Fr. Abbot Brendan Coffey
C.S. Lewis wrote a Christmas essay about the fictional island of Niatirb – Britain spelled backwards, where every citizen is obliged to send to each of their friends and relations a square piece of card stamped with a picture. Finding cards from someone to whom they also have sent cards, they throw them away and give thanks that this labour is over for another year. Finding cards from someone to whom they have not sent, they beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and, having sufficiently lamented their misfortune, they put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain and buy a card for them also. Sound familiar? Is this really, what Christmas has become?
Nothing, however, says Christmas in this part of the world like Charles Dickens. He has shaped many of our Christmas traditions with his stories. These dominate the Christmas Season even today and first among them is undoubtedly the heart-warming tale, A Christmas Carol. From Tiny Tim to Ebenezer Scrooge, this story has captured our attention like no other.
Ebenezer Scrooge is a central protagonist in this tale, but who, or what, is an ebenezer? Did you know that the word “ebenezer” comes from the First Book of Samuel? The Philistines had stolen the Ark of the Covenant. The country was in disarray. It was then the people turned their hearts back to the Lord. Samuel set up a stone and named it “Ebenezer” meaning, “the Lord has helped us”.
An ebenezer is a memorial of God’s faithfulness and our repentance. The stone is a marker for transformation and conversion and this is exactly what Ebenezer Scrooge becomes in Dicken’s story.
Gregory of Nazianzus tells us that instead of garlanding our porticoes and titillate our taste-buds, we should luxuriate in the word and in the law and narratives of God. So for a moment let us do just that.
When human history is complete and the last books are written, one of the saddest lines in all of that history will be this one: “there was no place for them in the inn”. How strange and how very sad that God simply doesn’t fit into our world and yet on this holy night his favour rests on each of us, on our communities and families and on all who suffer and feel afraid. Mary and Joseph, for whom there was no room, are the first to embrace the One who comes to give all of us our document of citizenship, for this night the Lord has truly come to help us. God has set up his own ebenezer.
Our gospel tells of a world thrown into turmoil for a census: but what Augustus and no one else realised was that this turmoil had the hand of God behind it. A virgin named Mary, betrothed to Joseph of the house of David, arrived in Bethlehem, the city of David for the census, “while they were there, the time came for her to have her child and she gave birth to a son, her firstborn.” It is all said so simply, just one sentence, and indeed that was how it seemed to everyone at the time too.
In Bethlehem, a small chink opens up for all who have lost their way, their land, their country and their dreams. Once in our world, a Stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world. God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of great power. He chose instead to be incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. The faith we proclaim tonight makes us see God present in all those situations where we think he is absent, for God has come to help us.
All of the trappings of this Christmas Season are only significant insofar as they are “ebenezers.” They are important because they mark a change and remind us of the change that is happening now and that is still to come; for I too am called to become an Ebenezer, “O Christian be aware of your nobility, it is God’s own nature that you share.”