I’m really not a Scrooge, really, and I don’t think I hang out with many who would call themselves one either. But when I talk with people about what they are planning for the holiday season, I hear more words laced with dread than joy. It’s not even Thanksgiving yet, but I chuckle in how we are already caught up in the traffic-choked Pigeon Forge shop-o-drama to buy gifts on sale with money we don’t have and for many people we don’t know that well. What used to be one of the best times of year has increasingly become just the opposite.
Be it the current economic crisis causing us to rethink how we spend or the weariness of fluff-up-holidays, I sense a fresh counter-wind blowing in the run-up to Christmas this year. Do you? I feel the breeze blow by me on the street when I overhear a hunger for hope in something more than politics, for a true joy that is not based in a pay-check, for a peaceful place where a no-strings -attached love is truly given as a gift. Do you feel this? I do, and I am compelled to dream and wonder what would happen if we as Fountain City United Methodist Church helped remind people of the true meaning of Christmas.
I am not so naive as to suggest that this year everyone will want to come to church for the holidays, but I do sense a larger trend that we are all hungry for something deeper. I feel there is reason to be optimistic that Thanksgiving and Christmas this year might become more fully an occasion for renewal and hope, and ever less a venue for credit-card debt and squabbling over family issues that can mostly be corrected with true compassion.
We believe in a Jesus who preached about a world where power and violence no longer reign, in which peace and compassion finally prevail, where our investment in faith is worth more than our bank account, where “trivial” issues no longer remain in focus. Christ is coming to us again, through Christmas. A light in potentially the darkest time of this year, hope in a period of creeping despair — these are powerful biblical themes that can give everyone a stake in Christmas, the un-Christian, nominally-Christian, and forever-Christian.
So perhaps we can start a new trend here at our church. Maybe we can help each other embrace the realization that it is fairly ridiculous that a Holy time has yielded to one of the more unholy aspects of our character, rampant consumerism.
Maybe it’s the darkness of the current historical context that makes these flames of hope stand out so vividly to me. With the economy slowing, even retailers have cause for gloom. Yet there is always hope! Always hope! Is there a better time than Christmas to reignite it? Whose birthday is it anyway?
- Don
