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The First Sunday after Christmas Nearly 120 years ago, the great English biologist, T.H. Huxley, penned these words, in description of the whole scientific enterprise: “The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.” Since Sir Huxley, the little land we have reclaimed in our knowledge of the world has been equal to that of the entire corpus of human thought. Imagine it. We have learned that our species is at the tip of an incredible evolutionary process in which life, over billions of years, has unfolded in its various forms. Looking further back in time, geologists are able to date the history of the earth to dwarf even the age of the tiniest microbe. Astrophysicists can take us to a time so vast and distant that it approaches incomprehensibility, when our fledgling galaxy we call our interstellar home exploded into being. And astronomers can take our thoughts into the heavens, to boundless space in which planets are but specks in an infinite ocean. Indeed, from these discoveries we have learned that the universe is mostly empty space, and if we were placed randomly in it, the odds of our finding ourselves on or near a planet such as ours would be nearly a trillion trillion trillion to one. We have learned that planets, worlds, our tiny earth, are incalculably precious gems in a immense sea of darkness. Our knowledge in this last century has expanded to the point of making even the most rational and skeptical soul dizzy and breathless with excitement. We have pressed so far into the mysteries of the universe, we have come to believe we have finally solved the ancient riddles of our ancestors. But in truth, the land we have reclaimed to add to the islet of Huxley’s time, is not that much, perhaps a few scant shovelfuls. While we possess dazzling knowledge and technology, we remain mired in the ancient hatred and bloodletting of our forebearers. Scientists rejoice to behold the birth of a galaxy light years away, but our world watches as another leader is assassinated and Pakistan teeters on political collapse. Technological advances usher a small minority of the world’s population into unprecedented life of comfort and ease, but somehow we are stymied at provided the most basic preventive care to billions of the earth inhabitants. We have come so far as a species, and yet the human condition has, in essence, not changed. Even with our vast powers of knowledge, even with our marvelous scientific discoveries of the how’s and what’s and when’s of our existence, we have come no closer to arriving at the reason why. Blessed with reason and skill, we have emerged out of unconsciousness only to find that we cannot escape our condition, we cannot by ourselves improve our lot. Science is not our savior. Our technology cannot transcend human determinants and rescue us. We are still a species groping for light, searching for our beginning. In twenty-six centuries, we have gone no further that to ask with Job of the Old Testament: “Have you comprended the expanse of the earth? Where is the way to the dwelling of light? And where is the place of darkness?” Perhaps this is why the words we have heard this morning from the Prologue to the Gospel of John offer such hope and comfort. For of all the mysteries solved and unsolved, of all the truths veiled and opaque, of all the light that shines for in the our darkness, there is no greater mystery, there is no more convincing truth, there is no more brilliant light to be found then in these resounding words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was in the beginning with God; all things were made through the Word, and without the Word was not one thing made that was made. In the Word was life, and the life was the light of humanity. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” Before human consciousness and history, before the vast display of teeming life forms that have risen out of lifeless matter, before the word was a molten sphere thrown into space, yes, and before the universe and time itself, was the Word. We who are bound by time cannot comprehend it, for once we have, Christmas no longer exists simply as a heart-warming story that we explain to our children and ourselves in romantic and nostalgic terms. Rather, Christmas becomes a story and even of cosmic significance. The birth of Jesus, this birth, this child, this man becomes uniquely related t the power and source of the universe. These word of John lie at the heart of our faith. Three centuries after they were written, the Council of Nicea drew upon them to form the Creed of Christianity that endures until this day. And such affirmations the world has never known: The light of incarnation is no ordinary light. It is the light of the Sun, the light of the stars, the light of the galaxies, the light of the Cosmos. And to borrow the words of astronomer Carl Sagan, “We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins; star stuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which here, at least, consciousness arose.” We, who are in Christ, have had this light, that gives form and being to the universe, poured into our hearts. And in the words of our collect, May God grant that this light which burns brightly within us shine forth in our lives.
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