Christingle service 2011

What do we most like about Christmas?

I like the quiet. Everything stops and there’s time to wonder.

Because the nights are dark and long there’s time to wonder about the moon, the planets and the stars.

I look at them and think ‘what must he be like who made all of these?’

If I can fill my mind with the sight of the moon, Jupiter, Orion, the Pleiades and so on I can imagine the mind of God.

If my mind can take in the starry sky God’s mind can take in so much more because he sees all and loves all.

God doesn’t just see one section of the sky he sees the whole of it and all the skies above all the planets in the universe.

God sees right back through history to the when there were no stars at all!

Who’s sitting by the List of Rectors of Horsted Keynes?

Can you give me the dates of the first Rector? Richard de Berkyng became Rector in 1177.

That means Christmas has been celebrated in this Church at least 834 times.

When did people first come to this area?

500,000 years ago – the earliest human remains were found 20 years ago in Boxgrove outside Chichester.

When did life on earth begin?

5 billion years ago. That’s 5000,000,000 years.

How old is the universe?

14 billion years. That’s three times as old as life itself.

It began with what scientists call the Big Bang but Christians know that by another name.

Tonight we are celebrating the revelation of the meaning and origin of the universe.

At one point in time chosen by him as the best time, the Creator of the Universe chose to show his face in Bethlehem in Judea some 2011 years ago.

This Jesus, the anniversary of whose birth we keep tonight, is nothing less than the Big Bang!

We know this from the way he died and rose at Easter more than from the stories of his birth, as in one of the earliest Christian texts from the letter to the Hebrews Chapter 1 verse 2. There it says Jesus, born in Bethlehem, is God’s Son whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds, the one who reflects God’s glory, the exact imprint of God’s very being who sustains all things by his powerful word.

This Jesus born of Mary in a stable made the Big Bang bringing time and space into being. He sustains all things which means he holds you and I together! He is to be heir or inheritor of all things.

We come from him, belong to him and we go to him.

So Christmas to me is a time to wonder!

To wonder at the stars above, the earth below, the existence of life and why human beings are here – and to see afresh in Jesus the power that brought us into being.
What sort of power?

The power of love - love wider than the ocean, immense as the earth and stars and cosmos - love that sees and enfolds all that is!

Love that came down at Christmas. The Love that set the world in motion to begin with became one of us for 33 years starting in Bethlehem.

This is nothing we could ever work out for ourselves but something God has revealed to us. Being a personal God he could do so and did do so in the birth, life, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus his Son.

Christmas is about the love that makes the world go round!

The orange, the candle and the red band tonight stand for the world, the light of the One who made it and the blood he shed for us out of love upon the Cross.

Love came down at Christmas – so let’s celebrate it with our Christingles.