Christmas Eve Homily – Born
Homily for Christmas Eve, 2009 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Born
Isaiah 9: 2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2: 11-14; Luke 2: 1-20
“Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim,
who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master,
and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or
borough, in the good old world.” That’s the happy ending of Dickens’s “A Christmas
Carol.” The story ends with Scrooge being good.
That’s not how it starts. At the onset he is described as “a squeezing, wrenching,
grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” With an exclamation point. He begins
as a sinner, an old sinner, and becomes a good man.
Scrooge’s talking to himself upon his awakening tells us how he has gotten from
being a covetous old sinner to a man who becomes as good a friend, as good a master,
and as good a man as the world ever knew. He has been given a fresh start–the old man
is gone, and it is as though he is born afresh. Scrooge says, “I don’t know what day of the
month it is. I don’t know how long I’ve been among the Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m
quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby.”
Christmas is about a baby being born. Christmas is about a faith that extols being
childlike; that affirms innocence and openness and wonder, that accepts dependence on
what’s bigger than oneself. The story of Ebenezer Scrooge is a parable about someone
who was acted upon from his birth by forces he couldn’t control and often didn’t understand,
and who ended up stunted, and solitary–ended up not seeing, as his partner and
counterpart also could not see–that mankind was his business, that people are born to love
other people. A new man is born on Christmas Day.
I don’t know how you react when you see or hear that verse “Ye must be born
again!” That’s always got an exclamation point, too. It’s on a sign in the front yard of a farm,
or it’s on the lips of some bossy sounding preacher. Somehow, and this is part of what’s
wrong with being human, I know–but somehow it always comes across to me as “There is
something wrong with you and there will be something wrong with you until you become
like me”– like the born-again person who lives on that farm, like the urgent believer who
demands your acquiescence.
We don’t hear the story of Scrooge that way. Dickens invites us to conceive the
promise and project of Christmas in the terms John’s gospel uses to describe why the
Word was made flesh and dwelt among us–”to all who received him…he gave power to
become children of God.” That transformation, that casting aside the cocoon of grubby
preoccupations and emerging as light as a feather, no longer thwarted promise but
achieved potential– that results from self-knowledge and recognizing love.
The big Christmas stories all work that way. How is Jimmy Stewart redeemed in
“It’s A Wonderful Life”? By consideration of who he has been, and by the knowledge that
he matters to someone who loves him, and can himself love. How is the creation reborn in
the gospels? By returning to the basics, believing in a loving and delivering God in the
midst of a world of slavery and cynicism, fear and force. By starting over with the premise
that it’s possible to be born, and instead of having innocence and affection thwarted and
bent, and our souls conformed to compromise–instead of that, to grow up for love, and
compassion, and generosity, and service, and courage–to grow up like Christ. Not to
despair, not to despair, and not to make ourselves hard to endure a world we find hard– but
to overcome what is hard and cold by letting love be kindled in our hearts. That’s the new
birth always offered by God, who brings Jesus to birth in Bethlehem. That’s the promise
of who we really are, past all the false guesses and wrong turns we’ve made, now that the
realm of the Spirit enlightens our insight into who we were born to be.