It’s amazing just what science can explain for us, isn’t it? 

A Yahoo news bit traveling around the internet recently reported that Swedish scientist Anders Larrson charted Santa’s journey visiting the homes of all children around the world. If you count them all, regardless of religion, that’s 2.5 billion stops between Christmas Eve and Christmas day. Larrson began by determining the starting point. He says though many believe that Father Christmas resides at the North Pole, Rovaniemi (a small town in Kyrgyzstan) claims to be his true home, so he planned Santa’s route from there.   

He estimated there are 120 people per square mile on the earth. He took into consideration factors like geographic density and possible weather-related detours. He figured the earth’s rotation gives Santa 48 hours to deliver the presents, which means if his reindeer travel at the speed of 3,604 miles per second and he takes 34 microseconds at each stop to slide down the chimney, drop off the presents, nibble the cookies and get back into his sleigh, then he could do it all in one night. One word of caution, however. He warns that Santa’s sleigh, weighed down with all those presents and traveling at supersonic speed, would encounter such massive air resistance that the entire contraption would burst into flames and vaporize within 4.26 thousandths of a second.  

Or here’s another from a few years back in an Ann Landers column. Students at MIT calculated that Santa needs more than eight reindeer to pull his sleigh. They based their conclusion on the premise that Santa only had 31 hours to deliver all the toys to 91.8 million Christian children spread across 24 times zones. That works out to be 822.8 households per second. To do this, Santa would need the combined efforts of 214,200 reindeer to pull his load of 321,000 tons (including reindeer) at an average speed of 650 miles per second, or 3,000 times the speed of sound, to complete the job in one night. Ann Landers said, “What I find baffling is that students at MIT would have the time to do the arithmetic on this far-fetched scenario.” 

So Swedish scientists and MIT students can do all the calculations and sort out all the data, but does that really tell you all there is to know about Santa? Of course not. Every mother’s child knows there are truths which are greater than facts and wisdom beyond the statistics. You can try to analyze it all, explain it all, still missing the truth altogether, and in the process, lose all the wonder and beauty, the joy and excitement, the hope and the gift which Santa brings. “Yes, Virginia, there really is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion.”   

On this night of nights, we come in wonder to view the miracle. We come to worship in the beauty of starlight and candlelight. We come like children with our stockings all hung by the chimney with care, ready to believe, ready to receive, ready to be touched once again with God’s amazing grace. Grace which comes to us as truth beyond our reason, love beyond our comprehension, like a gift dropped down the chimney—undeserved, unearned, unmerited, unlimited, unending grace.  

For God so loved us, that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have life everlasting. (John 3:16) 

Tonight, I can’t explain it any more than I can explain Santa Claus.  

I can’t offer rational arguments about how God could become human, how the Word could become flesh, how the gift of one baby born in a barn two thousand years ago can have such an impact on the whole course of human history on this planet—or much less, how that baby’s birth can make any difference in my life today. You can try to figure it all out and explain it all away—and in the process miss the mystery, the beauty, the joy, the blessing of this night.   

This is a night of worship and wonder, a time to pause and pray and open our lives to the mystery which lies behind all of life, the gift of God’s amazing grace made known in a child born in the simplicity of starlight and the stillness of a stable. It is a time to listen with the shepherds for the brush of angel wings and the sound of “glorias” echoing through the heavens. It is a night when it seems all heaven and nature sing, and heaven, and heaven and nature sing. It is a time to become a child again, to hope again, to expect again, to believe that miracles really do happen and that beyond our wildest dreams and widest calculations, something happens beyond our understanding: God moves and the earth catches its breath in wonder and amazement.  

John Pokinghorne is a fascinating combination—a renowned British physicist and, at the same time, an Anglican priest. Like many today, instead of focusing on the conflict between faith and science, the tired, old arguments about evolution and creation and all the rest, he explores the shared space between scientific understanding and spiritual meaning. He says: 

Science is very successful and very important and I take it very seriously. It’s also very limited. It can tell you some things, but not all things. So I quite often say to my scientific friends, “What about music?”     

(The Life of Meaning, page 33) 

If you ask scientists to explain music, they can tell you all about the vibrations of waves in the air and the movement of sound. They can give concrete explanations for the way sounds are produced and how they are received by the tiny bones in our inner ear and interpreted in the recesses of our brain. They can explain the danger of iPods pounding on your eardrums, threatening to destroy your hearing before you are 25. And all of that is true. 

But is that all there is to music? Of course not. We all know that experiencing music has more to do with the soul than the ear, more to do with the palpitations of the heart than vibrations in the air; that the truth of music is much larger than the facts. So Pokinghorne says that while science can give us the facts, faith introduces us to a larger truth, a wider reality that goes far beyond all the explanations.  

On Christmas Eve, we take that wider view of reality: 

• to believe that in Jesus Christ, God has come into our world in a unique, inexplicable way

• to sense that all of time and history hinges on the birth of this Child, to the point that all of time is measured BC/AD

• to realize that truth is more than facts and wisdom is more than knowledge

• to believe that in this child, God has spoken and human life on this planet will never be the same again

The Gospel of John doesn’t include a birth narrative. In fact, only one of the four gospel writers gives us any details of the birth (that’s Luke), and nowhere in the New Testament do the other writers spend much time on it. In John’s gospel, there are no cattle lowing, no baby awake, no shepherds watching their flocks by night, no Zachariah and Elizabeth, no Mary and Joseph, no Simeon and Anna, no wise men from the east. John gives none of the “facts” of the event. But he gives us all of the truth in the form of poetry and music. He sings of a truth beyond the facts, truth beyond our understanding: 

In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life and the life was the light of all. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. 

Does that explain it? No, not really. All John knows is that: “The word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father.” (John 1:1-14) 

Beyond that, I can’t much explain it, either. I can’t explain it any more than, as Robert Capon says, an oyster can explain a ballerina or a scientist can explain music. All I know is that when I pause at the manger, when I look at Jesus, when I glimpse the baby, I behold glory—glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And all I can do is pause in wonder and worship.