This sermon is adapted from s seies offered by Creative Communications for Advent & Christmas. The series, by Rev. Donald H. Neidigk, is entitled The Stars Tell the Story.
“He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” Genesis 1:16b-17
Stars and Christmas go together, don’t they? You recall the star that guided the Wise Men to the birthplace of the savior. Far to the east they looked up one night and saw it brightly beckoning them to Bethlehem. But that’s just one star. Stars are scattered throughout the pages of scriptures. You find stars in the very beginning. You find me, Polaris, on the fourth day of creation.
I was one of those vast arrays of celestial diamonds the Creator set in place to separate night from day and give light to the good earth. And it was good. Night and day, sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, birds, fish, creeping and crawling things, livestock, and humans made in God’s image all of it good. Indeed, God looked upon all he had made and it was “very good.”
That includes me, Polaris, the North Star. Travelers have relied on me for centuries. Many a sailor has suffered through a stormy night at sea, awaiting a break in the clouds that he might catch a glimpse of me shining his way home.
Doubtless, you’ve seen me many times. I’m not hard to find. As you look to the northern sky, you’ll see the constellation Usra Major, the Great Bear. You might know it as the Big Dipper. The two bright stars on the dipper’s cup point to me, the one bright star that never seems to move while all through the night the other stars revolve around me. There you’ll find me, less than one degree off true north. I was a part of what God made; part of the “very good.” How could it bb otherwise? God Himself is the greatest good, perfect in all ways, utterly holy. Everything He made and sustained bore the stamp of His perfection. You might say that a definition of sin is thinking that God’s work and His way is not perfect, that someone else knows better. Lucifer, another star whom you’ll meet next week, a star once perfect but now corrupt and twisted, thought he knew better.
It was his sin that made the Christmas story necessary. You see, sin never happens in isolation. It always involves someone else. In Lucifer’s case, it involved legions of angels who joined him in rebellion against God. But it was futile. There is no power greater than that of the omnipotent and holy Creator. Losing the battle, Lucifer and his cohorts were banished from heaven. They invaded earth where Lucifer enlisted Adam and Eve in the rebellion.
Adam and Eve had everything to lose and nothing to gain, a perfect marriage, a perfect home, a perfect relationship with God, and a perfect future-it was all theirs. They alone had the potential for living “happily ever after.” But Lucifer duped them into questioning God’s perfect plan for them.
God had given them all they needed for eternal life in Paradise. He made only one requirement of them-don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in the center of the garden. If you do you will die. Lucifer using half truths and false promises convinced them they would not die. Instead, he promised, you’ll become like God, knowing good and evil.
Adam and Eve fell for it. They took the fruit and ate. And their perfect world along with the livestock and birds, plants and fish, sun, moon, and stars, and me, Polaris crashed.
There was no sound when the crash came. Things looked pretty much the same. But nothing was. Adam and Eve hid from God. Out of shame they put on clothes. They lied to their Creator. It didn’t work. He knew what they had done and where they were hiding. In grace he replaced their pitiful garments with skins. Mercifully, God drove them from the garden lest they eat of the tree of life and spend eternity in the quagmire of sin.
Eventually, death entered their once perfect world. Their son Cain murdered his brother, Abel. In time, though Adam and Eve lived much longer than you and I, succumbed to death. Plants that formerly made the garden beautiful became their enemy. Tilling the soil became a battle against weeds. The love of man and woman, leading so naturally and beautifully to the birth of children, became the bloody agony and sometimes death of childbirth.
Animals, once living in harmony, now struggled against one another. Some species survived, others vanished. Gentle rains became deadly floods. The breeze that carried seed and pollen became screaming hurricanes and roaring tornadoes.
In the heavens, stars exploded, others collapsed. Whole galaxies collided. Even I, Polaris, the mariner’s friend, have but a brief moment to shine before I too am snuffed out.
Endlessly, the perfection of God’s creation would deteriorate and decay, order would become disorder, and the beauty of life would become the corruption of death. Endlessly that is, without the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem, the Son of God, the Bright Morning Star.
You are privileged to have Holy Scripture. You can read yourself of God’s power and holiness, his perfection and kindness. But what of the rest God’s fallen children? What will they read?
They have nothing but me and my companions in the natural world. We mark light and darkness, wet seasons and dry seasons, summer and winter. Much can be learned from us. Would you learn of the glory of God? Look to me and my companions! Would you learn that God is the Maker and sustainer of everything that is made? Look to Me! Would you learn that the Almighty is invisible? Look to me! I can tell you all this and more.
I Polaris, and indeed all of nature, have taught you much. But should you learn every truth that we wordlessly proclaim, you would hear only half the story. I can tell you of the fall and the calamity that followed. I can tell you of death and destruction wrought by sin. In response, you could fall on your knees and cry out to God for mercy, but you would still be lost.
You would be lost forever except for the rest of the story that is found only in Scripture. There in the pages of the bible, you learn that God, who made you and me, the God whom you have turned your back on, loves you!
God’s eternal Son Jesus Christ, through whom we were made, has been sent to save you. He came in the quiet obscurity of birth to a human mother in Bethlehem. He joined Himself to a human body like yours in the womb of the Virgin Mary. He was born as you were born, feels all that you feel, lives where you live, suffered as you suffer and died as you die.
Doing all this he put his holy life in place of your sinful life. His holy life becomes your holy life. His cross becomes your cross. His resurrection to life becomes your resurrection to life. In Jesus Christ, all that God requires of you is done. By faith in Him all your sin is forgiven; there is peace at last between you and your Maker.
Well, it’s getting dark and I, Polaris, must be about what I was placed in the sky to do, guiding the traveler home. However, I can only take you part way. I can get you anywhere in the northern hemisphere. I can tell you about God, my Maker and yours. But I can’t bring you to Him. That’s the job of another, Jesus Christ, the Bright Morning Star. Look to Him, and He’ll get you to your heavenly home, back to Paradise.
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