December 28, 2008 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Hard Times

Adam Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 148
Isaiah 61:10–62:3
Luke 2:22–40

“When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord,
they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.”

Luke 2:39 (NRSV)

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

Richard Wilbur
“Year’s End”

This story from Luke is from one of the most well-known chapters in all of the Bible. The chapter begins, “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be enrolled” (Luke 2:1). It’s the beginning of the Christmas story, including Mary and Joseph and wrapping the baby Jesus in bands of cloth and laying him in the manger, as well as the story of the shepherds being visited by an angel of the Lord and coming to see the baby Jesus. That story is, of course, always read on Christmas Eve; it is then followed by today’s story, which far fewer of us know, because it’s always read on the Sunday after Christmas, when many folks, feeling a bit churched out, choose to sleep in. So it seems like, first of all, I should give an enthusiastic welcome to all of you who showed up to God’s house today. I greet you on behalf of Simeon and Anna, two people who are featured prominently in this second half of the second chapter of Luke. I’m sure they would be pleased that you’ve come to hear their side of the story. And for my own part, I’ll say it’s good to have you here with me today. I preached last year on the Sunday after Christmas. I got some great feedback after I told you that this is the Sunday when you’re sure to see the youngest member of the clergy staff in the pulpit. Well, I’m back again this year, and the good news about that is that while I may have turned thirty since my last post-Christmas sermon, I’m here to tell you that all of my associate pastor colleagues are still older than me—and I hope that they’re all thinking about that today (especially my friend and colleague Calum MacLeod, who is taking the day off this morning to celebrate his forty-first birthday).

Today, on this first Sunday after Christmas, we hear a passage of scripture that I think goes somewhat unknown and unappreciated, and that is a shame, because it addresses a part of Christmas that we all experience: this passage talks about what life is like just after Christmas. Following the birth of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, good law-abiding Jews that they are, take their child to be circumcised on his eighth day, and they hear a prophecy about what is to happen to him (I’ll return to that in a moment). But then when Mary and Joseph leave the temple, they go home, and now they have a child to raise. Just like for you and me, Christmas ends, and Mary and Joseph get back to the challenges of everyday life.

It’s my hunch that this is what life is like for most of us, post-Christmas. The Christmas rush is over, and for some that means getting back into a quieter time, and for others it means moving from one rushed season right into another, and for still others it means getting back to all of the things that you put off last month.

The days leading up to Christmas have a way of helping us forget about things that then reappear after the holiday is over. We spend money on gifts and dinners in December, but the bill arrives in January. We try to be extra nice to friends and family at our holiday gatherings, but after Christmas, all the old relationship tensions are back again. Soldiers send us season’s greetings during television commercials in December, but in January, the news reminds us that the soldiers are still over there fighting a war.

On December 26, I got up in the morning and read the New York Times. Listen to some of the things I read, none of which have anything to do with Christmas, but there was a post-Christmas feeling to the stories that just jumped right off the page at me that morning:

Paul Krugman wrote an editorial in which he noted the tremendous optimism that surrounds President-elect Obama but then noted skeptically that once things aren’t going well, much of his base of support may disappear.

There was a front page article about the Bush’s administration’s creation of almost 1,300 community health centers, which have been “lauded as a cost-effective alternative to hospital emergency rooms”; they are places where the uninsured and underinsured often seek care. Just a few sentences in, the article transitioned almost immediately to the leftover problems in the healthcare system, particularly the limited access and increasing costliness of primary care, problems that have only been magnified in recent weeks as people continue to lose jobs and, along with jobs, health insurance.

That morning after Christmas, the whole paper seemed to be full of stories of some small good from the past year immediately followed by a litany on the chaos that awaits us in the next year. It seemed poignant to me that on that same day, the Times carried an expansive obituary story for Harold Pinter, the playwright known primarily for “anxious pauses” in his plays, “strategically placed gaping pauses . . . that often placed the audience on a scary precipice as they waited to see what might come next.”

It occurred to me that Christmas itself is followed by an anxious pause, and here’s why: You and I both know that each year, during Advent, we the clergy stand up here in front of the church and say that Christ is coming to make all things new, to fundamentally change what it means to be human. And then there’s the anxious pause—will it happen this year? Followed by the letdown: as soon as December 26 rolls around, we can all see rather clearly that not much has changed. People are still losing their jobs and their savings. We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the situation in Gaza seems to be worsening yet again. Poverty and disease, domestic violence and divorce, drug abuse and family strife still beset our world in every corner. Is the church lying to you about the promise of Christmas? What’s the point in being faithful to a story that keeps telling us about things that, year after year, don’t come true?

This is why I think it’s so important to hear this morning’s part of the Christmas story, the part that takes place after Mary and Joseph leave the manger, in the anxious pause before they go home. Let me tell you the story:

Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the temple to be circumcised, and it’s there that they meet Simeon. Simeon is a sort of holy man, something of a prophet, and he has been waiting his whole life for the baby Jesus to be brought to the temple; Simeon has been told by the Holy Spirit that he will not die before he sees the Messiah. And Simeon sees the baby Jesus with Mary and Joseph and knows who he is at once, and then Simeon says this to them, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and [he is destined] to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:34–35). Simeon tells Mary and Joseph that their precious newborn son will lead a life of great struggle. And the story says that Mary and Joseph were amazed at this—a better translation of the original Greek is actually that they were in “great anxiety”—at what was being said.

In the course of his life, Jesus will grow up and one day leave home, and many will turn against him and the lessons that he teaches, and like many times and places in our own lives, in many times and places Jesus’ life will be quite hard. And notice this: in the midst of all of this, there’s this statement that’s very hard to get your head around—the last line of today’s reading says that as Jesus grew up in the midst of struggle, “the favor of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40).

How could anyone have looked at Jesus and his family and said, “The favor of God is upon them?” How can you count yourself blessed when there is so much struggle to deal with? It’s just like the question we might ask: If Jesus has come to change everything, why is there still so much that is so bad? Why is there still so much struggle for us? Is the promise of Christmas a lie?

The truth, I think, is this: the story of Mary and Joseph going to see Simeon shows us that even at the first Christmas, the coming of Jesus did not mean that all the problems would go away. And it’s important to realize that that’s not what we are here for either. The promise of Christmas is not that Christ comes to take our problems away and to make us whole and complete. The promise of Christmas is that God has come into the broken world to experience with us what it means to live lives of struggle and to yearn with us for something better.

At first that seems like a pretty raw deal. If God is God, why can’t things just get better? Well, it might be a better deal than you think. Craig Barnes, who served at Fourth Church, has written a book about this. He writes rather frankly on the subject: “Nowhere in the Bible,” says Barnes, “are we told that God wants to give us wholeness. What God wants is to give us [God’s presence].” Furthermore, he writes, “if we really believed that, it would be enough. In fact, it would be more than enough. It would overwhelm us” (Barnes, Yearning, p. 18).

Is that true? Can we really be overwhelmed by God’s presence even though life remains broken? Can we really be glad about the arrival of a God who doesn’t come to fix things?

Gregory of Nyssa, one of the church’s earliest theologians, made one attempt at explaining what such a faith looks like. Gregory wrote that faith means “constantly going on in the quest and never ceasing in ascent, seeing that every fulfillment . . . continually generates a further desire.” This discovery, “far from making the soul despair, is actually an experience of God’s presence” (Gregory of Nyssa, quoted by James C. Howell in Feasting on the Word, First Sunday after Christmas, Year B). This is to say about faith something that you’ve probably heard about other things in life: that what counts is the journey and not the destination.

Here’s a more contemporary way of describing it: Presbyterian minister James Howell writes, “God is like a lover at some distance. You are filled with longing—and the longing is sweet, delightful in anticipation, rippling with eagerness” (Feasting on the Word). I like that description. Faith is about yearning for something, longing for something, and there’s something about that feeling of longing that we should never want to see come to an end. Faith is like wrapping your arms around someone you love. You know how you wish you could hold them a little bit tighter even though you’ve already got them right there? You don’t want that longing to go away; you want it to stay; you even want it to increase. You never want to get to the point where you say, “OK, that’s enough; I don’t need to hold you any tighter.” You want the yearning, the longing to stay.

During Advent we start talking about waiting for Christ to come, longing for Christ to come. Longing for the prince of peace, longing for one who rules with love, longing for the one who makes the wolf lie down with the lamb and the leopard with the kid. The truth is that when Christ comes, there is no promise that the longing will end; the longing is supposed to continue.

Longing, yearning, is a creative, constructive force in our lives. When we continue longing for a better world, we do our part to make it happen. When we long for something the most, we love it the best.

The prophet Isaiah wrote about this in the lesson Tom Rook read this morning: Isaiah knew that the world was not a perfect place, there were many things yet to be fixed. But in the midst of that, the faithful prophet rejoices in the Lord, and his rejoicing takes on the character of longing:

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest
until her vindication shines out like the dawn,
and her salvation like a burning torch. (Isaiah 62:1)

Longing. Yearning. Craig Barnes writes, “As long as we keep craving and yearning for something, life will hold together, because we are on the way to finding what we want.”

The promise of Christmas is not that God will fix our problems. The promise is that God is now with us as we long for things to get better. Barnes writes about the experience of being with his congregation on Christmas Eve: “After receiving [the gift of Christ] the newly divorced woman will still have to return to her pew alone. The grief-stricken parents will still miss the child they buried last month. And the tired old Alzheimer’s victim will still break his wife’s heart every time he asks her name.” What I hold up that night, says Barnes, is not that God will soon fix it. “What I hold up that night is the hope that God has found them [in their brokenness]” (pp. 180–181).

As you return to your homes today, as Mary and Joseph did long ago, after that first Christmas, hear this promise: God has come to us in Jesus the Christ. And because of that, the struggles that lie ahead of you will not disappear, but your struggles matter to God. Your struggles matter so much to God that God has come into the world to hold us tighter and tighter in the midst of our hardest times and to yearn with us for things to get better.

Amen.