All age Christmas eucharist address 2011

If there are children with a favourite present to show us could they be ushered to the front?

While they’re on the way let’s try a joke or two, like:

What did the reindeer say before launching into his comedy routine?

This will sleigh you.

What do you call the fear of getting stuck in a chimney?

Santaclaustrophobia

What do you get when you eat the Christmas decorations?

Tinselitis

Christmas is here and it’s time to be thankful for Jesus.

All the gifts we’ve been given this morning are given to honour the greatest Gift from the greatest Giver!

So what gifts have we been given?

Time for children to share.

I’ve brought my gift in – I got it early for Christmas and it’s the book from the David Attenborough TV series Frozen Planet.

Any other dads or mums got this too?

There’s a jingle on TV about it to the tune wonderful world that goes through some of its breath-taking images of polar animals.

Here’s one – what is it? p133

Polar bear

Here’s another – what is it? p165

Penguin chick

And these? p122

Killer whales

But this is my favourite (p75). It’s the Arctic woolly bear caterpillar.

Each year it feeds for just three weeks - as you may be able to see - on Arctic willow leaves. Then it gets frozen solid.

Fourteen times this living creature gets frozen solid and then after 14 years it becomes a moth and is able to fly.

According to my book it survives its annual freezing by producing glycerol. This prevents ice crystals forming inside it and damaging its vital functions.

Isn’t God wonderful?

The maker of the Arctic woolly bear caterpillar would have had no trouble planning his own way into human existence in the birth of Jesus.

Now a history test for the oldies in Church this morning!

If Jesus is the most famous who is the second most famous Jewish person of all time?

Albert Einstein lived between 1879 and 1955 and is the most distinguished of all scientists whose ideas on the working of the universe are still being confirmed by experiments.

Just before Christmas experiments with the Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, confirmed the likely existence of the long-sought Higgs boson or God-particle that was predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Einstein openly admitted amazement at the harmony of the laws of nature which he said reveals an intelligence of such superiority that compared with it all systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

Be it Einstein’s thinking or David Attenborough’s observations we can’t doubt that the world around us is the product of someone very, very clever indeed.

What must he be like who made the Arctic woolly bear caterpillar, or the Higgs boson?

Christmas gives us an answer.

As the Maker of All isn’t a thing but a person he was in a position to get in touch when he saw it was the right time and to show us more of who he is. This he did by taking human form in Bethlehem around 2000 years ago.

God showed us God in Jesus born of Mary - going on to teach and heal, suffer and die, rise, ascend and give us the Holy Spirit.

The power that made the universe, baby penguins and killer whales, Arctic caterpillars and Higgs bosons, is a person.

Actually he’s three persons in one God, a Trinity, because only a being who shares love within himself can be a God of love – for how could God be love when there was nothing to love 14 billion years ago?

He had to be love within himself, love of a Father for a Son and a Son for a Father with that go-between of love we call the Holy Spirit.

That first Christmas God’s love, poured by the Spirit into Mary, came to land on the earth in baby Jesus.

This Christmas the same love is destined for earth again - only for your heart and my heart.

Do not be afraid; for see - I am bringing you good news of great joy.

In the joy of this morning you may know many limitations in your life – regrets, fears and anxieties – but perfect love has come today to cast out fear.

Today God who made each of us out of love invites us to open ourselves to him so we can know afresh the glorious liberty of the children of God!

O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray. Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today!

Let’s pause for a quiet moment to reflect on all of this.