I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Maybe you know this already. Not everybody does. In fact, a lot people go through their whole lives never giving it much thought. I’m sure you’re not among them, but I can’t assume anything. Nevertheless, I’d like to suggest that this one little thing is driving much of the strife in our social and political life. So, if you don’t know, you need to.

Change is difficult.

Now, at some level I think we all understand this. You know how I know this?

The grocery store.

That’s right, the grocery store. Have you ever gone into the grocery store, went to find something you’ve dropped in your cart a thousand times before—and it’s nowhere to be found.

“This is always where the lima beans are. Why are there no lima beans? Hey, wait a minute! There aren’t any beans! There’s no corn, no mushrooms, no beets. Nothing. Now, they have the Cap’n Crunch and Honey Bunches of Oats where the stewed tomatoes are supposed to be. This is ridiculous! I can’t find anything! Where’s the manager?”

Whether it’s as simple as not being able to find the corned beef hash at the Kroger or adjusting to life without your best friend, change can be annoying in the less important instances and downright traumatic in the most important.

Of course, change can also be a good thing. If you’ve been beating your head against a wall, stopping can feel like heaven. But usually, even good changes cause some anxiety. Getting married is wonderful and exciting, but even so, it’s a pretty nervy experience committing yourself to another person “until death do us part.”

Miss Havisham, the jilted spinster of Charles Dickens', Great Expectations, makes a heroic attempt to freeze time, crystallizing in amber her disappointment at being left at the alter as a young woman. One of the great characters of English literature, Miss Havisham, upon being told twenty minutes before she is to be wed that her fiancé has defrauded her, asks that all the clocks in the house be stopped. Thereafter, she refuses to change out of her wedding gown. She lets the wedding cake fossilize on the table where it was set on that day in anticipation of the great event.

Miss Havisham lives with the determination that, out of some perverse need to hold onto the past, nothing in her life will change. She needs to exert control over a life that has spun out of control. It’s the grand scale of her quixotic attempt to preserve everything exactly as it had been at the most important moment in her life that makes her such an important and memorable literary figure. That she attempts to exert control by trying to stop time, however, isn’t particularly exceptional.

Human beings are amazingly partial to the idea of freezing moments (both the good and the bad) as a hedge against change. Humans tend to find comfort in a past they’ve survived, rather than a future about which they don’t yet know.

Seth Godin drives home the point, suggesting that “for many of us, the happiest future is the one that’s precisely like the past, except a little better” (Linchpin, 203).

We’ve seen this aversion to change in our own culture. It’s painful to watch, painful to experience.

The demographics in the country are undergoing a seismic shift. Various projections have the United States becoming a majority-minority country in the next 20–30 years. According to the Pew Research Center, more Americans than not believe that having a diverse and inclusive population is good for everyone. But, there’s a significant minority (almost 1/4 of the population) who are convinced that such a shift is going to be a bad thing.

The projection of a demographic shift isn’t new. We’ve seen this coming for a while. To be honest, it’s possible to read the political and social turmoil of the past five years—with the rise of White Supremacy and its hopes for a more authoritarian rule—through the lens of this fear of change. There are enough folks motivated by the terror that Black and Brown people will be equally represented in what has historically been a majority White country that they’ve gone to great lengths to try to reassert White dominance.

This fear of a more diverse future has caused a great deal of nostalgia for a world that was decidedly more favorable to White, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender people. The whole “again” in “Make America Great Again” has always been about a return to a world where everybody knew their place, a world where everyone knew who was supposed to sit at the top of the pecking order.

So, in the face of this disorienting change, a sizable number people have looked to a previous age to regain some sense of control of the future, which is to say, they’ve opted for a “future [that’s] precisely like the past, except a little better.”

Hanging onto the past is a common way of trying to create a hedge against change that threatens your control of your own world—or at least the illusionthat you control your world.

Today is the first Sunday after the Epiphany, which means it’s Baptism of Jesus Sunday—that day every year about this time, where our Gospel lesson focuses on Jesus and John the Baptist and their little confab down by the Jordan River.