Sermon from December 5, 1999
A little over a  year ago, I saw a baffling sight at the Roman Coliseum. I was standing outside the Coliseum looking up at its still impressive arches, and I saw a date chiseled expertly into a stone that had been put into place by slaves 1900 years earlier. The date was written, as one might expect, in Roman numerals. What could be more natural? But nothing could have been more unnatural than the date itself.

I, not always being swift on the uptake, felt the stirring of unease as I read the number, but for a moment I could not put my finger on what was bothering me. The number read XIV, 14. Slowly, my wits made the connection that explained my uneasiness. Fourteen years from what? You can be sure that Nero did not mean for it to be fourteen years after Christ. Besides, the Coliseum was built 70 years after Christ, and in any case the world was not dating itself at the time in reference to Jesus.

So, where did this mysterious XIV come from? I asked our friends who were guiding us around Rome. Their explanation made several things fall into place. Mussolini had ordered that date chiseled into the Coliseum stone in the 1930s or 1940s. "Why?" I wanted to know. "Because," said our friends, "he believed a new age had dawned in the history of the world, and it began with his accession to power." The number on the Coliseum was put there in the 14th year of the reign of Mussolini in the New Age of Man. Nothing shy about the old dictator. Arrogant, perhaps, but not shy.

He was also wrong. The Hitler-Mussolini Pact went up in flames in the firestorm of the Second World War. There was no New Age, and the stones of the Coliseum cry out in chiseled numerals the folly of human arrogance and cruelty. He also missed the point rather badly. Let me show you what I mean.

In his little letter to the Colossian Church the Apostle Paul said that in Christ there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all (Col. 3:11). Only here in the Bible to we read the name Scythian. The Scythians lived at one time on the steppes of Russia and later had a capital near the Black Sea. As Colossians says, the gospel of Christ may have reached them even in the first century. Four hundred years later the Church of Jesus Christ flourished in Scythia. Among those followers of Christ was a man called Dionysius.

About 1500 years ago, Dionysius made the journey to Rome. There he took for himself or was given by others a second name, Exiguus. Exiguus means small or insignificant. We don't know if that meant he was small or that he was humble. I am will to give him the benefit of a doubt and say that he was humble and call him, as writer Tom Wright has done (The Millennium Myth, 2), Dionysius the Insignificant.

His influence on the world has been anything but insignificant. Dionysius had the idea "to view Christ as the turning point of the ages," (History of the Christian Church, Schaff, Vol. 3, 354) and do something very practical about it. Like Mussolini 15 centuries later, Dionysius thought (accurately, we Christians would say) that a new age had dawned in the history of the world, and it began with Jesus Christ. That was the point that Mussolini missed.

Dionysius, being more humble, got the point and asked, "Why not honor Jesus by the way we measure the passing of time?" So, he did the arithmetic the best he could, identified the year of Jesus' birth, and began dating time from that year. And lo and behold the world found itself living in A.D. 500. It is not particularly astonishing that it took five centuries for someone to come up with that idea. People just do not go around changing the calendar. But two things made it feasible in Dionysius' day. First, the Roman Empire was falling apart, and, second, the Christian Church had become not only the dominant human institution but also the preserver of culture. As the preserver of culture, the Church was in a position to introduce a new calendar.

In any case, the deed was done, and Western Civilization has been following that arrangement ever since. Today, most of the rest of the world does the same, including those overly conservative computer programmers, who saved space by giving only two numbers for the year on their dateline. More about that another time.

Secularsts have been fairly successful in changing B.C. and A.D (Before Christ and After [the] Death [of Christ]) into B.C.E. and C.E. (Before the Common Era and The Common Era). But that did not even begin to change the massive reality that time as we measure it is time measured in reference to the birth of Jesus Christ. The calendar turns the pages of our lives as a permanent honor to Jesus Christ. It does it in another way.

You have probably noticed that some of the names of the months and of the days of the week sound like personal names. Wednesday echos the name of an old Norse god named Wotan. It is Wotan's Day. January embodies the name of Janus, an ancient Italian god that watched over the beginning of things. July was named in honor of Julius Caesar, and August in honor of Caesar Augustus. There are others.

No doubt, for reasons of expediency and tradition someone gave some of these names to days and months the way we name a street after someone. But here is the point. The gods and Caesars they were named after no longer have any punch left.

Julius Caesar may have deserved to have the month of July named after him, but Julius Caesar who once ruled armies and nations inspires neither fear nor admiration among most people. Neither does Caesar Augustus who forged the Roman Empire that lasted half a millennium. Thor may have once inspired worship and sacrifice among barbarians of Northern Europe, but no one insists strongly on something by saying, "By Thor, I can do that."

The calendar is a kind of catalogue of deities and emperors that have been defeated and de-fanged by Jesus Christ. As the Apostle Paul said of Jesus in Colossians 2:15, Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them triumphing over them by the cross.

Y2K, Year 2000, arrives in a few days as the 2000th celebration of the fullness of time, when God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons (Gal. 4:4-5).

As He always does, God has created another occasion for people to celebrate – as millions of people will be doing from Tiannanmen Square to Times Square. It is appropriate that the Church should join the celebration and also remember and remind any and all what the celebration is all about.

We celebrate the beginning of a new age for humanity and all creation, which began with the coming of Jesus Christ into our common life. The Apostle John could look out on his world toward the end of the first century and say, "The darkness is passing and the true light is already shining," (1 John 2:8).

So, "let's leave our heartaches and sorrows behind." Let the celebration – the 2000th celebration of the beginning of what Boris Pasternak called, "this glorious holiday, this liberation from the curse of mediocrity, the soaring flight about the dullness of a humdrum existence." What better way to begin than to receive here, together the bread and the cup in token of the greatest of all the divine gifts to Mankind.