Pastor's Corner: Scrooge and 'Messiah'

    I remember growing up listening and finally singing the “Messiah” in my mother’s church choir for many years. Handel’s “Messiah” has a great message about the Lord’s redemption, as does the reading of a man’s transformation in Dicken’s character Scrooge.

     For more than 273 years since its premier in Dublin, the “Messiah” has inspired audiences the world over. It opens with a tenor recitative from Isaiah, “Comfort ye, comfort ye, My people, saith your God,” and rises to the heights in the “Hallelujah Chorus,” and closing with the thrilling lines, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,” it joins the remarkable selection of Scripture with the inspired musical score to usher we the listener, or worshiper, into a kind musical heaven.

     It moved from Ireland to England in 1759, and on April 9, at Covet Garden, Handel, then nearly blind, made his last public appearance, dying eight days later on the eve of Easter Sunday. “Messiah” moved from England to Germany, where at one performance there were a thousand singers and instrumentalists. In 1770 parts of the oratorio were sung for the first time in the United States in a New York tavern.

     The night visitor in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” Marley’s ghost, warns his partner, Scrooge, that a grim fate like his awaits him if he does not change his ways. Scrooge replies, “But you were always a good man of business Jacob.” Marley answers, “Business … Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business: charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.”

And, after the “miracle” of Scrooge’s transformation, it would be good to ponder the words that summarize the change, “Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew … and it was said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”

     The incomparable Christmas story we find in Luke Chapter 2, and these two pieces, “Messiah” and “A Christmas Carol,” set a wonderful tone for Christmas.

Merry Christmas!

Pastor Michael O’Hearn

Kremlin and Goldstone Lutheran Churches

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church