THE WONDERFUL LIFE THAT JESUS OFFERS

FATHER JIM FOSDICK

ST. MARY OF THE SNOWS ANGLICAN CHURCH

DECEMBER 24, 2007

Lord of light - shine upon us. God of love fill our hearts with your wisdom. Holy Spirit, bring yourself closer to us in my words and how we hear them, in our thoughts and how we think them. Use this time - and use us to accomplish your good will. Amen.

“And the angel said to them, Fear not, for behold I bring you good news of a great joy that will be for all the people.” At Christmas most of us spend time, some a lot of time, trying to find that perfect gift that will bring great joy to someone close to us. What is the ultimate gift? That seems to be the question.

About a month ago a friend and former business partner of mine came to visit and he told me about a book he really enjoyed entitled The Ultimate Gift by Jim Stovall. It’s sold over 3 million copies and has been made into a movie starring James Garner of Maverick fame. He subsequently sent it to me and I read it over the course of a week. It’s a story about a billionaire who leaves various parts of his estate, money and real estate to various family members but to his nephew he leaves the Ultimate Gift. The Ultimate Gift turns out to be a series of challenges the young man must undertake in order to receive his inheritance. The challenges teach the over-indulged selfish young man important lessons about life including the value of work, learning, relationships, giving, time, and finally love. As I read it I called to mind various scriptures… teachings of Jesus that taught the same things and I wondered why the reading public found this book to be such a revelation. The one gift which the wealthy uncle apparently didn’t have himself and didn’t pass on was faith in Jesus Christ. For me the Ultimate Gift was missing from the book.

  Not the ultimate, but The Greatest Gift was the original working title for a movie most of us are familiar with. In my family we watch it every Christmas. The movie is It’s a Wonderful Life. As the seasons change, many of us find that the annual arrival of Christmas characterizes the passing of yet another year. For some, Christmas marks the close of a year brimming with happy and joyful memories while others remember only sadness and disappointment. Perhaps dreams for the past year were never realized and last year’s resolutions seem somehow to have just faded away without any progress being made. We may experience some of the feelings George Bailey feels when he feels like he never realized his dreams.

It’s A Wonderful Life, was made in 1946. The highly acclaimed film directed by Frank Capra and starring James Stewart and Donna Reed, remains one of today’s most popular Christmas films. Although those of us who have seen the film would I’m pretty sure characterize it as a ‘feel-good’ movie, the first part of the film comprises a far from ‘perfect’ story. The scenes trace the darkness of George Bailey, the leading character’s mood as his mounting personal and financial troubles plunge him to the brink of ruin and into an abyss of despair and attempted suicide. This is a story about broken dreams.

If someone were to ask us if we had a ‘Wonderful Life’, what would our response be?

In fact, how would we define a ‘Wonderful Life’? Perhaps one filled with material gain, financial prosperity or a successful and ever thriving career? Maybe a life packed with adventure, enriched by frequent and luxurious visits to foreign countries? This is how George Bailey imagined a wonderful life. Yet, realizing that another Christmas has come swiftly upon us, do we wonder if there is something more? More than we have yet to experience or discover? Is there some other ingredient to life that, without which, we simply cannot call our own life ‘Wonderful’? As I’ve said, the working title of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was originally ‘The Greatest Gift’. What ‘greatest gift’ at Christmas could possibly be enough to shatter our previous dulled experiences and reveal to us something new for the years to come?

At Christmas, we remember a man, born in a Bethlehem stable, who promises us exactly this. Indeed, Jesus Christ offers the gift of a ‘Wonderful’ Life. Jesus told us “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ tracks the fortunes (or misfortunes) of George Bailey, the unsung, beloved hero of Bedford Falls, whose every attempt to leave what he perceives as a humdrum existence in this small town is thwarted for various reasons. As a child, George was selfless, risking his own life (and losing his hearing in one ear) to save his younger brother who fell into a hole in the ice. As an adult, he gave up his dreams of traveling the world and going to college to stay at home and manage the Bailey Building and Loan Society after his father had passed away. Despite knowing that he had been forced into a job that he never wished to pursue, George is hard working and generous-hearted. During his career, he is offered a business proposition promising an impressive wage, ‘the best house in town’ and holidays to Europe from the mean spirited Scrooge-like Potter who seeks to buy George’s business and thereby gain a town monopoly. However, George rejects these offers because of his principles and in respect for his deceased father’s occupation.

Noble as his decisions seem to an objective audience, George becomes increasingly embittered, hardened and angry. He never leaves Bedford Falls, is married, has three children and watches his friends achieve ‘great things’. Meanwhile, George sees only wasted opportunities and regrets everything around him, feeling that life is passing him by.

This resentment turns to desperation when George’s absent-minded and eccentric uncle misplaces $8,000 leaving the company in a hopeless situation. His business rival Potter now has a major advantage and George feels doomed to failure with bankruptcy and a prison sentence seeming imminent. After a storming rage at home where George pushes his wife and children away, he gets hopelessly drunk at a local bar where he is punched and scorned by a schoolteacher’s husband and left bewildered, lost and alone.

I think that many of us can relate to the character of George Bailey in this film. At the climax of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, George looks back at his life as little more than wasted potential. His huge boyhood dreams to become an adventurer have amounted to nothing, while his vision to escape the mold of his family’s seemingly insignificant small-town traditions and become something significant just never materialized. On Christmas Eve, after mentally scanning his life George honestly believes that he is truly a waste of space and he contemplates suicide on the edge of a bridge. Bitter, resentful and angry, he slumps his head in his hands and prays to God.

“Dear Father in heaven. I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there. Show me the way. Please show me the way”. Convinced that he is worth ‘more dead than alive’, George wallows in regret over his seemingly pointless and wasted life. He is rescued from his jump into the icy river by the intervention of a lovable and bumbling guardian angel called Clarence, who has come to Bedford Falls in answer to desperate, calls of prayer, to show George that his life is worth living. George, who believes the world would have been a better place without him, wishes he had never been born and Clarence grants his wish. Clarence assures him “you don’t know all you’ve done” and shows George Bailey how very different the lives of his family and friends would have been if he had never lived.

As he and George travel through this nightmarish alternate reality, they observe how much worse off many people would be if George was not around. As Clarence reminds George “One man’s life touches so many others, when he’s not there, it leaves an awfully big hole”.

George comes to realize that although he never fulfilled his boyhood dreams, he was far more significant to others than he had previously imagined. In the alternative life, Mary, George’s wife, is a lonely spinster; his younger brother, Harry, is dead; George’s uncle, Billy, is in an insane asylum and Potter owns the entire town having transformed the idyllic Bedford Falls into ‘Pottersville’, an unrefined, coarse place loaded with shady looking bars. The individuals that George had given time to without even realizing it were in a far sorrier state and he decides in that moment “ I want to live again”. George chooses life.

George finally recognizes the richness of his life and he returns to his family to discover that the population of Bedford Falls, all of whom George has affected for the better, have combined their savings to save him from impending bankruptcy.

Throughout his life, George lived by a creed that always placed human need above riches, and as a result, his only real wealth was found in his family and friends.

Jesus, in the Bible reminds us of the infinite value of investing ourselves in the world of people instead of the world of money and possessions. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”

‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ has earned its legion of followers because it so effectively touches upon one basic truth of life; that each of us, no matter how apparently insignificant, has the opportunity to make a difference. It shows that the measure of our humanity has nothing to do with power, position or possessions, but how we live our lives on a day-to-day basis. The film highlights the importance of the individual and that each one of us, being born for a purpose, cannot be a failure.

Of course in theory we respond to these ideas positively and long to find deeper purpose in our lives. Yet we can also relate to the disappointment that George expresses, when we feel deprived of other people’s opportunities or we sense we have somehow never reached our potential. Perhaps, at times, we have made sacrifices for people and never been rewarded.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God says to us “My purpose is to give life in all its fullness”. This Life is ‘Wonderful’ because it enables us to reach our potential. Such a promise seems alien to the troubled, broken lives that surround us. Lives where disappointment and shattered ideals wear us down. A world where many people have come to exist with numbed and neutral expectations.

However, the good news is that for all of us, Christmas can be a time where our eyes are opened to the value that we, as individuals have in this world. Here we can see what God has to offer us in this world and the next and realize the purpose for which we were created was to enjoy God’s ‘wonderful’ life for us. Just as the angel, Clarence came down and saved George, so God, who values each one of us, came into this world in Jesus Christ to demonstrate He loves and cares for us more than we can imagine. Whatever our past has been, Jesus promises to help us change so we can have a fulfilled future.

It was when George prayed that things changed. His prayer came from his desperation, and it was answered in an unexpected way. When God showed George the important things in life George chose the life that God offered. We, like George, have an opportunity to see to the heart of what is important in this life. We are still alive and can make the coming year a wonderful one.

This Christmas need not be another one to drift past in a daze of tinsel and toys and turkey. Just as George Bailey had a choice to make between life and death on a bridge on Christmas Eve, so too we can choose to turn from the hurts and disappointments of our past and start afresh; removing ourselves from the centre of our self-created web of life and receive Jesus Christ who is ‘the Greatest Gift’, the Ultimate Gift who can guide us into a fuller life, the truly ‘Wonderful’ life.

You see both the book The Ultimate Gift and the movie It’s A Wonderful Life have something missing. You can learn all twelve of the life lessons contained in the Ultimate Gift and there will still be an emptiness in your life. You can learn as George Bailey did the importance of relationships…no man is a failure who has friends. You can learn these and many other things about this life and you’ll still be missing the one thing that matters. Jesus Christ. You see we all have a hole in our heart that only Jesus can fill. No amount of wisdom and good deeds will fill it, only He can.

So this Christmas learn the lessons that The Ultimate Gift, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Jesus are trying to teach. Mend a quarrel, release a grudge, lessen your demands on others, apologize, forgive someone who has treated you wrongly, reach out to a forgotten friend, write an overdue thank-you note, point out one thing you appreciate most about someone you live with or work with, dismiss suspicion, tell someone you love them, or give something away. You could actually do something for the poor either directly or by giving to the church so we as a community can do it. That’s why we’re here…to bring people to know the good news and then take the love of God out in the community to those in need.

Do all these things but also be sure you have received the ultimate gift that Jesus brings. The gift of a wonderful life. Pray this prayer with me. Lord Jesus I love you and I thank you for loving me. Lord I have done some wrong things, I have sinned. Please forgive my sins today. Wash them away and make me Holy in God’s eyes. Lord I want the wonderful life, the eternal life that you offer. Come into my heart tonight and stay with me forever. Be the Lord of my life. I promise to follow you forever.

If you just said these words for the first time, Happy Birthday. Tonight you have been born again. Praise God and enjoy the wonderful life he has in store for you. The good news of great joy for all people is now your good news. Merry Christmas.