I’m not entirely sure when I sang it- maybe in college, or seminary, but whenever I hear this text, I think of a choral piece my choir sang 15 or 20 years ago. This passage is, in many ways, the heart of the Gospel of John. John starts at the beginning, opening his Gospel by calling to mind Genesis 1- in the beginning God created. Because for John, he is giving us a new genesis- the story of God’s re-creation, and humanity’s redemption.  In this year’s Christmas Eve devotion

I love A Christmas Carol . Ebenezer Scrooge starts out closed off to everyone. Accumulation of wealth is all he cares about. He lives in resentment, fear and the ice-cold frozen state of watching out only for himself.  As he accompanies the Ghost of Christmas Past, Scrooge starts to thaw. When he sees himself as a child, alone at Christmas, he thinks of the young caroler he turned away. He sees the Fezziwig Christmas party and remembers how it wasn’t about the cost, but about

For the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about A Christmas Carol: how Scrooge starts out as the epitome of stinginess, greed, and “generally being in a terrible mood.” With the ghosts of Christmas past and present, Scrooge starts seeing how others live: some choose relationships and while it might cost finances, their lives are enriched because of it. And his actions have had a negative impact on others. Seeing that, Scrooge has been reconsidering his own life. But with the

In the beginning of A Christmas Carol , Ebenezer Scrooge blamed the poor for being poor. “If they would rather die, they should do so and decrease the surplus population.” And though not in Dickens’s original, in The Muppet Christmas Carol  Scrooge tells Kermit Cratchit “Christmas is a very busy time for us…. People preparing feasts, giving parties, spending the mortgage money on frivolities. One might say that December is the foreclosure season, harvest time for the moneylen

Hope. The Israelites needed it in Isaiah’s day. In verse one, there is a reference to the humbling of Zebulun and Naphtali. As Gennifer Benjamin Brooks noted in her Working Preacher  commentary one year, these territories “had experienced the devastation of the advancing Assyrian army, the direct result of their decision to trust human allies rather than divine promises.” Their king had worshiped idols, “which put them directly in the path of God’s anger, and divine retributi

I love A Christmas Carol . Ebenezer Scrooge changing because he sees his past, the present, and a potential future with a fresh perspective. Of course, before he can change, we need to see why change is needed. In the beginning of the novella, Ebenezer Scrooge is “living in resentment, fear and the frozen state of watching out only for himself.”  In his book The Redemption of Scrooge , Matt Rawle follows the character development of this curmudgeon who responds to Christmas w