The Real Christmas Carol
Carol Service 2009
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Finish this phrase – ‘For you, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without...?’
It’s true isn’t it that for most of us, if not for all of us, there are certain things that have to happen, or certain things that you have to have, without which, Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas. Maybe it’s coming to the Carol Service and listening to that old familiar story, like we have this evening. A story that is so comfortable, and so familiar that it fits like a pair of our favourite slippers. Or perhaps it’s the Christmas Tree, or the decorations. Maybe it’s the Christmas turkey, or being around family and friends, that makes Christmas, Christmas for you. Or perhaps it’s purely about the presents!
There were two boys spending the night at their Grandmother’s house. At bedtime, while they were saying their prayers, the youngest one began praying at the top of his voice: "I PRAY FOR A THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE TRAIN SET! I PRAY FOR AN ELECTRIC SCOOTER! I PRAY FOR A NEW SPIDERMAN ACTION FIGURE!!!" His older brother leans over and says "Why are you shouting? God isn’t deaf." The little brother says "NO, BUT GRANDMA IS!!!"
But it’s true isn’t it – we all have those things, those traditions that, without which, Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas! For Michelle its Chocolate Brazil Nuts – For me it’s Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’. I have the BBC version with Patrick Stewart at home, and every year before Christmas Day I make sure, that by hook or by crook, I find space, and a bit of peace and quiet to sit down and watch it – (the original film version was on this afternoon) – but, for me, Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without Scrooge.
This year we went off as a family right at the beginning of November to the cinema to watch the new Walt Disney animated version in 3D – so Christmas started a little early this year.
Scrooge
Ebenezer Scrooge is a mean and intimidating character, who lives only to make money. He’s a man who has no time, and no patience for religion or sentimentality – of any sort – especially Christmas. And then one Christmas Eve, he receives a terrifying wake-up call. He is visited by the spirit of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley was a miser just like Scrooge, and he has been condemned to roam the face of the earth, tormented by the things he neglected to value in life. Condemned to drag behind him the long chains that he had forged in life.
And he is desperate to give his old colleague a final chance to avoid the same fate. This is Scrooge’s last opportunity to turn from his ignorant, selfish, greedy ways. To turn from his materialistic, money making business, and begin making humanity his business. And Marley warns him that he is going to be visited by 3 ghosts, the ghosts of Christmas past present and future.
Let’s just remind ourselves of the story...
Show clip (Walt Disney ‘A Christmas Carol’ Trailer)
‘Arghhh humbug’ – Did you get what the narrator says half way through that clip... ‘What if you were given a second chance to get your life right... This holiday season the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future will give one man that chance!’
And in essence those words encapsulate the whole Christmas message. The whole meaning behind the Christmas story is of a God who gives humanity a second chance. And this evening, very briefly, I want to explore the ghosts of our Christmas’ past, present and future – to help us rediscover, in what is a very familiar and comfortable story, the God of second chances.
The ghost of Christmas past
Now the first spirit is the ghost of Christmas past. And this spirit takes Scrooge back through time to confront him with the pain and the agony of Christmas’ gone by. The spirit takes Scrooge to a schoolroom - where they see a lonely little boy sitting by the fire, whose only companion is the book he is reading. Scrooge remembers how he had been rejected by his father because he blamed him for the death of his mother who died giving him. Scrooge remembers how Christmas after Christmas as the other children went home for the holidays – he was left alone and deserted. He remembers his childhood loneliness, he remembers his childhood pain, he remembers how he had longed for the presence and warmth of friends. He remembers how he had longed for the love and acceptance of his family.
Then the spirit whisks him off and shows him his former fiancée, Belle, a woman whom he once loved deeply, but who had come a poor second to his passion for wealth. ‘A golden idol displaces me,’ she complains to him from the past. And as they travel from Christmas to Christmas, Scrooge is faced time and time again with his broken relationships, with his rejection, with his loneliness.
I’m sure that most of us have had Christmas’ that we’d rather forget. You know there are 1000’s of people like Scrooge today who will find celebrating Christmas this year very difficult because of the failed and broken relationships of their past. Because of the painful memories that each Christmas time brings, broken families, broken friendships, too much pain, too much loss, too much rejection.
And yet Christmas time is a time of hope, a time of joy, a time of reconciliation. There is a Christmas past that echoes down through the pages of history. A Christmas past whose timeless message haunts our every Christmas present. And if we were to travel back further than the history of our own Christmas past, if we were to travel back further than the history of Scrooge’s Christmas past, if we were to travel back and re-visit that very first Christmas... 2000 years ago, if we were to gaze upon that first nativity scene – the Christ Child born in Bethlehem and lying in a manger. Then all of our Christmas fears and disappointments would be dispelled and we would become filled with hope.
For on the night that Jesus was born, an angel appeared to shepherds and declared to them the good news that a Savior had been born. This good news was for “all people”, for young and for old, for rich and for poor, for Jews and the Gentiles, for you and for me. Christ had come, God in the flesh, to save us all. His birth wipes our past clean. All of our pain, all of our sorrows, all of our rejection, all of our broken relationships, all of our hurts are wrapped up in His love for us. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave… his only son, that whosoever might believe in him would not perish but receive eternal life’. That’s the hope and the promise of Christmas past. That’s the hope and the promise of the God of second chances.
The ghost of Christmas present
What becomes very obvious is that Scrooge is a product of his history. Scrooge is a product of his Christmas’ gone by. And so the second spirit to visit him is the ghost of Christmas present. This spirit comes to gave him an opportunity to see what his life was truly like in the here and the now.
He is shown the home of his employee, Bob Cratchit – where despite their poverty it is a home filled with joy and compassion and love for one another. A home where, as they sit down to their feeble Christmas dinner, Bob Cratchit still takes the time to share a toast to his greedy, selfish, miserly boss – the one who keeps him in abject poverty.
He is shown the home of his nephew – the only person alive who has any affection for Scrooge whatsoever, even though that affection is totally unwarranted. But year after year this nephew had invited Scrooge to come and share in the joy and merriment of Christmas with him and his wife, and year after year Scrooge had rejected his invitation. But still the nephew invites.
The ghost of Christmas present shows Scrooge exactly what he has become. The hardness and callousness of his heart. His dismissal of the poverty and the needs of those around him. His total disregard and disdain for humanity itself.
Oh he tried to justify his actions by the money that he had earned and how successful he was, but in the things that counted, in the things that really mattered, he was nothing and he had nothing. And the ghost of Christmas present shows him that even though he is utterly hard-hearted, that he is bitter and twisted, and may well seem beyond the point of redemption, despite all that the spirit shows him that others still loved him and had not given up on him.
And that’s the promise of Christmas present. Every Christmas we are reminded that, no matter how bad we are, no matter how selfish we are, no matter how greedy we are, no matter how rebellious we are, no matter how much we reject him… God loves us and never gives up on us.
Christmas is a time of love, joy, peace and goodwill to all men – Scrooge was so self centred, so in bittered, so materialistically motivated that he had lost sight of that completely. And before we become too critical – everyone of us is capable of falling into the same trap, neglecting that which is truly important in life, and seeing money - and the things it can buy - as the answer to our problems. If we’re not careful the spirit of Scrooge can highjack every Christmas; turning our pilgrimage of faith into a pilgrimage to the shops.
Christ-mas is exactly what it says it is – a holy celebration of the Christ. But for many people Christmas stopped being about Christ a long time ago. Now its about self- indulgence, now its about extravagance, now its about materialism and money. Now it’s about me, myself and I.
And yet the story of Christmas is the very opposite. The story of Christmas is about the one who left all riches, who left all glory, who gave them up and came and was born in a stable, laid in a manger, and wrapped in swaddling clothes. The one who came, not to be served but to serve. That’s the certainty of Christmas present.
The ghost of Christmas future
Then comes the final spirit, the Spirit of Christmas Future, who has no face and does not speak. It merely points. Scrooge looks to where the spirit is leading him, and sees the Cratchit family again, worn down in their struggle against poverty, and now without Tiny Tim, who has died for lack of proper medical care.
The Spirit takes Scrooge to visit the house of a man who has died in his sleep. A maid and a cleaner are dividing up his belongings before the undertaker arrives. Two associates out in the street are discussing whether it’s even necessary to hold a funeral service, since no one would bother to come.
’But who is this man?’ asks the miser. The spirit leads him to a grave, whose headstone bears the name ‘Ebenezer Scrooge’. It’s a chilling reminder that no one lives forever; that the journey of life is brief. As the Bible says, ‘our days on earth are as a shadow’ (1 Chronicles 29.15).
This is it, the life-changing moment when Scrooge understands that it’s now or never. He was known as a penny pinching, mean, hateful, self-centered old miser. No one really wanted anything to do with him. In the end even his own family didn’t care to be around him. All that he had worked for would be stolen, even the curtains from his bed. There would be no one at his funeral; for no one cared that he had died. He would die miserable and alone and his life would have counted for nothing at all.
But the promise of Christmas past, and the certainty of Christmas present means that your Christmas future is not yet written. Jesus comes to transform your life, he comes to make you into a new creation, to take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. The good news of Christmas is that we can learn from the past, to change in our present, so that we can have a better future. Whatever our past has been, because of the Christmas story, because God himself came as an infant child, we can have a better future.
You know, Scrooge considered the ghost of Christmas Future to be the most frightening of all. WE are all scared of the future, we’re all a little frightened of the unknown. But I want to say that just as we look back and remember Christmas past – to that first Christmas when God was born as an infant child, so so every Christmas we look forward to Christmas future. To that time when we know Christ will come again.
I Thessalonians 4:16-17 “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.
One day Christ is returning to take us home, and that is the hope of Christmas future. The ghosts of
Christmas past, present and future.
Conclusion
At the heart of ‘A Christmas Carol’ lies Scrooge’s transformation. Through his encounter with Christmas past present and future, Scrooge was changed from a selfish, greedy and bitter old man, and he becomes a grateful, generous and compassionate figure. On that Christmas Eve he is confronted by the reality of who he is and where he is headed and he responds by changing his ways, he repents and changes his destiny.
Jesus, the Son of God, invites us to do the same. What better time than Christmas to receive his forgiveness, to renew our faith, and to rebuild our friendships? There’s a Scrooge in all of us that needs to be repented of. The good news of Christmas is that we can learn from the past, to change now so that we can create a better future. It’s not too late: we can choose to change. Whatever our past has been, we can have a better future.
Scrooge learned his lesson well. When he was given a second chance he seized the opportunity and changed his ways to make the days of his life count. He became a man that understood the value of life; the joys of life and he learned to truly love life.
Now I doubt that any of you will be visited by the Spirit of Christmas Past, Christmas Present or Christmas Future as Scrooge was. But you will be visited by God’s Spirit – this Christmas and every Christmas - because He never stops trying to reach us. And his Spirit will point you to the only path to a second chance for a new life. Jesus isn’t just another pick-and-mix lifestyle choice. He claimed exclusively to be ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’. If you want to make this Christmas one to remember, then you need only to ask Jesus to forgive your past, and invite him to enter your Christmas present, then your life will be transformed - now, and for good.
Why not let Jesus be born into your life, this Christmas time? God bless us, Everyone!
