Two thousand and ten years ago, give or take a few, a child was born in the village of Bethlehem of Judea, a backwater nation of the great Roman empire.   The child was born to peasant parents.   The birth took place in a stable, because there was no room at the Holiday Inn, and mom and dad were a long way from home.  They named their son, Jesus.  
                                                         *
        19.1 hundred years ago, the Jewish nation had suffered a bad fate.   For centuries, the Jewish prophets had been writing of the coming of a savior, who would lead the people in revolution, casting out the oppressor and ushering in the kingdom of God.   The people got their revolution in what we count as the year 66.   The aforementioned Jesus wasn’t around to see it.    He’d been dead for over thirty years.
       There had been talk, when he was alive, that Jesus was, himself, the long-awaited Messiah.   People had been all excited, for a time, but the man from Galilee turned out to be a disappointment.  
         Instead of calling people to arms, Jesus of Nazareth had talked about loving the enemy, turning the other cheek, and other such things no one wanted to hear.   Public opinion turned against him and he was crucified dead and buried.
       As we said, some thirty years later came the revolution.   It ended badly.  Jerusalem was destroyed.  The Jewish nation went out of business.   The people were driven from the land, made into permanent refugees.
 
       But as the century ended, there were people—not many, but their numbers were growing, and not limited to Jews, either—who were saying that Jesus of Nazareth was not dead, but had been raised from the tomb as Lord, not only of Palestine, or of the Jewish people, but of all the peoples, all the nations, all the world.  
 Emperors such as Nero, who counted themselves as gods, reacted with incredible brutality.   But the state-sponsored persecutions only seemed increase the faith and numbers of the Jesus people.   
                                        *
         18.1 hundred years ago, political divisiveness had become the Roman norm.  Emperor and Senate were routinely at each other’s throats, fiddling while Rome burned. 
This was ominous:  Germanic tribes from the other side of the Danube had inflicted shocking setbacks upon the vaunted Roman Legions.   Rebellion was brewing in the provinces.  Law and order—always so precious to the Romans--was breaking down.
         In contrast, far from breaking down, the Christian movement continued to grow.   In spite of sporadic persecution, two hundred years after the birth of Jesus, there were Christian communities in every part of the Roman world and the movement had spread to peoples outside the empire.  
 Among the giants of the Christian movement was Irenaeus of Lyons.  There were lots of stories of Jesus floating around, accounts of his life and times; it was Irenaeus who fixed the number of authorized gospels at four:  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  

                                                        *
17.1 hundred years ago, Rome had been through a very difficult century, including fifty years of political anarchy.  Gothic bandits ate into the empire from Egypt to Africa.  Barbarians that couldn’t be driven off had to be bought off.   The Roman citizen staggered under the weight of inflation and taxation.  
 
Rome found a scapegoat in the Jesus people.  As Adolph Hitler would blame the Jews for Gemany’s defeat in the first World War, so were Christians blamed for the woes of third century Rome. 
The last half of this century was a particularly nasty time.   A succession of emperors demanded worship of the state gods.  Christians who refused faced forfeiture of their property, even torture and death.
There were, to be sure, plenty of people who had joined the church in happier times who now bailed out.  We didn’t know it would be this hard!   But others kept the faith, even to the point of martyrdom. 
I hope this doesn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway, given that our generations may equate martyrdom with suicide bombers and such.  The Christian martyrs never take anyone with them.  They never hurt anyone else.  They simply say to the powers that be:  Do to us what you will, kill us if you think you have to, but we know what we believe and we will not forsake our faith in Christ.       
                                    *
16.1 hundred years ago, in one of history’s great 180 degree pivots, Christianity had become the favored religion of the Roman empire.   Much earlier in the century, Constantine The Great had seen a vision of a flaming cross in the sky, and the words, “In This Sign Conquer.”   Constantine himself became a convert and the empire followed.  
Constantine didn’t know much about the particulars of what Christians believed and was surprised to discover considerable diversity of opinion within the assorted Christian communities.   This would never do.  Therefore, in what we count as the year 325, Constantine convened what is remembered as the Council of Nicea, which hammered out a common creed that endures into our time as the baseline of what Christians believe.
The Romans loved festivals.   One of the biggies was Saturnalia, the last week in December.  Constantine wanted to know when Jesus had been born.  Church leaders couldn’t give him a specific date.   So Constantine decided to Christianize Saturnalia.  Which is how December 25 came to be celebrated as Christmas.  
Constantine died in 337.   Subsequent emperors, such as Julian the Apostate (if anyone calls you an apostate, it’s not a compliment) would not share Constantine’s enthusiasm for Christianity, but what we remember as the fourth century ended with Christianity deeply imprinted on the map of the world as Rome knew it.   

                                        *
15.1 centuries ago, Rome had been abandoned.   In the year we call 406, the Rhine River had frozen solid, providing a natural bridge for barbarian invasion.   Western civilization was in full retreat.  Cities were destroyed.  Libraries were burned.   There was a very real prospect that the accumulated wisdom of Homer and Plato, Cicero and Epictetus, even Isaiah and the gospels of Jesus, would be lost forever.
This is the period Thomas Cahill documents in his wonderful book:  HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION.  Christianity had been planted on the island by St. Patrick.  Monasteries had been established, with libraries beyond the barbarian reach.      
As what we call the 5th century was ending, Christian monks in Ireland were painstakingly copying manuscripts on the endangered species list.   Armed with their books, the spiritual descendents of St. Patrick would mount the equivalent of a religious counter-offensive, taking their faith and knowledge to the continent of Europe, evangelizing the “barbarian” and reclaiming the continent for Christ.  
        
                          *
        14.1 centuries ago, the times had changed—in the most literal sense.   When the century began, time was still being told according to the old Roman system, which counted “Year One” at the founding of Rome.   If we were to go back in time to what we call the year 500 and ask a man on the street, What year is this?, the answer, per the A.U.C. calendar, would have been 1253.
       But fourteen hundred years ago, much of Europe had accepted a new way of counting time.   Credit is given to a monk named Dionysius Exiguus, who in the course of developing a new liturgical calendar for the church, decided to count time, not from the founding of Rome, but from the birth of Jesus.   The idea caught on.   If we were to go back in time fourteen centuries and ask a man on the street, What year is this?, chances are the answer would be, The Year of our Lord, 610.   
                                                     *
        Thirteen hundred years ago, Islam was on the rise.   The army of Muhammed had conquered Mecca in 630.    Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Persia came under the rule of the Arabs and their new religion:  A monotheism claiming spiritual kinship to both Judaism and Christianity.   The Moslems had built a mosque in Jerusalem, the Dome of The Rock, on the very place where Solomon’s temple had once stood. 
At the end of the century, the armies of Islam were gearing up for an invasion of Europe.  The invasion was repelled.   The drawing on the screen is from the Battle of Poitiers, year 732. 
That said, the Arabs of this era would make lasting contributions to mathematics, science and medicine.  As has been the genius of Christian culture, Western Europe absorbed the best of what the Arabs had to offer—including their system of numbers.  Which is why we write the number of this year two-zero-one-zero, rather than the old Roman way of two m’s and an x.  
                                                *           
12.1 hundred years ago, the year 800 to be exact, Pope Leo III crowned King Charlemagne of the Franks as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.   The name was something of a misnomer.  Some have questioned whether it qualified as an empire.  It was certainly more French and German than Roman.   And whether there was anything “holy” about it remains a matter of discussion. 
Nevertheless, the coronation was a seminal event in European history.  Church and state entered into a pact of mutual protection and support, with this considerable downside:  If you criticized the state, the church came down on you; and if you criticized the church, the state was on your case.   Which is exactly the equation America’s founders would want to separate, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. 
                                          *
11.1 hundred years ago, Vikings were routinely pillaging the continent of Europe, burning churches, killing priests, destroying entire cities.  The Norsemen served gods like Odin, who was big into seducing and impregnating women, and Thor, who killed everything in his path.   In 881, alone, Vikings burned the cities of Liege, Cologne and Bonn.  How could Christian Europe survive the onslaught?   By converting the Vikings to Christianity and absorbing them into Christian culture!   The Vikings had the conquering armies, but the Christians had the enduring idea.       
                                                                         *
A thousand years ago, the Christian movement was growing exponentially.  The Viking King Olaf, Boleslav the Brave of Poland, Vlaidimir I of Russia, Thorgeir of Iceland, Vajk of Hungary, all became converts in the last decade of the millennium—and with their conversions came nations and peoples.  Writes James Reston Jr. In his wonderful book, THE LAST APOCALPYSE: “the hinge of the last millennium signified a miraculous transformation…. Christian Europe had become a reality.   It became a community of nations, with a continental view….. The dream of civilization had been recaptured.” 
                                      *
            Nine hundred years ago, William the Conqueror was building his Tower in London, and Christians were singing new music, called “polyphonic.”  It was a pretty radical idea.  Instead of chanting in monotone, some voices now ascended as others descended.  Writes Will Durant, “three, four, five, even six different voices were made to sing in a complex weave of individual melodies whose diverse but concordant strains crossed and merged in a vertical-horizontal web of harmony as subtle and graceful as the converging arches of a Gothic vault.” 
Those of us familiar with the church’s reaction to changes in musical style will not be at all surprised that the new music met with considerable resistance.  (“Give me that old time religion, it’s good enough for me…”)   But imagine singing the Christmas hymn this way:  (monotone chant)  Silent night/Holy night/All is calm/All is bright…  Sometimes, folks, change is good!!!
*
      8.1 centuries ago, in a medieval village in rural France, finishing touches were being put on a structure unlike anything the world had ever seen: Chartres Cathedral, rising out of field, visible for miles throughout the countryside.   Using vaulted arches, the builders had constructed a house of worship that, all these centuries later, inspires nothing short of awe; with a ceiling reaching to the heavens, supported by what seems to be a wall of stained glass.
All the skills known to humankind had been put to service in the construction of Chartres Cathedral:   stone masons, wood crafters, glass makers, and countless others, employed their gifts and graces to the lasting glory of God.   
        It boggles my mind to think that medieval people could have conceived of something so magnificent.    Not only did they conceive it, working together they built it!   Theirs is a lesson for our generations of the church and the great things we can do together as God works through us.
                                                         *
Seven hundred point one years ago, the world had gotten much larger—at least the world as Europeans knew it.  Marco Polo had been to China and back, writing a captivating account of his adventures in the Far East.   This is interesting: Christian missionaries had already been there.  It is fashionable, in our era, to mock “missionaries” of another era as hand puppets of imperialism, but that was hardly the attitude of the Great Khan.  The Khan asked the Polo brothers to send him a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp of Jesus’ grave in Jerusalem.  
         Jesus commissioned the apostles, “Go into the world and make disciples of all nations.”  In the thirteenth century, believers were going into the most remote corners of the world, sharing the story of Jesus and making disciples for Christ. 
                                   
 
         *
Six hundred and ten years ago, Europe was reeling from what Barbara Tuchman has characterized as the “The Calamitous 14th century.”  The century began with what is remembered as the Little Ice Age.  (Climate change is nothing new).   At mid-century, a plague called The Black Death killed approximately one-third of the human population living between India and Iceland.   As if this wasn’t enough death, there was war, everywhere. 
The church was in crisis, too.  The papacy had been kidnapped by France, the papal court moved from Rome to Avignon.  In the fourteenth century, there were plenty of souls who didn’t expect the world to make it to the fifteenth.  
But through it all, Christian people got married and had babies and gathered in their churches and prayed for grace to outlast the calamity.  And true to the Biblical promise, the light of Christ kept shining in the darkness—and the darkness did not overcome it.   This is what Christians do in calamitous times:  We keep living, praying, believing. 
                                      *
Five hundred point one years ago, Christopher Columbus had recently “discovered” America.   Columbus was a complex fellow: an ambitious adventurer, to be sure, but also a devout Christian.  
This was the century of the Renaissance.  The epicenter was Florence, where the patronage of the Medici dynasty attracted the brilliance of Donatello, Botticelli, Bellini, da Vinci, and young Michelangelo, to name only a few.   
        Da Vinci had written, “The good painter must paint principally two things:  man and the ideas in man’s mind.”  
Many of those ideas, of course, dealt with themes of faith. 
Among the very favorite themes of Renaissance art was the birth of Jesus.  Though perhaps my favorite piece ever created was Michelangelo’s variation on the theme, the crucified Jesus on his mama’s lap, otherwise known as Pieta.

In that same century, in Germany, Johan Gutenberg had taken one of the giants steps in the annals of human progress, with the development of his printing press.  First off the press:  a Latin version of the Psalms.  
 

Gutenberg’s invention would play a key role in the developments of the next century.   To this point, the Bible had been available only to an elite circle of clergy.  Common folk had to rely on the church to tell them what the Bible said.   Post-Gutenberg, it would be possible for people to read the Bible themselves, in their own languages.   And what people read in the Bible was not necessarily what the church had said was in the Bible.  
                                                *
Four hundred and ten years ago, Western Europe was at the end of what had been a most eventful century.    The tumult had started with a German priest named Martin Luther posting his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Church--what amounted to a religious tea party.  
Luther had been set off by a papal fund raiser named Tetzel, who was going through the German provinces selling what were called “indulgences.”   Great fund- raising idea.  For the right price, a person could buy what amounted to a “Get Out Of Purgatory Free” card:  pay today, sin without consequence tomorrow   While I appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit of the idea, it was, of course, entirely unscriptural.   Luther protested that it made a mockery of salvation.  
Rome was not amused by Luther’s protest.   The sale of indulgences was raising much needed funds for the construction of the new St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome.    One thing led to another and the issue of “Reformation” rocked the century, involving such diverse personages as John Calvin in Switzerland and Henry VIII of England, then later in the century, Henry’s daughter Elizabeth.  
                                        *
Three hundred and ten years ago, Christian dissidents were finding a haven in the American colonies.   The Puritans came from various places in Europe, where they had been disdained by both Catholics and Luther-style Protestants, planting a flag of Christian faith in the “New World.”           
 
While the Pilgrims were making a home in America, back in Europe, a scientific revolution was underway.   Galileo had revolutionized the way we think about the heavens and the earth.    Isaac Newton’s laws of motion were revolutionizing physics.   William Harvey’s, “On The Motion Of The Heart and Blood In Animals” was revolutionizing the way people think about the human body. 
Among the most influential of these great minds was that of mathematician/ philosopher Blaise Pascal, a man of deep personal faith, who saw no contradiction between faith and science.  Pascal’s mathematical computations are to this day counted influential in insurance actuarial tables and even the gambling industry.  In his generation, Pascal offered skeptics this wager:  Bet on God.  You’ve got nothing to lose.  Faith itself will make you a better person, so if you’re wrong, you’ve still won.  Whereas those who bet against God, stand to lose the greatest stakes of all, eternal life.     
                                                       *
       Two hundred years and ten ago, the world had been shaken by two political revolutions.   One in France, one in America.  It had been a wild and crazy century in France:  the century of the philosophers Volatire and Rousseau.
Rousseau had written, “Man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains.”   The French Revolution started as an attempt to cast off the chains, but degenerated into blood bath.   Heads rolled.   Heads of a king and queen, clergy heads, noble heads, bourgeois heads, heads of anyone accused of insufficient enthusiasm for the rolling of heads in the name of virtue.  
 
The French Revolution was a very virtuous revolution.   If they could just cut off enough unvirtuous heads—heads filled with things like religious superstition—then virtue would reign triumphant!  But at the end of the century, the revolution had run out of heads to cut off, replaced by a new kind of autocracy in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte.  Not that things ended so well for Napoleon, either.  
       Secular historians have advanced the theory that England was spared similar spasm by the emergence of John Wesley and the religious movement tagged, “Methodism.”  The Methodists preached the eternal dignity and worth of the common man, a message conspicuously lacking in the pre-revolutionary church of France.

On the other side of the ocean, another kind of revolution had taken place.   Many of the American revolutionaries had, themselves, been deeply influenced by the ideas that would turn France upside down:  ideas about the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of property and/or happiness.   But instead of seeing God as part of the problem, the American revolutionaries embraced God as part of the solution, declaring the aforementioned inalienable rights had been endowed by our Creator.  
                                                 *
         One hundred and ten years ago, as the 19th century turned to the 20th, the United States of America was still the United States of America, having endured a terrible civil war, but ending slavery in the process.  The abolition movement had been driven by Christian conviction that slavery was an unmitigated evil, as evidenced in the Julia Ward Howe song, “In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea/ with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me/ as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.  Our God is marching on.”  Men, women and children were made free.  Among those who died:  The Great Emancipator, martyred on a Good Friday.   
 

Two years before the American Civil War, Charles Darwin had published “The Origin Of Species,” which some were convinced was the death-knell of Christianity—though others read Darwin and saw the hand of God at work in the crafting of a universe more complex and wonderful than previously imagined.  
       In the last decade of the century, immigrants were flocking to America, and Americans were moving west into what was still very much the frontier, places like Nebraska. 
In the last year of the century, Sigmund Freud published “The Interpretation Of Dreams,” opening up a brand new frontier for exploration:  the human interior.   
Karl Marx and Frederick Nietcheze had passed their judgment on Christianity:  An opiate for the weak and superstitious that must surely fade before the forces of history.   Their disciples, Lenin and Hitler, would make a lot of noise, but they’re gone and we’re still here.
                                                      *
One hundred years ago, Russia was ruled by a Czar, the Wright brothers were in the air, pictures were moving, and Christians were rallying around the Anti-Saloon League as a means of curbing America’s burgeoning liquor lobby.
       Ninety years ago, the world had fought a war to end war.   There had been revolution in Russia and rising fear about the spread of Bolshevik-style communism.  Here in America, there’d been happier revolution, as women secured the right to vote. 
       Eighty years ago, Charles Lindbergh had flown across the Atlantic.  The American religious landscape was being reshaped by the rise of Pentecostalism.  Pastors such as Aimee Semple McPherson not only broker gender stereotypes, but racial barriers, as Pentecostals invited black and white to worship together. 

       Seventy years ago, the world was in the grip of economic depression.  What were called Hoovervilles had sprung up in cities across America, including our nation’s capital.  The world economic calamity was the context for the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany.  
Among the most prominent Christian voices of this era was Reinhold Niebuhr.  Niebuhr championed both the social needs of the poor and the urgency of stopping facism.  He’s been on my  mind a lot recently and we’ll be talking more about Niebuhr the last weekend of this month.
       Sixty years ago, the world had been at war again.   Unspeakable things had happened in Europe.   The atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan.  But out of the rubble, for the first time in nineteen hundred years, the Jewish people had formed a nation in Palestine.   The implications of that are still be felt right now.
       Fifty years ago, America was watching television, and Rosa Parks had refused to sit at the back of the bus.
 Forty years ago, the times, they were a’changin’ again.  We’d been through a decade of assassinations, war and protest of war.  Human kind had walked on the moon.
Thirty years ago, America had endured a decade replete with hostage taking in Iran, gas lines at home, the first hint of the terrorism to come in the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.  A United States President had resigned before he got impeached.  The ‘70s were tough.
 Twenty years ago, Soviet Communism was falling apart.   Russian churches were being reopened.   The Cold War was ending.   Among the champions:  A pope from Poland, whose moral authority had given encouragement to those in Eastern Europe who said “no” to the beast.
 Ten years ago, at the dawn of a new millennium, some sociologists were talking about “the end of history.”  The big issues had been decided.  Before us was an uninterrupted field ripe for human progress.  Then came 9/11.

O God our help in ages past
Our hope for years to come
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home

 This week, one of our members wrote asking where I thought Christianity might be going in the future.  So let me say a short word about “years to come.”  I know there are people in this culture, even people in church pews, who are pessimistic about the future of the Jesus movement.  One of the things I hope you’ve picked up on, as a thread of this sermon, is that there have ALWAYS been people pessimistic about the future of the church.   We take a lickin’, sometimes self-induced, but we keep on ticking, because I do believe the church indeed is of God.
 I talked earlier about the Reformation era, and how eyes were opened as people read the Bible for themselves in their own languages.   I’ve been reading a wonderful novel of that period, WOLF HALL, and earmarked this passage:

As the word of God spreads, the people’s eyes are opened to new truths.  Until now…they knew Noah and the Flood, but not St. Paul.  They could cover over the sorrows of our Blessed Mother, and saw how the damned are carried down to Hell, but they did not know the manifold miracles and sayings of Christ, nor the words and deeds of the apostles, simple men who, like the poor of London, pursued simple wordless trades.  The story is much bigger than they ever thought it was.  (Thomas Cromwell says to his nephew), you cannot tell people just part of the tale and then stop, or tell them the parts you choose.  They have seen their religion painted on the walls of churches, or carved in stone, but now God’s pen is poised to write his words in the books of their hearts….

The core truth of that paragraph is as relevant now as it would have been then.  God’s story is bigger than any of us can imagine.  New chapters are being revealed to us in every generation, according to the needs of the times.   Part of that future is being written right now through St. Andrew’s United Methodist Church, as we tell the story of Jesus and his love to new generations of children, youth and young adults.  I am so thankful to be part of this…

Under the shadow of thy throne
Still may we dwell secure
Sufficient is thine arm alone
And our defense is sure

A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone
Short as the watch that
ends the night
Before the rising sun

Before the hills in order stood
Or earth received her frame
From everlasting thou art God
To endless years the same

 An important landmark in Christian history we have yet to discuss and don’t have time to go into, but needs to be at least marked:  The day you were baptized.  The day you believed.   And if you have not believed, if you have not been baptized, I pray this will be the year, maybe the day you join the greatest story ever told.  

Time like an ever rolling stream
Bears all who breath away
They fly forgotten as a dream
Dies at the opening day

O God our help in ages past
Our hope for years to come
Be thou our guide while
life shall last and our eternal home

BRD

Life is short
God is forever.
I ask you to believe.
God is with us.
God is with us in the sun
God is with us when we’re young
God is with when we’re cold
God is with us when we’re old
God is with us in the spring
God is with us when we sing
God is with us when we laugh
God is with us in our craft 
God’s been with us in each age
God’s with us when storms rage
God is with us when we cry 
God is with us when we die
God’s love is never severed
God is with us now—and forever