It’s a familiar story that has been done over and over and over again. It’s been told by the fireplace. It’s been performed in playhouses large and small. It’s playing at Tinseltown right now because of the latest Disney production. It’s been told through other familiar characters like Mickey Mouse and Kermit the Frog, and Bill Murray played the main character in a humorous film version called “Scrooged.” I bet it would be hard to find many folks who don’t have at least a passing familiarity with Charles Dickens classic tale published 166 years ago next month called simply, A Christmas Carol.

The story itself came out of Dickens own experience of encountering poverty first hand after his father was sent to debtor’s prison. He was embarrassed to be sent to work in a shoe polish factory, but as he got to know his fellow workers, he became a keen observer of of the social injustices that they suffered. Years later he toured nearby tin mines and observed the horrid conditions of children who were working there. He wanted to make an appeal to the English gentry to do better, to raise the living conditions of the poor, particularly poor children. What started out as a political tract became this amazing story of the conversion and transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge that still speaks to us about the dangers of greed and the values we learn from having the “Christmas spirit.” (Information from Wikipedia entry, A Christmas Carol)

But even as much as the advertisers want you to believe, it’s not quite Christmas yet. In fact, the Christmas spirit that we know to be about the parties and celebrations and giving gifts to others may be the re-invention of a secular Christmas that has more to do with Charles Dickens’ popular story than it ever had to do with Jesus or his birth. Sadly, the story that was meant to be the downfall of nineteenth century industrial greed is now frequently the season opener for the deluge of toy advertisements, Black Friday sales, and the rush to get the Christmas inventory on the shelves as soon as the Halloween merchandise has become irrelevant. For many folks, the joys of Christmas come at a price, the high price of post season debt. Dickens would probably be rolling over in his grave to know that his social commentary was ever being used as an incentive to buy and celebrate way beyond our means. Though he was drawn to the festivities of Christmas that were not such a regular occurrence during his lifetime, he probably couldn’t have imagined that the generous Spirit of Christmas would become a fabulous marketing gimmick.

I may be stretching my literary interpretations just a bit here, but it seems to me that Dickens may have been advocating that the Christmas season could be a time for taking the hard introspective look at ourselves that Scrooge does at the beckoning of his dead partner, Jacob Marley. In the time since the publication of this story, the American corpus of transformational Christmas stories has grown to include family favorites like, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” At Christmas we love a good story about some jerk of a character who is softened by the warm sentimentality that goes with the season. What we seem to forget as Disney offers us yet another Dickens interpretation is that Scrooge was terrified, embarrassed, and drug reluctantly and forcibly by strange apparitions to bear witness to just how cruel and evil his life had become.

In the church, we call this process of life-review repentance, and it definitely has a place in the changing seasons of the Christian calendar. In our secular world, we have the cultural remains of a few lame repentance rituals. We offer half-hearted attempts at New Year’s to make life changes through our resolutions or we are lured by gym advertisements to get on the pre-Summer diet program to absolve ourselves the temptations indulged during the holiday season. But rarely do we take the time or make the effort to assess what our lives have been and what they may become. It may take such a ghostly vision for us to come to terms with our own greed, lust, pride, hatred, or sloth.

In case you were wondering, this pre-Thanksgiving Sunday is not the start of the Christmas season of the church. We aren’t even in Advent yet, which is a time of anticipation in which we prepare ourselves for the birth of the Messiah – still more than four weeks away. The church’s celebration of Christmas actually starts on December 25. This Sunday marks for us the last Sunday of the church year, and it is liturgically recognized as a time for us to remember Christ’s rule in our own lives as we proclaim that Christ is King and ruler over all. It’s a strange Sunday. We are far more comfortable being “friends” or “students” of Jesus than recognizing that we owe every ounce of our allegiance to him. Too many other things have power over us.

For Ebenezer Scrooge, it was money, hoarding great big piles of money, and not seeing that there would be any benefit to him sharing some of his wealth with others. For us, it may be money, but it may also be the desire for security, or affection, or accolades. We bend our lives around those things that make us feel powerful in our own right. We get caught up in our own lives as they are without noticing the effects we have on others. To emphasize this lack of awareness, Dickens used the example that Scrooge was impervious to heat or cold. It made no difference to him. No cold could make him more bitter, no fire warm his heart. But the same time, just about every movie made of this story shows a scene of his clerk, Bob Cratchit freezing at his desk without so much as a second glance from Scrooge.

Like Scrooge, we can bury our heads into our own wants, needs, and desires without ever looking up. This is what our lives are like before the ghostly vision, before the Holy Spirit claims us for something greater. The Spirit of God is working, like Dickens’ ghostly trio, to show us the lessons of our past, the reality of our present, and the possibilities – be they great or grim – for our future. We can be changed, converted, even transformed, and it’s not so far-fetched to believe that the timing will be naturally good to do a little self-examination just as we prepare for Christ to be born into our hearts again at Christmas.

But the timing proves right for me this week, this Sunday, because in this text, John’s strange angelic Revelation promises us grace and freedom from our sin then prophesies that the rule of Jesus Christ is both near at hand but also covers every time and every place, everlasting. Jesus Christ is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, and every data point in between. Who can transport us back in time to our past and heal even the oldest, deepest wounds? Jesus. Who can lift our heads up from our own selfish indulgences and kindle in us compassion for our neighbor? Jesus. Who can offer us hope and love in an uncertain time with an uncertain future? Jesus.

As Charles Dickens characters and John’s timeless revelation rolled around in my mind this week, I was struck that our human actions and beliefs are governed much more often by Scrooge-like self-interest than they are by understanding that Jesus Christ is ruler over all. We hide and protect the secrets and shame of our past without ever learning the lessons that the Spirit plants in those experiences for our own benefit. We narrow our present reality to such a small sphere that we have the same tunnel vision that Scrooge did for protecting his own interests at the expense of others. We tremble at the thought of an unknown future rather than be amazed as God’s plan unfolds before us. The temporal spirits do haunt us, but they really aren’t that scary when we realize that Jesus is ruler over all time. Nothing happens outside of Jesus-time. Sure, there are still awful things that happen in this world. Poverty is as much a reality in our world as it was in Dickens’ day. Perhaps some lessons have been learned, and certainly new problems have been created. People are inventive in their sinfulness. Nevertheless, we can have hope, the hope that all such tales of transformation, whether secular or sacred, teach us. We are forgiven. We are loved. Our future is secure, not by any worldly standard, but by the only standard that matters – Jesus Christ is already there.

Amen.