Christmas In August

And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.’                                                                Luke 1.47

Most of us know the nuts and bolts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Through ghostly visitation and a hard, painful look at his past and future, an embittered miser is shown the true meaning of Christmas.
But there is a short, wonderful interlude in the Scrooge narrative that often gets overlooked amid the procession of ghosts and graveyards that has a much to say about grace than anything else in the book. And grace – the unmerited, welcoming love of God – is really what Christmas is all about, after all.
You may know it, but bear with me. Bob Cratchit and his family are preparing for their Christmas dinner. Despite their impoverished circumstances, they seem in a festive mood. Bob, ‘his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed to look seasonable’, comes home from church carrying his young son Tim on his shoulder. Tim is a crippled, as we all know; he walks with a crutch, and his legs are supported ‘by an iron frame.’ As they come into the house, Mrs. Cratchit, like all watchful parents asks how her child comforted himself in church: ‘And how did little Tim behave?’
‘As good as gold,’ answers Bob, ‘and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple; and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.’ ”
What a remarkable thing: to see in your own infirmity the potential for divine revelation. Imagine how different the world would look to us if we were able to see it through the same lens as a crippled child.
It strikes me that the grace in Tim Cratchit’s reflection lies in his willingness to see beyond the physical limitations of his world, his family’s poverty and his own handicap, beyond the pity others feel for him, to embrace the possibility that God may work through him in ways that exceed his expectations.

The reality that God redeems the world is at the heart of the Christmas story. Our response to that promise of redemption should be a faith rooted in an open-hearted willingness to see God so deeply and graciously inhabiting our lives and circumstances that every moment, every circumstance contains the promise of renewal, restoration and redemption.

It’s the wrong holiday, of course, but Tim’s theology pulses with the hope of resurrection.