Christmas Past, Present, and Future

Sermon for Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 2025
Luke 2:1-14

Here we are, in this beautiful space on this beautiful night, celebrating the realization of our hope:  the long-awaited coming of Christ the Lord, God made flesh, the One who will save us and bring us light.  For four weeks now, we’ve been marking church time, ever so slowly lighting a candle a week on the Advent wreath and waiting expectantly to see what happens next.

That’s been true for many of us.  But others have been waiting differently – waiting just to make it through a tough time.  From my perspective, closing the book on 2025 can’t come soon enough.  If you’ve lost someone or something recently, or if you’re having trouble making ends meet, or if you long for civility and common decency to be normal once again, then maybe you, too, feel weary, tired of waiting not so much in hope but in fear of what might be the next shoe to drop.

In fact, you’d be forgiven for wondering about the relevance of hope in our world at all.  Hope seems quaint, like rotary phones or TV Guide, a marker of a bygone age.  In fact, you might have come here tonight/today with some resentment or anger in your cup of Christmas cheer.  Peace?  Goodwill?  Hope?  They might sound, at best, like a nice children’s story, or, at worst, from the cynic’s perspective, like the opiate of the masses.

For me, I’ve always waited in hope for Christmas by watching certain movies – It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34^th Street, Elf, Love Actually.  This year, I haven’t watched any of them.  But, a couple of nights ago, I did feel the urge to see a Christmas movie.  So, on my daughter’s recommendation, I picked The Muppets’ Christmas Carol.

Now, A Christmas Carol is a story I imagine we all know, at least in outline.  Ebenezer Scrooge is the ultimate misanthrope – a truly awful man who describes poor people as “surplus population” and happily underpays his staff.¹  He’s visited by three spirits who show him how his choices have made life so much worse, for himself and for others.  The experience converts him to a life of love.

It’s a great story, and it sits very close to my heart.  In fact, I was in A Christmas Carol at a local theater in Springfield a long time ago, so at one point I had the whole script memorized.  And, of course, we offered our own short version of A Christmas Carol here for a decade or so, with me perhaps typecast as Scrooge.  So, Dickens’ words are in my head – and the Muppets’ version of it actually follows his language closely.

So, it surprised me to be surprised by a line I heard in this movie a couple of nights ago.  It comes at the end of the story, when Scrooge has had his epiphany.  The three spirits have revealed to him Christmas past, present, and future, each scene showing the consequences of choosing against love.  And Scrooge wakes up finally to daylight, realizing it’s morning, and he isn’t dead, and he hasn’t even missed Christmas.  Through the grace of God, hope still awaits him.  So, he arranges with a kid in the street to go buy the prize turkey in the butcher’s window and deliver it to the hungry Cratchit family.  He says, “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy.”  And as he comes to see just how good it feels to choose love, Scrooge promises the universe he will “keep [Christmas] all the year.”  That line I remembered – a lovely thought, but seemingly no deeper than what you might find on a Christmas card.  But in the Muppets’ Christmas Carol, true to Dickens’ text, Scrooge fleshes it out a bit and connects his jolly heart more directly with God’s purposes.  He says, “I will live in the past, the present, and the future.”¹

Sit with that a bit.  “I will live in the past, the present, and the future.”  That’s a line I hadn’t remembered.  But I think Scrooge is onto something there because the way he resolves to live is the way God lives – past, present, and future, all available to be lived, in any given moment.

Now let me tell you a second story, as quickly as I can.  It’s not that the story is quick – in fact, it’s the longest of them all – but this thumbnail version can be quick.  It’s the story of God.

It begins with God on top of the world – more precisely, creating all the worlds, all the universe, including this beautiful Earth, “our island home” (BCP 370).  God brings forth life over all of it, the peaceable kingdom of mutual dependence and blessed interconnection – the wolf living with the lamb and the leopard lying down with the kid (Isaiah 11:6).  And God creates humans, too, the coup de gras of creation, beings made in God’s own image and likeness, including the mirrored divine attributes of love and freedom.  God aches for the humans to choose the loving side of their nature, but these nearly divine beings choose individual interest over interconnection.  In time, they turn against each other, too, behaving so badly that God sees no choice but to start over.  Well, the flood ends up being messy and not exactly just, so God decides not to solve the problem that way a second time.  Instead, God anoints a couple of heroes, Abraham and Sarah, to journey into a divine covenant, for themselves and their descendants.  Why?  To bless the two of them and their families, sure, but also to bless everybody else, to show everybody just how good life is when you live it in God’s image and likeness.  The people of the covenant thrive and fail and thrive and fail.  God sustains them, and delivers them, and instructs them, and blesses them, even with other people’s lands.  But the people forget their covenant and choose against living in God’s image, over and over again.  Finally, God says, “Enough – enough of kings and their armies, enough of experts and their law.  I’ll send my beloved to show them what love’s supposed to look like.”

So, we find ourselves at that first Christmas, with the power that created the universe taking the appalling step of becoming a human baby, an absolute nobody and, thereby, everybody – the ultimate image and likeness of God.  People didn’t know what to do with that, especially once this incarnate Word of God started talking and teaching and training one poor Schmoe after another how to follow in his steps.  Against all odds, the movement caught on, so much so that the people in charge decided it was better to kill the power of Love than to lose their own power.  But the Word of God would not be silenced.  Christ rose from death and defeated it, sharing the Spirit of Love so his friends could spread the word, and then returning home as CEO of the universe.

And now?  What do we do with that now?  Well, now, we wait.  But it matters what we’re waiting for.  Are we waiting for God to do something more, for the sequel to the story, where God conquers sin and death completely?  You could see it that way.  Or, if you’ll entertain the possibility of a larger story with a God-sized scope of time, maybe that victory is already complete.  After all, if the baby in the manger, the Word made flesh, is truly the sovereign of the universe, that would imply there’s no serious resistance left.  Here on earth, we’re in a 2,000-year-long mopping-up action, just waiting to see the fullness of God’s victory revealed – both in our own choices, day by day, and eventually in Christ pulling back the curtain completely on creation that’s been made new.

As Scrooge said, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.  I will live in the past, in the present, and in the future. …”¹  That’s how we honor Christ, too.  We live in the past when we celebrate Eucharist, taking our seats at the Last Supper, as Jesus gives himself to give us eternal life.  We live in the present when we inhabit our role as the Body of Christ today, being Jesus’ head and heart and hands to bring the power of Love to bear in this mopping-up action of Christian life.  And we live in the future when we remember what’s yet to be fully revealed but what we’ve been affirming since the 300s as a done deal:  Christ “ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father … and his kingdom will have no end” (BCP 358-359).

In the midst of the hardness of this world and the hardness of our hearts, we can hope because God’s already got this.  What remains now – as we play the long game to face down all pretenders to Jesus’ throne – what remains now is to live hope by embodying love, joining Scrooge in his Great Commission for this present age.  So, take it as your Christmas commission, too, because it means much more than greeting-card verse.  Draw God’s past and God’s future together in the holy now by living Christmas every day.  Let your life be the light that shines in the darkness – the light that the darkness did not, and will not, and even now cannot overcome.

1.      Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46/46-h/46-h.htm. Accessed Dec. 23, 2025.