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	The Minister's Millennial Minute

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church in Wakefield 
	December 12, 1999



My biggest fear as I contemplate the millennium is that my brain may
not be Y2K compliant.  I really have a hard time deciding whether this
is the event of a lifetime or no more than a random lineup of digits.

As most of you know, I drive a battered old Geo Metro, circa 1993, a
car which was certainly never intended to see the new millennium when
it rolled off the assembly line in Tokyo or wherever.  A mechanic once
told me that it was supposed to be a disposable car, and ever since I
have felt in driving it like I am washing out my Kleenexes and reusing
them.

At any rate, I bought this hardy red bug from a Lutheran minister in
1996 when the odometer was showing 43,000 miles.  That same odometer
is now showing 99,950, and it is of more than passing interest to me
whether it will turn over to 100,000 before the year turns over to
2,000.

But that's not all.  The question that follows is, which event is more
significant in my life, the turn of the odometer on my car or the turn
on the Millennium?  Or put another way, is this just a matter of
digital coincidence, or is real change about to happen?

We know well that we can't even agree on whether the Third Millennium
begins this coming New Years or the next.  Logic holds with 2001, but
I know that my excitement at my odometer will peak when those 9's line
up and then become a string of zeroes, not when we reach 101,000.  So
I am now inclined to celebrate twice, and maybe for the year
in-between.  My idea is that in the next year I can from time to time
hold up figures from liberal religious history of the past thousand
years.

Now a thousand years is a long time, and the majesty of the number is
one of the things that makes us seek for meaning.  It is more than a
lifetime, more than a twenty generations, so from our human
perspective it looks incredibly long.

When we compare it to other periods, though, it doesn't seem so long.
From the latest cosmological calculations, the universe is 15 Billion
years old, so the millennium just past is only one of 15 million
millennia that have passed since the Big Bang.  The Earth is 5 Billion
years old, so 5 million millennia have elapsed since our planet came
into being.  Life on earth, it is now thought, arose about 2.3 billion
years ago, so two million three hundred thousand millennia passed
since the first life forms coalesced out of the amino acid soup.

And our species, homo sapiens, has been around for roughly a hundred
millennia.  Human agriculture has been around for maybe ten millennia.

The idea of a millennium is culture-bound, to some extent.  Many
people do not use the solar-based Gregorian calendar which is used to
calculate this as the 11th of December 1999.  We all have at least
passing familiarity with the Hebrew calendar, which is lunar, and the
lack of fit between this calendar and the Gregorian one explains why
Jewish holidays occur at different dates on the Gregorian calendar.

Many Buddhists also have a different calendar, and they also have a
term for a long time, "kalpa" It is often said that the next
reincarnation of the Buddha will happen in 100,000 kalpas.  How long
is a kalpa?  Some will say simply that it is a very long time, but I
have also heard it defined like this:  somewhere in the world there is
a mountain that is a mile high.  Every hundred years, a certain bird
flies by this mountain and brushes by with its wingtip.  It knocks off
less than an inch of dirt when it flies by.  A kalpa is the length of
time it takes the mountain to be eroded by this process down to a
level plain.

This definition reminds me of a game I had as a kid.  Three posts were
set into a board, and there were eight disks of graded sizes, each of
which had a hole in the center which fit over the post.  The game
started with all the disks on one post stacked in a pyramid or cone
shape so that the smallest was on the top and the largest on the
bottom.  The object of the game was to move the disks one at a time so
that the entire set of eight eventually ended up on another post; the
trick was that you could never put a larger disk on top of a smaller
one.

It turned out that smallest the number of moves you could accomplish
the goal was an exponent of 2, 2 multiplied by itself one less than
the number of disks in the game, so that for my eight-disk game it
took 256 moves.  But the slip that came with the game said that in
furthest Tibet there was a monastery where there was a replica of this
game with golden disks and golden posts, and there were monks who
moved the disks one at a time around the clock every day.  But this
golden game had 64 disks, so that the number of moves required to
finish it was 2 to the 64th power.  The legend was that when the monks
finally finished moved the disks, time would come to an end.  Perhaps
that is the end of the kalpa.

Well, all this is by way of trying to give us a scale, a way of saying
that a thousand years isn't really such a bid deal.  On the other
hand, as humans we are concerned with human history, and that means
the part of all this which happens after the invention of writing.
The invention of writing occurs about five to six thousand years ago,
so the last millennium is one-fifth or one-sixth, quite a significant
chunk of that time.

So to make this opposing perspective vivid, I have assembled the
Minister's Millennial Minute, my highly unscientific nod to some of
the characters, events and forces that have helped shaped the past
thousand years.  Here it is:

Emperor Otto III, William the Conqueror, Hildegard of Bingham, the
Crusades, Genghis Khan, St.  Francis of Assisi The Magna Carta, Rumi,
Marco Polo, the Plague, St.  Ignatius Loyola, St.  Thomas Aquinas, The
cathedral of Rheims, St.  Thomas More, Erasmus, Chaucer, Jan Hus,
Spinoza, the Alhambra, Ferdinand & Isabella, the Inquisition,
Columbus, Gutenberg, Martin Luther, Servetus, Henry VIII, Francis
Bacon, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Galileo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt,
Milton, Cromwell, Locke, Newton, Rousseau, Swedenborg, Kant, Voltaire,
Bach, Handel, Franklin, Johnny Appleseed, Jefferson, Mozart, French
Revolution, House of Rothschild, William Blake, Jane Austen, William
Ellery Channing, Napoleon, Eli Whitney, Hosea Ballou, Beethoven,
Pushkin, Emerson, Bolivar, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Queen Victoria,
Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, Marx, Darwin, Whitman, Edison, Susan B.
Anthony, J.P.  Morgan, Freud, James Joyce, William James, Einstein,
Eugene V.  Debs, Stravinsky, Schweitzer, A.A.  Milne, Picasso,
Clarence Darrow, Gandhi, Frank LLoyd Wright, Alfred North Whitehead,
Henry Ford, James Dewey, T.S.  Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W.B.  Yeats,
Clarence Skinner, Franklin Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill,
Camus, Sartre, Pete Seeger, Kerouac, Hemingway, Chairman Mao, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Elvis Presley, Buckminster Fuller, John F.  Kennedy,
Vietnam, The Beatles, the women's movement, the space program, Janis
Joplin, Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Carter, Va�lav Havel, Gorbachev, Nelson
Mandela, and Bill Gates.

Well, that whirlwind tour might have made you dizzy.  So far I've
shown several perspectives on the upcoming event, but maybe we're no
closer to the meaning.

Well, I'm going to make a stab at the question of meaning, but let me
first make a disclaimer.  I've only lived for 1/20th of the
Millennium, and I'm not that great a student of the rest of it, and
each of you will have your own take on it.  Here is mine.

The starting point of this odometer trip we're on is the person whose
birth we celebrate this month, Jesus of Nazareth.  In his ministry of
one to three years in about 28 or 30 of the era that came to be
counted from his life, he caused quite a stir.  What was that all
about?

I don't think many of us here give much weight to the proposition that
it was the finger of God intruding into history in a way it had not
before or since, sending a direct part of the God incarnate in human
flesh.  But whatever that ministry meant, it had a powerful effect on
those who heard his words.  There was a pent-up longing in the Jewish
people of Palestine for someone to deliver them from Roman oppression,
and many were willing to believe that this was the one.  The title
that his followers gave him two generations afterward, Christ, or "the
anointed," reflects this belief.

But as a Messiah, as a deliverer, Jesus of Nazareth was a manifest
failure.  Not only did he not throw off the yoke of Roman oppression
and restore the grandeur of King David's line, he got himself killed.
Why should anyone continue to pay any attention to his message?

One of the reasons is that people believed him when he said he would
come again.  Some people believed that he had been resurrected among
them.  Some of his followers claim to have conversed with him, to have
shared food with him, to have felt his wounds.

In the passage we read today from Mark, Jesus paints quite a vivid
picture of the end times, borrowing phrases from apocalyptic visions
in the Book of Daniel.

But as the years passed, the belief in another coming became harder
and harder to sustain.  The Greek word for the second coming is
"parousia" and it is said that the delay in the Parousia is the
driving force behind the construction of the Christian religion.  In
other words, the Gospels, which were not written down until after the
year 70 of the common era - after, that is, the Romans had decisively
crushed yet another Jewish rebellion and destroyed the Second Temple
for good measure - the Gospels were written with an eye toward trying
to sustain an essence of Jesus' teachings in the face of the
incontrovertible fact that he had not returned as promised, and the
Jews were still oppressed.

The description of the Day of Judgment in the book of Revelations is
part of this effort, a location of the Second Coming at some
inconceivably distant point in the future.  Here is Revelations 20:
1-6:

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the
key to the bottomless pit and a great chain.  He seized the dragon,
that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a
thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and locked and sealed it
over him, so that he would deceive the nations no more, until the
thousand years were ended.  After that he must be let out for a little
while.

Then I saw the thrones, and those seated on them were given authority
to judge.  I also saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for
their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God.  They had not
worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on
their foreheads or on their hands.  They came to life and reigned with
Christ a thousand years.  (The rest of the dead did not come to life
until the thousand years were ended.)  This is the first resurrection.

For our conservative Christian brothers and sisters these passages
point to an imminent event.  These are the true milleniallists, and
for them time is about to come to an end.

For the rest of us, the inconvenient fact is that now the age
predicted has arrived, and Jesus of Nazareth does not appear to have
come yet.

I take much inspiration from Jesus of Nazareth, but in order to get a
grip on him I try to filter out some of the baggage put on his
teachings by the early church in its attempt to explain the delay of
the Parousia, the second coming.  What speaks to me from the Gospels
is first, that Jesus preached and practiced inclusivity, acceptance of
non-Jews, Pharisees, Samaritans, prostitutes, tax collectors, and
second, that he preached the Kingdom of God.  Where is this Kingdom?
I think it is not in the sky, and I think it is not in a far-off time,
or after death.  I think Jesus was rather explicit that the Kingdom of
God is among us.

I think we make the Kingdom of God every day as we work to make the
world a little better place.  I think we haven't totally realized it
yet, and probably the meaning of history is that it is never going to
be totally realized, but always in the process of unfolding.  The
Kingdom of God, like the rest of reality, is dynamic, not static.  I
see it not as a removed, separated realm of unchanging eternal bliss,
but as the growing manifestation of forces for good operating among
us.  It does not work around us, but through us.

Now this present Millennium began in what are called the Dark Ages in
Europe.  Otto III, who started my Millennial list, was crowned King of
Germany in 995 at age 14, but according to a recent essay by Gore
Vidal, dreamed of reuniting all of Europe in a Holy Roman Empire, and
to that end he is said to have opened the tomb of Charlemagne to pay
his illustrious predecessor a visit.  Otto saw to it that his teacher,
a French scholar named Gebert, was elected Pope, and he became Pope
Sylvester.  Both Otto and Sylvester took up residence in Rome at about
1000, still dreaming of a Holy Roman Empire.  But a year later they
were both driven out of Rome and within three years they were dead.

Of course the dream of unifying the known world did not die, and in
the course of the Millennium we have many who tried to realize it,
from the revived Holy Roman Empire to the Third Reich.

Gore Vidal's essay, from which I got these musings, says that the
millennium had been a big seesaw between the centrifugal forces of
chaos and the centripetal forces of centralization.  (Do you remember
those terms from your science class?  You whirled the bucket around on
the string and the centrifugal force was what pulled out, and the
centripetal was the string pulling in.)  When Yeats wrote the poem I
read this morning, it looked as if the centrifugal forces were
winning:

"Things fall apart, the center cannot hold."

But we have not descended into chaos in this Millennium.  The dark
ages, when the learning of classical antiquity was almost
extinguished, has not returned.

I think the way things have developed has kind of sidestepped this
centrifugal/centripetal axis.  What we see, in the last decade is a
greater dispersal of centers of power and information, but also
greater organization and complexity.  Human interaction and human
interdependency is increasing on an ever-vaster scale.  What makes Y2K
a serious concern is the knowledge that we are all so dependent on
each other in this age.  The food I eat today has passed through a
dozen hands and probably traveled hundred or thousands of miles to
reach my mouth.  If any link in the chain is broken, I could not be
assured of eating tomorrow.

So what rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born?  I think
it is not chaos, disintegration, but new strands of the complex web of
existence being spun both by natural and human forces.  I think we are
being wound tighter and tighter together in a common skein of destiny.
I think that the future holds the prospect for a richer fuller life
than previous generations have ever thought possible.  The Dalai Lama,
I understand, recently predicted that the amount of love in the world
was on the increase.  There is reason for hope that, as the odometer
clicks over, there are a few more good miles left in this buggy we
call earth.

Amen.