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Christmas Memories
by Jim McCrea

Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 1:26-38

This past week, I read a very interesting explanation of the way modern scientists are coming to understand the creation of the universe.

For some time, cosmologists - scientists who study the cosmos, that is, all of material existence - have believed that all matter was once contained in a single sphere of incredible size and density.

The physical forces acting upon that sphere were so intense that it exploded in a massive detonation some 10 to 20 billion years ago, hurling matter in all directions at astronomical speeds. This theory was developed to explain why distant galaxies are traveling away from us at tremendous speeds and it seemed to be confirmed by the discovery of cosmic background radiation that has been described as being "the glow left over from the explosion."

This theory is now so unanimously accepted by the scientific community that cosmologists have been working hard to hone it to as fine a precision as possible. Things are now to the point where scientists believe that by applying the natural laws of physics and mathematics, they think they can understand everything that happened after the first millionth of a second following the Big Bang.

For those of us who struggle to balance our checkbooks or set our VCRs, one millionth of a second doesn't seem like any big deal at all. But it turns out that that almost infinitely-small moment in time has tremendous significance, not just for the understanding of some obscure scientists, but for life itself and for the universe as we know it.

That's because it was during that cosmic speck of time that all the natural laws which guide our universe were formed. Before that tiny hiccup in time, everything was possible. And, in fact, during that moment even a tiny change could have had radical consequences that would be magnified in monstrous proportions across the universe.

As scientists thought about that instant in which everything hung in the balance, they began to shift away from the typical questions of how things work to the deeper questions of why things turned out they way they did - questions that sound far more like those that would be posed by a philosopher or theologian than a typical scientist.

As Don Hoffman describes it, "[...] there isn't any scientific law that explains how our scientific laws came into being. They might have been different. What would our universe be like if those scientific laws were just the tiniest bit different? And what they discovered was that the tiniest difference in some of the rules for how sub atomic particles interact makes an incredible difference in the kind of universe we get. "More specifically, most of these other [possible] universes are incredibly boring. Hydrogen atoms. Helium atoms. ... Nothing else.

"No raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, because raindrops need oxygen, which wouldn't exist. Roses and kittens and whiskers need oxygen and carbon and nitrogen and lots of other things that wouldn't exist. No bright copper kettles because copper wouldn't exist. No warm woolen mittens because you can't make wool out of just hydrogen and helium. No planet earth. No life. And no you and no me.

"So these cosmologists asked, Why? Why do we have a universe that makes planets? Why do we have a universe with so many elements? Why do we have a universe that's friendly to life? Why do we have half a dozen or more scientific laws that, if they had only been very slightly different, would make it impossible for life to exist? It didn't have to be like this. Was the universe made deliberately, by some intelligence?"

The scientific community as a whole may not be ready to accept it yet since it comes without a shred of hard evidence to back it up, but the apostle Paul offered an answer to their question some 2,000 years before they posed it when he wrote these words about Jesus:

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible [...] all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

In other words, Paul is claiming that Christ is both the intelligence that formed those life-giving natural laws during that flicker of an instant after the Big Bang and so is the source of all life and the wondrous diversity of creation. That is, the rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens and all that. And, in essence, Christ is the binding force that holds the universe together. That's quite an amazing claim to be made about any human being, let alone someone born to an obscure, impoverished family in an out-of-the-way corner of the ancient Roman empire.

When we were in London a couple of weeks ago, we saw the crown jewels in the Tower of London, along with videotape of them being used in the coronation ceremony for Queen Elizabeth on June 2, 1953. The coronation ritual is designed to give the Queen's subjects a sense of the solemn stateliness and dignity of the occasion.

The crown jewels, I suppose, are designed to represent the power and wealth of the country. They were unbelievably beautiful and expensive. The crown jewels included everything from symbolic scepters and maces to jewel-encrusted, silver salt cellars.

I have to admit that when I looked at all that stuff, I reacted pretty much the way you might expect an American - especially an American of Scottish heritage - to react. It all seemed like a huge waste of money to me.

Even as I was thinking that, a biblical phrase popped into my head: "[...] this [...] could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor." I was feeling sort of smug about that until I realized that the person who originally said that phrase was Judas, when he was complaining about the expensive ointment that was poured on Jesus during the last week of his life by a woman who wanted to express the richness of her love for Jesus.

That story was actually a helpful insight to enable me to have some understanding as to why the United Kingdom would want to tie up so many of their resources in such incredibly expensive baubles. If their reason is anything like that biblical story, they keep the crown jewels due to love - a love of their country, a love of tradition, a love of their heritage and of the significance of the crown itself.

There was a time in British history when that was not the case. A time when a man named Oliver Cromwell, who was a very pragmatic man -like Judas and like me- gained control of the government from King Charles I.

During Cromwell's reign, the Civil War led to a severe shortage of currency in the British Empire. A committee was appointed to search the nation in hopes of finding silver to meet the emergency. But after a month-long search, the representatives returned to with a negative report. They said:

"We have searched the Empire in vain seeking to find silver. To our dismay, we found none anywhere except in the cathedrals where the statues of the saints are made of choice silver." To this, Oliver Cromwell answered, "Let's melt down the saints and put them into circulation."

Now that is an eminently practical decision - the kind of decision that makes sense nine times out of 10. But sometimes it's important to act with the heart and not the head, and do something utterly extravagant to demonstrate one's love.

Isn't that what Jesus did in that first one-millionth of a second of creation? Isn't that what he did on the cross? And, on this Christ the King Sunday, isn't that what Christ's whole kingdom is about - seemingly-impractical, self-giving love?

Christ's kingdom has no more to do with the kind of elaborate ritual of a British coronation than I do. In human terms, Christ's kingdom is a very strange one, because it turns everything upside down and expresses its extravagance through the emptying of power rather than the use of power.

That's still a hard concept for most of us to grasp, and so we often look for Christ in all the wrong places. Someone on the internet has a tag line to all their emails that says something like this: "To be Christian is to cease saying 'Where the Messiah is there is no misery,' and to begin to say, 'Where there is misery, there is the Messiah.'"

Who would have thought that the Creator of the universe - the One who had the power to design untold species and galaxies in less than one-millionth of a second - would choose to lay aside that power and become one of us - a part of the created world? It simply makes no practical sense. However, it makes perfect sense in the world of the heart. For this is a universe which he breathed into being for the sake of love, which he infused with the power of his Spirit and which he sustains with the devotion of his constant attention.

In the second century, a Christian leader named Irenaeus described Jesus' love for us this way: "He became as we are ... in order that we might become as He is." Therefore, Christ the King Sunday serves to remind us each year of the inverted nature of Christian power.

Chris Lockley says, "If we use power in order to impose our ideas or preserve our privileges, we betray the example of Jesus. He gives us a new way of understanding and using power, both in the church and in the world. He teaches us an 'upside down' use of power, a power that serves the poor, the oppressed, and the forgotten, a power that never steamrolls, a power that seeks the well being of others, a power that does not place ourselves on a pedestal.

"[...] Christ is King over all human history, over the entire creation, but in a way that subverts normal standards and expectations of the powerful. [...] Christ the King Sunday offers an alternate model: that true power is found in compassion and self giving."

Through the eyes of faith we see that the unsparing love that led to the cross is the real binding force of the universe. It was infused into the very essence of matter at the instant of creation, so that when we refuse to express that love in our lives, we deny our very nature.

But that binding force continues to call us back and when we heed its call, we are, in Paul's words, rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into Christ's kingdom of light. And that's a real cause for thanksgiving. Amen.
 


 

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