Rekindling the Joy of Christmas

We are going to begin by having a reading from Luke chapter 1,

Luke 1:39–55

verses 39 to 55, and then chapter 2, a few verses there.

At that time, Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea,

where she entered Zechariah's home and greeted Elizabeth.

When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb,

and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

In a loud voice she exclaimed, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear.

But why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.

Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her.

And Mary said, My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my

Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.

From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done

great things for me, holy in his name.

His mercy extends to those who fear him from generation to generation.

He has performed mighty deeds with his arm, he has scattered those who are proud

in their innermost thoughts.

He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and

his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.

And then there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby,

keeping watch over their flocks at night.

An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around

them, and they were terrified.

But the angel said to them, Do not be afraid, I bring you good news that will

cause great joy for all the people.

Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you. He is the Messiah, the Lord.

This will be a sign to you, you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel,

praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest heaven,

and on earth peace to those whom his favor rests.

Few seasons trigger the memories that Christmas does.

Think back to your childhood Christmases. Some of our memories are very precious.

When I see the lights on the trees and the excitement in the kids' faces,

my mind is transported back to a Christmas here in Richland Center when I woke

up in the house at 537 Sheldon Street.

Now, did you know that the parsonage used to be on Sheldon Street?

Anyway, I woke up to find a brand new bicycle stuck back behind our Christmas

tree that my father had sacrificed money for and stayed up late on Christmas Eve to assemble.

Yes, at that time, bikes had to be assembled.

When I see the houses decorated and the lights showing all around,

and when we drive through the city light display down at the park,

My mind is transformed back to Oklahoma City

when we used to travel around to the well-to-do neighborhoods like Ski Island

and Caravan through the long lines of spectators as they quietly and patiently

toured the massive displays of personal Christmas art on all of the trees in

that subdivision in all of the houses.

When I go to company Christmas parties and see the food spread before us.

My mind is transported back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when we were invited to

accompany Christmas parties of a company that a man in our church owned.

There was always a spread of food of all different types of ethnic varieties.

It was there as a boy in fourth grade that I had my first taste of pickled pig's feet.

It must have been okay because I'm still here today.

Even with hundreds of employees, the owner of that business,

Irving Young, wanted to make Christmas special for everyone individually.

Every person who attended from child to adult, from employee to children,

was given a Christmas present to unwrap and made to feel special.

Mr. Young made his way around to visit people, 200 and some employees in his

manufacturing business to visit people and visit them and wish them a personal

Merry Christmas, especially the children.

And every year as our girls were growing up, we would sit in the living room

and read the story of the first Christmas to our children who were impatient to open gifts.

My mind would then be transported back to the days in my home growing up when

dad would gather us all together on Christmas Eve,

and we would read about the birth of Jesus Christ and the love that his life

represents, while my sister Vicki,

and I hope she doesn't watch this, anyway,

my sister Vicki impatiently wanted to open gifts.

Can we just forget reading the Christmas story? We already know about it,

Dad. Can we just open our gifts tonight, please?

I'll just die if I have to wait until Christmas morning.

But I also know that for a minute, well, by the way, she didn't.

She's still here with us too.

But I also know that for many people, their childhood memories of Christmas are not so pleasant.

Their mother and father are separated at Christmastime, or they've lost a love

on very close to Christmas.

They were laid off from work just a week before Christmas.

My mom used to get teary-eyed when she thought about Christmas as a young pastor's wife.

Never having much to go around, my parents always tried to make do.

Mom remembered with tremendous hurt the year that they decided to accept my

aunt and uncle's invitation to have Christmas together with their family.

Things were very tight financially in our home, in the Parsonage,

and Dad and Mom were barely able to scrape enough together to buy each one of us kids one small gift.

As our relatives arrived at my aunt's house, boxes and boxes of presents were

unloaded and placed under the Christmas tree.

My two older sisters sat there in silence with their small little dolls while

my cousins greedily and thanklessly open gift after gift after gift.

Mom vowed never again to have Christmas with our extended family because of

the hurt she felt in not being able to provide for her children and because

of the hurt she saw in her daughter's eyes.

And I remember other years, too, listening to and comforting a young mother

whose husband had walked out of the home just a week before Christmas after

having an affair with another woman.

Or I remember getting a call during a church board meeting from a frantic mother

in the week before Christmas and going to sit and talk with her teenage son

who was threatening to commit suicide.

I remember comforting an employee who had come home after a weekend away to

find that her adult son had broken into her house and lay dead on the floor

from an overdose of her own medications,

leaving a suicide note that said he just couldn't take it anymore because his

girlfriend had broken up with him. Thank you.

The angels may sing joy to the world, but they might as well have been singing

to another planet for all the good it does us at times, right?

In last week's message, we looked a little at the life of Ebenezer Scrooge as

he learned to value relationships.

Hopefully, you've been working at valuing those relationships this week,

especially to those who may not experience a whole lot of love in their lives.

Now, we want to look at today, we want to look at Scrooge's experience with

the spirit of Christmas past.

You'll remember how from the book or the movie that Scrooge's business partner,

Jacob Marley, his ghost had come back to warn Scrooge that the consequences

of Scrooge's humbug attitude,

were more serious than he could ever have imagined.

He informed Scrooge that he would be haunted by three spirits as Christmas Day was ushered in.

The first spirit would come as the clock struck one in the morning,

and without their visit, said the ghost, you cannot hope to shun the path I've tread.

When Marley's ghost disappeared, however, Scrooge reconsidered the encounter,

dismissing the whole thing as a bad bowl of soup and went back to bed with a

bah humbug on his breath.

Then at one o'clock, just as Jacob Marley's ghost had said Scrooge was awakened

by the ghost of Christmas past, even as the ghost took Scrooge to visit the past,

I invite you to make your own journey down memory lane.

Many of your memories will be pleasant, but many will not be not.

When you take the journey into the past, you may discern some of the central

experiences that have shaped the.

And often controlled your own attitude toward Christmas and life in general.

First of all, the ghost of Christmas

past invites us to go back to the experiences that shaped our lives.

The Spirit took Scrooge back to five scenes from his childhood.

These encounters stir a mixture of strong emotions in Scrooge as he watches this scene.

They also give us this first glimpse of insight into the forces that shaped this now miserable man.

I mean, even the name Scrooge causes us to have kind of shivers in our mind

thinking of what kind of anxious and negative guy this could be.

Sometimes we are robbed of joy by the memory of wounds we've received at the hands of others.

The spirit of Christmas past first Scrooge back to his boarding school.

It was a dark, lonely time where his only real friends were the characters in

books that sustained him.

Dickens doesn't fill in the details, so we are left to speculate as to why Scrooge

was so lonely and desolate.

We see the scenes of his school classmates who were all picked up to go home

for Christmas while Scrooge stayed at the boarding home alone.

The second Christmas scene, however, gives us a significant clue.

It was the time when Ebenezer's younger sister came to the school and indicated

that their father is much better, much kinder now, and would finally allow Ebenezer to come home.

Her comment indicates that Ebenezer had been put in the boarding school,

not simply for his own good, but because of his father's rejection.

I wonder how many children grew up with their father's rejection.

Again, Dickens gives no details, but the message is clear.

Young Ebenezer experienced times of bitter loneliness and separation from his

family. I wonder how many at Christmastime suffer bitter.

Rejection, and separation from their families.

The root of humbug-itis are often found in the experiences of rejection and lost love.

Two other scenes remind Scrooge that not only the wound he suffered,

but also the choices he made brought pain that could be blamed on no one else.

Here we see that our own decisions can steal our joy.

While sometimes we're robbed by the memory of wounds we've received from others

at other times, and more often we are robbed of true joy by the memory of the choices we've made.

Scrooge saw that he had smothered the Christmas spirit and quenched his own joy.

He saw this by reliving an encounter with his fiancée Belle.

In this scene, she confronts him with the radical change she had seen in him

since he became a man of business.

She said, another idol has displaced me, and if it can cheer and comfort you

in time as I would have tired to do, I have no just cause to grieve.

Scrooge replied, what idol has displaced you? And she replied, a golden one.

You fear the world too much. All your hopes have merged into the hope of being

beyond the chance of its sordid report.

I have seen you nobler aspirations fail one by one until the master passion,

gain, or greed has engrossed you.

When she asked if he still would have chosen her with no dowry to bring to the

marriage, his response is long, and then, no, I think not.

Belle responds sadly, I would gladly think otherwise if I could.

Ebenezer, I release you from our engagement. and she goes off.

The older Scrooge, in this scene, seeing his younger self,

pleads with the younger Scrooge in the dream to go after her and repent of his

coldness and hypocrisy, but the die had been cast and the scene of the past

remained unchanged and Scrooge was alone.

Scrooge had dealt with his wounds through ambition, the spirit of materialism

that we often use to try to soothe the pain of life.

Rockefeller was asked, how much is enough? And he replied, more.

The ambition, Scrooge's ambition robbed him of love. He chose his career over the dourless bell.

We likewise sometimes find that the intense experiences of family at this season

may be tinged with the memories of wounds we've received or bad choices we've made.

We find ourselves remembering harsh words we've made, disappointments and interactions

we wish had been different. How do we respond?

Many have learned to cope in various ways, some through overwork and others

through underachievement, some through avoidance and others through confrontation,

some through anxious drivenness to make things right and others through hopeless resignation.

How many of us have known businessmen or businesswomen and other employees who

have made wrong decisions in their material purchases or in the ways they have treated others,

or in their harsh and unkind words in their relationship with their spouse and

children, or who have retreated to their job sites or to their workshops to

shut out their frustrations, to avoid facing themselves in the mirror.

How many of us know people who would rather work than be with their family?

But we will never be free until we face those memories and allow the Lord to

touch those memories, and yet this is not our natural response.

Like Scrooge, we may want to extinguish or suffocate the truth.

This is often our first response to pain and regret, but there is a better way.

In spite of the past, we can choose joy.

Life is not all darkness and gloom, even for Ebenezer Scrooge.

The spirit of Christmas past also showed him a memory of joy and the hope of future promise.

Scrooge was taken back, was transported back in time to the shop where he had

apprenticed as Mr. Fezziwig's accounting clerk.

He was taken back in time to old Fezziwig's ball on Christmas Eve,

a party which showed Scrooge the alternative of riches in the pleasures of life and love.

Scrooge was transported back in time when he danced joyfully with his fiancée Belle.

At one time, Scrooge had tasted the joys of life. He could say he enjoyed the

dance literally and figuratively. Why?

Because he saw there was more to life than bolts of cloth and musty ledger books.

More than production and profits.

But he forgot that joy. Instead, he became consumed by business and making money, crowding out joy.

If only he had remembered, there's no telling how his life might have been different.

Memories can remind us that things have been different before and could truly be different again.

The gospel gives us the power to choose to respond differently to life.

Joy is not something that we feel based on our circumstances.

Joy is how we choose to live.

We must choose joy in all circumstances. We could take steps today to rekindle

the joy of Christmas in our lives.

And as we rekindle the joy in our minds,

the blaze of joy begins to glow in the fireplace of our hearts as it takes over

our circumstances until it bursts forth into a raging blaze of joy and love.

So we can take steps to rekindle the joy.

The spirit of Christmas past shows us that our memories, far from being barriers,

can actually become bridges to joy and freedom in Christ.

We can, first of all, choose to focus on the memories that bring us joy.

We can savor them and let them awaken the full range of life-giving feelings

that are written within them.

What are some of the joys that we remember, some of the experiences we remember that brought us joy?

When we go back in our memories and think of those things, we always and almost

always think of them in terms of being with other people and with our relationship with others.

Second, we can let the living Lord touch and redeem those painful memories.

He can remove those painful memories and cause them not to be pain anymore.

The power of our faith is that it is able to transform our memories.

We can bring our memories before the Lord in prayer and ask him to transform

them by his presence and by his power.

It is the coming of the Jesus Christ that has brought joy and health and life into this world.

We can ask him to reveal himself in those memories so that he gives us,

in effect, a new memory of our old memories.

Experience the power of Christ, the Lord of time, releasing you from the pain

of the past, we can joyfully embrace the present and the future.

And third, we can invite somebody to be along with us in this holy season.

This is what we see with Mary following the visit from the angel,

during which she learned that she would conceive and give birth to the Messiah.

Mary found herself in a significant predicament.

What looks to us like the highest of honors, could well have looked to her like the making of a scandal.

What would she do? What would she tell Joseph and her family?

What would her future look like? We can imagine there were many emotions swirling

around Mary, including fear and anxiety of this young, maybe 13-year-old girl,

now woman, who was conceiving, thinking and conceiving the thought of the fact that if,

and yes, she was pregnant with the Holy Spirit's child and not with Joseph's

child and not being married,

she could be subject to stoning to death.

Her joy of having a baby may well have been dampened, if not quenched.

So what did she do? She sought out someone who could share this time with her,

someone who understood her heart.

She went to stay with her cousin Elizabeth, who was pregnant with a child who

would become known as John the Baptist.

They encouraged and supported each other. In fact, during her time with Elizabeth,

Mary gave one of the most beautiful expressions of joy and praise in all scripture

that was read this morning, the song of Mary, also called the Magnificat.

Mary found joy with a spiritual partner.

She could call Elizabeth her dance partner to recall the image of old Fezziwig's party.

I can imagine Mary and Elizabeth leaping and dancing together in joy when Mary

arrived and the baby in Elizabeth's womb leaped with joy.

Pray that the Lord will give you someone to walk with, to share with,

to make new memories with.

Maybe even pray that you can be that someone for someone else,

that dance partner, that someone who will help to rekindle joy in that person's life.

Find someone who can help rekindle your joy.

Find somebody whom you can help to rekindle the joy in their life.

Seek someone out. If you don't already have a spiritual partner, find one.

Maybe it can be the person to whom you sent the Christmas card this week saying

that you were thinking about them and praying for them.

Maybe they are your dance partner and you are theirs.

Are you hanging on to a humbug moment, something that's happened in the past?

Write it down, not to dwell on the matter, but to heal it.

Ask God to help you transform that memory.

Pray about it. Take whatever positive steps you can in the situation and then

watch God make a new memory out of that old memory.

And once he has done that, take that old memory that you have written down,

take it over to one of the candles, light that memory on fire and place it in

your kitchen sink and let it disappear.

Christmas is a season of unspeakable joy. It brings the message that God loves

us and sent his son to live among us, to die for us, and to bring us the gift of eternal life.

It is the memory and the understanding that God came to bring us joy.

It proclaims the fact that life is more powerful than death,

that light overcomes the darkness, and that nothing can separate us from the

love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Angels declared it in the hillsides. The shepherds shouted the joy through the

streets of Bethlehem, and I can't imagine what that scene was like.

Joseph beamed with joy as became the earthly father of the Messiah,

and Mary wept with pure joy as she pondered the thoughts she held deep in her

heart, knowing that God had finally come to save his people.

The name Jesus means God with us, or Emmanuel means God with us.

The name Jesus means God saves.

That's the joy that Jesus brings at Christmas, the joy of a new life in Christ,

like a newborn baby, hungry for more of God.

I don't know about you, but when I came to know Christ at age of 17,

it just seemed like I couldn't get enough of knowing more about Christ.

And I'd grown up in a pastor's family.

I couldn't get enough. I wanted to die in service to the Lord.

Not then, but at 120-some years old as a cranky old man, something like that.

Anyway, the joy of new hope in a dying world, the joy of knowing the ever new

love and mercy of a wonderful Lord.

True, Christmas can be a time of painful memories, but they can also be transported into new ones.

We can take steps not simply to deal with our memories, but to choose to make

good memories now and in the future.

For a Christmas we'll never regret. We can say to ourselves,

I will make joyful memories with those I love.

After all, it's not the memories we have, but the memories we choose to make

that will determine our joy in Christmas.

Joy is not something that we have experienced upon us.

Joy is something that we choose and what we choose to do and say and live.

How we choose to live is joy. Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, Lord of all times, Creator and Redeemer, we ask you to rekindle

the joy of Christmas in our hearts.

Forgive us for too often clinging to the wounds and the regrets of life instead of clinging to you.

Father, we know that the song of the angels is true, that the coming of Jesus

brings joy to the world and peace on earth with those on whom his favor rests.

Rest now your favor on us. Give us a new song. Give us a new hope.

Give us a new vision of your grace, your power, and your victory in our lives.

And, Father, we ask this in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

our Savior, our joy giver, the Son of God, the one who came to give us peace and joy. Amen. and.