Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 1:39-55:
For the past two weeks we have been looking at Christmas
through a lens provided for us by Charles Dickens in his classic story A
Christmas Carol. In the story, Ebenezer
Scrooge, who approaches Christmas, and really everything in his life by
exclaiming famously “bah humbug”, is visited by four ghosts. The first is the ghost of his former partner
Jacob Marley, who is forced to carry the chains of his misdeeds in his life
around with him for all of eternity.
Marley comes to warn Scrooge that his fate will be the same unless
Scrooge makes changes and that he should heed what the ghosts who come to visit
have to show him.
The first ghost is the ghost of Christmas past who helps
Scrooge to remember a different time in his life when he didn’t approach
everything as simply an economic exercise in which to make, or save, as much
money as possible and when he approached life with excitement and verve. He is also shown the process by which he had
become the man he is so that he would understand what changes could be made so
that he could become someone different and not face the same fate as
Marley. It was important for him to
understand that who he was, was not who he had to be, that he could make other
decisions in his life that the past neither determined the present nor the
future.
The second, the ghost of Christmas present, showed us the
hyper-consumption and consumerism that affects how we celebrate Christmas
today. And we highlighted the fact that
most of us want Christmas to mean more for us and we worry that we have gotten
caught up in everything else and have forgotten the reason for the season, but
because we can’t quite figure out how to make our celebrations more meaningful
we focus on trying to make society’s celebrations more Christian in order to
compensate. And so we begin focusing on
things which, I believe, distract us and distance us from truly understanding
what the birth of Christ means for the world.
Everyday more than 20,000 children around the world will die as a result
of malnutrition, war and water-borne illnesses, problems, most of which, could
be solved with a fraction of what we spend on Christmas every year? And so we heard Jesus, quoting from the
prophet Isaiah, proclaiming that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him, and it is
upon us as well, to proclaim the good news to the world, and I posed two
questions for us to ponder, and those where what would we gain if we stopped celebrating
Christmas and what would we lose if we stopped celebrating Christmas. The answer to those questions, I suggested,
would help us to realize what was truly important in our own Christmas
celebrations which could lead us to potentially celebrating Christmas
differently this year and creating new traditions for the future. And that leads us to the last ghost, the
ghost of Christmas future, or as Dickens says, the ghost of Christmas yet to
come.
The ghost of Christmas future is the scariest of the ghosts
which Scrooge encounters. Indeed, he
says, “I fear you more than any specter I have seen.” The ghost of Christmas future is usually
pictured as the grim reaper who is there to show Scrooge his own death and
people’s reactions to it. Certainly not
an image that most of us want to spend any real time contemplating, especially
at Christmas. Scrooge is filled with
fear because he doesn’t know what to expect from this ghost, and at the same
time he also does know what to expect, and that scares him even more. Scrooge is really being forced to ask what
the legacy is that he is leaving for those around him. Is the world going to be better off because
he was in it or not? Of course he knows
the answer is that few people will be upset to see his demise and that many
will be glad to see him go, and that is exactly what he sees on his ghostly
rounds. He sees his servants and others
stealing from his home, he sees people joking about having to be paid in order
to go to his funeral, and he sees people wondering not about him, but instead
about how much money he left. The answer
to that, which Dickens doesn’t provide, is the same for Scrooge as it is for
us; he left all of it. The ghost of
Christmas future calls to us is to answer what legacy we are leaving about what
Christmas means to us, how we recognize the birth of Christ and how we live
that out in the world.
Scrooge is fearful.
But it’s not just the ghosts that frighten him, it could be argued that
Scrooge has led most of his life in fear, fear of spending too much and more
importantly fear of not having enough.
It is fear that drives his relationships with others and it is fear that
drives his relationship with money. In
that Scrooge is not alone. Many of us
are driven by fear, and many of the same fears that Scrooge has, especially
around our finances and the fear that we don’t have enough or won’t have
enough, especially when we are constantly being marketed to and told that if
only we had this then we would be truly happy.
But what is the first thing we hear about the coming of Christ? Fear not.
It’s what is told that Zacharias and Mary and Joseph, and it’s what is
told to the shepherds who are out in the fields abiding. What they are abiding I don’t know, but there
they are when suddenly the darkness is shattered and the angel says “Fear not,
for behold I bring you good news of great joy that shall be for all the people
for today in the city of David a child has been born” and his name is Emmanuel,
God with us, God with you and with me.
One of the questions that Scrooge asks the last ghost is
whether “these shadows are of the things that will be, or are they shadows of
things that may be, only?” That is, can
he change the future or is it already determined. We, of course, already know the answer to
that because it has been apparent from the first two ghosts, that not only can
the future be changed, but that Scrooge has to change and that when he does
that the future will be changes as well.
Those changes won’t keep him from dying, because we are all mortal, but
that how he approaches life will make all the difference for him now, and for
the difference that he can make in people’s lives, which is really what he
comes to understand as the meaning and purpose of Christmas, for the world to
be changed and transformed. And after
the last ghost is gone, Scrooge “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to
keep it all the year. I will live in the
past, present and the future. The
spirits of all three shall strive within me.
I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” The spirits won’t just live in him on
Christmas day, but will live in him every single day, that Christmas will matter
for him and for the world every day.
The gospel passage we heard from Luke this morning is known
as the Magnificat. It is Mary’s song,
and it is a song of joy, with the name coming from her line saying that her
soul magnifies the Lord. That is the
line that always strikes me. Mary does
not say, “I magnify the Lord,” but “my soul magnifies the Lord.” I’ve always wondered what that looks like, or
what that feels like. What would it be
like for our souls to magnify the Lord?
To me that’s about more than just saying something or even just acting
in praise of God, but when our souls magnify the Lord it’s about giving more
than just a little of ourselves, but giving all of ourselves, everything we
have, and not just doing it once, not just doing it at Christmas, or even when
things are going well, but doing it all the time, even when things are not
going well or how we would like them to be, which is also what I imagine was
going through Mary’s mind. Here is a
young girl, unmarried, who is told that she is going to have a child. I don’t imagine that her first thoughts were
those of joy, or maybe even feeling blessed, and yet that is what she says, or
even sings, out to God, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in
God my Savior.” And what she also says
in the future generations will call her blessed. Although in the protestant tradition we’ve
sort of rejected, or at least forgotten, Mary, in contrast to her veneration
her in the Roman Catholic church, we can clearly say that she made a difference
in lives, and certainly made a difference in the Christmas story, and we can
still remember and celebrate Mary today, of her soul magnifying the Lord, or
being filled with joy, of celebrating Christmas every day. We are told that after the shepherds visit
that she treasured what they had told her in her heart.
We too should be celebrating Christmas every day, which
should fill us with joy but not joy as it is typically understood, which we
also talked about last week. Yesterday,
I came across a quote from George Lucas that I though summed this up well
especially as it applies to Christmas, and I’ll give credit to the Force, or at
least to the Holy Spirit for helping me find it. Lucas said, “Happiness is pleasure, and
happiness is joy. It could be either one.
Pleasure is short lived. It lasts
an hour, a minute, a month, and it peaks very high… Joy doesn’t go as high as pleasure, but it
stays with you. It’s something you can
recall. Pleasure you can’t. So the joy
will last a lot longer. People who get
the pleasure will say, ‘Oh, if I can just get richer, I can get more
cars…’ You will never relived the moment
you got your first car. That’s the
highest peak… Pleasure’s fun, but just
accept the fact that it’s here and gone.
Joy lasts forever. Pleasure’s
purely self-centered. It’s about
you. A selfish, self-centered emotion
created by a selfish moment for you. Joy
is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to
something else, or somebody else. It is
much more powerful than pleasure. If you
get hung up on pleasure, you’re doomed.
If you pursue joy you’ll find everlasting happiness.”
God does not come into the world in the person of Christ
because everything is great, nor does he come in spite of the fact that
everything is in turmoil, but instead Christ comes because the world is broken,
he comes because we need him in order to restore relationship with God, he
comes because God so loved the world. Christ is a sacrificial gift given to us,
and that is why it doesn’t give us pleasure, because that is self-centered, but
it does give us joy. Christ comes as
greatest present that God can give us.
So what will we do? What has
Christmas meant to us in the past? What
do we want it to be for us in the present?
What do we want it to be for us and for others in the future?
Scrooge say, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to
keep it all the year. I will live in the
past, present and the future. The
spirits of all three shall strive within me.”
Scrooge became filled with the Christmas spirit and lived it out in everything
that he did. He stopped being self-centered
and instead sought joy by giving to others and giving of himself. Will we too learn the lesson and try and keep
Christmas all year long? Will we remember
that we too are filled with the spirit and that it “has anointed us to bring
the good news”? Let us live out in our
lives the true meaning of Christmas, let us make this year be the year that we
make Christmas more meaningful, that we connect to the things that really
matter, that we pursue joy not pleasure and that we welcome the Christ child
into our lives today and every day. What
does Christmas mean to you? How is Christmas changing you? Does Christmas still
make a difference?
At the end of the novel, Dickens says of Scrooge, “And it
was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well…. May that be truly said of us…! And so, as
Tiny Tim observed, God bless us every one!”
May it be so my sisters and brothers.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment