Luke 2:41-52
December 30, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
You know when Christmas is over is when all the gifts have been unwrapped, dinner is over, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief, especially the preacher. On this first Sunday after Christmas, we still have our wreaths hanging and all five of the advent candles burning, and the grandchildren may still be visiting from out of town. But we are quickly turning our attention away from Bethlehem to an event that takes place around Passover in Jerusalem more than a decade later.
We all want baby Jesus to stay lying in the manger a bit longer but all babies grow up faster than we want them to. We all want these holidays to last longer but as the vacation days come to an end and the New Year of 2013 approaches, our lesson for this morning leads us to the reality that the world awaits for the Lord to be in our everyday.
In a week’s time, the infant Jesus whom we left lying in the manger Christmas morning, has grown to mid-childhood, twelve years old, standing on the threshold of manhood in the Jewish way of marking life’s seasons. At thirteen he will become an adult at his Bar Mitzvah, but at twelve he is still a child, and therefore accountable to and under the care of his parents, who have lost him on the their way back to Nazareth.
Jesus in the Temple
Luke says that it was the custom of the holy family to go to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. In other words, Jesus’ family does much the same thing that you have done this day; they went to the temple to celebrate Israel’s grand day of deliverance, Passover. And here you are celebrating our grand time of deliverance and salvation in the birth of Jesus.
They go to worship, to sing songs of joy, just as you have done today. And then they leave, to go back to business as usual, back to the everyday life in Nazareth.
A day later Mary and Joseph begin looking for little Jesus in the entourage of their friends and family, but he is not among the throng headed back home. So they “returned to Jerusalem to search for him.” They find Jesus there at the temple, putting the temple elders through the paces, debating fine points of theology with them. The learned elders are “amazed” that Jesus, even though he is a little boy, is full of learned understanding. The little boy knows the answers to even the deepest spiritual questions!
Picture these learned old men there, those who have given their lives to the study of scripture, stupefied at the wisdom of a child! It must have been quite a jolt to them. “How on earth could this little boy know more about God than we do?”
Mary and Joseph also received a jolt. They are astounded to find their little boy standing up before the rulers of the religion. When they rebuked Jesus for making them mad with worry and not leaving with the family, little Jesus rebuked them back, telling them that they ought to know that he would be “in my Father’s house.” But his “father’s house” is Joseph’s house. What is he doing here and not there?
Jesus then obediently travels back to Nazareth with his parents. But it must have been an event they never forgot. Luke says that Mary “treasured these things in her heart,” which may be a polite Bible way of saying that Mary never got over the shock of thinking they had lost their first-born, then finding him standing up to the elders of the temple, and then having him rebuked them for their misunderstanding.
God With Us
This is quite a story. Jesus is a precocious child by any definition of the term, no doubt able to take care of himself and perhaps insistent on a certain amount of independence.
In the apocryphal and Gnostic gospels, texts that were left out of the Bible, we read that some writers imagined what Jesus was like in his childhood since the lesson we read this morning is the only account of Jesus at twelve. These stories described Jesus doing magical tricks and even terrorizing people in his village when they didn’t agreed with him.
I believe that the important message in our text is while Jesus shows precociousness, he is not outside the boundary of human behavior. In fact Jesus shows a little childish disobedience when he wanders off without telling his parents of his destination or when he was a preteen, he was a little flippant to his mother!
After we finish admiring the angels with their sheet music and the wise men with their foreign clothes and costly gifts, we might notice that the baby really does nothing. Some nativity sets might show a baby Jesus smiling.
Today we are reminded that baby Jesus is a real human baby. He is a real baby with the defenselessness of a baby in any age. He is born to poor parents in squalid conditions in an age of the Imperial Roman Empire when the lives of simple peasants like Joseph, Mary, and their baby meant nothing. Christians confess that God was in Jesus, and if so, it means that God entered into this world in helpless fashion as a baby. God had to have God’s diaper changed! Think about that! God’s diaper had to be changed perhaps 4-5 times a day!
This is the powerful image of divine incarnation; an image of God who completely identifies with the human creature. God goes through the full range of life experience of any human being. God identified with us in the process of our world and our lives. God understands our pain and our joy.
In our present text we have a teenage Jesus. We have a teenage God. Granted Jesus is smart and amazes the teachers of the Law, but look past that. He is a teenager who frightens his parents by forgetting or failing to tell them where he is, and then has an attitude when confronted by them. And when Jesus gives his parents a nice pious answer, does he apologize for worrying them? No! He answers them as if to say that they should have known where he was. He’s a teenager. Those of us who have raised teenagers (I raised two) recognize this behavior. I believe that an important message of this story is how God was present in our midst. God is in our everyday.
God is with our Youth
We can identify with this story. We know the trials and the stresses that lie within every human family. Even though we love one another, we are often most mystified by those whom we love the most. Our children baffle us with their behavior.
When I talk with parents, they are particularly anxious when their children are adolescents. Adolescence is often a stressful time for both parents and children. The long renegotiation of relatedness and locus of control between parents and teenagers is fertile ground for struggle and mishap. But this text reminds us that adolescence is a journey not a disease. It’s a myth that adolescence is fraught with peril and conflict. We know that where children are in reasonably safe and supportive environments, they generally meet their maturing challenges of teenage years without realizing their parents’ worst fears or becoming estranged from them.
After his adventure, Jesus went home willingly with his parents. For, he never actually ran away or was lost to them. Jesus at the temple was actually at home where he discovered his true self and beginning to realize his calling will be a time apart from his parents and his family.
Parents are not the only ones with great anxiety about adolescents. Many congregations are worry about the loss or absence of young people in their membership and therefore their future. Some are afraid of youth unruly passions and disobedience. Some fear the generational gap that makes communication difficult. Some lament and grieve for past days and futures lost. Many churches have not found ways to engage and keep young people involved.
But in a recent national study of youth and religion, they discovered that most youth are not down on faith or unreceptive to religious faith. The study finds for example that a significant number of youth are involved in religion. A small but significant number of these are very devoted. They found that religious faith of teens matters—religious involvement correlates strongly with what are broadly considered positive health, relationship and other life outcomes of youth. And the majority of adolescents who have faith have a very conventional and unreflective faith that is much like that of their parents. The majority of teens who are not religious are not anti-religion, so much as indifferent to it. In this way they are also like their parents.
In other words, parents, not their peers remained the most influential persons in most adolescent’s lives at least through their early twenties. If we want more youth in our church, we need to have parents who are more religious and faithful. Parents are the most important youth ministers. And if young people don’t have religiously active parents, then churches need to be places where youth can find adults who will “adopt” them spiritually. No “cool” program can substitute for the modeling and hospitality of faithful adults.
Ultimately churches that attract and keep young people involved are the ones where faith is not only preached but practiced and experienced as faithfulness. Apparently the temple that held young Jesus enthralled for several formative days proved to be such a space. Jesus was among good teachers and listeners who were interesting to him and more important who were interested in him.
God in Our Everyday
We come to church to have a religious, spiritual experience, only to be surprised when the holy connects with the ordinariness of everyday life.
This story from the childhood of Jesus, this first scene that opens the Gospel, is Luke’s way of saying: now that God has become flesh in Jesus, expect to be surprised, count on being startled, get ready to see God in our everyday.
We come to church wanting to be with God, Almighty and we encounter God in a little child. We may want to escape from some of the trials and tribulations that we face in everyday life with our ordinary families, but we find that now that God has become God With Us, the trials and tribulations of everyday life are given spiritual significance.
Befuddled religious experts, worried parents, smart-mouthed kids, mothers who keep turning over some episode deep in their hearts, it’s all here because God has now come among us, redeeming us in our ordinary world. The Holy is making contact with the ordinary: spirit on earth, God With Us.
Here’s a Christmas parable. A farmer and his family were preparing to head out to the Christmas Day service in a blinding snowstorm. The snow had been piling up in large drifts since midnight. Now, in the first light of day, the snow was deep.
As the family dressed for church, the farmer pushed his way out to the barn to check on the livestock. He was surprised to see a couple of small birds fluttering around before the big door into the barn. Strange to see birds around here this time of year, he thought. The birds probably been blown off course by the storm as they tried to fly south.
He knew immediately what he would do. He would open the barn door and coax them inside where they would be safe from the storm.
So he pushed the big barn door open. But when he did so, the birds fluttered away and sat on the fence, frightened by him. He stood just inside the door, futilely attempting to speak to the birds, attempting to coax them in the barn, but of course the birds couldn’t understand him and kept their distance, watching him from the frigid fence.
He had an idea. He grabbed a handful of grain from the cow stall and tossed the grain toward the birds, hoping to get their attention. Then he dropped kernels of grain in a path from the door toward the fence. He hoped that the birds would see the grain and, kernel by kernel, hop their way back toward the barn.
But it was all to no avail. Though the birds were obviously freezing with cold, they did not risk hopping toward the warmth of the barn, fearful of the farmer.
He had tried everything he could think of. In frustration he thought to himself, “If only I could become one of them. They would surely respond to another bird and come into the safety of the barn. If only…”
At that moment he heard the bells of the little church in the village, pealing forth at the beginning of the service, telling the world about a God who loved us so much that God came to us as one of us.
You want to get close to God? Here’s the good news for today—God has come close to us. Look at this little boy—confusing his worried parents, astounding the religious leaders in the temple—God With Us. God is in our everyday.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, on this joyous day we celebrate that you loved us so much that you refused to love us from afar. In your Incarnation you joined together things of earth and things in heaven. You came closed to us, shared our fate, and changed our destiny. May you enter each of our hearts this day and, in drawing near to us, draw us nearer to you. Amen.