We’ve been celebrating the wondrous birth of Jesus in all kinds of ways:

traveling, house cleaning for company, shopping, shopping, cooking,

wrapping, Christmas cards and letters, extra socializing, extra work, extra expense, extra stress, and great joy!  All of this is part of a feast day, as feast days are celebrated in every culture.

Christmas, the Mass of Christ in our long tradition, is a wonderful holiday and I’m especially pleased that you are all here on    the day after, to just relax and share some reflections with me.  So lets all take a deep breath, relax, and reflect on what it’s really all about.

One year, over forty years ago, my young kids and I decided to get into the Christmas mode by making a camel.  And a marvelous camel it was! 

The old camel still holds up as you can see.  How we made it was quite amazing, although a bit hard on the parsonage appliances.  Let me explain how to do it, in case you want to make a camel.

First you make the basic animal out of paper mache – pasting on layer after layer, and drying each in the oven, until the camel takes shape. 

Then you find an old burlap bag in the garage and throw it in the washing machine, temperature set on high, with lots of detergent to get rid of the mouse smell.  When the cycle finishes, you have a wet mass of fibers that you scoop out of the machine and you put that into the dryer until it gets almost dry.  You collect all of the loose, damp mess from the dryer – as much as you can – (luckily Mom was out shopping.)   Then you start pasting it on the camel frame - patches here and there, to look mangy like a real camel.  Yes, it is a messy project, for quite a while afterward, I must say, but it’s well worth it when you are celebrating Christmas.  That is exactly how we did it.  (I would not lie to you) and we were pretty proud of our camel.  But, as we were finishing our camel project, our pre-school age daughter Marylynn, thoughtfully asked,  “Daddy, what do camels have to do with Christmas?” 

Over the years, that question has provided lots of fodder for Christmas sermons.  Even a pre-schooler could see that the essence of Christmas is not in cattle lowing and camels humping.  The real essence of the Christ event is in that little song we sang earlier from the Kindergarten curriculum:

“Baby Jesus, soon you’ll grow tall; You’ll be showing God’s love to all”

Well, we have grown up, so lets put some reason in the season!

Lets move beyond the stories, the carols, and the biblical metaphors, to the message BEHIND the Biblical narratives to the central message of Jesus, which is that God cares about us here on earth - each of us - and the center of all life is love.

This morning let’s think about God’s love in two dimensions.

   First, the human dimension, as God is embodied in a human being,              Jesus, and then, second, God in the cosmic dimension. 

 In both instances, - the finite and the infinite – our concept of God tends to be too small.

Let’s look first at the finite.  Jesus was born and lived as a human, to show us the central meaning of life, which is love.  His life demonstrated that  love, and compassion, and sacrifice on behalf of others, and he showed how love works - right here and right now….anytime, all the time.  He demonstrated how life could be, and should be lived by each of us.

The Christmas message is that God cares about the finite… each of our lives.  God is with us…Emmanuel…human, personal, immediate.  Jesus was born here, in our dimension, in the flesh, only 2000 years ago, (which is as nothing in eternity….)

Maybe we should stop grousing about the commercialism of Christmas     and be thankful for all the celebrating!  For we are celebrating the most amazing event – the coming of the God-force into our human dimension as a person, Jesus, to show us the way! The Christ Event is far more awesome than the simple stories in our sacred texts - the shepherds from Dr. Luke, and the wise and powerful kings in Matthew. Our carols are pretty trite, many of them - chestnuts roasting, sleighbells ringing, red-nosed reindeer…trite, but nice.  Fine, and all part of the celebration.

But let’s also put some reason in the season, and really think seriously about Jesus growing tall and showing God’s love to all, according to the Kindergartener’s song…God’s love to all and in all, no matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, such as those in prison, for whatever reason.         God is there, in them, sharing the hurt and despair.  And in those thousands and thousands of women and men who are in our endless wars and then come home horribly damaged and disfigured, begging for support and help and healing and understanding.  God is there, suffering with them.  God suffers with homeless people, here in Lansing, and with homeless people by the millions across our wealthy land, and with countless homeless refugees, wandering across the earth.

The list goes on and on – the life force that we call God lives in Haiti, in conditions that defy description. God is embodied in our earthly life.  All of it.  Not just the religious part, but all of it, every day and every hour.

As someone wrote recently in The Christian Century journal, Jesus knew what it means to be tired and hungry and lonely, and he also knew what it means to be happy and loved and hopeful.  Because of him we know that God cares about the cholera victims in Haiti, about frightened Palestinians and Israelis, and about affluent adults who may be living in meaninglessness and despair.  The life of Jesus means that we encounter God, not only in elegant theology, but in hard work for justice, and in our enjoyment of beauty, friendship, and love – especially in love.

Now when some folks refer to Jesus as Savior, they mean Savior in the sense that Jesus came to save us from hell. That concept of salvation is woven through many of our Christmas carols, just as it permeates much of our traditional theology.

But others of us believe that Jesus saves us from mediocrity, shallowness and self-centeredness,  by teaching and demonstrating how God’s way addresses selfishness, greed, isolationism, and the thinking that our way is the only way. This baby Jesus grew to adulthood and revealed what God is really like, and how our thinking can be transformed, if we just let that God-force take hold of our lives.       Jesus revealed the immensity of the love force that is the center of all of creation, as described in the Psalm that was read today.  (Psalm ) and he applied it to everyday life in ways that are awesome.

This is what we celebrate – that the love force of the universe is in us.  Each of us.  Even though, in the grand scheme of things we are so small as to seem insignificant.  Our whole earth globe is only a speck in the far reaches of space. And yet each of us on the earth is formed in the image of that awesome God, with all of the  love, all of the compassion, all of the possibilities of life available to us.  Oh, if we could only really believe that!             

When Jesus said “Follow me, he meant “Follow me into the depths of life - into the deep understandings of life,     into the awesome power of relationships and into the universal power of compassion”, like Him.

That is the earthly dimension – the embodiment of God’s love, the coming of God into the finite dimension of our life. During these days of Christmastide, and in all of the days ahead, let us try to apply the principle of God’s measureless love in all that we think and all that we do. 

Let us try to love wastefully, in the words of Bishop Spong.  Throw it around.  ”Waste” it on everyone - this love without limits - like Jesus.

God was in Christ, and God is in us.  (Hear that!) God was in Christ, and God is in us!  That’s what Christmas means. Let the time of Christmas be a time of liberation for each of us – letting go a little, looking where Jesus is pointing and moving boldly. I trust that you feel alive and ready for new challenges, anticipating days filled with new decisions, thoughts and possibilities as we approach another new and exciting year together, trying our best to follow the example of Jesus. That’s what it means to be fully human - finite.

Now what about the cosmic dimension?  Is our concept of Creation too small? Is our creation theology too limited? Is our God too small?

Recently, Ada and I visited our close friends in Minneapolis, and they took us all around the twin cities, including a visit to the Science Center in St. Paul to see a film on Hubble.  The IMAX film, projected on the giant screen all around and above us, was on the Hubble telescope.  Hubble orbits about 350 miles above the earth, moving at 17,500 MPH.  We saw the larger than life images of the astronauts preparing for their flight to repair the telescope.  We had an inside view of the preparations for lift-off, many fascinating details of living together in the module, the actual flight and attachment of the module to the giant telescope and great pictures of them repairing it on various space walks. Then we were shown pictures taken through the telescope, and frankly I was blown away!  The camera took us out through countless stars in our Milky Way galaxy, out beyond to only God-knows-where, through other galaxies in the far reaches of space.  It was breath taking, as are the statistics.  Generalizing, scientists now believe there are 100 billion to a trillion galaxies! And each galaxy has a hundred billion to a trillion stars!  (Are you with me?)

Just this month the astronomers announced that there are now probably three times as many stars than previously thought!  How many? 300 sextillion stars.  That is a 3, followed by 23 zeros. or 3 trillion times 100 billion.  Dazzling!  The telescope pictures just kept expanding out, out, out, into interstellar space.

Meanwhile, back home, we are told that our sun is really a relatively small star in the scheme of things, but it is a million times huger than the earth! 

And every second since creation, our star, the sun, has transformed four million tons of itself into light.  Every second!  So, I ask you, Is our God, the Creator of it all, awesome, or not?   

And, here is perhaps the most mind-blowing proposition of all:

A growing number of astronomers and scientists are now suggesting that there is no end to the universe!  Creation may well be endless!

As I sat there in the science theater in St. Paul, I kept saying to myself “Self, this has got to be part of our Christmas reflection at Edgewood.”

So please hear this: The message of the Christ event that we are celebrating, is that the God force that created the endless universe is present in it all.  Somehow, but don’t ask me how!

And, as the legends of Creation in Genesis say so eloquently and simply, “All of creation is good.”  All of the Finite, and all of the Infinite. Cosmic, and at the same time personal for each of us. 

All of it good and all of it awesome.

While the media throw at us images of mayhem, violence, hatred, suspicion, war upon war, rampant materialism, and all the rest that faces us, let us, the followers of Jesus, celebrate the big God - the Creator and Sustainer of everything.  Our God becomes flesh in Bethlehem and in East Lansing, in   Afghanistan and Somalia and Haiti, and  (who knows?) maybe becomes flesh on countless earths, in countless galaxies… in an endless, infinite universe!

And at the same time our God cares about each of us.

Wow!  Now that is worth celebrating! 

                 Thanks be to God!