"Sing to the Lord a new song! Sing to the Lord, all the whole earth. Sing to the Lord and bless his Name."
Tonight our Psalm commands us to sing! Three times we are commanded to sing: "Sing to the Lord a new song! Sing to the Lord, all the whole earth. Sing to the Lord and bless his Name."
And so tonight we sing! And just as we have been commanded to sing three times, in our opening hymn we commanded the angels to sing three times: "Sing choirs of angels, sing in exultation, sing all ye citizens of heaven above." And later, in our closing song, we will command heaven and nature to sing three times: "and heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing, and heaven, and heaven and nature sing."
Tonight we sing, because tonight heaven and nature meet in a cradle!
The Christmas story has a simple beginning: an emperor sends out a decree, a man and a woman journey to Bethlehem, and shepherds watch over their sheep. Nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary, just the normal day-to-day activities of governing, traveling, and working. If we had been there, we could have seen Augustus governing, as he hands his decree to a courier; we could have seen Mary and Joseph traveling from Nazareth; we could have seen the shepherds working on the hills above Bethlehem. But there was an entirely other kind of governing, traveling, and working which we could not have seen, an entirely other kind of governing, traveling, and working which the emperor, the young couple, and the shepherds could not have seen. But suddenly, that invisible governing, traveling, and working is revealed in the glory of angels.
We, too, spend our lives in the normal day-to-day activities of governing, traveling, and working. And in times like these, times of great change and anxiety, when our very capacity to govern, travel, and work seems precarious and uncertain, it can be hard to sing to the Lord at all, much less sing to the Lord a new song. Unless. Unless we remember that other kind of governing, traveling, and working which we cannot see.
So tonight I want to let heaven and nature sing by giving you two glimpses into God's invisible governing, traveling, and working.
The first glimpse is a glimpse into heaven.
The BBC recently published an article on the latest findings about our universe. It turns out that "normal matter," the stuff we can see and touch, makes up only about 5% of the universe. So when we say in the Nicene Creed that we believe in God, "the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen," the "seen" part is only about 5%! Another 25% is called "dark matter," because we can't see it directly; we can only "see" the effects its gravity has on "normal matter." The rest of the universe― 70% of the universe― is empty: it doesn't have "normal matter" or "dark matter." But yet it is filled with what astronomers call "dark energy," and that's a good thing, because without "dark energy" the gravity of "dark matter" would cause the Universe to collapse in on itself. But "dark energy" is an anti-gravity force which keeps the Universe expanding by "stretching space."
So sing to the Lord a new song, for tonight the God "through whom all things were made," both "seen and unseen," is seen in a manger!
The second glimpse into God's invisible governing, traveling, and working is a glimpse into nature.
Toward the end of the Christmas story, St. Luke tells us that "Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart."
Steven Pinker, in his bestselling book How the Mind Works, describes our amazing capacity to treasure and ponder words.
When we begin to express our thoughts, whether by speaking or writing, we have, on average, about 10 choices for the first word, 10 choices for the second word, 10 choices for the third word, and so on. So in order to say even a simple three-word sentence, our minds sort through 10 times 10 times 10, or a thousand, different possibilities. Which means that to produce a sentence of twenty words, our minds sort through a hundred million trillion different possibilities! Do you have any idea how big a hundred million trillion is?! Neither do I! but apparently it's a hundred times the number of seconds since God created the universe! Think of the number of words we speak in a single conversation; or write in a single paragraph.
So sing to the Lord a new song, because even a hundred million trillion words are inadequate, for tonight, in Bethlehem, the Word was made flesh!
There is yet another invisible power in the universe, of which astronomy and psychology know nothing, a power greater than all the "dark energy" and all the "dark matter" in the universe, and that is the power of love. And it is that invisible love which we glimpse tonight in Bethlehem, that invisible love by which the Father governs, the Son travels, and the Spirit works.
No matter how precarious and uncertain our lives may be, we need to remember these words from St. Paul's Letter to the Ephesians: "Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine."
Now that's something to sing about!
Amen.
Comments