Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

So again Christmas has come and gone – all the preparations, the shopping, the decorating, the wrapping, the cooking…and not only is Christmas gone, but school begins again on Wednesday. We are hurtling back to business-as-usual. The Baby Jesus has been born again – it turns out even Jesus needs to be born again – next week we will celebrate Epiphany, the coming of the Wise Men, which will seem very irrelevant because we will have fully resumed our normal routines by then. Christmas ends very fast.

So, what’s the difference? For some of us, Christmas was a wonderful experience – we gathered with family, some for the first time as a married couple or as parents. For some being with family or friends meant traveling or being hosts. We enjoyed each other, found deep pleasure in the giving of gifts and in the receiving, too; we ate too much perhaps, but enjoyed the shared meals and celebratory feasting. We enjoyed laughing together, playing board games or sledding or skiing or shopping. We had at least a day or two off, and some of us more than that; we read books by the fire, and we had a lovely holiday.

For others of us, this season brought pain – while some were marking the first Christmas without a beloved parent, friend or spouse, others were experiencing a more familiar pain of missing a loved one. For some, the pain came not from good relationships cut short but from hard relationships that keep on being challenging. Some experienced worse than usual anxiety, depression, anger or issues around alcohol, food or drugs. Others found the familiar grind of financial pressures building to a more acute level. For some, childlessness becomes a particular burden at Christmastime. For others, there was the thought that this Christmas might be the last, or solitude became loneliness as Christmas came and went without seeing anyone else.

The good times are better, the hard times harder at Christmas, and so for better and for worse, Christmas is about over, and once past, what’s the difference?

Many of us don’t really expect things to be any different after Christmas – for lots of people in our culture, it is the New Year that portends change. I celebrate my own personal new year today, so this week is always a special time of taking stock for me that comes a couple days before the New Year. And like everyone else, I am thinking about what I’d like to do and be differently in the coming year. And like many of you, I’m making plans for some personal changes. It’s a little peculiar that culturally the season of creating dissatisfaction with our possessions is followed by a time of dissatisfaction with our selves.

And so I’ve been thinking about how change happens and doesn’t happen. What makes things different? As I make some resolutions that I have made before, and failed at before, I want to know how change happens. What makes a person able to change? What makes a world change?

After all, at the time of the birth of Jesus, although Luke’s gospel tells the story of angels proclaiming peace while heralding the infant God’s birth, Matthew’s gospel tells quite a different story. Unfortunately, the story comes sort of out of order because we will read the preceding episode next week for Epiphany. The story we read this morning comes right after the visit from the Magi. In the Catholic and Episcopal calendars, December 28 is celebrated as the Feast of the Holy Innocents, marking the slaughter described in today’s reading, the slaughter of all the boys under 2 years of age. On my stole, which depicts the history of God’s care for people through creation, the patriarchs, the exodus, the kings, and the coming of Jesus, this episode is shown by a river of blood. We don’t talk about it much, and yet the horror of this event is told as part of the Christmas cycle of stories. There is evil in the world, and the coming of the Christ-child didn’t end it. In fact, this particular evil came because of the birth of Jesus – it was no disinterested coincidence. It was part of the cost of the joy.

I had a friend in college who had lost his faith because, as he put it, God pushes little children in front of school buses. I pointed out to him that surely God doesn’t actually push children to their doom, but he insisted that if God could stop it and didn’t, then God might as well have pushed them into the path of destruction. My friend was like many people who can’t reconcile a loving God with the reality of suffering in the world. I hope we all find this challenging. It is a challenge that is as old as Scripture, and as fresh as our own sorrow – why do bad things happen to good people? And just as vexing: why do good things happen to bad people? It’s not enough to shrug our shoulders and say “Life isn’t fair” with resignation – we’re called to care, and we do, when life’s not fair. And the continued presence of evil and suffering in the world is one reason many Jews don’t believe Jesus was the Messiah – because the prophets described what the world would be like when the Messiah comes: the lion will lie down with the lamb, swords beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, or as Isaiah 25 tells it “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” This is indeed the Messianic vision, and I think we can all understand why some people say it hasn’t happened yet. Christian faith says we’ve tasted it, but that we will realize it more fully in the future.

There is still suffering and evil in the world – and while we can agree that some things are getting better, let’s just look over the last 70 years: Hitler, Hiroshima, Stalin, lynchings, Agent Orange, and leapfrogging to recent history: Rwanda, September 11, Darfur…plus the so-called natural disasters of Katrina, the tsunami 3 years ago, 30,000 hungry people dying each week, and AIDS. Let’s not forget the individual cruelties like child abuse and infidelity, or individual suffering in cancer and mental illness. None of these is deserved. It’s a continuing experience of injustice. There is deep suffering and great evil in the world. If God’s love is real, apparently it coexists with real suffering, and that is the continuing paradox of our faith.

And so many of us wonder how change comes, and while I don’t want to suggest that our own individual frustrations with failed resolutions is a level of suffering on a par with the genocide and dislocation in Darfur, or the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem, in another sense, it still comes down to ‘how do people change?’ Somehow “each day in every way I am getting better and better” doesn’t describe the change process for me. At the other extreme, the cynical, “Life sucks and then you die” isn’t sufficient either. The fact remains that change is elusive, and yet I believe it is possible. Many of us want so very much to change, and care deeply about creating or enabling change in the world, and our faith tells us that change happens, and yet things seem to stay so cruelly the same. I seem to stay the same despite my most repeated, committed efforts at change. Yet again this year, like so many others, I am making the same commitments to habits that will improve my physical and spiritual health.

And candidates in Iowa this week are offering versions of what makes change possible. One seemed to capture an important insight when saying, simply, “change takes a lot of very hard work.” There are no instant answers – but what makes the commitment to that work possible? I remember reading somewhere that there are two times you can change: (1) when you believe you can and (2) when it hurts too much not to. The latter place is the place of 12-step groups, terminal diagnoses, and relentless honesty. But the problem for many of us is that we don’t want to experience the hurt. We want to feel better more than we want to be better – and we want comfort from our faith. The church is too often complicit with bad habits in that way – most of us prefer affirmation to transformation. And yet, transformation and truth are at the very heart of the Christian message, and are supposed to be at the heart of the Christian experience. And at Christmas more than any other time, we should find this believable. For the doctrine of the incarnation – God coming among us as one of us in Jesus Christ – is the intersection of creation and history in a way that makes newness possible. James Alison, a gay Catholic priest and contemporary theologian whose most recent book is Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in, wrote about history and creation in the December 11 issue of The Christian Century: Alison says that we tend to see creation as something that happened at the beginning and that we see history as what humans do after creation. Incarnation, says Alison, “…is predicated on an understanding of creation as permanently contemporary, as something always pulsating just beneath all matter, and, for those with open eyes, as something that announces the presence of a Creation. Incarnation is the Creator beginning to fulfill all the possibilities of history, insisting that what we humans make of the flux of matter can be turned into something that delights in and praises God.” In other words, God is active now partnering with history creatively, and in this, Alison reminds me of Douglas John Hall, who writes in his autobiographical reflection that, “In Christ, the triune God comes to us with possibilities that do not inhere in our past, in our human performance, in our ‘works,’ in our history.  The new comes to meet us.  ‘Behold,’ says the God of Jewish and Christian scripture… ‘I am making all things new.’  So we must not be fatalized by our past, by the heavy weight of historical cause and effect, by our own blundering attempts at history making.  God breaks into the vicious circle of historical cause and effect cycle and offers us new beginnings.”

This is indeed Good News. And our readings today remind us further of how the Incarnation makes transformation possible. Both readings point to it, though differently – they point to the importance of presence. The Isaiah passage describes God caring for the people, not by sending a messenger, but in God’s own presence, and in God’s love and compassion. Going back to the story from the gospel, the painful story of the Slaughter of the Innocents, which tells us, quoting from Jeremiah, that “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” K.D. Billman, who was my pastoral care professor, wrote a book with Princeton theologian Daniel Migliore, called Rachel’s Cry on the role of lament in creating hope. They point out that Rachel refuses to be comforted. She stayed present to her pain. Billman and Migliore point out that neither lament nor praise are sufficient, but that the Christian faith requires both. “…[T]he danger of praise without lament is triumphalism; the danger of lament without praise is hopelessness.”

Triumphalism is an approach to faith that assumes all the answers are in place and readily apparent. It is an approach that has no room for doubt, or suffering, or lament. Douglas John Hall writes that “The only antidote to triumphalism in the readiness of communities of faith to permit doubt and self-criticism to play a vital role in the life of faith.” We’ll talk more about doubt in the development of honest faith next week. The point today is that our willingness to be present to our own pain and doubt is a necessary precondition to hope.

And a friend of Jason and Shen’s this weekend as we were chatting about her recent experiences in Uruguay, reminded me of the importance of our being present to others. Our willingness to be present to each other in our own pain and in the pain of the other is the precondition for genuine transformative community. It turns out that the Christian life is all about presence – being honestly present to ourselves, being fully present to another, and receiving the presence of God. This is what the contemplative tradition is about – being fully present to intimacy with God. In the incarnation, Jesus lived intimately with us, and invites us into intimacy with one another and with the Divine. In being fully present to each other as we actually are, we are able to embody the love of God, a love which sees us as we are and also sees the possibilities that are already present within us.

So what’s the difference? I think the difference comes down to paying attention – which is another way to say being present. I believe God’s Word teaches us that when we take the time to be present to God, to ourselves and to each other, we will be transformed in accordance with God’s vision for us. It might not yet be our dream for ourselves, but real change is indeed possible. Beyond our experience of changes for ourselves, as we consider the world, this leads to prayer like Mother Teresa’s, “Lord break my heart, and let the whole world fall in.”

When can we change? “When we believe we can, and when it hurts too much not to….” So perhaps being present to God, to our own pain, and to each other will enable us to catch God’s vision, to believe in the possibilities, and to support one another along the way. May it be so, may we be so. Amen.