Well, we made it, as far as I can tell. My computer still boots up, enabling me to write yet another sermon - though I did print out a draft New Year's Eve - just in case. And, as far as I know, Jesus did not come to end the age and beam all the faithful to Paradise. We are still in real time. The world continues to turn. In retrospect, it may seem the advent of the new millennium was nothing more than a pseudo-event. Still, it was really more than that, and we do well to explore its meaning. There is something in us that finds dates with many zeroes to be very poetic.
The coming of the year 2000 was a curious mixture of fundamentalist Biblical frenzy and high tech anxiety - the sacred and the secular commingled in an almost comical way. On the one hand, the Christian millennialists predicted the end of the world as we know it, while the secular computer millennialists predicted the world would remain as we know it.
Church historian Martin Marty shared the story of a minister who received a letter from a junior high student: "Dear Pastor: The seventh grade Sunday school class is interested in doing a sermon on the Book of Revelations. If there is anything important I need to know, please call me. Tips would also be helpful."[1]
Actually, it is the Book of Revelation which is pivotal here. Written early in the second century of the Common Era, it was a passionate statement of hope for the early Christians who were discouraged that Jesus had not returned to earth as he had presumably promised. That hope was a Second Coming - the Parousia - when Jesus would come to judge the wicked and vindicate the righteous.
Most biblical scholars follow the lead of Albert Schweitzer who believed Jesus hoped to bring in the imminent Kingdom of God. But, according to the Gospel of Mark (13:32), the prophet from Nazareth was a bit vague: "About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." The Book of Revelation - and thus the Christian New Testament - ends with the plaintively hopeful words, "Come, Lord Jesus."
That indefiniteness doesn't seem to bother those Christians who were certain the world would end at the end of the first millennium or at the end of the second. We can only be certain that these soothsayers were seriously misinformed about the apocalypse - which means revelation - unveiling the hidden mysteries and meanings. This hope was strong in Jews and Christians who had borrowed the concept from the Zoroastrian faith of ancient Persia. This was the belief that history was a great cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil - culminating at the Battle of Armageddon, at the hill of Megiddo - a fortified city guarding an important pass from the Mediterranean Sea to the inland of ancient Palestine and the site of many battles.
Millenarianism is the apocalyptic belief in a 1000 year kingdom to be established at the end of historical time when resurrected Christian martyrs reign with Jesus.
And so, as Martin Marty says, "Revelation seems to have been written to encourage early Christians to be hopeful. In our time, many expounders use it to scare the daylights out of people."[2] And so it has. One in four Americans believe Jesus will come in their lifetimes. If he doesn't they are prepared. As one believer stated, "It doesn't embarrass me in the least to think that the next ten years could come and go with no event. God's big enough to handle it."[3]
While the participants in the turning of the first millennium feared the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - war, social collapse, famine and death - most of us have been worrying about the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse - Y2K - the little glitch that makes computers think the double zero really means 1900, not 2000. That Y2K was no joke is demonstrated by a Harris poll of Silicon Valley computer programmers and engineers in early 1998. It found that 62% would avoid air travel New Year's Eve 1999, 20% would withdraw all of their money from savings accounts before then. One in 12 planned to move to safer quarters before January 1.[4] What they really did I haven't a clue.
The problem has apparently been fixed and the world did not collapse, tempting me to say never have so many made so much of so little - though we still have to get through tomorrow morning when businesses reopen. However, it wasn't really so trivial after all - I have heard estimates ranging from 100 to 300 billion dollars to fix that little mistake made by those geniuses who invented computers not so long ago.
In a delightful aside, Douglas Adams of Apple Computers says, "We may not have gotten everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end."[5] Apple Computers was Y2K defiant.
Well, what have we learned from this encounter with Y2K and the millennium - if anything - or are we simply "doomsday dummies" who are vulnerable to any degree of hype - theological or technological? The year 2000 provides us with a teachable moment. What can we learn?
Bible scholar Roland Emerson Wolfe once wrote that "Religion is the only area of human experience where no progress has been made in 2000 years."[6] Given the Jerusalem syndrome in which some Christian visitors to Jerusalem believe they are biblical characters who will bring in the end of the world; given the vindictive attitude of some fundamentalists that they will be the ones saved in the end times while the rest of us perish in eternal hellfire; given the unjustified elevation of a simple Middle Eastern peasant-prophet of righteousness to the status of Cosmic Judge; given the waste of energy and resources on such trivial matters which ought to be applied to the real scourges of our time - nuclear and environmental disaster, poverty and ethnic wars, normalization of greed - one could make a good case for Wolfe's thesis.
However, in the midst of all this millennial hype, there are encouraging signs in religion - organized and unorganized. Never have interfaith relations been so strong or so promising at the highest levels of leadership. Rochester is only one locale for deep and enriching communions of religious faiths. Organized religion, which so often has ripped humanity apart, and sadly continues to do so has to take as its charge the replacement of walls with bridges in the new millennium.
And that will be hard given the dramatically different religious understandings which inform the various faiths. It is superficial to claim there are few important differences among the world's religion. For example, I have discovered that while I share much with my liberal Christian brothers and sisters, there is a fundamental difference in the way we view the world and its history. As one Christian theologian put it, "Christians share the conviction that that history is not only headed somewhere, but headed toward a consummation in Christ, a time when all things will be united in Christ. Though we should be quite happy to leave the details of Christ's final triumph shrouded in mystery, the expectation of that event, and confidence in that triumph cannot be abandoned lest the faith itself be abandoned."[7]
I am not confident that history is headed somewhere - as if there were some final destination. I believe human history is open-ended, an on-going project of repairing the world and creating some semblance of the Beloved Community. That Beloved Community is not an historical reality. It is rather a vision which guides us as we struggle with the mud and muck of the everyday - as we seek to love our neighbors near and far - as we strive for some approximation of justice for the have-nots of this world - as we search for meanings to give significance to this all-too-brief earthly sojourn.
A second learning from the changing of the millennial guard is delightfully expressed in the words of the old preacher who said, "God created time so that everything wouldn't happen at once." I don't know if God created time, but clearly an understanding of the meaning of time is at the heart of religious experience.
I'm not talking here about chronological time here. I leave that to those who have been called the "math police."[8] It is, of course, interesting to note that, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory, the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third will be reached on January 1, 2001, a date is based on a calendar created in 526 of the Common Era by a monk variously named Dionysius Exiguus, Dennis the Diminutive, or simply Denny the Runt, the head of a Roman monastery who forged a common calendar from the divergent dating systems of his day.
I speak about the religious meaning of time - as in our western understanding of linear time taken so seriously by both Greeks and Hebrews. Time really matters - progress depends on it, evolution requires it, science is based upon it. Religiously, by measuring time we are reminded that we are finite creatures in an apparently infinite ocean of time. We have a beginning and an end, and happily, a middle. As Saint Augustine put it: "Time is a three fold present: the present as we experience it, the past as present memory, and the future as a present expectation."[9]
Each of the great religions and cultures finds time significant. In Jewish history this year is 5761; in Islamic countries it is 1421; for Zoroastrians 2390 and China is en route to 4698 - the year of the dragon - an auspicious time to be born. At the same time we cannot ignore the cyclical meaning of time which intersects the linear. That is, we are part of a cosmic process in which seasons succeed seasons in a circular parade. The phases of the moon are cyclical as are the tides of the ocean. The stars in the sky are measured by a cosmic time, but are also cyclical as they parade around the heavens in a most predictable pattern. In a sense generation succeeds generation in the same way - we are now, but there are those who preceded us and there will be those who succeed us - generation without end - at least we hope so.
And what do we learn from this fragile and preliminary grasp of time? That we are not really central in the great cosmic scheme of things. Time and creation will go on without us - though it is also true that if in terms of time we are negligible, it is also true that we are the timekeepers. Nonetheless, the transition from one millennium to another should help to keep us humble before the ultimate mystery of time.
A third important learning must now appear obvious to us - our incredible and sometimes dangerous dependence on modern technology. We Americans at least simply assume our computer-driven society. That came clear to me as I watched the welcome of the new millennium in a rather primitive South Pacific Island where Y2K began to unfold. The natives were engaged in communal dancing and feasting, obviously enjoying themselves. When asked by a TV reporter what he thought about Y2K, one village chief was not even sure what that was. When it was explained, he could but laugh, because his culture was totally free of dependence on such technology - food would be grown and cooked, clothes would be washed - life would be enjoyed no matter what happened to computers.
Now, I am not a technological troglodyte - no Luddite I. I'm not looking for the peace and quiet of a "phoneless cord." After all, I received a Palm Pilot from my family for Christmas - another steep learning curve looms ahead! From a militant computer skeptic in the 1980's, I am not quite a true believer, but I am an enthusiastic user of modern technology as I write about matters spiritual. Nevertheless, I am concerned at how casually we accept our technologically based civilization with little thought given to its natural grounding. There's something very vulnerable about a people who are held hostage to the short-sightedness of otherwise brilliant scientists and engineers. Technology, we have discovered, can bite back if used irresponsibly.
Perhaps more important is the danger that our machines become our masters, not our servants. The $300 billion spent on Y2K might have been invested so much more effectively on human development. Yet we accepted the price tag without complaint. Somehow we have gotten lost in the pride of our technical achievements. I think of poet Wendell Berry's admonition, "Every day do something that won't compute."[10]
Something else I have learned from my encounter with the millennium. There are times I think our preoccupation, our obsession, our fascination and fixation with the millennium is that we don't have a significant life in the here and now. And so people scour the far distant clouds looking for something of meaning. The ordinary does not seem to be enough for some - the flatness and predictability of modern life just doesn't provide enough meaning. And so we attach ourselves to the larger realities of apocalyptic time.
I, too, seek to feel a part of something greater than I am. I want to feel I am more than a mere mortal living at this particular point in time and space. I want the confidence that cosmically I am O.K. But I find that ordinary time in a finite life provides a plentitude of meaning and being. I do not need the thought of being transported to heaven by some supernatural savior. I am content in the thought of making the most of this life with my earthly neighbors, striving to build something better than I inherited. We are always in apocalyptic time - seeking to discern the mystery in which we live and wrench meaning from it. For me, that is enough.
The Latin American poet Octavio Paz spoke about the "spiritual sterility of the geometric spirit."[11] What I think he meant is that we have become so fixated on things technical, matters technological and the amazing physical universe we inhabit that we have forgotten to probe the human spirit. How much of our energy in these past days, months and years has been devoted to the fascination with Y2K? Intriguing, to be sure. But surely not the stuff of which human meaning is made.
We have so completely conquered the physical world that we forget that our mission is to befriend it. We have become so entranced with our human ingenuity to invent things, we have forgotten why we do it. We have become so infatuated with our material security and monetary prosperity, we are in danger of forgetting how to be human.
If the 20th century was a time to explore outer space, and if the turning of the millennium was about cosmic matters, and if Y2K is about the great gains of technology, then may the 21st century be about greater exploration of inner space. May there be some introspection among us that we take seriously our charge on earth; may there be some reflection on who we are and what we are about as human beings; may there be some meditation upon the glories of living, our gratitude in being alive and our responsibility for human history and the future of the earth.
In the words of my late colleague Jacob Trapp, "Grant us to see that only a few things bear the mark of the eternal: the beauty that lives with lovingkindness; the transmutation of suffering into wisdom and understanding. The divine impulses given and received. Give us so to cherish life's perishable beauty that it may be imperishably present with us. And may we so pass through the things that are fleeting as to be richer in the things that endure."[12]
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