Online Sermons
The Second Sunday in Christmas: January 4, The Rev. John Horn
Welcome to our website. You are here: The Word --> Online SermonsThe most recent issue of Iowa Connections, the diocesan newspaper that is wrapped around Episcopal Life, has a homily given by Father Glenn Rankin. He’s a priest who has faithfully served three small parishes in western Iowa for over thirty years. He preached at the installation of the new dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Des Moines. If you haven’t read his sermon yet, I suggest that you do. Glenn was preaching on the feast day of St. Nicholas, and chose to talk about children. “Where are the children?” he asked. He was thinking of the children who “are just plain overlooked in a congregation and in our neighborhoods,” and then goes on to give several examples from his own experience of the ministry of children.
It may seem odd to bring up the question “Where are the children?” on a weekend when the children’s pageant will be celebrated at the 10:30 service. The children will be very much present at that service. I know that children are incorporated in many aspects of the life of Christ Church, and that you have a strong and active youth ministry here. But still, this period of transition is an excellent time to reflect on the value each of you places on the contributions that youth can bring to the life of the church and surrounding community, and the wisdom that youth can provide.
The Gospel lesson this morning has a story about the youthful Jesus. In fact, it is the only story in any of the Gospels about Jesus between his birth and adulthood. By next Sunday Jesus will be all grown up and ready to start his preaching mission after being baptized. It’s really too bad that this reading is one of three options for today; that means that it is rarely heard. So let’s take some time with it and see what it tells us about children growing up in faith.
As usual with Luke’s stories, the stage is set first. There were a number of annual festivals that drew pilgrims to Jerusalem, and Passover was the largest. It would be during a future Passover festival, in fact, that Jesus would be arrested and crucified. But that is still many years in the future. Luke indicates that Joseph and Mary were devout Jews and took their family to Jerusalem every year. The particular time that Luke has in mind is when Jesus was twelve years old. Given that the rite of entry into manhood, what we now call the Bar Mitzvah, occurred at the age of thirteen, Jesuswould still be considered a child.
At the end of the festival, Joseph and Mary start heading home to Nazareth. There would have been a lot of noise and confusion on the dusty road with the swarm of humanity and smell of animals. Friends and relatives were also traveling, so at first Jesus’ parents didn’t think about his absence. They just assumed he was somewhere else in the crowd. After a day’s journey they couldn’t find him, however, so they headed back to Jerusalem. They looked everywhere, and finally located him in the temple, in the midst of the teachers.
It’s not hard to imagine how upset Jesus’ parents must have been. Any parent who has lost track of a child will empathize with them. I am glad that my own son’s escapades I usually found out about after the fact, such as the time he went to Chicago on a class trip and slipped away with a couple of friends and rode the El all over the city. Mary’s anxiety comes through very clearly in her reproach to Jesus: “Child,” she says, “why did you do this to us? Behold, your father and I looked for you in great distress.”
Jesus’ answer is, in some ways, the classic response of a twelve-year-old. He wasn’t lost; he knew perfectly well where he was! Yet it is also the highlight of the whole passage for Luke. “Why did you seek me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know that I must be in my Father’s house?” That’s what we heard this morning, but it’s not exactly what Luke wrote. In fact, Luke didn’t specify what things of “my Father” Jesus had to do. The King James Version translates, “I must be about my Father’s business,” and in this case, I think that’s closer to the truth. It’s not so much that Jesus is supposed to be in church, but rather that he has a true father other than Joseph the carpenter, and God’s business of teaching and healing is what he is called to do.
At any rate, Jesus willingly went with them to Nazareth. He was obedient to his parents –something that doesn’t sound like a twelve-year-old, but then, this is Jesus we’re talking about here. On the other hand, if Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine, I just have to believe that sometimes he rolled his eyes or let out a very audible sigh before taking out the trash one more time.
I realize that there is a great risk in reading modern psychology into events of two thousand years ago. Yet the transition from childhood to adulthood is a universal human phenomenon, one that is timeless. And I think we see in this Gospel passage some of the elements of that transition.
First, Joseph and Mary have been faithful in bringing Jesus up in their tradition. They have gone to the prescribed festivals each year. In the background would be the daily and weekly prayers and worship common to first-century Judaism. They have raised Jesus as a faithful Jew.
Second, they have allowed Jesus some freedom as he gets older. They don’t insist that he travel right with them, but allow him some independence. If that were not the case, they would not have lost track of him. I know that we live in a very different culture, but I do wonder about parents who insist on the ability to track the location of their teenagers electronically through their cell phones. For me, a certain level of trust is necessary to allow the development of a healthy independence. No, I was not happy to hear that my son had wandered all around Chicago with some buddies, but I sure worried less about him when he eventually traveled to Europe and had to fend for himself.
Third, Jesus is beginning to develop his own sense of who he is and acting on it. I don’t want to get into a discussion here of whether Jesus knew all along of his divinity or whether that realization developed over time, but it seems to me that if he were fully human, that human part would not fully understand his own identity until it had matured sufficiently. I said that Luke’s story is the only one in the canonical Gospels that shows Jesus as a child, and that’s true. But that didn’t stop other early writers from making up some stories about Jesus as a child. One of my favorite apocryphal stories is of Jesus playing with other boys, making sparrows out of clay. Jesus’ sparrows flew away! Fun story, but it doesn’t ring true. Jesus was not a magician.
Fourth and finally, Luke’s story shows the seriousness with which the teachers of the temple regarded Jesus. They listened to his questions and answered them. They treated him as someone of value. They took seriously the wisdom he offered them. In this story there is no trace of the antagonism that would eventually erupt between Jesus and the temple leadership; there is only mutual respect.
Do you always treat twelve-year-olds with respect? Do you consider that they have wisdom to offer you, a wisdom of youthfulness that you may have forgotten as you aged, a wisdom of possibility and enthusiasm?
To be twelve is to be in transition from childhood to adulthood. It is a time when faith learned from parents must be examined, even challenged, and taken up again as one’s own rather than one’s parents’. It is a time to learn how to make decisions, decisions that may be made one day and discarded the next. That inconsistency may be one reason people shy away from working with middle school youth, that and the moodiness that comes from hormonal changes and from the difficult work of creating an adult personality.
Yet it is also the very time that respect is needed, especially from all of you who surround these youth. Not only during pageants should the youth of this parish and community be visible in your lives, but always. That is the importance of this unique story in the life of Jesus. My prayer for you is that you will continue to be the teachers of and listeners to the young people who are in your midst. Amen.