When we think of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” we automatically think of the three ghosts. What were their names, again? [Pause.] Actually, there were four ghosts, not three. The first ghost to appear was the ghost of Scrooge’s former business partner, Jacob Marley. Weighed down by the heavy burden of his own sin and regrets, he comes like some ethereal John the Baptist to announce the coming trinity of ghosts who will bring about Scrooge’s redemption. “I am here tonight to warn you,” he tells Scrooge, “that you have yet a chance and a hope of escaping my fate” (Dickens, p. 15).
The first ghost … excuse me … the “second” ghost to appear is the “Ghost of Christmas Past.” This ghost was strange and ethereal … intimate … yet distant. After being shown visions of past Christmases, Scrooge realizes that the person he was doesn’t look anything like the person that he’s become. His bitterness and hurt have consumed any hint of love or joy that he once knew. His redemption begins with the realization that the path that he is on is not the path that he was meant to tread … that this was not the life that God had planned for him.
The next ghost is the “Ghost of Christmas Present.” Unlike the Ghost of Christmas Past, this ghost is very real and very present … just as this moment … right here and right now … is very real and very present. Scrooge can feel the warmth of the fire in the fireplace … he can smell the turkey on the table. The Ghost of Christmas Past showed Scrooge who he had become by showing him who he used to be. The Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge who he is by showing him what other people think of him.
These two ghosts show Scrooge exactly what he has become … the hardness and callousness of his heart … his dismissal of poverty and the needs of those around him … his total disregard and distain for humanity itself … making him realize that for all his money, what he has accumulated amounts to nothing. Jesus said: “Do no store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19) … or, in Scrooge’s case, where the cleaning woman, the laundress, and the undertaker can steal it after he dies and try to sell it at a pawn shop, amen?
At the stroke of one, Scrooge is greeted by the specter of the Ghost of Christmas Future … a “solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him. The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached … the very air through which this Spirit moved it seem to scatter gloom and mystery. It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.
“Am I in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come?” said Scrooge.
The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand” (Dickens, pp. 47-48).
You know, we often speak of being haunted by the past but it is also true that we can be haunted by the future. When Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, he cries out: “Ghost of the future! I fear you more than any other spectre” (Dickens, p. 48). And so do we. Yesterday is but a memory. It’s problems, it’s monsters cannot touch us today … they can only haunt us. The present is here, now but it is always moving towards the future where anything can happen. What horrors, what monsters lurk in the shadows … just around the corner?
Look at Dickens’ description of the “Future” – dark, draped and hooded, moving forward like a mist … you can’t see its face, its shape, its form … just like you can’t see tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Our future has no shape, no features. It is always draped or shrouded in darkness and uncertainty. We don’t know what our future looks like because it hasn’t happened yet. The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come doesn’t speak … it has no voice … just like our future has no voice. We can go to fortune tellers and soothsayers and they can pretend that they can “see” the future but they can’t speak to the future and the future can’t speak to the present. Go ahead … ask Tomorrow what will happen. See if the Future will speak and reveal its secrets. Like Scrooge, all we can do is follow the bony finger of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and walk blindly into the future and whatever fate it holds for us, amen?
Like Scrooge, I suspect that the Ghost of the Future is the one that we fear most … the one that keeps us tossing and turning in our beds at night worrying and wondering what’s going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. We fret and fear and we worry about what the future will bring … imaging all kinds of ghosts and phantoms and problems and things that could go wrong. And like Scrooge, we fret and we fear about whether the future is not somehow set … that somehow we’re on a train with no brakes … speeding God knows where headlong into the future … racing uncontrollably towards some unknown but inevitable fate … [pause] … or are we?
You can hear the hope in what almost sounds like a prayer when Scrooge pleads with the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come: “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the course be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me” (Dickens, p. 58).
Oh, my Lord! Did you hear what Scrooge just asked the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come? “If I change my ways … if I stop doing what I’ve been doing … if I REPENT … can I change my future, my fate?”
The Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come is a shadowy, dark figure reminiscent of the Grim Reaper … with none of the light of the Ghost of Christmas Past … nor the generosity and joy and clear criticism of the Ghost of Christmas Present. The phantom seems to suck light in and cast nothing but gloom in return. There is no conversation … only a relentless insistence that Scrooge continue his journey … a journey that Scrooge is fearful to take … yet knows that he must complete. Again, sounds a lot like life, amen? We have no choice but to keep moving forward on this journey of life that we must complete.
“But as I know your purpose is to do good,” Scrooge tells the Spirit, “and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart” (Dickens, p. 48). Scrooge knows that the ghost’s purpose is to wake him up … to make him a changed man. The writer of Proverbs explains it like this: “My child, do not despise the LORD’s discipline or be wary of His reproof, for the LORD reproves the one He loves, as a father the son in whom he delights” (Proverbs 3:11-12).
Courage is not the absence of fear but doing the right thing … taking the right action … even when you’re scared down to the bottom of your boots. Terrified as he is, Scrooge is actually very courageous. It took courage … a lot of courage … for Scrooge to look at his past, his present, and now his uncertain future … to face the truth of who he is and where he appears to be headed in life. Would any of you want to face the reality that these ghosts have shown Scrooge?
The Spirit stops beside a knot of business men . Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced to listen to their talk.
“No,” said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, “I don’t know much about it, either way. I only know he’s dead.”
“When did he die?” inquired another.
“Last night, I believe.”
“Why, what was the matter with him?” asked a third, taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff box. “I thought he’d never die.”
“God knows,” said the first, with a yawn.
“What has he done with his money?” asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.
“I haven’t heard,” said the man with the large chin, yawning again. “Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn’t left it to me. That’s all I know.”
This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.
“It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral,” said the same speaker; “for upon my life I don’t know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?”
“I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided,” observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. “But I must be fed, if I make one.”
Another laugh (Dickens, p. 49).
The Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking that the explanation might lie here. He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of business: very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point always of standing well in their esteem: in a business point view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.
“How are you?” said one.
“How are you?” returned the other.
“Well!” said the first. “Old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?”
“So I am told,” returned the second. “Cold, isn’t it?”
“Seasonable for Christmas Time. You’re not a skater, I suppose?”
“No. No. Something else to think of. Good morning!”
Not another word. That was their meeting, their conversation, and their parting (Dickens, p. 49).
As I said, would any of you want to face the truth of who you are and where you appear to be headed in life. Would any of you want to face the reality that these ghosts have shown Scrooge? To hear his business connections say not a single kind word about him but only wonder what happened to his money or if they are going to serve lunch at his funeral … to hear the businessmen he looked up to and sought to impress discuss the weather and go about their day as if he had hardly existed … which, to them, he hardly did. Like Scrooge, they had other things to think about … like making money and more money!
He watches as his maid, his laundress, and the undertaker barter with a seedy pawnbroker over the stuff that they have stolen from him … he sees his dead body covered with a sheet … and there’s no one there to prepare his corpse for burial … no one to sit by his bed all night and watch over his lifeless body … no one to shed a tear or grieve or say a kind word. He begs the Silent Spirit to show him “any person in the town, who feels emotion caused by this man’s death … show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you,” he begs (Dickens, p. 54).
The only person that the Spirit can show him is a married couple who owed Scrooge a considerable amount of money. “We may sleep to-night with light hearts, Caroline!” the husband sighs with relief. “Yes. Soften it as they would, it was a happier house for this man’s death,” says Dickens. “The only emotion that the ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure” (Dickens, p. 55).
A sad contrast to what Scrooge sees in the Cratchit home where Tiny Tim has also passed away. A continuous stream of people flow in and out of the Cratchit home offering their condolences and asking if there is anything that they can do to help. Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, offers Bob Cratchit’s oldest son a job. Tiny Tim is remembered with sadness and joy. Scrooge is remembered with scorn and contempt … his headstone neglected and over-grown with weeds. Tiny Tim’s final resting place is a “lovely green spot” that his father visits every Sunday. No one visits Scrooge’s grave to be with him or sit and remember him.
Scrooge’s journey leads him all the way to the grave … where he sees that he will die alone … without friends … without anybody to mourn him … his grave as forgotten and neglected as his memory.
Is this the future as it WILL be … or is this the future as it COULD be? “Spirit hear me!” Scrooge cries out. “I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?” (Dickens, p. 58).
EXACTLY!
What IS the point of all this if there is no chance of repentance? If there is no hope of redemption? Standing before his neglected tombstone, Scrooge pleads with the Ghost of Christmas Yet To come: “Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life. I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone” (Dickens, pp. 58-59).
[Pause.]
“For God so loved the world” … and all the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinners in it … “that He gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through Him” (John 3:16-17).
This process of redemption hasn’t been easy for Scrooge. It’s been a difficult and painful journey. At one point he cries out in desperation to the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come: “I have not the power, Spirit! I have not the power” (Dickens, p. 54).
Have you ever been in that place? Can you identify with Scrooge and what he has been through … what he’s feeling? Have you ever cried out to God: “I don’t have the power to do this! I want to change! I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried but I keep failing. Lord, how I want to change but I don’t have the strength … I don’t have the power that I need to change.” The Apostle Paul’s been in that place. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). Can you relate to Scrooge’s struggle or Paul’s? Do you know what it’s like to be a wretched person like Paul or Scrooge? Do you know what it feels like to want to change and not have the power?
Well …
There was a “wee” man who climbed a sycamore tree to get a glimpse of Jesus who might know what Scrooge was going through. His name was … [pause] … that’s right … Zacchaeus. The name “Zacchaeus” means … are you ready for this? The name “Zacchaeus” means “Righteous One.” What a painful irony for Zacchaeus, the Righteous Tax Collector.
Understandably, the Jews regarded tax collectors as traitors because they worked for the Romans … the ruthless and unscrupulous occupiers who had no regard for Israel’s God or the things of God. For one of their own … a Jew … to become an agent of the Roman government was seen as … well … in the eyes of Zacchaeus’ fellow Jews he was nothing but traitorous vermin. Any Jew who held such an odious and reviled office was declared “unclean” by the priests and excommunicated from corporate worship and the Jewish community.
Zacchaeus wasn’t just a tax collector … he was a “chief” tax collector. In order to become a “tax collector” you had to make a bid for the position and agree to pay Rome a certain amount of money. The tax collector got to keep anything they could rake in or extort above that amount. Zacchaeus did such a good job for the Romans that they promoted him to “chief tax collector” … which meant that Zacchaeus oversaw all the other tax collectors in a certain region. Zacchaeus was also the one who took bids and controlled who would become a tax collector … so no doubt he got a lot of bribes … and, I’m sure, that he got a cut of what all the other tax collectors beneath him took in.
All of this made Zacchaeus a very wealthy man and very hated and feared … like our friend, Scrooge. If Zacchaeus didn’t like you or you crossed him, he could simply raise your taxes … or worse, tell the Romans that you owed him money and refused to pay and you’d receive some visitors from the local Roman garrison. Zacchaeus, and those like him, had the full force of the Roman army behind them.
Scrooge wasn’t a crook. He did everything by the book. He had the full force of British law behind him. The people of Israel suffered under Rome and their oppressive tax system just as Bob Cratchit and his family suffered poverty under Scrooge’s tight-fisted autocratic rule.
You could describe Zacchaeus in much the same way that Dickens described Scrooge … as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner” (Dickens, p. 3) … and it would be a pretty accurate description. He loved money more than kin and country. He was hated by everyone. He had sold out his own people for the sake of wealth … given his allegiance to the occupying Romans and the Emperor of Rome … and worshipped the “Golden God” of money instead of the God of his ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love God with all our hearts … with all our souls … and with all our minds … and the second, which was like it was to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:36-39). Scrooge and Zacchaeus loved money more than God, more than Israel, more than Rome, more than England. As for loving their neighbors … both Zacchaeus and Scrooge exploited them for financial gain. We saw how Scrooge “loved” his neighbors. He chased off a boy singing Christmas carols. He told two kindly gentlemen that the world would be better off if the poor would just hurry up and die. He rudely turned down his nephew’s invitation to Christmas dinner … again. He begrudges giving Bob Cratchit a day off with pay. And he chooses money and career over his lovely fiancée.
The thing is … Zacchaeus must have had some understanding of who he was and where he was going in his life. He may not have been visited by ghosts but he may have been a man who was haunted by his past and by what he was doing for a living. Something led him to climb up that sycamore tree that day to catch a glimpse of a passing itinerant rabbi from Nazareth. Everyone was talking about Jesus and the healing that He had done in the lives of so many people. Zacchaeus must have heard that Jesus was more than just a good teacher but a great healer who opened His heart to everyone.
As he sat there in the branches of that tree and saw Jesus coming, I wonder what was going on in his mind … in his heart. What was he looking for? Something must have been stirring in his heart … troubling his mind. Maybe, like Scrooge, he had gotten a sense of who he was … what he had done to his life and the lives of those around him … and where he was headed if he didn’t repent and stop doing what he had been doing.
While he was up in that tree, something amazing and totally unexpected happens. With a big crowd around Him, with so many people clamoring for His attention, Jesus walks right up to the sycamore tree, calls Zacchaeus by name, and invites Himself to dinner at Zacchaeus’ house. Why would Jesus do that? Perhaps it was because Jesus knew that Zacchaeus was stuck up a tree in more ways than one. Maybe He saw Zacchaeus as he was and what he could be.
Jesus has the supernatural ability to do that … to see us as we are and to see us for what we could be. He knows our past … He sees our present … and He sees us as we could be. He looks at us with eyes of grace and love and sees us with amazing divine imagination … like a sculptor who can look at a block of marble and see the beautiful statue within … or the young couple who stand before a dilapidated old house and can see the gorgeous family home that it could become. Jesus looked at Zacchaeus and saw what no one else could see … a heart that wanted to do right … a persistent desire to undo all the pain that he had caused. “Look,” Zacchaeus professes, “half of everything I have I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything then I will restore it four-fold” (Luke 19:8).
The ghost of Jacob Marley comes to Scrooge and sets up three ghostly visits in the hope that Scrooge will change his ways while he still has a chance and a hope … and he does. When Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning, he is beside himself with joy! “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! … Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, Old Jacob; on my knees!” (Dickens, p. 59).
Ebenezer is changed … a new man. He orders the monstrous prize-winning turkey hanging in the butcher shop to be sent to the Cratchit home. He gives Cratchit a raise. He runs into one of the gentlemen who came by his office the day before asking for money for the poor and he gives him a generous donation. He provides the medical care that Tiny Tim needs to survive. He gives to the poor and repays those he’s defrauded. And can you believe it … he even goes to church to pray!
When Zacchaeus climbs that tree in search of Jesus, Jesus comes to him. When Scrooge pleads for a second chance, the Lord gives it to him. Zacchaeus wanted to change but lacked the power. Scrooge wanted to change but lacked the power. But God had the power that they lack. God has the power that we lack, amen?
I’m sure that everyone who heard Jesus invite Himself to Zacchaeus’ house must have grumbled and wondered how or why Jesus would do such a thing. What good could come out of it? Zacchaeus was beyond hope. And yet, in the Scriptures, we heard what happened. Zacchaeus was a changed man … a new man.
Everyone thought that Scrooge was beyond all hope … except for his nephew, Fred. Everyone wondered why Fred kept inviting his horrid old Uncle Scrooge to Christmas dinner every year. “He’s a comical old fellow,” Scrooge’s nephew would explain, “that’s the truth; and not so pleasant as he might be” (Dickens, p. 19). Did you hear the hope? Scrooge is “not so pleasant as he might be.” Fred knows that his uncle is not as pleasant or as happy as he has the potential to be. Fred’s faith in his uncle is rewarded on Christmas day when, to everyone’s surprise, the old Humbug appears and humbly and meekly announces that he has come to dinner.
By the end of the story, Scrooge knows what he must do … just like Zacchaeus knew what he needed to do. Scrooge’s journey will not be complete until he humbly and selflessly reconciles with his family. When his nephew, Fred, exuberantly welcomes him home, Scrooge’s redemptive journey is complete. When Jesus spread His arms wide and took our sins upon Himself and died on the cross, our journey of reconciliation with our Father in Heaven was complete.
Christmas is an invitation into a relationship with God, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Christ was born so that God might have ears to hear our wants, eyes to see our needs, hands to touch us and heal us, lips to speak the good news of God’s love and His Kingdom to come, and arms that that would be stretched out on a cross to make our salvation a glorious reality. When we accept Christ’s invitation, we discover that we have been redeemed. We have neither earned it nor do we deserve it. It is a gift from God.
What a transformation. We’ve seen Scrooge go from a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner” (Dickens, p. 3) to becoming “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world” (Dickens, p. 64). He went from edging his way along “the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance” (Dickens, p. 4) to walking on a new path, heading in a new direction, towards a new future.
This is the Gospel story. This is the Christmas story. For thousands of years, the earth has been up a tree … looking for a Messiah … a Savior. Jesus comes into our world and invites Himself into Zacchaeus’ heart and Zacchaeus becomes a new creation in Christ. Jesus has come into our world to be invited into your life … whatever your past … whatever your present … to give you a new future. You can, by God’s grace and with God’s power change the course of your life. And when you come to that place where you feel … well … where you realize that you have no actual power … that’s when you’ll discover the Source … with a capital “S” … of true power … the power of God … to change and shape lives.
The promise of Christmas past … the certainty of Christmas present … means that your Christmas future has not been written … yet. Jesus came to transform you … to transform your life … to transform your future … to make you, like Scrooge, like Zacchaeus, into a new creation … to take your heart of stone and give you the gift of a new heart … a heart for God and a heart for your neighbors.
The good news of Christmas is that we are not doomed by our past. With God’s help, we can change our present so that we can change our future. It is my heartfelt prayer that you will follow Zacchaeus and Scrooge’s example and start thinking about the commitments that you have made and the commitments that you will be making … the choices that you will have to face … more importantly, to begin thinking about who or what is going to be at the center of your life as you go forward into the future.
Honor Christmas in your heart. Try to keep it all year. Abide in Jesus, who is the Alpha and Omega … the beginning and the end … and everything in between … Who sees and knows our past, our present, and our future. Let the Spirit of God dwell within your heart and let it strive to do its work within you. Do not shut out the lessons that it will teach you. Like Scrooge, may we honor Christmas in our hearts and try to keep it all the year.
Let us pray:
Gracious God:
Enable us to allow our past, our present, and our future to strive within us ... not to discourage us but to encourage us … not to weigh us down but to unburden us.
By Your grace and by the power of Your Holy Spirit, help us to learn from our past what we need to learn and to leave in the past what should remain in the past. We pray that You open our eyes and our hearts to those around us. May Your Spirit guide us into that better future …not just for us but for our church, our families, our workplaces, our community, our world … for all Your people.
In Jesus’ name, in whom we live and breath and grow, we pray. And would all who welcome the gift of Jesus Christ into their hearts and into their lives make it so by saying … amen!
