Christmas Is Amazing!

Christmas is absolutely the best time in all the world.

And it’s been the top of the pops for over 2000 years.

Forget about the commercial frenzy – that’s not really Christmas, even though we get ourselves very much involved in the whole scene anyway.

CHRISTMAS IS AMAZING!!

In fact its utterly beyond comprehension, which is probably why we do all the crazy things we do at this time of the year.

We eat too much, we put up lights everywhere, we bring trees into our houses, we buy things for people we see everyday, and wrap them in beautiful paper which we will just throw away anyway – whole forests disappear in December which is a real headache for the concerned conservationists.

All of this is just our feeble attempt to somehow celebrate something which is incredibly amazing, so big, so vast, so utterly unbelievable that we even sometimes do some stupid things to mark the occasion. Kind of like, “pinch me, I think I’m dreaming!”

How do you get to grips with “Emmanuel” – God with us?

Can you actually get your mind around it?

God coming to us – the Creator within His creation.

Its really hard to get the picture, isn’t it?

I was reading about the Rev Robert Evans this week. He is a fulltime minister and a part time astronomer. His claim to fame is that he has discovered more Super Novas that anybody else, even more than the great scientists in their huge observatories.

Now listen to this …

A Supernova is an exploding star whose light can outshine an entire galaxy for about a month. How it explodes is an interesting phenomenon. Over time, millions of years, its inner gravitational pull becomes so strong that initially it implodes, drawing everything into itself. Its gravitational pull is so strong that it sucks in everything, including light – it becomes a black hole in the universe.

And its core becomes incredibly heavy. Imagine a million cannonballs squeezed into the size of a marble. As Rev Evans says, just a teaspoon full of this imploded star could weigh 90 billion kgs.

…And then suddenly it explodes outwards sending all kinds of matter into space. It’s a nuclear explosion of such gigantic proportions that it makes Hiroshima look like a Christmas cracker. It would be the equivalent of a trillion hydrogen bombs all going off at once.

But you don’t need to worry about it. The nearest likely candidate to be a Supernova is a star called Betelguese which is a mere 50 thousand light years away. To put that in perspective, to get there you would have to travel at the speed of light for 50 thousand years. In contrast, travelling at the speed of light, it would take you a mere 1.3 seconds to get to the moon, or 8.3 minutes to get to the sun.

Its hard to fathom God’s creation – its mind boggling.

We see pictures in books of our own solar system but they can never be to scale. If the earth were the size of a pea, Jupiter would be 3 lengths of a rugby field away, and Pluto, the furthest planet from earth would be 21/2 kilometers away. The nearest star outside our solar system is Proxima Centauri, which would, on this scale be 16000 kms away. There is absolutely no prospect whatsoever that any human being will ever travel to the edge of our solar system and our solar system is just a dot in the universe.

Amazing isn’t it…

And the God who made all this came right inside His creation. RIGHT INSIDE!

He who flung stars into space by speaking them into being, who spoke the separation of sky and earth, who announced light, and life..

This God came as a baby born of a virgin mother…

Man, I can’t get it. I just can’t understand it.

The Lord of all creation, the master of the universe – God, made himself utterly dependent on man. Formed in the womb of a virgin girl, He came to us.

Its absolutely crazy but it’s the reason why we are here today.

This amazingly, fantastically big God became a child, a baby in a virgin’s womb – following His own rule for a nine month gestation period, and the years needed to be lived in order to grow to be a man – so that He could lay down the life He took up in order to change our destiny. To turn around everything that we had messed up in our life and history and to give us a new beginning.

Oh, man, this is incredible!

Its no wonder that we do crazy things like coming to church in the middle of the week, and eating a roast lunch just a few days after the summer solstice.