God Bless Us - Every One!

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 from the Center for Action and Contemplation, Brian McLaren wrote on this, the beginning of John’s gospel. He noted that on Christmas Eve “we celebrate a new beginning. We welcome the dawning of a new light.

“A new day begins with sunrise. A new year begins with lengthening days. A new life begins with infant eyes taking in their first view of a world bathed in light. And a new era in human history began when God’s light came shining into our world through Jesus.”

That is what Ebenezer Scrooge gets at the end of the story: a new day. The weather as Scrooge sits in the counting house in the beginning is drastically different from the scene when Scrooge wakes up. In the beginning of the story, it’s dark and foggy. “It was cold, bleak, biting weather: …[Scrooge] could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.” And the bells are described as well: “The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, … struck the hours and quarters …with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there.”

But when Scrooge awakens Christmas morning, the cold is still there and bells still ring, but the peal of the bells are “the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer; ding, dong, bell!... Oh, glorious, glorious!”

And when Scrooge opens the window, he sticks his head out and the cold is clear: “No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells.” 

As Matt Rawle states in The Redemption of Scrooge, “When [Scrooge] woke up on Christmas morning, everything looked different. Earlier in his story, the streets had been dim and the weather frightful. Now he overflowed with happiness and found that ‘everything could yield him pleasure.’” Everything is seen with new eyes!

We see this newness in our Revelation passage as well. “At the end of God’s story, the Book of Revelation, we hear that there will be a new heaven and a new earth. [Rawle says,] This reminds me that whether we are right or wrong, … whether we are more like Scrooge than we care to admit, God offers us a new day.” 

Along with Scrooge, we can reawaken to life. No matter how far off course we might have gone, “we haven’t missed it!”

So live into the Peace, Hope, Love, and Joy that we have considered over the past month. Dickens closes A Christmas Carol by telling us “[Scrooge] became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew… [I]t was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” 

As Rawle notes toward the end of his book, “Christmas is an invitation into relationship with God, through Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Christ is born so that God might have ears to hear our wants, eyes to see our need, hands to outstretch on the cross in order to clothe us in his resurrection, and lips to speak the story of good news, that we might share with the world. When Christ’s invitation is accepted, we discover that we have been redeemed. We have neither earned it nor do we deserve it. It is a gift from God, calling us to respond in the world with love.” 

As Dickens states after saying that Scrooge knew how to keep Christmas well, “May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!”