The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 21 C
If you haven’t noticed already, the Halloween decorations and candies are on full display when you go to the store. Obviously, no one is buying Halloween candy now for trick or treaters – that candy’s for us. And people have strong, strong opinions about the candy: whether candy corn counts as candy (it really doesn’t), whether the pumpkin peanut butter cups are better than any other shape (they are), and whether the sheer amount of plastic for each “fun size” piece of candy is absurd (it is). But, soon enough, Halloween will be starting to give way to the next holiday on the list: Christmas. (Poor Thanksgiving!) Christmas is already going to be creeping into the store, mark my words!
For decades, we have complained about the mass-marketing of a sacred holiday. I recall the consumerist frenzies that would happen on the day after Thanksgiving, when stores would open up before dawn, people could camp outside in the cold (back when it would get cold before Thanksgiving), ready to slam their way down the aisles to buy those extra-good deals. I am grateful we no longer have those spectacles – and the violence and even trampling deaths that would occur with them. Now, we have sales upon sales flooding our email inboxes for weeks ahead of time, and we can safely buy stuff from home even on Thanksgiving.
Beyond that, there have been subtle cultural shifts in how we Americans celebrate Christmas. As a child, I remember watching so many re-makes and re-envisionings of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with every version bringing something new to the same story. Some focused on being faithful to the Victorian England setting, while others placed the action in a new setting. Some focused on being somber, and some were willing to be a little silly to make the story appealing to kids. Somehow, this story could be retold and retold and not get old; even though I knew how the story ended, I’d want to see it again and again.
But I’ve noticed that the story has slowly been moving out of the Christmas repertoire. A public domain story of a grumpy rich miser’s repentance and redemption isn’t seemingly as profitable or entertaining as a boilerplate romance story or re-imagining Santa Claus and his elves as action stars.
Which, to me, is a great shame. I think A Christmas Carol is an amazing re-telling of Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. A Christmas Carol is a re-telling of this morning’s parable which imagines the rich man’s redemption arc before he dies by situating his repentance in terms of his re-connection with his humanity and others’ humanity.
In Jesus’ parable, the afflicted man Lazarus lies at the gate of this rich man. The rich man steps over Lazarus and refuses to see him as an equal, a fellow human being. Then Lazarus dies, and is carried away by angels to be with Abraham in the afterlife. Vivid, beautiful imagery! The rich man also dies and is buried; no beautiful poetic imagery for him. The rich man calls out to Abraham – send this Lazarus to give me water, send this Lazarus to warn my brothers! The rich man still does not see the humanity of Lazarus. Lazarus is a servant at best, below the dignity and status of the rich man. Abraham points the rich man back to the Law and the Prophets; if the brothers won’t listen to the Law and the Prophets, then a ghost coming back from the dead won’t do much good, either. If these brothers don’t care to read the prophets like Amos, then what good will a ghost do? Scare them into obedience? Or for modern Christians: if Paul’s letter to Timothy saying that the “love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” won’t convince them to be more generous stewards of resources, then what good will a ghost do? If their hearts are impermeable to prophetic wisdom, the Law of the Lord, and the Gospel, then what else will actually move their heart?
And so we move to A Christmas Carol. Here, we have a ghost sent back to warn the living, but it’s not the ghost of Lazarus; it’s the ghost of one of the rich men, Jacob Marley. He, one of the rich men,is sent back to warn Ebenezer Scrooge of the dire fate that awaits him if he continues on his cold-hearted accumulation of wealth at the expense of others. But even this warning is dismissed by Scrooge, right? Bah Humbug! It’s all a hallucination, a bit of “undigested beef.”
Abraham in the parable was right: even if someone went back from the dead, there would be no change.
But A Christmas Carol keeps telling the story. It wasn’t the dire warning from a ghost condemned to spiritual torment that might warm the cold heart of Scrooge. He is visited by three additional ghosts, as you know. The Ghost of Christmas Past connects him with the pains and joys of his younger years, of festivities and loneliness, of love and loss. That ghost connects Scrooge to his own humanity, something he had tried to bury under mountains of wealth. The Ghost of Christmas Present connects Scrooge to the humanity of others: to the suffering of the Cratchit family in their poverty and the illness of Tiny Tim, and to the joys of his nephew Fred and the celebrations that Scrooge turns down. The final ghost, the Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come brings Scrooge to the pain of the future, of Tiny Tim’s fate and his grieving family, and to the coldness of Scrooge’s own grave.
The ghosts here connect Scrooge to his humanity, to others’ humanity, and to the pain and joys of the world. And in this re-connection to humanity, Scrooge repents, he changes his heart, he changes his ways. Where the rich man could still not see the humanity of Lazarus in Jesus’ parable, Scrooge sees humanity and learns to love it with a generous heart. He is not turned by the dire warning of a tormented future in order to save his own skin; Scrooge learns to love. The parable is re-told, and there is rejoicing.
This is a story that needs re-telling in our days. I know the cold, commercial world around us invites us to reject our humanity and neglect the humanity of others. We will not be saved by a multitude of possessions, we will not be saved by adhering to a political tribe and destroying our enemies, we will not be saved by wealth or status or power. We will only be saved by Love, a divine Love, a love for humanity, a love that is so transcendent and eternal it became human in Jesus.
Yes, this is a Christmas sermon – but just as every Sunday is a little Easter, so every day that we human beings live and breathe and try to love one another is a little Christmas. The love of God made human flesh in Jesus – a love that binds us together in our humanity and binds us together with God. In a world that is so cold, unloving, inhuman, in a world where power leads to genocide, where wealth leads to poverty, where status leads to unending loneliness – we need our humanity, our humanity that links us together with one another in our joys and pains, our humanity that weaves us together by Christ and with Christ and in Christ.
It is this sacred humanity that is deeply missing in our world. Are we willing to be the hands and heart of Jesus, the incarnation of Love itself? Are we willing to love real flesh-and-blood people, to love one another? Are we willing to share that love with even strangers and enemies, to see their humanity as our own? As the decorations change from spooky skeletons to festive trees in a few short weeks, I ask you: how will you proclaim the incarnate love of God, the one we call Jesus Christ, in thought, in word, and in deed? How will you live out that love in your humanity, a humanity you share with countless others? Amen.