'It's not fair!' Parents of young children will be only too familiar with that cry! But it's worth reflecting for a moment on how universal, innate and unlearned the sense of 'fairness' is, and how much meaning is packed into the word 'fair' itself. The first sense of 'fairness': justifce and even dealing, to which all children always appeal, is universal. Universl in the sense that everyone recognises the distinction between 'fair' and 'unfair', especially when they feel that it is they themselves who have been treateed unfairly.

But that universality, across all human cultures, is all the more remarkable when set alongside the other universal truth, which is that though we all recognise and ask for 'fairness', none of us seems capable of always behaving fairly ourselves! We recognise 'fairness' as muc, if not more, by its absence than its presence. Perhaps that tells us something about fairness, that its origin is beyond the horizon of experience, that the desire to see things fair and just is one of the transcendent or divine qualities of our soul, persisting in spite of all that is 'fallen' or compromised in our nature.

But there's something else about the word 'fair'. It doesn't just mean 'just'! It means well-wrought, fitting and beautiful. A craftsman makes his work smooth and 'fairs' off the rough spots, the lines of a boat have a beautiful 'fair run'; a beautiful person in her prime is described as fresh and fair. There is a deep, intuitive, almost organic connection between something which is fair in one sense, and fair in the other. Justice and 'fairness' are beautiful in themselves. We rightly describe an unfair society or a brutal bullying scenario as 'ugly'.

Now we have all been made aware, by this financial crisis, that we have become a deeply unfair society; the gross inequalities allowed by corporate greed, the demands of the ultra-rich that books should be kept balanced by cuts for the poor and needy, these are ugly truths about our society. But perhaps they are also expressed in other kinds of ugliness: the brutal excesses of high-rise corporate architecture sneering down on the poor from its penthouse offices, the gross excesses of celebrity life-style wheeling between Botox makeovers and unrestrained blow-outs. Are all these symptoms of the same failure to recognise what is fair in every sense?

If so, then we have an answer. Christian life and worship is an attempt to make things fair again in both senses. We seek fairness and justice, but we also want to bring back, through the beauty of worship, its music, its movements, its rituals, something fair and lovely that our world has lost. And in our daily life even the smallest act of 'making something fair', whether it is a financial exchange, or sanding a garden bench, can be part of redressing a balance and helping our society to take the spiritual turn it desperately needs.

As we start the New Year, the Internet will be awash with end-of-the-world predictions! This is because people with more time than sense have calculated that according to an ancient Mayan calendar the world is due to end in 2012. No matter that there is almost nothing else in Mayan mythology that we would want to take literally, we are asked to entertain the idea that in this matter the Mayans may be right!

Why bother even to mention this particularly far-fetched instance of the perennial, and perennially disproven, pastime of predicting the end of the world? Because even in the most mistaken of views there can be hidden a kernel of Wisdom. I don't believe for a moment that the world will end this year. Jesus Himself told us that no-one knows the time, and yet Jesus also points to the paradox that awareness of the end is the key to a new beginning. He specifically told His followers not to be anxious, but to see 'the end' as a time of deliverance and renewal. Then, in the most dramatic and decisive way, He showed that the end we will all meet one day, Mayan calendars or no, our own personal end in death, has become, in Him, a beginning! Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies He said it bears no fruit, but if it dies it yields a rich harvest.

And then He Himself went through that 'end' - the grave, and gate of death, and showed in His resurrection that it was not a final end, but, as the Collect puts it, 'a bed of hope' to all people. Not only does His life, death and resurrection give us new hope and help us to see that final end as a beginning, it also shows us that every other ending, every little death, even the ending of an old year, is really also a beginning and a new start. As the poet TS Eliot, reflecting on this very truth, said, 'The end is where we start from'. So at the end of an old year I wish you joy and life in the new, and pray that in Christ we may be set free from the false anxieties that pervade the society around us, free to help that society make the new beginnings it so desperately needs.