It’s been amazing to watch Charles Dickens’s beloved story, A Christmas Carol impact people so powerfully through Redwood’s six night’s of sold out dinner theatre. It’s a story that touches churched and unchurched alike with it’s simple but powerful call to care for those who have less in our society, to learn how to live beyond ourselves and own selfish wants and needs.
The passion with which a young 31 year old wrote this story is huge. It reflects Dickens’s own journey of fascination with many of the basic themes and values of the Christian faith found in the birth and life of Jesus. At the same time Dickens’s appears to have really struggled with church folk who didn’t look at all like Jesus, who went to church while at the same time being the very folk who exploited the poor and made their profits on the backs of the marginalized.
Dickens’s was raised in a nominally Anglican home, briefly attended a Baptist church that he found quite boring and for awhile in his adulthood he hung out in a Unitarian setting before moving back into Anglicanism. He never settled well in any church setting. Dickens’s, like many Canadians today, liked Jesus, but not the church. Yet Jesus remained fascinating and important to him. So much so that one of the last books he wrote was on the life of Jesus, called “The Life of our Lord.” It’s a retelling of the four Gospels so that his children would be familiar with Jesus. It was not published until 85 years after his death at this request.
When you look at A Christmas Carol you find a story about conversion and transformation, where conversion and transformation cannot take place apart from an encounter with the supernatural. The Gospels would remind us that it is ultimately through an encounter with Jesus Himself that our lives can be touched and changed forever. The Apostle John in his telling of the Christmas story, in the opening of his account of the life of Jesus, invites us to receive Jesus, the Word made flesh into our lives by believing on his name thereby having a supernatural encounter where you become a child of God, reborn of God so to speak.
A Christmas Carol is an eloquent cry for social justice, a plea to care for the poor and the oppressed. This theme is strong throughout the Gospels that teach spiritual vitality is linked to care for the poor. Mary the mother of Jesus when she found out that she was pregnant with God’s son in a psalm of praise we call the Magnificat, said, “My soul glorifies the Lord … he has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:46 ,53, NIV) Jesus himself early in his ministry, used the words of the prophet Isaiah to describe his mission: “The Lord has put his Spirit in me, because he appointed me to tell the Good News to the poor. He has sent me to tell the captives they are free and to tell the blind that they can see again. God sent me to free those who have been treated unfairly.” (Luke 4:18, NCV)
Another underlying theme in this Dickens’s classic is that call for life to be enjoyed to the full, not just by the rich, but by the poor, that we are all to “eat, drink and be merry!” It reminds me of Jesus’ words in John 10:10 that he has come that we might have life, and have it to the full. Life that is full of joy and purpose now, and life that goes on forever in eternity bringing glory to God.
Certainly Dickens’s is not overt in directly pointing people to the desire of Jesus to empower our lives so that we live lives of love that impact those in need around us and around the world. But ultimately that is what Christmas is all about, that God so loved the word that he sent his one and only son, that we might experience conversion and transformation through a work of the Holy Spirit that causes us to be people who bring the transforming love of Jesus to people wherever they are.
