Newsletter & Newspaper piece

[I was needing to write for both the local paper and the December Newsletter in the same week. So I wrote this and sent it both places]

Let the Transformation Begin!

The lights are up on the streetlight poles. The decorations are in the malls. As I write these words there are ads out for Black Friday sales. It’s beginning to look more like Christmas.

Many of us have some things, without which Christmas is not complete. Maybe it is a favoured bit of baking, or a particular song, or a party or get together, or a visit with a close friend. Maybe it is a special church service. Whatever it is, you just need those things for the season to feel right.

Two of those things for me are reading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and watching the How The Grinch Stole Christmas (the original half hour narrated by Boris Karloff, not the Jim Carrey movie) on TV. In fact if I had to choose I would rather watch the Grinch over that other perpetual favourite A Charlie Brown Christmas. (Luckily we own both on DVD so I don’t have to choose anymore)

Why do those two things hold such a place in my vision of ‘making Christmas’? Certainly a lot has to do with history. The first time I was on stage was playing Scrooge in a school play when I was in Grade 5 and I grew up reading and watching the Grinch every year. But there is something more. Something thematic, something in the meaning of those stories.

Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch have something in common. They hate Christmas. At the beginning of their stories they are thoroughly unlikeable characters. They seem to have no redeeming values. At the end of their stories they are totally different. They are, to use churchy language, redeemed. The Grinch carves the roast beast. And Scrooge, well we are told that in his life after that magical night “It was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge”. If Scrooge and the Grinch can be transformed and redeemed than surely there is hope for all of us.

Christmas is about many things. But at its heart it is about God choosing to reveal Godself in a new way to accomplish something. To me one of the biggest things God accomplishing in the story of Christ is transforming and redeeming us and the world around us. That transformation starts at Christmas. It starts at the beginning when a young girl hears she is going to have a baby when that shouldn’t be happening. Afraid at first, she ends up singing a song that really has the markers of a revolutionary manifesto: “he has filled the hungry...and sent the rich away empty”. This child will not only change Mary’s life but the world as a whole.

When the baby whose birth we are getting ready for grows up he will stand in his home synagogue and proclaim “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me ... [God] has sent me to proclaim release to the captives”. I hear echoes of his mother’s song in those words. In Christ God is working to transform the world, to turn it upside down and shake it up. In Christ God is showing us (as individuals and as a community) that we can be redeemed, set free from those things that bind us up. In Christ God is inviting us to be changed, to have our beliefs and priorities challenged, to turn and follow a different path.

I firmly believe that each of us has a bit of Scrooge, a bit of the Grinch, in our being. Sometimes we tuck it away, sometimes it comes out boldly. Sometimes our hearts are hardened or 2 sizes too small and we fail to care about each other as fully as God asks us to. I see this when we worry more about the bags of bottles someone grabs from our backyard than the fact that people need to steal bottles to get money for food. I see this when we worry about property values being lowered because “those people” are in the neighbourhood rather than asking how best to help people get their lives back in control. And yes, both of those examples grow directly out of comments I have seen from Grande Prairie people in various Facebook discussions.

When the Scrooge in us rears up its head we are reminded that we too need to be redeemed and transformed. When the Grinch speaks in our voice we know we need to find a different path (though hopefully our hearts won’t grow three sizes because that sounds medically dangerous). But here is the hope.

Christmas is coming! God is once again breaking into our world and our lives. Transformation and redemption are possible. Are we willing to let it happen?

Blessed Christmas.