The Mind of Millennialism

Sermon by Stephen D. Edington
December 5, 1999

Sermon

They were called "Millerites," and they comprised a rather minor chapter when it comes to the story of religion in America. But I've been noticing a few references to them here and there in the popular media's coverage of our anticipations of the year 2000. The Millerites also put great emphasis upon an approaching millennium. For them, the eagerly awaited day was October 22, 1844, which was to be the beginning of a new Christian millennium. This was the date determined by a Baptist minister from our neighboring Vermont named William Miller. By doing some very elaborate calculations based on his readings of the apocalyptic writings of the Old Testament Book of Daniel and the New Testament Book of Revelation, Rev. Miller set the actual date for when Christ would return to earth, destroy all the powers of evil, and begin a 1000-year reign. He'd had a fewother, earlier dates for this event, which he admitted were miscalculations, but he was completely convinced he'd gotten it right when it came to 22 October, 1844.

Rev. Miller must have been a rather convincing type himself since using the means of communication available in the 1830s and 40s--which did not include radio, television, or the internet--he managed to convince thousands of people that his date was Year One of a new millennium. So convinced were many of his followers that hundreds, if not thousands, of them got rid of all their worldly possessions and gathered on hillsides as the appointed day approached, believing that they would be among the participants in the reign of the triumphant Christ. Well, needless to say, October 22, 1844 came and went, and those Millerites who'd chosen not to hedge their bets had nothing to show for it other than the clothes they were wearing. In a college class on American Religious History, I still remember the professor telling the story of the Millerites and stating in his dry-wit style, "after his calculations proved to be wrong, Rev. Miller passed from the scene..." which prompted the guy sitting next to me to mutter under his breath, "Yeah, I'll bet he did!"

Actually William Miller did not completely drop out of sight. He went back once again to his calculations and interpretations, determined that the world was still in pre-millennial mode, that we should still be preparing for Christ's imminent return, but it could not be nailed down to a precise date. It was, in fact, these later writings of William Miller that provided the basis for the Seventh Day Adventist denomination or sect, a sect whose members still take seriously signs of the end even as they live from day to day.

The Millerites have not been forgotten. They got a couple of paragraphs in a front page article that ran in last Wednesday's Boston Globe (12/1/99). It seems that as the "days dwindle down to a precious few" before the advent of the year 2000, the popular media is treating us to more and more millennium-type features, including cover stories in recent issues of both Time and Newsweek magazines. In fact I had to laugh at a story on "millennium fatigue" that ran in a recent issue of Time, the gist of which was that we're all tired of hearing about the millennium and it's not even here yet. Now, I don't generally talk to magazines, but in this instance I found myself saying, "Maybe we have millennium fatigue because folks like you can't seem to shut up about it."

But given my near life-long interest in the interplay between religion and culture, the Globe piece I just mentioned held my attention. It was about people who see in the approach of the year 2000 the approach also of some kind of end-time. Perhaps learning a lesson from the Millerites, they don't tie it to a specific date--like January 1, 2000--but do see in the coming new year, century, and millennium one more sign that some sort of apocalyptic end is nigh. I'll just read a little from the opening paragraphs: "From her Oklahoma farmhouse, Sharon Skipworth looks at the world and sees the Book of Revelation playing out before her eyes, in the reformation of Israel, the lawlessness, the violence in schools. 'I believe we're definitely in the end times,' said Skipworth, 27, 'it just makes the whole Bible real....' She is not alone. Across the country a subculture of deeply religious Christians, reading Bible passages as literal warnings, has seen fulfillment in current events--ranging from the advance of technology to a flurry of false Messiahs to political statements about a New World Order."

"These are not," the article goes on, "the proverbial doomsayers on the street corner, the cult members, or comet watchers who've made headlines of their own in recent years. They are church-goers and parents, homeowners and professionals, who go through their daily routines even as they quietly anticipate the end of life as we know it. And many are distressed that the rest of the world doesn't see what they see." Well, I am among those with whom I'm sure Ms. Skipworth is distressed because I do not see what she sees. But to simply hold the kind of thinking that she represents up to ridicule--implausible as it may seem to most, if not all, of us--is, I feel, a bit shortsighted. For there is a philosophy of history, if you will, contained within such thinking that is not really all that alien from the western world's view of history itself. Now let me see if I can sort that statement out. The western world's view of history--which is increasingly becoming a global view as well--is that human events move along in a linear manner, and that these events are connected in a cause/effect, cause/effect process. That is how history is studied and learned. Implicit in this view is that history has some overarching meaning, some overarching purpose, that it is going somewhere, and that we human beings are, in a very real sense, players in a larger drama that continues to unfold. Whether one is an "apocalypticist" or not, this view of history is embedded in our psyche.

This concept of history is also part and parcel of the western concept of God, or the Divine. In the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic faith traditions, God is a God of History; that is to say a Being, or Force, or Power whose purposes and plans for humanity are being worked out in the context of human history as it moves in a linear fashion. The idea that the Divine or the Holy is found in the workings of the cycles and seasons of the world of nature is more of an Eastern, or Native American, or pre-Christian notion. It is a way of thinking and acting that is having something of a revival right now in earth-centered or neo-pagan spirituality, and is contributing in a positive way to an increased ecological awareness. But the idea of history as an unfolding story with some deeper meaning to it, and the idea that we are participants in that story who may not fully grasp its meaning but still feel it has one, is very much a part of the western mindset, regardless of what one's personal theology may be.

Let me try a little experiment with you along this line. Consider these rather well-known words by William Shakespeare which has one of his better-known characters, MacBeth, say:

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time ... Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and is then heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Now for the experiment: Push come to shove, are you with MacBeth on this one or not? Don't raise your hands or anything, just think about it. Since we don't even know for sure just who Shakespeare was, we can't know if he's stating his own view here, but what MacBeth is saying in so many words--eloquent words to be sure--is that there is no underlying meaning to history, and to our lives as creatures of history. Rather, it's just a petty pace, creeping from day to day. It's not a grand story at all, but instead a tale of "sound and fury"--told by an idiot, no less--that in the end signifies nothing. Some three hundred years after Shakespeare's day, an American writer who used the name Mark Twain said pretty much the same thing in a somewhat more earthy and colloquial way when he stated that "history is just one damned thing after another." Then sometime after Twain's day Henry Ford put it even more tersely: "History is bunk."

Whether the words come from Shakespeare, or Mark Twain, or Henry Ford, I'm going to guess that something within us--within most of us--viscerally resists what they're implying. I can imagine a response to my little experiment going something like: Look, I may not be all that sure about this business of God being the Force behind, and Meaning-Giver to, History; but that doesn't make it all completely meaningless either. I mean history has to be about something, doesn't it? We're a part of life and a part of human events for some reason, aren't we? With all due respect to Mr. Shakespeare, a tale told by an idiot and signifying nothing is a bit harsh, isn't it?

Actually that's my reaction, and if I'm projecting my thoughts into your mind without your wanting them there, then I apologize. One of the reasons I remain an agnostic is because even if I don't know that there is some larger Force or Power that gives meaning to my life and to "the course of human events" as Thomas Jefferson put it, I still try to live as if such were true.

Before getting too far afield from my topic, though, let's return to "The Mind of Millennialism." What I've tried to say over the past several minutes is that persons who see in the approaching millennium certain "signs of the end" are in fact reflecting the rather commonly held view of human history as the unfolding of some larger story or drama. What distinguishes them is their belief that they know when and how the story ends. I recently came across a very intriguing and thought-provoking book, which I'm still in the process of reading, called The Millennium Myth [Quest Books. Wheaton, IL.] It was published in 1995, just before the term "Y2K" became part of our lexicon. It's by a Michael Grasso who has a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University, has taught and lectured at a number of universities, and who, according to the jacket blurb, "lives in rural New York...and likes to lose himself gazing from his window at the Shawangunk mountains." (Not a bad life if you can swing it, I guess).

When Dr. Grasso writes of a "millennium myth" he is not using the term "myth" in the sense of falsehood, but rather myth as a story or idea that helps shed some light on life and reality. These are a few lines from the opening chapter, which he might have written while gazing at the Shawangunk mountains: "The vision of the Millennium has roots that sink deep and wide in human consciousness; it is a vision that has inspired many great movements and many great souls. At the heart of the myth is the idea that history--Our Story--is a journey with a goal, a drama with a climax ... While some see in the pursuit of the Millennium delusion and social pathology, others find a soulful attempt to come to grips with the meaning of time and history. I have come to see the Myth as both a source of guiding light and a caster of sinister shadows."

"A source of guiding light and a caster of sinister shadows..." these are the two directions that Grasso sees millennial thinking as taking. To get some sense of what the distinction might mean, I'm going to briefly go back to where I began, that is, with the Millerites. For reasons I don't have time to get into here, the 1830s and 40s were a period of millennial and apocalyptic fervor--the Millerites being but one example. This created a division within evangelical Protestantism at that time between the "pre-millennialists" and the "post-millennialists." (Follow me on this--I promise you there is a point to it.) The pre-millennialists, which included the Millerites, believed that the world had become so fallen and so corrupt that the only thing left to happen was for God, through the triumphant, powerful, and apocalyptic return of Christ, to cause the forces of evil to be completely subdued for 1000 years. This 1000-year period would then be followed by the passing of this world itself into a "new heaven and a new earth." All of this was (and is) substantiated and foretold by a literal reading of the very bizarre imagery found in the Book of Revelation. In this view, Jesus is the conquering Christ, and he bears practically no resemblance to the loving and compassionate teacher and healer of the gospels. For the pre-millennialists, history is indeed an unfolding story, and this by God (literally) is how the story ends.

The post-millennialists, who were also very fervent Christians, just couldn't quite buy that. They reasoned that maybe Jesus had already returned, in certain non-triumphant and non-apocalyptic ways, and now it was up to us to undertake the kinds of good works that will eventually make what Jesus called the "Kingdom of God" a reality here on earth. Around the turn of the 20th century, these evangelical post-millennialists even managed to find some common ground with the liberal Protestants (which included the Unitarians and the Universalists) in advocating what came to be called the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel movement was one that held that the role of the Christian in society was to do good works and advocate for social policies and legislation that would bring about the creation of a more just, fair, and humane society.

The pre-millennialists, the post-millennialists, the liberal Social Gospelers (of which our Unitarian and Universalist forebears were a part) all had a view of history--and of human events--as moving in a deliberate and purposeful direction, of being an unfolding story. The pre-millennialists, as just noted, happened to believe that the last chapter was, and is being written.

It is the pre-millennialists today who are garnering some media attention as the year 2000 nears. In addition to the Globe piece I cited earlier, the November 1 issue of Newsweek devoted its cover story to certain millennial visions of the end of the world. Very few of them involve a date certain for the end of time, but at one point a Newsweek poll was cited in which 18% of Americans say they expect the end times to come in their lifetime. "This translates," the article went onto say, "to roughly 36 million people--not just fringe extremists but your office mate, mail carrier, or soccer coach..."

I'm going to guess that most of these folk are, like Ms. Skipworth in the Globe article, your basic good living, good neighbor, salt-of-the-earth type of people. Their way of thinking and way of looking at the world is based on a certain type of faith, but it is a faith grounded in a literal interpretation of a narrow piece of Scripture that was never meant to be read literally in the first place. More to the point, a pre-millennial, apocalyptic faith actually constitutes a loss of faith. It is a loss of faith in humanity, a loss of faith in the human spirit, and in the human story. For today's pre-millennialists, ironically enough, life has become nothing more than a tale of sound and fury, and so we'll wait for God to close the book. I can become, and do become on occasion, terribly discouraged at human folly, human greed, and at the sometime unfathomable inhumanity of human beings. Still, the sun comes up each day. I see the acts of human kindness that people like you perform. I see people trying in ways small and large to live out the values they hold. And I sense that our story as a human race, and our story as one of many creatures on this interdependent planet is far, far from over. And that will still be the case when I stand here on January 2nd to give my first sermon of the year 2000.

One more point in closing: Since I haven't had a chance yet to read all of Dr. Grasso's book, I'm not altogether sure what he means about how the millennium myth can be a source of guiding light, but I'm guessing he means that some of the imagery used to express a vision of a new world can serve as a inspiration in our own efforts to serve the cause of humanity in this world. I think of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech/sermon in this regard. If you watch the entire speech, you can't help but notice that Dr. King was kind of plodding along for several minutes until he got into the rhythm and cadence of speaking to a dream or vision. Just before he begins to speak about what his dream looks like of an America where racial reconciliation and racial justice have been accomplished, he leads into it with these words: "I have a dream today, that one day every valley shall be exalted and every mountain made low; the rough places will be made straight and the crooked places plain; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. I have a dream today..." Then from there Dr. King just plain takes off to deliver will surely be regarded as one of the more memorable speeches of this century.

The words Dr. King used are from a few verses in the 40th chapter of the Book of Isaiah. You'll probably hear them over the next few weeks. If you're in a choral group that sings "The Messiah" you'll sing them as well, for they are ones George Handel used in his magnificent work that is sung at this time of year. Dr. King was using some very ancient, apocalyptic language and imagery to urge his followers, and to urge his country, to move into a new era racial justice. It's an unfinished journey we are still having to make. I thought of Dr. King's speech as I read what Michael Grasso said about how a millennial vision can "inspire many great movements and many great souls."

We need to be called in this day and age, not to await the apocalyptic arrival of some other world, but to be about the healing of this one. If the coming of a new millennium can in any way call us to do just that, then so much the better.

Copyright © 1999 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.