Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
December 1, 2019
Scripture:
Luke 1:46-55
(In our "Story for All Ages" we watched part of The Muppet Christmas Carol to introduce the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. You can watch that clip here.)
“Oh! but he was a
tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping,
scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which
no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret, and self-contained, and
solitary as an oyster.”
So those aren’t my
words – those words come to us from Charles Dickens, as he introduces the
reader to the character of Ebenezer Scrooge.
In popular culture,
the character of Scrooge has come to be seen as a person who hates Christmas,
but if you think that is the extent of his issues, you might be mixing him up
with the Grinch, who hated Christmas a lot.
No, Scrooge’s issues go a lot deeper than just hating Christmas. He is a person who seems to live without any
love in his life. He is greedy, he is secretive,
he has cut himself off from the rest of the world.
The first part of the
book or any one of the movies that have been made of it introduces us to
Scrooge through a series of interactions.
As we just saw, he is approached by people asking for a charitable
donation, and he says that the poor should stay poor, since that is their
station in life, and after all, what else are prisons and poorhouses for?
His nephew visits to
spread some Christmas cheer and invite him over for Christmas dinner. Scrooge tells him that he has no right to be
merry, since he is too poor to be happy; to which the nephew replies that by
this logic, Scrooge has no right to be miserable since he is too rich.
And we are introduced
to his clerk, Bob Cratchit, whose workspace is kept frigid and who is only grudgingly
allowed a day off of work to celebrate Christmas with his family.
At the end of the day
on Christmas Eve, Scrooge leaves work, has a lonely dinner, and returns to his
gloomy house to go to bed, with not a candle or a gas-lamp to light his way, since
darkness was cheap.
So not a very joyful
beginning to this Christmas story. And
like I said earlier, I think that the thing that is missing is love.
That beautiful piece
of poetry that we heard from Luke’s gospel (Luke 1:46-55) proclaims for us a different
way of being. These are words spoken by
Mary, the mother of Jesus, shortly after she agrees to give birth to God’s
child. She sings of a world where
spirits rejoice, where the lowly are lifted up, where the hungry are filled
with good things, a world where God remembers promises made to all people,
especially those living on the margins.
This vision that Mary
proclaims sounds like very much the opposite of the worldview of Scrooge. Mary sings of rejoicing; Scrooge prefers what
he would probably call “realism.” Mary
sings of the poor being lifted up; Scrooge feels that prisons are good enough
for the poor of the world. Mary sings of
sending the rich away empty-handed; Scrooge hangs on to his wealth with every
ounce of energy he can muster. Mary
sings of mercy; Scrooge prefers justice that is untempered by any form of grace
or mercy or love.
But early in our story
of Scrooge, he hears a call to change his ways.
After returning home from his lonely meal, he is visited by the ghost of
his now-deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, who is now weighed down by
chains and the weight of the wealth he spent his life acquiring.
This first ghost tells
Scrooge that he is going to be giving an opportunity to escape a similar fate,
by way of three visits from three different spirits that night.
The message of
Christmas is a message of transformation.
At Christmas, God is born as a vulnerable baby, on the margins of
society more than 2000 years ago, and is laid in a manger. The one who created the heavens and the earth
has become human; and our humanity can no longer be separated from God.
But the thing about
transformation is that it’s messy – you can’t become the new until you have
been able to leave behind the old.
Scrooge can’t be transformed into who he is to become until he has been
able to leave behind the person who he is at the beginning.
And that is why I
think that the story of A Christmas Carol
is the perfect story for us to be reading or watching through the season of
Advent. Advent is a time for waiting, a
time for preparing – preparing to welcome the transformation of Christmas. If we leap into Christmas without taking the
time to prepare, then is anything going to change? Can we expect Scrooge to go to bed, a
miserable, greedy, stingy person and wake up, without the intervention of the
three spirits, a changed person, full of generosity and love?
And so I think of
Advent as an opportunity to open ourselves up to Christmas transformation. Like Scrooge being visited by the Spirits of Christmas
Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet-to-Come, these four weeks are a time
to look into our hearts to see where our values lie. Are we living our lives looking only to
ourselves, or are we living our lives as if the God who became human in Jesus
lives in us too by the Holy Spirit? Are
we living this world of love that Mary proclaims, or are there some things that
we might need to change in order to be transformed by Christmas?
And so as we begin
this new season of Advent, my wish is that each one of us might receive this
season as a blessing. That each one of
us might have the opportunity this month to prepare – to truly prepare our
hearts and our lives – for the transformation that Christmas brings.
And may it be so. Amen.
Scrooge and the Ghost of Jacob Marley
Original Illustration - Public Domain
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