to the young. Let them encounter their own disillusions," he said. "We strengthen our souls, when young, on hope; the strength we acquire enables us later to endure despair as a Roman should."

He continued: "The process of life never stands still. The creation has not come to an end. Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week - the children of the Eighth Day."

When Anne Lindbergh was trying to regain her soul along the shores of Captiva Island and wrote those superb essays in Gift From The Sea about her pilgrimage - using the images of sea shells - she said it was "along toward the middle of the second week" that she started to come alive again.

Perhaps we are the children of the Ninth Day, if Dr. Gillies was correct, with more new chapters of the Creation Story about to begin on January 1, 2000.

It's hard, though, to bid adieu to an era that has witnessed a thousand revolutions, spawned a dozen new forms of freedom. Still it is - and always has been - Good-bye Forever.

I wrote a poem by that name, remembering the sentiments of leaving home for college.

'Twill only be for a year, Mother, that I must leave. And the scholarship - it will help me learn so much. And I will learn; I will pass all the examinations. Then, After one year, I will return to you. Wait for me.

Good-bye, my son; good-bye forever. And thank youfor the love that will take the scarlet wounds of life'sNew loneliness, and fill them with the oilOf knowing that this is the price of a man.

The volumes of forecast have already begun to appear, furnished with awesome things to come, miracles stacked one on top of the other, scenarios that both dazzle and warn, and make us glad it will be others and not us who will be stuck with the problems "progress" brings.

Preachers of the new millennium will see older nationalistic loyalties dissolved, the Third World merged with the rest of us. The magic word will not be computers, but genetics. People will continue to regard 100 years as a normal lifetime, yet disease will get in its familiar innings. AIDS will become a terrible thing from out of our past but other battles will replace those dreadful letters, "HIV-Positive." Space won't fascinate the imagination the way it did during the twentieth century, but we will keep learning more and more about how all things began, and what is cosmologically possible as space platforms turn operational - soon to be as routine as the 1980-90 shuttles. We will continue to delight in convenience and speed, but be gradually dissuaded from letting them become ends in themselves.

Five great Imperishables of the Spirit persist. Belief:• In the Permanence of God.• That Life is a sacred journey and involves our choice.• In the undisputed supremacy of love.• That God is knowable; that faith risks being wrong.• That Life has a transcendent dimension and is transformed by encounters, both human and divine.

The church will continue because it has an Eternal agenda. Its institutional decay may continue, but an exclusively materialistic existence will self-destruct on Empty, and we will press the search beyond Lexus automobiles, second homes with jaccuzis, and the idolatry of leisure and exemptions from responsibility. We will never be able to shake off the call of holiness.

The pressure of population and environmental integrity will make community less and less optional if there is to be survival for any.

In 1830, after five billion years of existence, the world population was one billion. A hundred years later, in January 1930, we became two billion. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were vying for the presidency, the figure became three billion. In 1975, four billion. Today there are 5.7 billion of us. And by 2000, 6.3 billion. So that more than half of all the people who ever lived on planet Earth are alive today.

We might wish there were some sort of intrinsic magic to the flip of a calendar page - that the heavens would let out a gasp, that God would speak, and the world would be suddenly different. We know, without waiting to read it here, that in that moment, the sun will rise and set with the same regularity as it did the day before. It will not be marked by the tolling of any Great Clock. Rather, it will be a day to be born, or die, to begin to plan high school graduation, schedule a wedding, or sign up for try-outs on Broadway.

In the waning days of the twentieth century, we have found ourselves meditating even more than usual upon the Meaning of Time. But whatever that is, it hasn't changed. A trillion seconds equals 33,750 years. Light still travels at 186,000 miles per second.

Only what we do with time transforms a blank canvas into wild streaks of color and meaning, and maybe those meanings are the only things that really endure.

Looking back, 1000 A.D. produced these accomplishments: Leif Ericson reached Nova Scotia; an Indian mathematician, Sridhara, recognized the importance of the zero; there were several abortive attempts to fly; potatoes and corn were planted in Peru; the Chinese invented gunpowder; the Saxons settled in Bristol; and because it was the end of the millennium, there was widespread fear of the end of the world.

2,000 A.D. should produce a more impressive list. The world has speeded up. We are smarter, richer, much better equipped to explore what the world is all about than we were a thousand years ago. But we are also more dangerous to ourselves, more conceited - and less inclined to be kind and tolerant.

Dawn is a good time to be thinking about such things as we bask in the newness of another new beginning and restudy our dreams. Lifting up still one more prayer for peace, and, for the ten-millionth time, go about the business of sorting out the permanent and the beautiful from the impermanent and the ugly.

We wish for a more settled order, but the chaos that has followed what appeared to be the end of the Cold War is enough to prove to us that we will have to wing our way into tomorrow just like those who were around to begin this century for us.

As the '60s came to an end, someone wrote:

The face of change is a young one - and it comes in many colors. All previous revolutions had, as their goal, the attainment of some new state of equilibrium. What we are seeing in our time is a new order of revolution, whose goal is not a new equilibrium but social disorder itself. It is the first social recognition that continuous change itself is a form of equilibrium, and that it is only in disorder that we find order. You can't have fun surfing on a slow wave, and you can't surf at all on a frozen one.

Yet in the midst of this uproar we still find a compass in the music of George Frederic Handel and Ludwig von Beethoven; and the heart of Nature in the sound of the sea. Or see the summary of everything that ever was, or ever will be, in the silhouette of mountains or the patterns of Orion and Cassiopeia.

There have been many dawns. Mother-of-pearl grays, vermillions, pink ones - laced with gold. Genesis describes how dawns and sunsets separated the days and paved the way for Order. First the salt-water life. Then, as the cycles multiplied, and cellular forms started to show what they could do, the drama took on new proportions. The dinosaurs, and primates.

Whitney came home from nursery school and invited his mother to quiz him on what the class had talked about that day.

"Do you know," he inquired, "what made the dinosaurs disappear?"

"No. What made them disappear?"

"The world changed and they missed the boat!"

The world is always leaving, and the Captain is calling out to us to get aboard.

Then one long blast on the whistle. Up comes the gangplank. It moves out upon the Deep.

Preaching in the morning hours may not guarantee the biggest crowd. But unless we start early it may be too late.