C, Advent 2 "God is for me!"

Wherever we stand, we stand with a sense of importance. We know that before God we are important, but sometimes our importance is based on our own greatness. Life is all about me. I am...

But who are we in the scheme of things. Today this sermon is going will be mostly spoken by pictures. Look at the point were we stand! Right here at the Children’s Christmas service it’s pretty much the centre of things for us at this moment (for those at home it’s sitting at your computer at this moment).

But let’s move back from ourselves and see where we stand, physically and in the scheme of the bigger picture. As we can see here is the church. We are inside of it. But we are getting small. Even the car looks small, that’s parked outside the manse. Let’s take a few more steps backwards.

Now we can’t even see the car anymore as we look down upon our town. We can see the roads coming to and from Chinchilla, but the church is too small to be seen and so are we.

These next two pictures show us more and more of the big picture, but Chinchilla is now a speck at the end of the arrow. And we are somewhere at the end of the arrow too, in the speck that’s now Chinchilla.

We are getting smaller and smaller, now that more and more is revealed, as we see more and more of the big picture.

Chinchilla is now out of sight. Australia is just a shape on a globe, this globe we know as earth. In fact there are many other globes the same size as us, they are planets. We live in the solar system with many other planets.

When we see that there are larger planets; earth is getting smaller and smaller. It is amazing that billions and billions of people live on this tiny planet. We here in the church are members of the human race that makes up the billions and billions that live on earth. Right now as we sit here the sun is burning and our planet and others are revolving around this golden ball.

But our sun is tiny in comparison with the other stars in the solar system. Some of these bigger stars appear insignificant in our night sky, in fact some are barely visible. But if we got in a space ship and flew to the vicinity of these stars our sun would not be seen at all. Nor would Jupiter or our earth, or Australia, or the Darling Downs, or Chinchilla, or Trinity Lutheran Church, or you and me.

Antares is the 15^th brightest star in the sky, it is 1000 light-years away. There are probably more stars out there than we will ever know about! If we look at the picture of Antares our Sun is not even visible!

Is life all about me! If I consider life as much more than the life we as individuals have, or even the collective life of the human race, we stand in a solar system, on a planet, in a country, that, in the scheme of things, is not even a pin prick. But infinitely greater than any of these is God. In comparison to any created thing God cannot be measured or even be seen because of his greatness. In fact life is all about God, rather than us, God is the great I AM!

So when we consider God in his greatness, against our smallness, it comes as a shock that God would even consider us. But he created all these things around us for us. Even though in our sinfulness we turn the universe around and dethrone God, the great I AM, and in his place perceive that I am the greatest!

But because God’s love for us was so great, he came to us. He came to our seemingly insignificant world. He came to a point in time. God who is greater than any created thing came to a place not that far away from us. God came to Israel, to Nazareth, into a girl that was only about 12 to 16 years old. This girl was no one special until God bestowed upon her the highest honour of any woman, to bear a son. Not just any son but the Son of God. Mary gave birth to the One, who was greater than all creation; who was in fact the creator of it.

But when God Almighty came into this girl, she was not married to Joseph. She was the object of shame. Furthermore she and Joseph travelled to Bethlehem according to the law of the land for a census.

When they got to Bethlehem Mary began to give birth. No one took Mary and Joseph in, and so they gave birth to the Son of God, amongst animals at the back of an inn, and they laid him in a manger. God was laid in one place in his creation, not a very suitable place for a king, let alone the King of Creation.

This is how important we are to God. He gave us the gift of his Son and later demanded of him that he die on the cross so that we might once again look away from ourselves and look to God as the most important in all creation.

God is now present before all of us, here in this place, in church, because he came as a baby at Bethlehem and was nailed to one place on a cross outside Jerusalem. Why did God, who is so big he makes us look so small, do what he did? Why did he come; why does he still come? He did it FOR ME, to forgive my sin; so that I am his, and he is mine. God is so big and we are so small, he is without sin and we will die because of sin. But he died FOR ME so that we who are tiny might live in and with him forever! God says, I AM who I AM and now because of the gift of Jesus FOR ME, we will be who he has recreated US to be! Amen.

PDF file of sermon available by request via email at heath.puk@lca.org.au