Christmas Eve is the night for midnight blue skies, cloudless and serene; a night for stars dazzling and tantalizingly close to earth in all their silent glory; the night for galaxies vast and mysterious, drawing us away in time and space to worlds beyond the fringes of sense and imagination. Increasingly urban as we are, we often lose the appreciation for the sky's nighttime splendor so spectacular to dwellers in the more arid climes. As a very young child in Wisconsin, on our way to the school Christmas program, I was entranced by the splendid glory of the winter sky. Through the years the wonder has never diminished and has grown even more as now we read of galaxies and stars in the making as viewed through the Hubble telescope. These galaxies, vast beyond description, distant beyond imagination, lure the mind and soul toward the edges of the infinite and beyond.

Robert Frost spoke of it when he wrote:

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music -- hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went --
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been. --"Come In"

Naturalist Loren Eiseley relates a similar experience in his youth, a time when he was out for stars, his attempt not only to examine the universe with the naked eye, but to observe the stars and galaxies through an observatory telescope on a mountain peak. The attempt to examine and explore outer space led him to turn his thoughts in the opposite direction, toward inner space. He observed "that the venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever growing universe within to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without" (The Unexpected Universe, p. 174).

Dr. Eiseley goes on to observe that "the inward skies of man will accompany him across any void upon which he ventures and will be with him to the end of time" (Eiseley, p. 175). It is true that Christmas Eve is about external galaxies -- the star of Bethlehem, the heavenly hosts of angels singing, "Peace on earth, good will toward men," with the universe in the background as the stage props.

When we look into this sacred nighttime sky we are to be reminded there are something like a million billion billion planets in the universe. If all the science writers in the world were to shovel sand nonstop they couldn't shovel a million billion billion grains of sand in a lifetime, says Timothy Ferris in his book, The Mind's Sky. Add to that the fact that the universe of today is displayed across ten billion trillion trillion cubic light years of space after expanding from a hot little spark smaller than an atom -- or so say some astrophysicists (Ferris, p. 84).

Yes, Christmas Eve does draw us outward and upward toward the vast, the infinite, the external and immeasurable, and we are out for stars. But perhaps even more, Christmas Eve draws us downward and inward toward the finite and internal. If outer galaxies dazzle us, inner galaxies intrigue us. If outer galaxies humble us, inner galaxies lift us up and affirm our self-worth. If outer galaxies have to do with eons and eons of time and trillions and trillions of light years of unconscious space, inner galaxies have to do with this particular time and this particular space.

The story is told of Teddy Roosevelt entertaining guests at his Sagamore Hill estate on Long Island. After a late dinner he invited his guests outside to walk beneath the brilliant nighttime sky. After a silent, reverent stroll Roosevelt said, "I guess we've been humbled enough now. Let's go inside." And that's what Christmas Eve is all about -- about stargazing toward the infinite to be humble in our finiteness. So in response to the angel chorus and the angel announcement, the simple, rustic, stargazing shepherds said, "Let us go even now into Bethlehem to see this thing that has happened...." And they went inside the stable, and beheld in the manger the inner galaxy -- the interior meaning of the universe. And what did they experience?

I

For one thing, they experienced mystery. Luke tells us they returned "glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen...."

Writer Alan McGlashan says, "There is strong archeological evidence to show that with the birth of human consciousness there was born, like a twin, the impulse to transcend it." Indeed, that has been the experience of the prophets and poets and mystics of the centuries. When we come to behold both the outer and the inner galaxies we are startled by mystery. Whether it is Moses and the voice of God from the burning bush, or Isaiah caught up in a religious trance in the incense-filled Temple, or Jeremiah trembling with the inner Word of God, or the shepherds amazed in the presence of angels and Jesus, people through the ages have been awakened by mystery.

Sometimes the experience of nature does it. Poet William Wordsworth wrote of it at age eighteen:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
... A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things....
-- Lines Composed A Few Lines Above Tintern Abbey

William Blake experienced it when he wrote,

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in your hand
And Eternity in a hour.

Or it can be delightfully expressed as in the Children's Letters To God, this one by Eugene. He says: "Dear God: I didn't think orange went with purple until I saw the sunset you made on Tuesday. That was cool."

If nature suggests mystery, so does human nature. Famous Harvard psychologist, William James, wrote of the universal pervasiveness of the mystical experience without respect to specific religions or cultures or races. Consider the experience of Thomas Aquinas, theologian par excellence of the thirteenth century. Aquinas had revived the classics, especially Aristotle. He wrote prolifically, including his Summa Theologica, which is the standard theological work for the Roman Catholic Church today. Aquinas became enlightened with mystery while saying Mass in Naples, December 6, 1273. He ended his sermon, declaring, "I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life" (quoted in Ferris, p. 89).

Some years ago a man boasted to me of his extensive travels, impressive education, and vast experience, and that as a consequence he was convinced there was nothing new under the sun. How sad, I thought. How tragic to enclose yourself in such a prison. But then again, many of us get in that mood from time to time.

So then tonight, let us with the shepherds bow the knee to mystery. Let us with the poets and prophets, physicists and philosophers, theologians and hardened rationalists, humble ourselves with the shepherds to be open to mystery which transforms the inner galaxy.

II

What did the shepherds experience this magical night? They experienced hope -- hope for peace on earth, good will toward men. The story is told of two farmers conversing in a nineteenth century country general store in Kentucky. The general store was the place to exchange gossip and get caught up on the news. One farmer asked the other, "Anything new happening?" "Naw, not much," replied the other. "Except I hear Tom and Mary Lincoln had a baby boy. Named him Abraham. Not much going on."

So Caesar Augustus of imperial Rome could have said of this night long ago. King Herod was more anxious and killed all the Judean boys under two just to make sure nothing new would be going on. Even now with hundreds of births occurring every hour we are tempted to say not much is going on, except when it is our own child or grandchild. The world's first birth ever is the birth of your own child. Except maybe in the case of little Joyce in her letter to God, where she said, "Dear God: Thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy." Or possibly in little Marsha's letter to God where she wrote: "Dear God: My brother told me about being born, but it doesn't sound right" (Children's Letters to God).

And yet, even with all the births (all of them miraculous), even with Jesus' birth, many remain hopeless. They remain hopeless, says anthropologist Loren Eiseley, because they see man as the "brawling ape and bestial fighter" struggling for existence. All these births bring more of the same, say the pessimists -- a human being controlled by dark passions and bloody instincts, a human being who is at heart a savage beast. But all that's out of date, says anthropologist Eiseley. No materialistic reductionism can explain humanity. The direction for seeing our true nature is not so much backward as forward. Unlike lower creatures, we are not locked into our impulses and instincts. We keep redefining and reconceptualizing who we are and what we can become. Our psychological make-up is not fixed. We can see visions and dream dreams. The music Mozart heard in his head is soon played by orchestras and experienced by millions. The ideas which come from above and from within are soon architectural wonders or splendid works of art. That is why Leonardo da Vinci could say, "I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have." Or why Claude Monet could say, "My life has been nothing but a failure." They always saw more than they could express.

Human beings have a restless inner eye, a capacity to transcend even their darkest selves, to give wings to their vision, form to their dreams, and structure to their altruism. "I am resigned to wait out man's long barbarity," says Eiseley. For Eiseley, with the shepherds and mystics on this holy night, has looked into the inner galaxy, into the dream world, into the visions of things yet to be. And with the shepherds he has hope -- because we have seen in Jesus more than we have ever yet been able to express.

III

But even more, the shepherds on this night experienced love. If anything can awaken love and admiration, it is a baby. On a crowded department store elevator the other day, a young mother entered with her beautiful, smiling baby. The once silent, reserved elevator crowd began cooing and smiling and kitchee- kitchee cooing as if on cue. And all that from only one floor to another! Is it any wonder actors hate to act with babies? They upstage even a Robert Redford or a Demi Moore.

God has designed human beings to procreate by the act and ecstasy of love -- an appropriate way for beginning that miraculous, new inner galaxy of an embryo and human being. For the body itself is an inner galaxy -- the womb and the fetus growing within it -- a galaxy of endless wonder and miracle. Writer Harriet Ritchie tells the story of her family searching out a nearly deserted truckstop after the Christmas Eve midnight service for a Christmas breakfast. The air smelled of coffee, bacon, and stale cigarette smoke. A one-armed man in a baseball cap was drinking Pepsi from a bottle at the counter. Two other men sat at a table talking and eating on a lonely night.

The thin, weary waitress came to take their orders. Then an old, overloaded Volkswagen came. A young couple got out with their little baby, and took a booth in the back. The baby wouldn't stop crying, and the embarrassed young mother started to leave. The waitress said, "Here, let me see what I can do. You drink your coffee." She talked and cooed, showed the baby to the one-armed man who began whistling and making funny faces to make the baby stop crying. As Rita, the waitress, took the baby to explore the blinking lights, the one-armed man took coffee from a burner and began waiting on tables. And a warm glow came over the whole scene.

Harriet Ritchie said she was moved to tears and said to her husband, "If Jesus were born tonight in this town, he'd come here to this truckstop, wouldn't he, rather than to our upscale neighborhood and church?" "Either here or a homeless shelter," said her husband. But then as they were getting into the car her husband added, "Remember the angel said, 'I bring good news of great joy to all people.' " And Harriet Ritchie remembered the needy people in her upscale neighborhood, and I remembered our neighborhood. Over here is a family whose house burned down with a mother and child inside. Over there is an athlete and attorney with Lou Gehrig's disease, who breathes with a ventilator and talks through a computer. Over here is a woman whose aged father had died -- a father for whom she cared and with whom she had become an adult friend. Over there is a young man about to have a malignant tumor removed from a lung. Over here is a woman whose husband left her and the three children for another woman. Over there is a man whose business of ten years failed in an economic downturn. Over here is a mother whose little six-year-old girl has incurable cancer.

Does Jesus come only to homeless shelters and deserted truckstops on Christmas Eve? "No," says the angel. "I bring good news of great joy to all people." And it is the news of a love that never gives up, news of a love that transforms inner galaxies and causes a generous outpouring of money and talent and helpfulness to all in need. This love which sets everything in motion, as Aristotle said, is the same love that moves the sun and stars along, said Dante, and is the same love however discounted in our time, which, says scientist and naturalist Eiseley, "moved the dying Christ on Golgotha with a power that has reached across two thousand weary years" (Eiseley, op. cit., p. 179). And now it is for us on this holy night, to bow the knee in adoration, and to open the door wide to our inner galaxy, where mystery waits to ignite a cold mind, and where hope beckons to a defeated spirit, and where most of all, love would flood our inner beings with love for God and love for one another. So with Phillips Brooks we pray:

O holy child of Bethlehem
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in;
Be born in us today.

We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell;f
O come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord Emmanuel.

Prayer

Eternal God, who calls the stars into being and who makes sport with galaxies and who expresses yourself in universes beyond our comprehending, it was your pleasure at the beginning of time to brood over the primeval waters and to bring forth light and life upon the earth. You visited our planet with your presence to shape us in your image and to bring your very being to self-expression in us as your people. We praise and adore you for the fathomless mysteries of the universe, and thank you that you have brought us into the adventure of living, loving, and thinking, as a part of your grand scheme of things entire toward which the whole creation moves.

Visit us again tonight with an awakened sense of your holiness and power, and quicken our minds toward the new realities you have in store for us. The world is very much with us, late and soon. The burdens of life often oppress. The pressures and stress tax our resources and nearly exhaust our inner reserve. So be pleased to refresh us, O God, for the living of these days.

On this night of miraculous birth, we pray you will cause us to be reborn from within. Some of us have had seeds of creative thoughts needing germination. Some have had new inventions brooding within their minds for a better world. Some have had dreams for economic justice and greater equity for the poor and oppressed.

Others of us have had glimmers of ideas for love better expressed in our families and we have received hints of ways of forgiving grudges so long and firmly held. In others of us there is the book or poem to be written, the music to be composed, the business to be formed, the kindly word to be said, the generous gift to be given, the friendly deed to be done. O God, bring to birth all the latent creativity within and the residual potential buried beneath our fears.

And hear us, loving Father, as we make our supplication for peace on earth, good will toward men. Remove the strife within our families. Cause us to bridge the generation gap and other gaps -- the gaps of race and language, culture and religion. Bring contentment to ravaged souls. Heal those torn by hatred and violence. Comfort those who mourn, and grant your healing power to all those who do battle with the powers of disease in body, mind, and soul.

Thank you, God, for this night, for Jesus the Christ, your Word became flesh among us, full of grace and truth. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.