The Miracle of Christmas
From the Series—Wonder
December 23, 2003This evotional concludes our Wonder series. Luke 11:33-35 says, “Your eye is a lamp, lighting up your whole body. If you live in wide-eyed wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. Keep your eyes open, your lamp burning, so you don’t get musty and murky. Keep your life as well-lighted as your best-lighted room.”
The Miracle of Breath
Albert Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”
If I were to ask if you’ve ever experienced a miracle I’m guessing that, depending on your definition, some of you would say “no.” I beg to differ. By the time you finish reading this evotional you will have inhaled and exhaled approximately 250 times. And most of you won’t give it a second thought, but I want you to stop and consider the journey of an oxygen atom.
The journey begins when air passes through your nose where unwanted dust and debris is filtered out. For what it’s worth, the average person moves about 440 cubic feet of air per day! It travels through the trachea and into the lungs. The surface area of your lungs is forty times greater than the surface area of your body—compressed within the tiny space between your ribs! The oxygen atoms then hitchhike with hemoglobin and travel throughout the entire human body via blood vessels. If those blood vessels were laid end to end they would be approximately 100,000 miles long. The blood vessels in your body could wrap around the equator four times! At the end of the journey, oxygen enters individual cells, bonds with the food we eat and releases energy. Biologists call it cellular respiration.
In his article “The Miracle of Breath,” James Robinson writes, “Webster’s Dictionary defines a miracle as ‘an extraordinary, unusual wonder or marvel.’ Isn’t a bloodstream 100,000 miles long, in a small body, an unusual wonder? Isn’t the journey of an oxygen atom a true marvel? We don’t need supernatural events to experience a miracle. All we need is breath. The human breath is Sacred. Cherish your breathing: it is the miraculous gift of life.”
Acts 17 says that God “gives all men life and breath.” Job 34 says that if God were to withdraw his breath we would return to dust. The bottom line is this: every breath we take is miracle. The average person takes approximately 23,000 breaths per day. That means you owe God about 23,000 thank yous every day!
We are surrounded by miracles, but we have a choice to make. We can live as if nothing is a miracle. Or we can live as if everything is. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
Christmas Story
Luke 2:8-20 records the Christmas story.
“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over the flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do no be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.’ When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let’s go tot Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.’ So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.”
The Announcement
Every once in a while I read a passage of Scripture and try to look at it from different perspectives. Let me look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the angels.
Throughout history, God uses angels to communicate special news. Let’s call it the DAA—the Department of Angelic Announcements. They have made some pretty important announcement to some pretty important people—prophets and priests and kings. They have announced life and death, victory and defeat, judgment and mercy. But this is the big one. This is the most important announcement in the history of humankind. The angels are commissioned to announce the birth of God’s Son.
I can imagine a strategy session where the angels start brainstorming how they want to make this particular announcement. It seems like the most important announcement ought to be made to the most important people in the most important place at the most important time. So the angels come up with this plan to make the announcement at the in Jerusalem. They decide to do it during one of the annual feasts when there would be thousands of Jewish pilgrims from all over Israel in Jerusalem. And they decide to let the priests in on it first.
They’re feeling pretty good about their plan when God walks in the room and makes a few minor adjustments. Instead of the Temple in Jerusalem, he chooses a hillside outside Bethlehem. Instead of an annual feast, He chooses the nightshift. And instead of priests he picks shepherds. God walks out and I can see the angels crumpling up their paper plans and throwing them in the trash. I mean recycling bin.
We take the Christmas story for granted because we’ve heard it so many times, but God could have announced the birth of his Son any way He wanted. Why did God do it the way He did it? Max Lucado has an interesting take. He says, “Had the angels gone to theologians, they would have first consulted their commentaries. Had he gone to the elite, they would have looked around to see if anyone was watching. Had he gone to the successful, they would have first looked at their calendars. So he went to shepherds. Men who didn’t have a reputation to protect or an ax to grind or a ladder to climb. Men who didn’t know enough to tell God that angels don’t sing to sheep and that messiahs aren’t found wrapped in rags and sleeping in a feed trough.”
Religious Boxes
I find it fascinating that God didn’t reveal himself to the religious leaders. I think you have to read the rest of the gospels to discover why, but let me give you my theory. I think the fundamental mistake the religious leaders made was trying to force God to fit in their religious boxes. Instead of being conformed to God’s image, they tried to recreate God in their image. What they ended up with was “a God in a box.”
Jesus came healing on the Sabbath and instead of celebrating the amazing miracles, they plotted to kill him. Why? Because he didn’t fit in their box. Here is the danger with religion: it can become an attempt to control God. Let me explain.
Theology of Dissection
In his book Rumors, Philip Yancey says there are two ways of looking at the world. “One takes the world apart while the other seeks to connect and put together.” He said, “We live in an age that excels at the first and falters at the second.”
In the same sense, I think there two ways of approaching God. One approach takes God apart—I call the theology of dissection. I think we need to study theological nuances. And I’m not suggesting that we don’t put Scripture under the microscope. But here is the danger: if we aren’t careful we end up with “a God in a box.” Or in the words of A.W. Tozer we end up with a God who can “never surprise us, never overwhelm us, never astonish us, never transcend us.” We make God manageable and measurable. We reduce God to a set of propositions or seal tight theologies or divine formulas. And we fall into the trap of reductionism.
The religious leaders were reductionists. Jesus said, “Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglected justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.” They missed the forest for the trees! They were majoring in minors and minoring in majors! Their religion could be described as a place for everything and everything in its place. They pigeonholed God. There is one problem with that: God doesn’t fit in nice neat categories!
Theology of Mystery
My theological starting point is Isaiah 55:8. The Lord says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Astronomers have discovered galaxies 12.3 billion light-years away. That means it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, more than twelve billion years to reach the outer edges of the heavens. And God says that’s about the distance between my thoughts and your thoughts.
We all underestimate God by 12.3 billion light-years. Psalm 145:3 says, “There are no boundaries to His greatness; His greatness no one can fathom.”
What I’m espousing is a theology of mystery. I like the way one Greek Orthodox Theologian put it. “God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.”
Saint Chrysostom said children exhibit an innate sensitivity to mystery. And he applies it to the Christmas story. He said, “Tell a child the story of Bethlehem, the vigil of the shepherds, the quest of the Magi, the song of the angels and the babe in the manger. He drinks it all in. An adult, similarly situated, opens a discussion on what he is pleased to call the doctrine of the Incarnation. Tell a child the story of the Cross; he accepts it avidly, finding no difficulty anywhere. Relate to an adult the same impressive facts and he will ask learnedly for a theory of the Atonement.”
What does that have to do with the shepherds? Lucado says God announced the birth to shepherds because they “didn’t know enough to tell God that angels don’t sing to sheep and that Messiahs aren’t found wrapped in rags and sleeping in a feed trough.”
Mark Nepo said, “Birds don’t need ornithologists to fly.” That ranks as one of my all-time favorite quotes. Birds don’t need ornithologists to fly and God doesn’t need theologians to do miracles! I think sometimes we analyze and categorize and theorize and formulize instead of just letting God be God.
God is looking for people who don’t tell Him what He doesn’t do—who don’t put him in little religious boxes. The shepherds took God at face value. When they heard the news they embraced it with a simple childlike faith. It says they “hurried off” to see the child. I think sometimes we miss the miracle because we analyze it to death.
Santa Claus
A few years ago I got an email that was circulating around Christmas time titled “Santa Claus: from an Engineer’s Perspective.” I think it illustrates the way we can analyze something to death—literally.
There are approximately 378 million Christian children in the world according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average census rate of 3.5 children per household that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west. This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations, we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second—3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man‑made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run at best 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set two pounds, the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with nine of them—Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth, the ship not the monarch.
Six hundred thousand tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance—this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re‑entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of acceleration from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in one-thousandth of a second, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 pound Santa which seems ludicrously slim would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4.3 millions pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.
Final Thought
Albert Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”
May you re-experience the mystery of Christmas—the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God born as a helpless little baby in Bethlehem.
Don’t miss the miracle!