First Parish Sermon

The movie, and the book that followed, fantasized what the world would be like at the beginning of the third millennium. The film portrayed men and women living on the moon, manned space flights to the planets, the discovery of three strange obelisks left behind by a highly intelligent alien civilization (one on earth, one on the moon and one in orbit around the planet Jupiter), super-intelligent computers that talk and play chess, and dispute with their human masters about the purpose of their mission in space, and then the final scene where astronaught, Frank Bowman, enters the obelisk around Jupiter and is transformed into a Cosmic Star Child. I am sure that the movie will be resurrected and shown again in the theaters now that 2001 has finally arrived. It sure seemed a long ways away in 1968. But, believe it or not, here we are! Arthur C. Clarke is still living at age 83 at his home in Sri Lanka. And Dick Fewkes at age 64 has retired to his house by the Swan Pond River on Cape Cod. Where did those years go?

 What is interesting to note is that Clarke and Kubrick chose the year 2001, not the year 2000, to mark the beginning of the new millennium. Clarke still insists that "the intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the third millennium." Last year there was a great of hoopla and excitement about the transition to the year 2000. This year the celebrations were much more restrained. Whether excited or restrained the transition from the year 2000 to 2001 represents the end and beginning of a New Year, a new decade, a new century, and a new millennium--one year, ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years! That is awesome to contemplate! As the Psalmist put it, "a thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone."

The word millennium derives from the Latin mille (thousand) and ennium (annual or yearly), thus a thousand years. Of course, the making and keeping of calendars, is a human invention. Nature keeps no calendar and God lives in the dimension of the eternal except for a brief incarnational interlude if the Christian myth be taken literally. The problem you see, is that the Gregorian calendar did not begin with year zero for the date of Jesus' birth, but year one. Most of us don't reach our first birthday until we've lived a full year. The Gregorian calendar says that the year 1 B.C. immediately became 1 A.D. the moment that Jesus was born, which means that he was a year old the second he drew his first breath. So, technically, the 20th Century did not end until December 31 in the year 2000. 

Most scholars and historians these days refer to our time as 2001 CE (meaning of the Common Era) rather than the Christian designation A.D. (Anno Domini, the year of our Lord). But CE or A.D. the reason for our custom of calling this the year 2001 relates to the date or year in which Jesus of Nazareth was presumably born. We now know that the Gregorian calendar, which was established in 1582, miscalculated the year of Jesus' birth by four to six years, which means that the millennium by all rights should have begun in 1994 or '96 depending on whether Jesus was born in 4 or 6 B.C. 

The use of the designation "the Year of our Lord," A.D., was first established by a little known monk named Dionysius Exiguus, about 500 A.D., to counteract the ancient Roman calendar. Many of the ancient Roman rulers, you will remember, had the gall to designate themselves as gods, and to demand not only obedience from their subjects, but worship as well. That was too much for Christians to swallow and so they refused. Many of them were persecuted and martyred for their refusal, as were the Jews before them, who would give worship only to Yahweh Adonai, the Lord God of hosts. By changing the calendar to Anno Domini Christians were saying that no Roman or secular ruler was equal to God or above the God they believed was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. They affirmed instead that Jesus, not Ceasar, was the Lord of history.

Without getting into the Trinitarian-Unitarian controversy about whether and to what degree Jesus was human or divine, we can indeed affirm that no secular or political leader of any nation is above God or the law, or above the ideals of justice and righteousness which apply to all human beings. That’s a very good thing to keep in mind as we approach the inauguration of a new president, George W. Bush, on January 20th. The apparent wish to idealize our political or religious leaders needs to be tempered with the reality of our all too human nature, lest our leaders, or their followers, lay overblown expectations upon us, and we end up disillusioned and disappointed yet again.

Among conservative and fundamentalist Christians the Millennium refers not to a specific calendar date, but rather to the thousand-year reign of perfect peace and justice on earth that will occur just before or after the Second Coming of Christ. It all depends on whether you are a premillennialist or a postmillennialist Christian, not to mention a dispensationalist. If you are a premillennialist you hold that the Millennium cannot begin until the Second Coming of Christ has actually happened. If you are a postmillennialist you hold to the belief that Jesus will not return until just after the Millennium has been completed. If you are a dispensationalist you believe that all the unfulfilled prophecies of the Old Testament will come true at last during the thousand-year reign of peace and justice. I’ll bet you never knew there were so many different kinds of millennialists!
 

Millennialism is invariably joined with so-called apocalypticism, the belief that the inequities of human history will finally be resolved by supernatural intervention. God and his Messiah will return on the clouds of heaven and set all things aright. The devil will be bound and chained and thrown into the lake of fire along with all those who have followed a sinful and evil path. It sounds very much like a Greek morality play in which the plot is finally resolved not by the characters themselves, but by the intervention of the gods, a deusex machina. It hasn’t happened that way yet, and it never will. All of these millennial views are based on the belief that God’s kingdom will come, and God‘s will be done, "on earth as it is in heaven." As a literal belief with a specific date in time and history it can only disappoint. As a symbolic expression of the human longing for a more perfect and just society it can give inspiration for working towards a better world.

The ancient Greeks had two concepts of time and history. One was chronos, or chronological time, the time that can be measured on a clock, tracked on a calendar, projected on a linear time line. This is the time of learned history, dates, and events, which can be accounted for and even planned. Jesus was born in 6 B.C. The stock market crashed in October 1929. World War II ended in 1945. I turned 64 on the 11th of December. In the last week of December our church secretary mailed the first issue of  BRIDGING for the year 2001. Tomorrow morning we’ll be catching a Southwestern Airlines flight to Tampa, Florida. This is the time of chronos, and we wear it on our wrists, read about it in the newspaper, watch it on television, write it in our checkbooks.

But the Greeks had a second concept of time, which they called kairos, which means the right time, or a time of opportunity, a time of great meaning and significance or challenge. A birthday, an anniversary, a memorial, graduation, marriage, sexual intimacy, giving birth, a job change or a promotion, climbing a mountain, planting roses, being caught up in the beauty of art or music, feeling a connection with God and others in church or in nature--such events and experiences can be kairotic, fraught with meaning, filled with wonder and purpose, turning ordinary time into extraordinary time, transforming chronos into kairos. I shared such a moment with a family a year ago as I Christened their infant son Jake on the eve of the new millennium. Tears of joy came into the eyes of Jake’s parents as they spoke about how their connection with this new life and new person had utterly changed and transformed them. It was a truly kairotic moment.

The birth of Jesus of Nazareth was a kairotic moment for his parents, Joseph and Mary, and eventually for the course of western civilization which was changed and transformed by the impact of his life and teachings. How can we become the instruments of kairotic change in our world as Jesus was for his world? How can we turn our chronos into kairos?

We shared Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year with our son and daughter in law and grandchildren in Needham. We attended the Candlelight service at the First Parish in Needham on Christmas Eve, and then opened presents with the family the following morning. Among other things our three grandchildren each got new scooters. They rode those scooters around the house in a circle through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room and front hallway again and again. Our 9-year-old granddaughter, Katlyn, the middle child between two brothers, had a big smile on her face. On one of her circles through the living room she exclaimed, "I’m glad I was born!" Wow! What a beautiful affirmation of being for the spirit of Christmas, the New Year, and the beginning of a new century and millennium. Every child of God deserves the gift of being able to say to themselves, "I’m glad I was born!" To feel that and to say that is truly to turn chronos into kairos. As the poet Max Ehrman put it, in spite of the pain and struggle, "You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here." You have inherent worth and dignity. Your life has meaning and significance.

That's what I think the existential concern about dates and changes in years and millenniums is really all about. We are seeking an ultimate meaning to our existence behind the changing and transitory nature of our time and history. We are creatures of chronos who hunger for kairos. As we enter into the greatest chronological change since the beginning of the first millennium, we ask ourselves, what is the meaning of the human venture on this planet among the stars? What can we do with the time God has given us to make this global village into a haven of love and peace and friendship? How can we help to bring about the day when every human being will be able to affirm for themselves and others, "I’m glad I was born, and I’m glad you were born."

This is the challenge that awaits us in the new millennium and in all the days and years yet to come. May we welcome the challenge of those years with courage, hope and determination, to better serve our God, our dreams, and one another. O Eternal, take the moments of our lives, the good and the bad, the happy and the sad,  and  turn them into timeless memoria in the making of our souls, that we may reach  beyond  things  temporal  to  truths  eternal,  wherein  the  holiness  and wholeness  of  life  is known and celebrated in all its pain and glory, and whence all beginnings and endings begin and end in thee. Amen.