christmas and the pale blue dot (john 1;1-18) christmas eve 2019

This is a message i preached at the wonderful Candle light Christmas eve service at HopeWhangarei. 

I don’t know about you but I often find myself distanced from the Christmas story that we had read to us this evening. Not just by time and place, not just because its two thousand years ago, not just because it is way over on the other side of the world. But distanced by the fact that we have come to view it through the Lens of the rush to get it all done in time for  summer holidays, the lens of the great and wonderful  festivities we associate with it, the lens of tinsel and lights, and those wonderful baubles on Christmas trees. A lens very well captured by the image we used to advertise the service this year (see above). The Christmas story has become in danger of being simply a nostalgic Hallmark moment. That we are more used to thinking of it as a silhouette on a card from a distance relative than a real life event that has real life transforming power for us today.

As an amateur photographer,  over the past few years I have developed the discipline of looking at the Christmas story through the lens of some of the most significant photos of the past few decades. Using them to reflect on how the story we had read from the gospels connects with us today. For example, in an opinion piece for the Northern Advocate this week, I used this image of a single man

standing in front of the Chinese army tanks heading to break up a pro-democracy rally in Tiananmen square in Beijing.  2019 is the thirtieth anniversary of that massacre, and it casts itself as a foreboding long dark shadow over the prodemocracy protests we have seen in Hong Kong this year.  But it is an image of Hope, the possibility of change that one person can make. The hope that so many people have put in the coming of the child Jesus. Whether or not you believe in Jesus as the Son of God, you cannot deny the impact of that one solitary human on the hope and history of the world.

Tonight I want to use a different image to reflect on Christmas. Ironically it is a very long distant image that I want to use to help close the distance between us and the Christmas story. I hope it’s not too much of a long shot.

As the Voyager 1 space craft exited the solar system, it preformed one last task it turned round and took a final photo, looking back through the solar system a photo of the earth from a distance of about 6 billion km’s.

It’s been described as the world’s most expensive selfie, and if you were alive on February 4^th 1990 you are in that photo… although even with your glasses on, or through a microscope, or a telescope you won’t be able to make yourself out.  But trust me you are in it.

The earth is 0.12 of a pixel in this image, and it looks like a mote of dust caught in a beam of sunlight. A speck lit up by the sun in a cold dark universe. The photo is called the pale blue dot, and the name came from a famous quote from astronomer Carl Sagan when he said,

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves… Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”

While as we face the challenge of how we are impacting the environment of this pale blue dot, this fragile place on which we live, Carl Sagan’s words need to be heeded as sage advise, we need to care for this home of ours.  

 Chirstmas, however tells us a different story. It tells us a story of hope. John in his gospel, does not start his story of Jesus life with the tale of the baby in the manger but like Sagan looks outward to cosmic proportions and cosmic beginnings. He says that we are not alone rather that in the darkness of the void of space and in the darkness of the worst of our humanity, that God has shone a light. That Jesus born at Bethlehem is that light. In Jesus the God who created it all became one of us. We started this evening with the lament “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and the word emmanuel means God with us and in Jesus John tells us that God is with us and for us as we live out our existence on this precious mote of dust. It tells us the story of a planet which God so loved that he sent his only son. God offers us hope and help if we will turn to Jesus. The one who came at Christmas came to offer us abundant life…a fresh start and his abiding presence to bring hope, peace, love and joy.  Enabling us to live in a new way that is hope filled for this pale blue dot of ours…

Another photo and the story behind it brings that down to real life…

This is perhaps the most famous photo of the last century. It has come to encapsulate the horror of war and the civilian price of our conflicts. June 8 1972 the United States and South Vietnamese forces drop napalm on the village of Trang Bang. Nick Ut took the photo of six-year-old Kim Phuc running from her burning village her back and arm badly burned.

Kim Phuc’s life is radically changed by this moment. She goes through years of pain and suffering. The communist government use her as a propaganda tool of how merciless and vile the American forces were. In the midst of all that she hears the good news of Jesus Christ and it changes everything.

In 1996 Kim Phuc, then living in Canada, was invited to speak at the Vietnam War Memorial.
“ Dear friends” she says…
… as you know, I am the little girl who was running to escape from the napalm fire. I do not want to talk about the war because I cannot change history. I only want you to remember the tragedy of war in order to do things to stop fighting and killing around the world. I have suffered a lot from both physical and emotional pain. Sometimes I thought I could not live, but God saved me and gave me faith and hope. Even if I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bombs I would tell him we cannot change history but we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace…’
(Denise Chong: The Girl In The Picture, 1999. pp362)

In the Crowd was John Plummer who was involved in planning the raid on Trang Bang. He had been haunted by the picture…They meet that day. He explained who he was and he cried, “I’m sorry…I’m so sorry…” Kim Phuc embraced him and said, “I forgive, I forgive”.

She  worked for many years for UNESCO as an ambassador for forgiveness, peace and reconciliation. Her life gives us hope of the change that the Christmas message can bring to our pale blue dot even in the face of our worst inhumanity. This is the other famous Photo of Kim Phuc taken by the same photographer. It is almost Madonna and child like and speak volumes as to the healing of Kim's life.

“It was fire that burned my body, it was the skill of doctors that mended my skin but it took the power of God to heal my heart.”

JB Phillips in his story ‘the visited planet’ has a senior angel telling a young angel the wonders of when the son of God had visited that small insignificant planet, the pale blue dot and as they look at the dark globe before them there is a great flash of light when the angelic army sing God’s praise at Jesus birth and then an even greater flash as the power of God raises Jesus from the dead, Christmas leads directly to Easter the cross and the resurrection,  but after that the planet seems dark again, then like a series of small candles being lit at a vigil in the dark night… slowly small lights come on all round the world as one person tells and shows another the wonder of God coming amongst us In Jesus Christ.

We are going to stop there and the choir is going to sing for us… A joyful song proclaiming the new life and hope that comes from Christmas then I’m going to invite you to join us in singing that wonderful Christmas carol ‘ O come all ye faithful’ and as you sing it to do what is says and come a light one of these small candles from one of the big candles up here and place it on the tables down the front. To symbolically say this Christmas I want to know the light of Christ, or I want to let that light shine through me or simply to say this Christmas I want to be more about taking light into the world.