I want to tell you two stories tonight.
The first, once upon a time all of space was contained in a tiny point. One moment, about 13.8 billion years ago, it exploded, and it’s been continuing to expand ever since.
After a while, the universe cooled down enough to resolve into atoms. Huge clouds of these elements eventually came together through gravity and formed stars and galaxies.
Around 8 billion years later, or two-thirds of the way into the universe’s history to this point, the earth was formed by a similar system of gravitational convergence of atoms.
A billion years after that forms of life appeared, and about 2 billion years ago oxygen started to be generated by primitive plants.
Human beings emerged around 200,000 years ago, which, when you’ve got used to measuring years in billions, is more or less yesterday.
An unusual, perhaps unique, set of biological and climactic conditions came about to make the beauty and fertility of the world as we know it.
The species exist together in remarkable balance, and the seasons come and go, replenishing life in the grand sweep of a David Attenborough multi-programmed canvas.
Patterns of migration and cycles of life lend rhythm and order to what would otherwise seem unfathomable sequences of development and change.
I remember a few years ago talking to a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. He said it takes more faith to believe that these life sustaining patterns that enable growth in sequence happen by chance, than believe a wise, loving purpose is afoot in the process.
That’s the first story. The second story is the same, yet very different. You’re sitting in a church on Christmas Eve.
You want to sit in church and be happy and festive, but your mind is buzzing with a thousand things that don’t feel done or don’t feel festive.
You’ve worked hard this week getting everything ready and welcoming, but you’re just tired. Christmas was supposed to be this oasis of joy in the middle of family, work and events.
But it isn’t working out that way. Meanwhile your colleague at work has asked to take the day off. She had not done so before so you ask her why. She says she’s picking her family up from the airport.
It turns out she managed to escape from a desperate situation in the country she came from, and she’s spent the last two years living on next to nothing while sending home all her money to her relatives to enable them to escape the way she did.
Finally they’ve got enough money and they’re arriving tomorrow and she’s currently got no idea where they’re all going to sleep tomorrow night.
When you look at the combination of strain, suffering, tiredness, pride and relief on her face you see a whole world of displaced people and cruel regimes and selfless generosity and human ingenuity and you reflect on your own life and wonder if you could ever have achieved what she’s achieved.
That’s the second story. The first story is epic in scale. It’s about billions of years, about indescribable distances and details and dimensions and discoveries.
It leaves you thinking, in the context of this massive story, am I a tiny speck in time and space.
My existence seems the most colossal chance and my significance seems the tiniest obscurity.
The second story is the opposite of the first one. It’s about you and tiredness and exhaustion.
And the only thing that makes you pause is that other person, like you, but not like you, whose story is dominated by political realities you’re largely protected from, whose gentle demeanor hides her experience of violence and terror and exploitation and pain.
Her every waking moment is designed to free others from the prison she’s escaped from, she’s absorbed in her world as you are in yours, but her challenges are on a scale that leaves you humbled.
I said earlier that both stories are the same story. How can this be? The answer is, they’re both the Christmas story.
The Christmas story is about two words that come together like never before. The first word is ‘word’ – in Greek is ‘logos’ from which we get words like biology, anthropology and theology.
It means logic. It means the meaning of; the meaning of the big bang and all that cosmological language about galaxies and planets.
The second word is ‘flesh.’ Flesh literally means what lives between skin and bone, but in truth it means what I just described in that second story – the human reality of passion and struggle and intensity and hope and despair and grief and love.
Flesh means being so angry you can’t see straight, being so in love you can’t think straight, being in so much pain you can’t feel anything else.
Logos or word and flesh seem like polar opposites. They both describe our story, what it means to be human both as a result of all those cosmic goings-on and in the midst of strong passions and intense experiences.
But what never happens is any overlap, or connection, or intersection is ever drawn between these two stories.
Except once. At one moment in eternity there was a point where word and flesh met. There was an instant in time when the cosmic story and the fleshly story became the same story.
That was the moment we call Christmas. The God of heaven and eternity, the God of logic and divine plans, the God beyond and above and forever – took up residence in the world of passion and immediacy and suffering and anger and hatred and love.
The word became flesh. This is the story the gospels tell. The heavens moved – the stars were rearranged, the cosmic order stood to attention, the angels lined up to order.
The sleepy shepherds and the smelly stable and the earthy manger made a welcome for the bloody, messy, tiny new-born baby.
The word became flesh. The cosmic and the earthly intersected. The logic of the stars and the life of the flesh kissed one another. And the result we call Jesus.
When people don’t believe in God, it tends to be either because this life, the flesh, is so absorbing in its demands or disappointments or destruction that they can’t see anything past it; or because the cosmic realities seem so far away, they can’t see any meaning or purpose in any of it.
In their own way, these objections make plenty of sense. But neither of these objections rejects the Christian God.
Because the Christian God brings heaven to earth in being made human, and brings earth to heaven in elevating fleshly life to eternal significance.
The whole Christian faith hangs on this moment, when heaven and earth, word and flesh, intersect, and the two parallel stories become one. The point of intersection we call Jesus.
Without Jesus neither story makes any sense. With Jesus we see that they were the same story, waiting to be united at Christmas.
It’s quite common as an abbreviation for Christmas to write Xmas.
The X is an anglicized version of the Greek letter chi, which is pronounced like an English ch, as in the word charisma. It’s the first letter of the word Christ, and so Xmas becomes shorthand for Christmas.
But the word Xmas contains a deeper truth. Christmas is the moment of intersection between the cosmos and the intensity of human existence; the coming-together of heaven and earth; the moment the word becomes flesh, and the flesh becomes word.
Christmas is the intersection, the moment when the two great stories meet. Christmas is the crossover, the true X moment. Maybe it should always be called Xmas.