Caught In Chains We Cannot See Transcript

This time of year. It's challenging at times. It's a blessing most of the time, but this time of year marks when we enter into stories and songs. We often dive into the things that we've heard before, over and over again, those Christmas carols that we sing every year, the advent hymns that we remember fondly, and we find comfort in reading these stories and singing these songs each year because they bring up those memories for us. Some families have that tradition of reading the night before Christmas together on Christmas Eve; that's where they find that comfort and bring forth those memories of joy and laughter of having heard it sitting on their father's knee or grandfather's knee. 

For me, one of those stories is the Christmas Carol. It is one of my favorite Christmas traditions to find any new version of that that I can find to watch, and some have been really, really good, and there are some really bad ones there. We're talking Ghostbusters cartoon from the 80s telling the story of the Christmas Carol, or bad. On the other hand, we have my favorite, which is the story with the one with Neil Patrick Stewart as Scrooge, and, of course, my ultimate favorite, the muppet Christmas Carol. That's high level, and everything else is in between. My other tradition is to read the story every year, roughly around the last two weeks of Christmas. I'll read a bit, going back and forth and reading a bit at a time and slowly finishing it before Christmas. I always needed to understand why. Why was I attracted to this story? It's a great story, but there are so many other good Christmas stories to hear there are movies abounding. Why do I seek out and find the ones I've heard so often? And why this story? Over the next four weeks, we will explore this story through our Advent season. We will dive into each section, learn from it, and tie it with the Scripture and, I hope, experience and live out the gospel story and the process. 

So today, we begin with Ebenezer. Ebenezer before he had been visited by the ghost before anything in the story had happened. And if you don't know the story, I hope this fills you in, and you may want to watch them up at Christmas Carol for a really entertaining refresher of the story before we dive in even further. But Ebenezer screwed was known as a tight-fisted hand of the grindstone, the sort of man that trampled on the poor, ignored them completely, and if that wasn't bad enough, he made their lives miserable. Anyone who would wish him Merry Christmas would reply Bahumbug, right, this has hated Christmas. He hated the joy and laughter that it brought. He didn't see himself in it, and we start to understand why throughout the book. But at the beginning of the story, we know this man who absolutely hated the poor, who said it would be right If they didn't want to go to the poor houses if they didn't want to go to the prisons if they didn't want to go into the workhouses, then they ought to die. There was no room for the poor in his heart and life. This is how our story opens. 

It's very similar to the passage we just read where we have the rich man feasting at a table, enjoying the food and all of the goodness that comes with having that wealth. Wearing purple linens didn't stand out to me, and as I was wearing my purple stole today. Still, he was feasting at the table, and just outside of his door, just outside of earshot, just outside his table feast was a poor man named Lazarus. The Scripture compares these two in that Lazarus was covered in sores, and the dogs would come and lick his sores, and all that he wanted in life, all that he longed for in life, was to get some of the food that had fallen off the rich man's table onto the floor. We see these parallels between the rich man and Scrooge. But what we experience in the Christmas Carol, what we experience in today's Scripture, is this understanding that we do have a limited time. There is a short window of our lifetime where we can make changes in our lives, where we can be transformed, our attitude on life, how we treat other people, how we encounter the divine, and how we live with our fellow man. We have a short window where things can be transformed. For Lazarus, the transformation did not happen or sorry; for the rich man, the transformation didn't happen. They had gone through their whole life with Lazarus eating and poor and suffering and agony from the sores and being hungry, and the rich man going through life with his riches, and then they both die. 

On one side of the chasm with Father Abraham is Lazarus, who lived in agony in his old life, and on the other side, you have the rich man burning in agony and hate at ease. And the rich man calling up to Father Abraham, not even to Lazarus, but Father Abraham saying, send Lazarus to help me. He still doesn't see Lazarus as a fellow human being. Send Lazarus to help me. Send just a drop of water off his finger for my tongue. And Father Abraham says you know he can't do that. First of all, when you were in luxury and living up life, and he was in agony, you did not lift up his agony. You did not let morsels fall from your table to feed him. But even if he wanted to, he couldn't because of this division, this chasm between them. 

The story shows that what we do in this life matters, and the time that we have matters, and we ought to use it well, ensuring that we keep our eye on our fellow men, how we treat them, and how they're living. And then we go back to the Christmas Carol. We have this play on the same imagery, where you have Scrooge, who hates Christmas, hates his fellow man, wants to be alone, has hoarded wealth, and has kicked people out of their homes because he was a money lender. They couldn't pay his bills or interests, and he would charge them exorbitant interest, and people would suffer His own worker. He would not pay him enough to care for his whole family. We see these echoes of this gospel story, this parable that Jesus is telling, in shaping this Christmas Carol. But there's one difference. Unlike the parable where nobody can make that chasm between Hades and the Promised Land or between the living and the dead, Scrooge has a friend that comes back to him in ghost form, Marley, and warns him that he's going to be visited by these three ghosts the past, the present and the future and to be ready Now. 

What we find at the beginning of the story, and one of the reasons why I really like The Muppet Christmas Carol, is because it makes a visual reference to the chains that Marley talks about that Scrooge has already had. Scrooge has no idea these chains are wrapped around him. He has no idea how bound he is in this life. He has no idea that the way he is living not only separates him from the rest of mankind but also wraps him up in chains that he cannot see or feel and keeps him utterly bound in this life. He cannot live life to the fullest. He cannot experience all that life has to offer. He has no idea how terribly bound up he is as he goes about his life. He thinks this is the normal and better way of living. 

When we are shown in these stories and images that he is genuinely confined, with all of his wealth, prestige, and everything going on, he thinks he has the security he longs for, but in reality, he has no freedom. How many of us are in our lives today? How many of us who are here find ourselves bound by unseen chains? How many of us here think we have freedom and have it suitable but are bound up by things we do not even realize are binding us? For Scrooge, it was that desire for a sense of security, that desire for money and wealth and self-importance isn't quite the right word, but this idea that he only needs himself, self-reliant. He sees freedom in that, but in reality, it's binding him from experiencing the fellowship of those around him, experiencing the joy and laughter that life brings, experiencing the freedom that Christ offers as Christ tears away those chains that we wrap ourselves in because we are always doing it, whether it's our desire for security, our desire for stability, whether it's our desire for things to remain familiar to us. What can seem excellent and hopeful and securing, if taken too far and let drive us so much, ultimately wraps us in chains that we cannot see. 

We see the effects of this in our world today as we try to divide ourselves from the other. We try to set ourselves apart and say the people with us are correct and sound, and the people who are not with us disagree with us, look different from us, are separate, and are wrong. As long as we can keep those two things separated, I am secure, the world is proper and sound, and I can live. We see this in the world as it tries to divide among race and gender, trying to decide and define norms and expectations. We say these people are good because they look and act in ways we like, and anyone who isn't doesn't belong. We see Christian groups doing this all of the time, unfortunately, trying to decide and defend this. Some crazy idea is that white Christianity is the best way to go and is the fullest expression of divine love. And this is true. These groups exist, these Christian churches exist, trying to create those divisions because we feel safer when we're with people who are like us, who think like us, who worship like us, who dress like us. In reality, when we try to create those boundaries, when we try to create that separation, we try to keep people at bay, we end up wrapping ourselves in the very chains that keep us confined and from experiencing the fullness that God has in store for his world, his community, his church. 

Just this weekend, I took Joshua to Philly for a board game convention on Friday. I know I'm weird. We can talk about it out there if we have that time. But there is that temptation, even walking off the subway, through the station, and through the streets, and you see that person saying, do you have any change? Do you have any money? Can you help me out here? And there is that temptation to ignore them completely, to try to separate them. Walking on the other side of the street, you don't want to say no because saying no is just wrong. I should be helping people experiencing poverty. So if I can't hear them ask, pretend I didn't hear them, or pretend that they're not there, then I don't have to say yes, but I don't have to say no either and feel bad about it. 

About five or six people were just from the train station to the convention center. I would like to know if you have a chance to help me. I've got to admit I hardly ever carry cash, and I literally did not have anything, and I had to tell them that. But it was the truth at the time. But there was that temptation of, if I just turned my head down, I'd look away, pretend I didn't hear them. Other people are walking around me that can answer them. This line to get into the convention center was three people deep-wrapped around the block at one point. Other people will say yes, and other people will have money. But if I give into that temptation to ignore, if I give into that temptation to not look them in the eye and say I'm sorry, I can't, even if that at the minimum, we are wrapping ourselves in chains that bind our actions, bind our hearts, bind our souls, when we ignore our fellow man when we ignore the needs around us when we pretend they don't exist or pretend we don't have any role in it. 

The whole point of this first part of The Christmas Carol is to establish Scrooge as this person who has cut himself off, is bound in chains, and is bound beyond hope. He is so far gone. In this first stave, we hear the beginnings of the gospel message that I want to share with you today before we move on that no matter how far down the hole you've gone, know how bound you are, no matter whether or not you feel like there is room for hope, there is always room for an in-breaking of something supernatural to bring about the work. Now, in The Christmas Carol. They're ghosts, they're spirits, there's all of that, and we're gonna talk about each of those ghosts and what they might mean. 

But for us as Christians, for the world, as it is now bound up in the chains that we build for ourselves, there is the hope and the promise of the Holy Spirit, that supernatural ghost, that supernatural outside-of-reality divineness that is working within us to call us and say look at the chains that you're surrounded in, look at your life right now. Take a look and don't just see what you wanna see, don't just see what your eyes let you see, but take an honest look, and are you truly free? Because the first step of redemption, the first step on Scrooge's journey, the first step on our journey is recognizing where we are, recognizing who we are, recognizing the ways that we bound ourselves up by our sins, by our station in life, by the ways that we wanna separate ourselves from others and see the chains as if, for the first time, the Holy Spirit is what gives us that ability to see them, to recognize them and then seek out to be rid of them. And there's a lot of ways that we try to ignore the Spirit's prompting and a lot of ways that we say no, that's not God, that's just a piece of indigestion, it's a little bit of heartburn. It's not God telling me anything. 

We come up with reasons to stay in the chains because they're comfortable and we don't see them. Only when the Spirit works at us, constantly pokes us, prods us, and says, "Look, look at you. There is freedom, hope, and a reality beyond all expectations. That's possible, but you've got to get rid of the things binding you to experience it. Sometimes that's pain from the past, sometimes that's something like loneliness in the present, sometimes it's a fear of the future. 

The chains that bind us are plentiful. They come back even if we get rid of them if we need to be more careful. But there is always hope because God's Spirit is always with us, calling us to see Him and how we wrap ourselves in these false chains and see how we are genuinely brown so that we can cast them away and experience the fullness of life. And so, over the next couple of weeks, we look at these chains of the past: how our past shapes us, how it builds us, how it can set us free, and also how it binds us. Following week, we look at the present, how our current lives build up those chains, and what is available even now if we experience and claim that hope and freedom. And then those chains of the fear of the future, how the future can either be something that we are terrified of and want to avoid at all costs or something that can give a promise and life and future and give us hope. 

Then, on Christmas Eve morning at 10 am, we take a look at my favorite scenes of the Christmas Carol story and why I prefer the one with Patrick Stewart of having gone through and tried to break those chains of past, present, and future with supernatural help, the joy that comes with Christmas. This joy comes with that freedom. So that's our pathway in the future. This is like a sermon series that I've always wanted to do, and I haven't done it yet because I love this story so much, but I hope you'll join us throughout it. If you can come, it indeed will be a blessing. Thank you.