Scrooge

In “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens created Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly money lender, and placed him amidst the gas lights and soot of Victorian England. Scrooge lives on, as most caricatures do, and has taken up new digs on Wall Street. Lots of folks are finding a lump of coal in their 401K’s this Christmas.

There is a new sobriety this Christmas season and it’s not due to a revival of holiness or reverence. A glut of bad news stifles optimism and breeds negativity. The “holly, jolly” Christmas borne of bull markets is muted. The bears are growling. The Christmas bell is silent. Scrooge is smiling like the Grinch who stole the nest egg, and Santa’s little elves are all unemployed.

Retailers are predicting a “cold” shopping season, and they weren’t talking about the weather. In the midst of rising unemployment, sky-high fuel prices, bailouts, and a loss of consumer confidence, Christmas expectations were severely downsized. Some were talking of a retail disaster, the dawning of an economic ice age. Some were predicting the leanest Christmas in two decades. Although no one advocated the cancellation of the season or predicted a ban on Christmas lights, one wonders if part times Santa’s were advised to go a little easy on the ho-ho-ho’s!

Yet, there is something good – very good – emerging on this decimated holiday scene. While the almighty dollar suffers with a bad case of the flu, we might just be left, on Christmas morning, with the essence of it all. We might just rediscover the reason for it all. Could it be? Could we, in the silence of the cash register, find a treasure more precious than gift cards; more costly than diamonds, more beautiful than a wet winter snow on a fur tree forest? The greatest loss at Christmas cannot be measured by economic indicators. Our greatest loss came with the intoxication of prosperity. Somewhere, in the mad rush for more, we lost sight of what Christmas truly is. We got bogged down in gooey Christmas flicks and were mesmerized twinkling lights. We felt driven to give big presents and run up our debts with little concern for their payment. We were conditioned to celebrate the holiday, throwing caution to the winds, though we may have forgotten just who was being honored. People talked about the “Christmas spirit,” but ignored the Holy Spirit causing the only virgin birth in history. People talked of Christmas cheer but neglected its source. Somehow, the story was buried under a mountain of mythology and marketing. But now greed has blown off all the covers, tripped over the plug and killed the lights, and if your heart will listen… you might just hear an angel chorus singing.

Every Christmas, Christians celebrate the Gift that surpasses all measure; the Gift beyond economies; the extravagant Gift that lives, and gives, and helps. In my lifetime I’ve opened hundreds of gifts. Most, I have welcomed, and some I have loved, but no gift ever loved me back. No gift ever changed my life. No gift held a hint of the miraculous, or the hope of enduring beyond my years. All gifts, no matter their monetary value, pale in comparison to the Gift of all gifts: a Savior who is Christ the Lord.

You can keep your grumpy Santa’s, tired myths, and fake snow, I’m dreaming of a right Christmas. It’s the kind of Christmas that warms the heart with love. It’s the kind of Christmas that fills the soul with awe. It’s the kind of Christmas that doesn’t need a stimulus package. It’s the kind of Christmas that doesn’t know a bear from a bull. It’s the kind of Christmas that opens the ancient text to reveal the always present Lord. It’s joy in a down market, good news in a bad news world, hope beyond politics, and certainty in a lost age. It’s the kind of Christmas once lost in a blizzard of marketing, now easily found by all who will look to the Bethlehem manger and listen to greatest story ever told.

Benjamin Franklin was credited with the saying, “nothing is certain but death and taxes.” But Ben was wrong. Christmas is forever. Christmas is a celebration of certainties. The Word became flesh. God came down to man. Eternal Hope was born. A new and living way was opened to forever. Death was dealt a fatal blow. Taxes belong only to the temporal, and the story of the baby in a manger will be cerebrated when a million ages have come and gone. Christmas is the ultimate “sure thing.” It cannot be cancelled, even if markets are shaken and dollars devalued. Christmas doesn’t belong to the retailer, it belongs to the faithful storyteller. It belongs to the captivated worshipper. It belongs to all who believe in the Savior, not the season.

Let’s take back Christmas from those who have covered its glory with tinsel and trinkets. We can give more, even as we spend less. Love is the ultimate gift. So often our pricey gifts are cheap substitutes to sooth a troubled conscience. Time is a wonderful gift. To its recipient, it says, “you matter to me.” Help is a timeless gift that never falls out of season. Encouragement is a rare gift, so easily given, but so strangely absent in our self-centered days. Grace is a treasured gift that does even more for the giver than for the receiver, and what about forgiveness? Wouldn’t our Christmas celebrations be forever remembered and marked with integrity if we let everybody off the hook? Aren’t we celebrating the One who came to wash our sins away?

This could be the greatest Christmas we’ve ever known. The absence of excess might just awaken us to the presence of Majesty. Christmas is the celebration of a King who became poor that we might be made rich.

And that brings me back to Scrooge. Scrooge was rich… and mean, and miserly, and miserable. He didn’t understand that Christmas has its own currency that cannot be devalued. Scrooge measured his riches in numbers and gold. We measure our riches in God.