God's Kingdom: Some Assembly Required, Batteries Included

I received an email last week with a subject line that claimed, “This is unbelievable!!! It’s something you’ll not want to miss.” It wasn’t referring to our glorious Christmas decorations, or the rich sound of our choir and new organ, or to the timeless majesty of our prayer book liturgy. What I discovered when I opened up the unsolicited email was a description of the world’s largest train set, located somewhere in Germany, covering over 12,000 square feet and featuring almost six miles of track with much more yet to be completed.

Twin brothers Frederick and Gerrit Braun, 41 years old, began working on their ‘Miniature Wonderland’ nearly ten years ago. They explained that “Our idea was to build a world that men, women, and children can be equally astonished and amazed in.” Their model wonderland covers six regions, including America, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Germany and the Austrian Alps. The American section features giant models of the Rocky Mountains, the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, and Mount Rushmore. The Swiss section has a mini-Matterhorn. The Scandinavian part has a four foot long passenger ship floating in a ‘fjord’. When they’re finished in four or five years, their train set will cover more than 19,000 square feet and feature almost 13 miles of track, adding detailed models of parts of France, Italy and the United Kingdom.

This wonderland has 700 trains with more than 10,000 locomotives and cars. The scenery includes 900 signals, 2,800 buildings, 4,000 cars – many with illuminated headlights – and 160,000 individually designed human and animal figures. Thousands of pounds of steel and wood have been used to construct the scenery. 250,000 lights are rigged up to a system which mimics night and day by automatically turning them on and off in an abbreviated 24 hour day. The whole system is controlled from a massive high-tech nerve center. This miniature world has taken 500,000 hours and more than $8 million to put together, the vast majority of which has come from ticket sales.

We, of course, are gathered together this evening here in this place to celebrate something even more unbelievable than that model train set. The reason the angels sing, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men” is because the most incredible thing ever made isn’t a thing at all, it’s infinitely grander than the Grand Canyon, the Matterhorn, the fjords, and you and me put together - it is the incarnation of God’s Son, the one person through whom all things are made and the one person through whom all things are being remade and restored: Jesus Christ. We celebrate the birth of Jesus because it marks the beginning of the most ambitious and incredible project ever undertaken, not just the creation of a miniature 19,000 square foot manmade model wonderland that can amaze both adults and children alike, but a larger-than-life world in which peace and justice are made and established forever through Jesus Christ.

Some of your children and grandchildren may receive a model train set tomorrow morning, or perhaps a dollhouse or a playhouse or a something else which will require some assembly and some batteries or some other source of power in order to work. Some of these gifts may be fully assembled and powered when they are opened tomorrow morning, thanks to those who will work quietly and secretly into the night, after their children have fallen asleep, putting all those train sets and doll houses and bicycles and tree houses and God-only-knows-what-else together before dawn. As I reflect back on my own childhood, I now realize that I actually liked receiving presents that weren’t already completely assembled. Putting them together was a way of extending Christmas, of celebrating Christmas for twelve days, and indeed, for a lifetime, and not just as a one day extravaganza that is soon over and done with. Some of my fondest memories are the times when my dad or my mom or one of my brothers helped me assemble my tinker toy dinosaur or my Lincoln log home or my erector set Ferris wheel or one of my 500 experiments in my chemistry or electronic project set. I can also remember how frustrating it was when, after my first erector set or electronics project was assembled with the help of others, we would occasionally discover that batteries were required and had either been forgotten, misplaced, were dead or the wrong size, and there was no WalMart or CVS open on Christmas to bring our creations to life. But even that frustration reminded me that assembling something of real satisfaction and worth involves all of us, and especially a power greater than us, and often takes days or weeks or months or years to complete.

The good news of Christmas is the fact that even though he has just been born, Jesus comes fully assembled with batteries included. As incredible as it is, it is still true that with Jesus we have the one person who not only assembled everything along with his heavenly Father when this world was first created, but the one who can and will help us disassemble, where necessary, our fallen world, and reassemble this world even more gloriously than the paradise he created when he made Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. Jesus invites us to join him in reassembling this world, of being a co-creator of a real wonderland, by being a peacemaker, of making peace between neighbors near and far with the batteries of his Holy Spirit which he supplies.

That’s what tonight is all about – reminding ourselves that this Christ child is come, as Paul tells Titus, “to save all men, training us, [like the assembly manuals of our children’s Christmas gifts,] to renounce irreligion and worldly passions, and to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world, awaiting our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.”

Do you remember the recent story in the newspaper about the retired pharmacist and his wife who arrived a day early for a tour of the White House, and found themselves escorted by the Secret Service into a buffet breakfast with the President? Well if you came here tonight, like that couple, thinking that all you would be able to do is to visit God’s house, to enjoy and appreciate the music and the decorations and the beauty of this place, with no expectation of actually meeting God himself, then I remind you that God wants this night to be even more unbelievable for you than it was for that couple from Georgia. God invites you to dine with him tonight, to even dine on him tonight, to take his very life, that unbelievable combination of human and divine, of bread and wine with the batteries of his life-giving Spirit included, into yourself so that you can be empowered and guided by the same Spirit which made his glorious birth possible, to help recreate the world in peace.
The shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night are like that couple from Georgia. They had no expectation of seeing their Savior’s birth. They just wanted to get their sheep safely to Jerusalem and receive a fair price for their flocks. They had no idea that the heavenly host of God, God’s own Secret Service, would allow them and even encourage them to go and see for themselves the very Son of God.

Know that God’s angels are here and have already done a thorough background check on you tonight, just as the Secret Service did a quick background check on that couple from Georgia. And know that you have been cleared and are welcome not only to tour God’s house, to enjoy the company of others who also want to be here, hoping against hope to even catch a glimpse of God, discovering that you are invited to come forward and dine with Christ and dine on Christ.
That’s the unbelievable truth of Christmas: that God enters into human flesh, into the very stuff of his own making, into bread and wine, so that we might taste his eternal kingdom and become peacemakers just like him. His is an unbelievable meal. His is refreshment and nourishment that will slowly remake us in the image of Christ. This is Christ’s mass, Christmas. This message of Christmas is a message we must never forget, because God intends to remake his world, beginning with our own hearts and minds and bodies, because tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day, until we see him face to face, are days for joining with him in assembling the kingdom of his peace, the more-than-real, larger-than-life wonderland, to his praise and honor and glory. AMEN.