As we look through the newspapers for the last year we find a world plagued by disaster. The great tsunami of Boxing Day must be one of the greatest natural disasters to strike humanity. Since then, cyclones have swept into the southern USA and droughts, famine and disease have swept through Africa. In Australia the shadow of the bird flu epidemic hangs over us, while many regional areas are still in the grip of drought. Even the city of Sydney is facing a water shortage and water restrictions are a reality. We cannot do much about these natural disasters. Our scientists may predict them but all we can do be aware of the dangers and live with respect for our environment.
But there is another disease which threatens us more immediately than any epidemic. It is the disease which leads people to hate and kill other people, it is the disease which makes groups of people see other groups as somehow less than human, it is the disease which leads to prejudice, cruelty, exploitation, rioting, warfare and terrorism. St Paul in his letters has made some lists of these evils, which he contrasts with the good fruits of the Holy Spirit. Paul was writing nearly twenty centuries ago, so there is nothing new in the divisions among humans. The prophet Isaiah saw that these divisions were evil six hundred years before Paul, and in the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis the first humans fell into the same error. Cain was a grower of crops; his brother Abel was a herder of animals, and Cain murdered Abel because of this difference between them. This tragedy, this tendency of human beings to see other human beings as different and hostile is called sin.
Humans have looked for the answer to sin ever since they could think. Ever since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, humans have tried to overcome the sin which separates them from God and from each other.
Moses the great prophet brought to the children of Israel the Law of God so that they would know how to behave. But still their hearts were not changed, the law inspired fear and not love. The Law of God made the children of Israel feel different from other people, better than other people, so the Law, which was supposed to bring people to know God, was used to separate people into righteous and sinners, Jews and Gentiles.
All the conflicts which plague our world arise from sin which separates us from each other and from God. Whether it's Bondi or Baghdad, Indonesia, Innaminka or Enmore, the broken-ness of our community testifies to the power of sin. The good news in all this is that God has acted to break the power of sin. In the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve hid from God, God went looking for them. When the children of Israel were in slavery in Egypt, God sent Moses to lead them to freedom, and on this night, two thousand and five years ago, God sent Jesus to show God in person to the world once and for all. And God arrived, as we all know, as a baby human being, being born in the same way that all of us are born, weak, helpless and distressed, needing many years of love and care to grow to full stature.
Some people were horrified that God should take human form - for them, God was supposed to be up in heaven, ruling the world from a fiery throne. Some people were frightened, like King Herod, who saw Jesus as a threat to his own power. Other people, like Mary and Joseph, and Elizabeth, Mary's cousin, the shepherds and the wise men from the East; these people began to understand.
God was not to be found in the storm or the tempest, God is not in the earthquake or the tsunami, God is not even in the Law of Moses or the words of the Bible - God can be found in the hearts and minds and flesh of human beings.
Perhaps Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth, the shepherds and the wise men remembered that when God called humans into being, they were created in God's own image, in the likeness of God, that is, to be like God, both male and female. And God blessed them and saw that all God had made was very good.
Was this, perhaps, what the world had forgotten? All the separation from God and from each other had blinded them to the fact that each human being is made in the image of God. No wonder the birth of Christ is such a world shaking event. People had been wondering for centuries what God was like - Aaron thought God was like a golden calf, Daniel thought God was like a mighty King on a throne of power. Isaiah had three images, the blood-soaked warrior marching home in triumph, the suffering servant and the child born to a young woman. There is truth in most of these images, but the image we are given at Christmas is God in the fragility of human life.
I believe that if we could hold on to that image, if we could see that God is present in every human person, including ourselves, then sin would be no more. Would the rioters at Cronulla or the fighters in Iraq go on fighting if they could see that their opponents were fellow human beings, and that both they and their opponents are created in the image of God? If they could see God in themselves and God in those they met, would they still hate?
Christmas, the coming of God in Christ, reminds us that we who carry his name are called to be the presence of God in the world. Emmanuel, God is with us, of course, but God is with and in all other people, and it is God's plan that we should discover that and treat each other accordingly. And maybe, if we do, and all Christians discover the image of God in every child born, then the people of the world will come to love God in their neighbour and in themselves.