All Souls Community Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan

December 17, 2006

The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith, copyright@2006

It is as though the cold and barrenness of this time of year ignites a yearning within to reconnect with humanity, with family, with those who brought us into the world and those who nurtured our growth. This time of year is the time of holiday, of custom and ritual whereby we connect to deeper things of the spirit.

Thus, we light these candles to remember the spiritual traditions out of which we came, which brought us into the world and nurtured our growth.

For we are spiritual children of both a Jewish and a Christian lineage.

From our spiritual ancestors the Jews we were bequeathed the revelation that God’s activity in this world is freedom, and all who seek that liberating spirit through a covenant with others, seek to walk towards truth and towards God.

And from our spiritual ancestors the Christians we were bequeathed the revelation that each human being bears a divine likeness, and like Jesus, all souls are to be loved for that divine kinship; for God is love and they who love dwell in God and God in them.

Every moment of our living is a preparation for the next.

Every moment of our living is a leaning forward towards the future.

Every moment of our living is a hope for the love that tomorrow might bring:

A love for which human beings, as conscious creatures, are fashioned for;

A love that ushers us into a larger and broader sphere of existing.

A love that sets us free.

Every moment of our living is a chance for each of us once again to seize the moment to manifest love and liberate it into the world.

That all who would be born and live might do so in a freedom bequeathed by a love for all souls.

On this third Sunday of the holiday season we pause to light a candle for the love that endures beyond our capacities to arouse or extinguish it, a love that endures throughout all seasons and is ever-present and abiding amongst men and women and children even in the darkness. For it is love that sets humanity free.

For me, A Christmas Carol is the essential story of Christmas --- it calls us to our better selves in a way that few other stories of the season do. I see it as a story of belief in humanity. Even though Scrooge’s reclamation is brought about by ghostly intervention - the message is that he was a man who simply needed to recognize his own humanity, and act upon it. In a sense this seems to be a fictionalized version of Aristotle’s ethics - in which we’re exhorted to act in the right way - at the right time - in the right amount. Or, in other words, for one to become the hero of one’s own life.

When I read A Christmas Carol I cannot help but be struck by how wrong most of the movies are in presenting the story. Following the convention of movie scripts, Scrooge is typically presented as stubborn and unrepentant until the end - when the Ghost of Christmas Future literally scares the hell out of him. Dickens had a completely different conception, and, I believe, one of much deeper meaning. Scrooge is affected right from the first contact with the Ghost of Christmas Past. He’s immediately sensible of the thing that his later fears have walled away from him - that it’s relationships which make life worthwhile, its relationships that define life. Upon first sight of the children he knew in school, he cries; he’s delighted by the bravery of his own childish self, and pained by that child’s aloneness; he’s overjoyed to see his sister again, he’s elated to see “Old Fezziwig,” whose example reminds him that a man of business can be decent, compassionate, and a friend to others. Likewise, when the Ghost of Christmas Present helps Scrooge understand the lives of others, he’s grateful for the lesson and finds himself shamed by his own history. The Ghost of Christmas Present teaches us about the tie that binds, that is, human affection; and the fact that the man who tries to be an island will increasingly lose his humanity as he decreases his covenant with others. And, while fear plays a role in the Ghost of Christmas Future’s presentation, it seems less about being “scared straight,” and more about coming to grips with that ultimately defining event in of every person’s life - death. Death, for Scrooge, as for all of us, is the point at which life can be truly evaluated: Was he a good man, did he care for others, was his spirit generous, forgiving, sympathetic? Death is the stark fact that gives the lie to pretense and illusion.

The metaphors and images employed by Dickens are also telling. The Past comes upon Scrooge unbidden - it pulls his bed curtains away and sheds blinding bright light on everything, while, at the same time, being itself amorphous and hard to define. The Present is vivid, huge, loud - but in the other room. If Scrooge wants to participate in the immediacy of life, he has to get out of bed and seek it out; his individual existence is really a matter of indifference to the universal “now.” Appropriately the Future comes right on the heels of the Present - there’s no going to sleep in between the two experiences. As immediate as the Future is, it’s still silent and unknowable - it’s monochrome rather than fleshed out, very real, yet mysterious and mutable.

A Christmas Carol is really a very different sort of story than most tales of the season. It isn’t about having our fondest wishes fulfilled; it isn’t about a Messiah coming to address the ills of the world. In the end, it’s a story about a man trading the certainties of his cynicism, fear and distrust for the risk of human relationships, the possibility of love, the satisfaction of service to others, the hope of “taking a bite out of life and saying ‘Ah, just right.‘”

I wish for the dull a little understanding, and for the understanding a little poetry. I wish a heart for the rich and a little bread for the poor. I wish some love for the lonely and some comfort for the grieved. I wish companionship for those who must spend their evenings alone. I wish contentment for the aged, who see the days slipping by too quickly, and I wish dreams for the young. I wish strength for the weak and courage for those who have lost their faith. And I wish we might all be a little kinder to each other.

(Frank Schulman)

For those who keep track of such things the sermon title in the newsletter and newspaper, and the one in the order of service, are different, and just to make confusion complete I have also changed the sermon so that it won’t really relate to either titles! That sometimes happens when you try to discern the meaning of events. I thought this sermon would be about how at this time of year religion tries to make a story of the human spirit into a story about the certainty and truthiness of beliefs. A story of the appearance of the divine through the most fragile and dependent of creatures is turned into a story about an exclusive Son of God that you either accept or reject.

This time of year is not about belief at all, but about the human spirit. That gets lost in all the battles over religion, that are really battles over belief, that are battles that seek to crush the very spirit the season is meant to engender. What if Christmas was not about belief at all? What if the aim of singing these songs, hearing the story told, huddling in the darkness to light candles, putting up lights and greens and a tree, giving and receiving gifts, thinking of times past and hoping about times to come, was about something different and something more?

When Unitarian Charles Dickens’ published “A Christmas Carol” in 1843 he included an explanation for the reader: I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me.  May it haunt their houses pleasantly… It has over the years, haunted our houses pleasantly, and become the additional, holiday story most associated with the Christmas story. And the irony is that Jesus’ birth is not mentioned at all! In the book, religion is not mentioned. Religion plays absolutely no role in the story. Scrooge does not change his miserly ways, does not turn away from a life of indifference and callousness to others by religious means. God’s fury or judgment does not cause the change. The birth of the Christ child does not bring about the change. No priest or preacher precipitates the change, which seems to be the deepest of all ironies in that this time of year is oftentimes portrayed as being all about belief. This time of year is all about believing appropriate things, proper and truthful belief in virgins and angels and Jesus as God’s only son, and yet this beloved holiday story of Dickens’ contains nothing of the sort.

It’s why it’s beloved. It’s about the human spirit.

Scrooge’s conversion is what it is popularly called, and yet it is a conversion unlike what we normally mean in using the word. But it is what many experience. A hundred years ago philosopher William James, in studying the phenomenon of conversion, a cross-cultural, cross-religious experience whereby an individual radically and dramatically changes his life, called it a change in the center of personal energy; that is, where as once our lives were energized through one kind of “center,” it abruptly and unexpectedly changes to another. James discovered it is not instantaneous, but oftentimes follows a period of deep introspection, reflecting and brooding over the meaning of one’s life, a process the individual’s consciousness consents to, accepts. It is an inventory of what has been done combined with the realization of a desire to connect a healthy to a hopeful spirit. It’s a process Dickens portrayed over a nighttime.

Scrooge changes from centering his life in making and holding money, a life he comes to see as holding and preserving and containing who he is. He changes from conserving who he is to liberating and liberally giving away who he is. The profound thing about this story is not that an individual can change his life, profound as that truly is. But, the transformation of the self does not involve religion and if religion is involved at all, in the form of beliefs and creeds and doctrines and dogma, it arrives much later. It is first and foremost an experience, and secondarily conceived of as a religious one if at all.

In the fourth chapter of the story, the portion that chronicles the visit of the third and final ghost, the Ghost of the Future, Scrooge meets it with the acknowledgment: “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart.”

We want to believe in Scrooge because as human beings we know we, too, are capable of such transformations. We know this capability as Scrooge knows it, and we court it, and long for it, yearn for it, and are held back only by our own unbelief. Not unbelief in the religion of the season; religion arrives much later if at all. Our unbelief is our fear. That in changing to what we yearn to become, we will lose who we are.

Scrooge realizes his own fear in this kind of transformation. “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen,” he says to the Ghost of the Future, because he is beginning to realize that life as it is lived, means something that his lived life has not yet realized. But his fear, while real, is not debilitating. His fear, while real, is not what motivates him to change, because finally it is not fear of punishment that lures men and women to do justly and love mercy. Men and women change because they consent to change their center of personal energy. “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart.”

Our unbelief is that change is possible at all. Says Scrooge to the Ghost of the Future before he is whisked away to what the Ghost will show him: “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.”

The ghost takes Scrooge into the future, and finally to the grave that bears his name. But it is not the specter of his own demise that rattles Scrooge and cuts him to his core. Scrooge knows all individuals must die. Dickens was a Unitarian, sympathetic to Transcendentalism and the prospect that it is God’s immanent presence, and feeling and living inside of that is the aim of the spiritual search. Before seeing his grave, Scrooge hears townspeople dismiss his death as nothing that has affected their day. No hint of sorrow, no life or individual heart moved by his passing, for there was no life moved by his living. When he sees his name on the grave, he is not afraid of the afterlife. He realizes he has lived for nothing in this life, though he thought he was living for the most important thing. He thought he was rich but turned out to be poor. He was confident he was first, and discovered he was last. And he needed no Scripture to tell him this, no preacher wagging his finger and dooming him to God’s judgment. It is self-evident. At his gravestone, on his knees: “Spirit!” he cried, tightly clutching at its robe, “hear me. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been… Why show me this, if I am past all hope?”

I love this story, too, because no soul is past the hope of realizing what is self-evident, and what we do not need religion to tell us. There is something in human nature that loves the good, and if invited, will dare to seek out what is good, seek out what will transform a life towards the good. That search carries considerable risk. If you embark upon it, you will lose yourself. Everyone does who dares to look inside a manger to see a newborn babe. You will become someone different. The change will not be about what you believe, but about who you consent to become. It will not come about by accident or fluke or the imposition of the trappings of religion from outside of you, but by the self-evidence of life’s blessing calling you to a something more.

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach,” recites Scrooge as he begins to transform his life into the grand design that creation was meant to become. Every time of year invites this transformation, and especially this time of year. “And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, “God Bless Us, Every One!”

AMEN.