Anno Domini 2000 Newsletter Jesus Christ's Bi-millennium

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"Flight to Egypt" by Balinese Christian Artist Ketut Lasia

• C is for Compost
  Thank you for your challenging responses to Dr. Bertram's challenge. Last issue, recall, he invited readers to submit a sentence describing a Crossings theme, which sentence would consist of nine words beginning successively with the letters C-R-O-S-S-I-N-G-S.

• R is for Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
  The following is my abridgment of a longer piece Dr. Bertram prepared for another occasion. Every word is his, but there are fewer of them than originally. This Christian reflection on the turn of the millennium shows how Christ composts even our relationship to time into something genuinely new.

• O is for Old
  Next time students will be graduating it will be in the Year 2000. Some of you will be serving as their commencement speakers or baccalaureate preachers. I can see it now. You will begin your address by greeting them: "So you are the Class of 2000."

• S is for Square one
  Jesus Christ does have a beginning, a rather recent one at that. As Jesus Christ he does. There was a time when Jesus Christ was not -- a time B.C., "Before Christ." But then that means he had to start at some Year One, like us -- square one. That is definitely ungodlike and, when you think of it, humiliating.

• I is for IOU
  This is the way the Law works, chronologically speaking. In any given day most of us have more to do than we have time to do it in. We may wish, as we say, "there were more hours in the day." But there aren't. So instead we borrow additional time from the future.

• N is for New Time
  I'm betting that the little girl did not give up on the second Wow altogether. Remember, the child had asked why Jesus Christ, being just as old as God, being God, would still have a birthday like one of us. I'm not sure her mother answered the Why head-on. But I do have it on good authority that what the mother does reply, simply, is this: "Aren't you glad he did?"

• G is for Glad
  Aha, notice the switch. Suddenly we are asking, Why did Christ come so early? Here, all along, we had been asking the opposite, Why did he come so late? Now we are asking instead, If Old Time is going to end anyway, all too soon, why did Christ have to come and end it even sooner -- ahead of time? Why? Answer: to give us an option.

• S is for Sanctify ("make holy")
  What would you do if your preacher directed, as I did a few weeks ago, "Raise your hand if you are holy"? If you hesitate, as many of my hearers did, the reason is probably a modesty (either appropriate or unnecessary) concerning one's own behavior, namely, is it so God-pleasing?