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We presented the story Christmas Carol for adult class. As you all know, the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future appear to Scrooge. I'm going to use those as a way to organize the end of Luke's story, where Mary treasured and pondered them in her heart.

 

Scrooge discovered that he let love slip through his fingers as human love was replaced by greed. The thought unnerved him and began to open his cold, closed heart. Christmas past Mary retold the story every year when they remembered the birthday of Jesus. She always told the part where he didnt have a proper cradle, but was placed in a feeding place, the Manger. Christmas and memory are entwined. We create memories for others. I just talked with someone whose mind is starting to slip away. She repeated a lot, but how she described her Christmas memories, of taking a sleigh to the wooods to cut down a Christmas tree that was always too big, and her father's efforts to cut it to fit the ceiling of the house. Go back to some early Christmas memories, your role as a shepherd n a bathrobe, the time your angel wings almost caught fire, or a family tradition like watching It's a Wonderful Life or a Christmas Story.

 

Scrooge becomes more human when he views the warmth of his nephew's party and the love of his clerk's poor family. Scrooge realizes that he would like to try to help Tiny Tim live a longer life by letting go of some of his wealth. Imagine Mary with Jesus at 12, noticing some shepherds. Imgaine a Christmas angel passing through our time like the ending of Joyce's story, the Dead, could see a divorced father, a crowded dining room,a hospital room, a toddler delighted with a box. Christmas present doesn't measure up to the burnished memory, or the fantasy of the perfect Christmas we've created. This applies to church as well, to be expected to be carried off in a haze of spiritual fireworks and depth may well be expected too much. In its way, it is a denial of the Incarnation as it tells us to work with reality, the world as it is, a world in need of but on the road to restoration. This Christmas is the one we have. Emmanuel, God wth us, continues to enter into the fullness of the human situation.

 

Scrooge saw his own, unmourned death, and the impact that the death of Tiny Tim would have on the family of his clerk, Bob. He saw his precious things, like Golem's ring, pass into the hands of thieves. Imagine a Christmas future- Mary was older, her son gone to follow his calling, and she celebrates his birthday-but the prophecy comes to her- a sword would pierce your soul. The angels sang of peace. We still crave it. The angels form a choir instead of the militant host of an army.-imagine yourself older. Maybe you're seeing your great grandchildren for the first time. Chirstmas forms a vision of what the world should look like, a goal not easily attained but well worth pursuing. 

 

Treasure the time we have, not only the treasures we will soon receive.  Take some time to ponder the true Christmas miracle, the Incarnation. God's own vision for human life was enfolded within the human life of Jesus. In this way, the Incarnation then sanctified human life, or at least put it within a divine perspective, that cast new light on it daily. In one of my favorite carols, the Scrooge in all of us is addressed as we pary that we are reborn this day by having the dear child enter in, to have us all be the manger wherethe child is born in us today.