December 12, 2021
Luke 3:1-6

By John Wagner, co-chair of United Methodists for Kairos Response

Scrooge’s goodhearted nephew Fred has come to his uncle’s office to wish him a happy Christmas. Scrooge calls Christmas a “humbug” and angrily declares it has no real meaning and no real value. Fred responds that for him it is a sacred time, but also “a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time” and the only season, “when... one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely” and remember how we are all “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” Of course, by the end of the story, Scrooge is completely won over to Fred’s point of view, in large measure because he is given the extraordinary opportunity to peer into the lives of those who were previously invisible to him. He now sees their well-being as intimately connected to his.

Charles Dickens, the creator of these characters in “A Christmas Carol,” wrote during the Victorian era in England, and along with social reformers like the early Methodists might appear today as paternalistic in their concern for the poor and marginalized. But accepting other people as real children of God, bearing witness to their afflictions, and then being moved to action … is a necessary step for those living in any century.

In 2008 an odd set of circumstances led my annual conference to send me on a tour of the Holy Land sponsored by the General Board of Global Ministries. Afterward, I was supposed to teach the United Methodist Women’s study on Israel and Palestine at their School of Mission. I have to say that prior to this I had no real inclination to visit that part of the world – it was never on my bucket list. But I went and encountered people and situations previously invisible to me. The suffering and oppression I’d only read about was real. I came back home determined to respond to the call of Palestinian Christians who were asking us to do what we could to help.

In our churches, we gather with people of all sorts who have all kinds of approaches to politics and the Bible. Yet as a pastor for 40 years I can attest to the fact that when injustice is seen up close most Christians want to do something. We may strongly disagree about how to go about it, but the stakes are high enough that we have the energy to work through those differences. I’ve been privileged to see courageous Christians confront their own prejudices and side with unpopular causes time and time again.

Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, is right. This season, more than any other, invites us to connect ourselves to the fates of other human beings, to view them as fellow passengers in this life and “not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” We get a sense of this when the angels proclaim “glad tidings of great joy for all people.” (Luke 2:10) Let’s not wait for ghostly visitors on Christmas Eve to tell us what we already know, namely, that we Christians are to act on what we’ve seen and heard, and do so with the strong hope that the love of Christ can be made real in this world.

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John Wagner serves as a pastor in Ohio and as co-chair of United Methodists for Kairos Response.