God Bless Us Every One!

Sunday, Cissy and I, along with Bob and Penny Brown, were blown away by the spectacular performance of A Christmas Carol at the Imperial Theater. Before Sunday I had always thought that the best musical presentation of Dickens’ classic was at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. That opinion is history – the Augusta Players are now number one for me! After thunderous applause from an appreciative audience the show ended around five o’clock. We grabbed a quick bite and rushed to Good Shepherd for Nine Lessons and Carols. As clergy, I got to sit up front, and as I was settling in my seat looking around at the choir I thought I was back at the Imperial Theater! There was Ebenezer Scrooge-AKA Brandon Brune, Mrs. Fezziwig-AKA Rebecca Brune, Grace Smythe-AKA Mary Bryson Wright, and one of the townspeople-AKA Donovan Reimche. I know that there must have been other choir members in the show, but I had trouble recognizing them out of costume. Wow! These folks changed clothes quicker than superman, and traveled almost as fast! What a wonderful asset these talented people are to the Augusta community, and what a great gift they gave us at the Imperial and at Good Shepherd!

It’s unusual for me to be at a church service and not have to do something. This time I had the gift of being quiet and just being. When I’m not talking I can “listen.” What I “heard” from both the Christmas Carol performance and the Nine Lessons and Carols experience was a single phrase – “Joy of giving.”

The choir and the readers gave us the gift of their special talents – it was clear they were “enjoying” expressing in word and song the greatest story ever told. In this story, God paints himself indelibly into the human performance as the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. It is through Jesus that we see God, and what we see is a God who is the essence of the joy of giving. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…”

Joy of giving was Scrooge’s salvation. He learned the awesome paradox of the joy of giving, “The one who gives becomes the most grateful.”

Dickens writes of Scrooge in the end of A Christmas Carol, “that he knew how to keep Christmas well…” He kept it well by giving it away. “May that be true of us, and all of us.” And so, as Tiny Tim observed, “God bless us everyone!”

- Joe +