Those Pesky Christmas Ghosts

A couple of Sundays ago, I volunteered down in KidCity. I was with three and four year olds. I seriously love that age group. Anyway, in walked a sweet-looking young man wearing an outdoor vest. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his open hand, and told me, “I got worms.” Indeed he did: two live, actively squirming, healthy worms. Now that’s quite a treasure to bring into Sunday school class – especially in December! It was a good thing I actually like worms. (With five older brothers, making the choice to like worms was purely self-defense.) I tried to talk the young man into giving the worms a new home, in a plastic cup. He would have none of it. I used my teacher voice to let him know that if his worms came out of his pocket again, they would need to spend some time in the cup. He mostly complied, only checking on the not-quite-as-lively-anymore worms once more toward the end of the Sunday school hour. I’m not a novice at teaching Sunday school. I taught two-year-olds most Sunday mornings for maybe 18 years before “retiring” a couple of years ago. Recently I started volunteering again, once a month wherever I am needed. In all those years of helping with Sunday school, this is the first time, as far as I am aware, that earthworms have participated in one of my classes.

You may wonder what earthworms in Sunday school have to do with Christmas. Well, the truth is, I am looking for something to shake up my Christmas celebration the way those worms shook up my day teaching Sunday school.  The familiarity of all the holiday traditions, the carols, the gift exchanges, the cookie exchanges, and even the Bible narrative can rob the holiday of its magic. It can become rote rather than reverent. And it’s easy for us to become distracted, because as grown-ups, we are in charge now - and Christmas won’t happen if we don’t get everything checked off our lists, right?

We need a way to recapture the thrill of Christmas. I started thinking that maybe Charles Dickens had it right in his classic, A Christmas Carol.  Everyone remembers how Ebenezer Scrooge was confronted by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future in order to restore his sense of awe, his compassion, and his joy. Is that what would it take for me to change my ways?

Dad and Mom, in October of the year she
passed away.

First of all, I would like to tell you that Christmas does have ghosts, and that’s not just a part of a Dickens’ story.  I personally carry the Ghost of Christmas Past with me into every Christmas season. December 19 marked the anniversary of my mom’s death, sixteen years ago. I miss all the joy and love she added to Christmas. I miss her and my dad, who also passed away in December, ten years after my mom. The memories of their lives and their deaths are all tied up in my celebrations of Christmas. Many of us, and many of our close friends and family, grieve deeply during the Christmas season. How can so much joy and so much grief coexist? I am not entirely sure, but I do know that I have experienced the intermingling of the two. As my dad took the step from this world to the next, my brothers, sisters-in-law, R.J., and I stood around his bed, holding hands in a circle that included him. We prayed, telling him that the hard part was over. He didn’t have to fight anymore; he could just go be with Jesus. It was as we prayed that Dad entered heaven. There was profound grief in the loss I felt instantly, and yet there was also an overwhelming joy in knowing what Dad was experiencing at the very moment of my grief. Christmas is the result of a plan that God set into motion in the Garden of Eden, the moment He started grieving His separation from humanity. Sin entered the world, and with it, death. What is almost unfathomable is to think that God loves us so much that He didn’t let sin win. “Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15) Grief is a part of life, and the Bible says that God cares for the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18 & 147:3). I have a mental image of God reaching down to dry our tears with hands still we from His own tears. Allowing ourselves to let joy into our hearts, even in times of great sorrow, is a matter of trusting God with everything. That isn’t easy, but it’s the path to dispelling, or at least reconciling with, that Ghost of Christmas Past. 

“Joy to the world, the Lord is come!” We sing these words, and we mean them; but Christmas today seems to be filled with the frivolous, covered in chocolate, and strung with colorful lights. We want something more. The Ghost of Christmas Present is easy to find. He looms in the stress I put on myself each year, trying to avoid the worldly and make Christmas perfect. He adds a spirit of discontentment to the holiday season. My family photo Christmas cards arrived late last week. Hmm, not a lot of time to turn those puppies around and get them sent out before Christmas! I still might do better than last year, when I finally sent out my 2013 Christmas cards for Christmas 2014. Each year, I put all kinds of pressure on myself in a search for something unattainable: perfection. When things aren’t perfect, in creeps that discontentment. I don’t always see it that way in the moment. I tell myself I have a right to be grumpy at long lines, late packages, unreasonable family members, and whatever else is getting in my way. But searching for perfection in this holiday is not the same as searching for the Perfect One. This point was driven home for me a few years back when I was preparing for the Christmas program with my preschoolers from Kingdom Kids. We were entering the sanctuary to rehearse for the program. I was firmly entrenched in the mundane details of getting the kids on stage, practicing their songs, and moving on; I was definitely in a “get-‘er-done” sort of mode. I was at the front of the line, with 17 wiggly, excited four-and five-year-olds following closely behind me. The little girl right behind me audibly gasped as we walked into the sanctuary. “It’s Jesus!” she said, looking up. She looked at the stained glass window with eyes open wide. I need to remember that feeling of awe when I come into God’s presence, and I need to come into His presence often, especially during the Christmas season. I can’t let the distractions or inconveniences of the day keep me from embracing Him.  I need to keep Christ involved in every moment of my holiday preparation, because Christmas is and always has been all about Emmanuel – God with us. This very day we need to recapture that Christmas joy in order to be able to share it with our friends and our families.

The beautiful stained glass window at our church.

Dickens wrote the Ghost of Christmas Future as a dark character. For me, this ghost is represented by worry. Worry, at its best, can possibly help you discern some things you need to pray about. At its worst, it will rob you of the joy of what IS and cause you to dwell on what MIGHT be. It can take you to a very dark place. I believe worry, or its best friend, fear, contributed significantly to my father-in-law’s suicide. Worry can make you feel helpless and hopeless and can deplete your emotional strength. I don’t think of myself as a worrier, and yet a certain amount of things continually weigh on me. My greatest fears or worries are for my loved ones. Whenever I hear of someone I love getting a divorce, I worry about all marriages. I have several friends with cancer, and that causes worry for them and for their families. I would love to say that I pray for them and then the worries all go away. I can definitely say I do pray for them, but then I tend to hang on to the worrying. The future is…well, it’s unknown! It cannot be known. Worrying gets me nowhere, and it gets in the way of my relationship with God. When I think about worry at Christmas time, I think about how much Mary and Joseph could have worried about. They were far away from home, about to have a divine baby, and unsure of people’s reactions to their situation. God had it all in His hands, but WOW – that was a lot of cause for worry – or even fear. The Bible doesn’t speak about them worrying. What it does say is that when Mary was told she would be the mother of God’s son, she responded with, “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.” (Luke 1:38) It looks to me as though she chose to trust rather than to worry or fear. Christ can do that for us, if we let him. “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”  Tonight, yes even right this moment, help us to put all our worries out of our minds and fully embrace our Lord and Savior, and the gift of Christmas.

Grief, discontentment, and worry all melt away in the presence of the Christ child. With a full heart, I can turn away those Ghosts of Christmas as I “come adore on bended knee, Christ the Lord the newborn King.” Amen and amen.

(Quotes from the classic Christmas hymns "Joy to the World," "Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem," and "Angels we have Heard on High.")