This "Pastor's Page" is the brief message
delivered by Pastor Gene at the grand millennium worship
which brought five congregations together at the APEX for a
two hour celebration of hymns and songs from the past and
future millennia.
MILLENNIUM
MESSAGE
The Rev. Gene R.
Preston
In the first century life for most
of the world's estimated 300 million people was unimaginably
mean, dirty, unhealthy and short. A thousand years later at
the last millennium the same general description was also
true of the world's population which in the first thousand
years had hardly grown because life continued unimaginably
mean, dirty, unhealthy and short.
But by this millennium we've come a
long way, baby!
For today's six billion persons the
life span has doubled for men and women; the mortality rate
among infants has improved 400%; the per capita wealth has
increased at least a thousand fold since the last
millennia.
We still are concerned about dirt
but not the street slosh and domestic sewage which
besmirched all our ancestors. The dirt which bothers us now
we produce from our industrialized life styles through air,
water and land pollution.
Most of the world's former health
plagues, which kept half of infants dying as fast as the
other half of their siblings could survive, have been
conquered to be replaced with illnesses which are more
mental and emotional in cause.
For the world's one third poor,
life is still mean, dirty, unhealthy and shorter than it
need be, but it is not unimaginably so for them. Even the
poor have access to radio, television, phones and have a
predisposition toward hope which the poor of all earlier
eras could never have.
And for that half of the world
which aspires to middle class status or higher, which
certainly includes all of us here, life is substantially
healthier, wealthier, easier, nicer and longer.
We are privileged in another, most
special way. To have lived in two centuries is a fine thing.
To be alive in two millennia is a much, much rarer
experience. Saint Paul did not manage that; nor Genghis
Khan, nor Mohandas Gandhi, nor Mother Teresa. But it appears
that all of us present will.
The threshold of every millennium
puts in sharper focus issues about human destiny. What's
next for us? Will we humans do better or worse in the new
millenium? As the clock turns, apocalyptic thinking has
risen only, predictably, to soon fall as no end of history
and no final judgement confront us tomorrow.
At every new year, but especially
this one, many among us look back on persons dear to us who
died in the dying century; to successes and defeats
experienced in the passing century; on personalities
important to us but now receding into a gone millennium.
There's something about passing to a new millennium which
puts a definite stamp of "closed and finished" upon our
remembered experiences.
The new millennium also occasions
future thoughts. What is your sense of your destiny as you
cross over to a new millennium?
Our hopes are shaped by our faith.
The Christian faith affirms that we live always in
relationship with a caring and purposeful God; our faith
declares that God has a plan for the betterment of all his
children, a plan in our tradition called the Kingdom of God.
Our faith further declares that God has most fully shown
himself and his purpose for us in the person of Jesus of
Nazareth, whom we call the Christ. And this Jesus is - in
his life's work, in his voluntary death, and in his
resurrection - our real and ultimate hope.
Our hope in Christ is grounded in a
personal relationship with God through Christ and in our
collective commitment to assist God and the Living Christ,
or Holy Spirit, in realizing the Kingdom of God on earth in
the next millennia. These two Christian hopes of personal
salvation and collective justice come together in the
sacrament of holy communion which we now celebrate.
The Jesus of our faith has promised
us that he is always with those who want to be with him. He
is with two or three, or two or three hundred as we are this
millennium eve, or with two or three billion as we pray will
be the case in the next century. He has promised to be with
us particularly when we gather in his name to celebrate the
sharing of the Lord's Supper which he began. He is with us
through the guidance of his Holy Spirit, which changes this
shared ritual into a foretaste of the Kingdom of God on
earth and the Kingdom of Heaven which awaits us.
When we go to his table we know the
one constant across the millennia, Jesus Christ, is with us
today, yesterday and tomorrow, to lift the meanness of life
for all and to increase the holiness of life among us.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year,
Glorious New Millennium, and Blessed communion to us all and
to the age which awaits us.
Pastor Gene Preston