First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany
"Millennial Madness"
Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore December 5, 1999


Centering

From Matthew Chapter 24:29-35

´And immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from the heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken; and then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in the heaven; and then shall all the tribes of the earth smite the breast, and they shall see the Son of Man coming upon the clouds of the heaven, with power and much glory; and he shall send his messengers with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his chosen from the four winds, from the ends of the heavens unto the ends thereof. ´And from the fig-tree learn ye the simile: When already its branch may have become tender, and the leaves it may put forth, ye know that summer [is] nigh, so also ye, when ye may see all these, ye know that it is nigh--at the doors. Verily I say to you, this generation may not pass away till all these may come to pass. The heaven and the earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.'

Those who find such predictions attractive are constantly looking for signs the end times draw nearer. The change of the calendar is but one of the signs they point to. Another is the prediction taken from Revelations that the world will be ruled by Satan right before the second coming of Jesus. This anticipation of Satan's rule, a world government, a new world order, looms ominous in quotes from Millennialist web sites such as these:

In 1920 an editor of the Christian Science Monitor wrote: "What is important is to dwell upon the increasing evidence of the existence of a secret conspiracy, throughout the orld, for the destruction of organized government and the letting loose of evil."
In 1975, Richard A. Falk, in an article entitled, "Toward a New World Order: Modest Methods and Drastic Visions," wrote, "The existing order is breaking down at a very rapid rate, and the main uncertainty is whether mankind can exert a positive role in shaping a new world order or is doomed to await collapse in a passive posture. We believe a new order will be born no later than early in the next century and that the death throes of the old and the birth pangs of the new will be a testing time for the human species."

David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, in an address to their meeting in June, 1991 said, "We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.".

Perhaps most ominous is this quote from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money."[1]

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction; the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand;
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
- W.B.Yeats

Sermon


Have you stocked up on survival supplies yet? Have you checked to be sure your bank and computer is Y2K compliant? Have you taken out extra money, hidden some gold coins and diamonds in your shoe and buried important papers in your backyard? We've got less than a month you know!

Millennial madness is upon us and only likely to get worse as the media whips up a level of hysteria unseen perhaps in a thousand years. If it weren't for the programming error of saving the date as two digits rather than four, I doubt we'd be dealing with any of this craziness. Or could this be part of a divine plan to hoist us on our own petard?

Of course the source of much of the insanity, as the end of the millenium approaches, will not be found in the external world. It will be found in our inner world shaped by our fears. Thankfully we have already seen several crisis dates come and go. The Global Positioning Satellites that give exact positions to instruments on the ground, ships in the water, and planes in the sky flipped over its date in August. September saw come and go the magic date 9/9/99 that was expected to crash bank computers that used the number 9999 as an empty record marker. Did you notice these digital blips? I didn't notice a thing. Fortunately, the New Year is on a Saturday which will give those who discover any problems two days to deal with them before Monday morning when the business week begins.

Even the change in the calendar is pretty meaningless when you realize that the Gregorian calendar isn't the only one in use. This coming year will be:

The best dating of Jesus' actual birth places it at 4 Before the Common Era. So this is really 2003 - it already happened!

The real source of the concern about the changing millennium comes from a deeply rooted religious impulse. Many different religious groups have believed and continue to believe that at some future date, a messiah will come and solve all of their problems. Here are just a few of the religious groups with a messianic expectation:

Add to this list messiahs hoped for in Indonesia, Maori, Central Asia, Northern Canada, as well as the better known Jewish and Christian expectations, you can see the pattern. Since we human beings have such a tough time working out our problems by ourselves, our only hope is some kind of God-Man who will show us the way out of our troubles and bring peace. If we can't overcome our oppressors in the present, we need to project our freedom into the future to make our misery meaningful now. Without hope, it is hard to keep on going.

Much of the apocalyptic literature we are familiar with comes from Jewish and Christian sources. I read for you the section of Matthew predicting Jesus' second coming. The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century was the end of the world as the Jews knew it. Jesus must have seen it coming and that prediction, while probably misunderstood by his followers, is probably an important reason why his name and message survived. Yet the record of his prediction hasn't been fulfilled literally and some of his followers in every generation have expected to see it with their own eyes.

The Christians are basically divided into two camps. Those who believe the second coming language is symbolic and those who believe it is literal. Those who find the second coming to be immanent look to the last book in the Bible for their justification, the Book of Revelations.

Revelations has been an enigma, a riddle told and retold without answer. Those of you who have struggled to read the cryptic text illustrated with dreamlike fantastic imagery will understand the difficulty of extracting meaning from it. Scholars have spent many years puzzling over it and find little consensus.

Revelations is an excellent example of a genre of Biblical literature written between the defeat of the Maccabean rebellion and the destruction of the temple. Other examples can be found in passages from the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures and in Paul's letters in the Christian Testament. Their purpose was to reveal God's hidden plan for the future. The plan was hidden and needed to be revealed since the people saw no evidence of that plan in their daily lives. In this genre of writing, tremendous figures coming down from the heavens signaled God's reentry into the world to bring judgement and restitution to the righteous. Characteristics of this form of writing included the secret revelation to a prophet in a dream, vision or some kind of transportation, mediated by a divine figure. The language is highly mythological stimulated by the intersection and cross fertilization of Greek, Zoroastrian, Assyrian and far eastern cultures.

The date Revelations was written isn't known but scholars suspect that it was written around the end of the first century. There are internal clues that suggest, for example, that the sign of the beast, 666, refers to the Roman Emperor Nero. The authorship wasn't an apostle or disciple of Jesus. Most likely Revelations was written by someone on the Turkish island of Patmos, probably a leader of a Christian community founded there suffering humiliation, oppression and martyrdom; a community rejected by Rome and by the Jews.

These were very pessimistic times. The aim of these writings was to inspire confidence that God had not abandoned his people. The writings speak of a God appointed end of the present sinful order. This age, controlled by evil, will be replaced with a new age, signaled by a divine intervention. As this evil age ends, paradoxically, the suffering and evil will go up in a battle of cosmic proportions. Thus, as times appear to get worse, people should then be encouraged to see God at work rather than the absence of God. Pretty clever psychology.

The attraction of Millennialist thinking is providing the mind with a symbolic source of hope when there is no evidence of any material source of hope. It is almost a psychological defense mechanism.

It is hard to believe we in this country can be fearful for our future as this millenium comes to an end. Just ten years ago with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of Sadaam Hussein, we were celebrating the end of Communism and the coming New World Order dominated by us. Our economy is doing better than it ever has. Whether you like it or not, we should be expecting to dominate the world for the foreseeable future giving our children an even greater inheritance than we had from ours as we overwhelm the world with our media and merchandise.

But the world is never short of doomsayers to keep us anxious. Even in our moment of triumph, dark clouds are gathering on the horizon.

Unlike one hundred years ago when we believed science would solve all our problems, there is great pessimism about our future today. We face threats which only will get worse with the passage of time. The biodiversity of our planet is collapsing right now. Species are becoming extinct at an accelerating rate with increasing human incursion into the last remaining wilderness in search of raw materials. The increase of carbon dioxide and other green house gases threaten to raise the average temperature enough to melt the polar ice caps and make Albany an ocean resort flooding all of our coastal cities. Ozone holes open up each year letting in ultraviolet light further damaging plant and animal life as well as threatening human beings with cataracts and skin cancer.

Terrifying as the ecological ills are, they pale before the increase of our capacity for destruction fueled by technological innovation. The menace of nuclear weapons can only expand as the ability to create such weapons propagates to more and more nations. As we continue to figure out more and more ways to kill and maim, such weapons of mass destruction cannot be contained. Global terrorism will be accomplished by smaller and smaller units of resistance using germ, chemical and biological techniques perfected right here in the developing world.

The question arises from this gloomy assessment of forces at work in the world that will be hard, if not impossible to stop, from whence will our help come? Bill Batt recommended a book to me by Reg Morrison titled The Spirit in the Gene that suggests we are so limited by our genetic construction that we will be unable to stop the coming disasters and depopulation. He argues that our emotions will win over our rational thought every time and prevent the changes needed to stop the juggernaut of coming destruction.

Now, I'm in the business of meaning and hope so I'm very resistant to the idea we can't begin steering a new course. Where I do find agreement with many predictors of doom is the reality that there will be great suffering and death in the 21st century. There is already great suffering and death right now around this world.

The major change we must see if the human race is to survive, is a turning from a materially based growth oriented culture to one that is a spiritually based growth oriented culture that highly values increasing appreciation and acceptance of diversity, be it human, animal or plant. Ever increasing creative expression and wisdom of all life forms is the growth that offers a bright future for this earth. This is the pulse of evolution we inherit.

While it may seem we are rushing headlong in the other direction as the rainforests are cut down, species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, and the world population continues to climb, the ideas on how to move in a new direction are already here and ready for an opportunity to take hold. They have even been chiseled into stone and set on a hill.

I'm speaking of the Georgia Guidestones, America's Stonehenge. Their origin is a well guarded secret. Made of 19 feet tall granite slabs located on a hill in Elberton, Georgia in 1979, they are the signposts standing in wait for a post apocalyptic age.

Written on the stones are ten precepts repeated in English, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Spanish and Swahili, in addition to archaic Sanskrit, Babylonian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics and classical Greek. The four main stones are topped by a capstone with an astronomical calendar. A center stone has an eye-level, oblique hole drilled so that the North Star is always visible. The stones weigh 119 tons.

What is the ageless wisdom that the designers wish to pass on for the ages? Here it is:

  1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
  2. Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.
  3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
  4. Rule Passion - Faith - Tradition - and all things with tempered reason.
  5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
  6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
  7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
  8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
  9. Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.
  10. Be not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature - Leave room for nature.

Christian Millennialists read these stones with dismay suggesting this is the sign of Satan's return. I read in these words core values of Unitarian Universalism. Discovering others with ideas like ours gives me hope for the twenty-first century.

These aren't my only sources of hope for the new millenium. I encourage you to come early for the 9:00 AM service next Sunday as I go further into this topic looking at the problems of this Century and more wise guidance for the next one.

Everything that is wrong in this world has the potential for resolution. Whatever resolution we achieve will likely come at a high cost. What we must accept is our lack of individual control of the outcome and the timetable while at the same time giving ourselves wholeheartedly to the struggle. For in an ongoing creative engagement with life, will be the meaning we crave for our lives. SO BE IT

Benediction

Will a messiah come to save us from ourselves?
Maybe no and maybe yes.
If we expect Elijah or Jesus returning riding in a flaming chariot,
We might be disappointed.
But if we expect the spirit of life in us
to innovate in surprising, unexpected ways,
We may be saved but what we least expect.
No one will know the day of my coming.
For the spirit of the messiah
may be already at work in all of us.
Go in peace. Make peace. Be at peace.


[1] Foreign Affairs (July/August 1995)