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Christ Mass One , 12/30/2018
Sermon on Lukas 2:41-52, by Luke Bouman
Luke 2:41-52
41Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. 42And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. 43When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it.44Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. 45When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. 46After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.48When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” 49He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” 50But they did not understand what he said to them.51Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. 52And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.
Be Not Afraid
Despite the fact that in our lessons, both in the lead up to Christmas and the Christmas story itself, the angels say to Mary, to Joseph, and to the shepherds the words, “Be Not Afraid,” I confess myself fearful and anxious. I guess I am in good company, what with the fact that angels in times past would not counsel against fear to people who aren’t, at least in part, fearful. I have also noticed that there are plenty of anxious and fearful people around me in the world today. Some, like the late Rabbi Ed Friedman, have gone so far as to pronounce judgement on our culture and our epoch, describing them as “anxious times.” We are not the first to participate in a culture of anxiety and we will not be the last. There are no angels to exhort us against fear and anxiety, at least none that we attend to.
The reasons for anxiety today are many and varied. In our culture and the currently political climate, fear and anxiety have been weaponized. On the one side are people who are anxious and concerned that their very way of life is slowly eroding away. They turned to a populist political movement in the 2016 presidential election in order to take a stand against what they feared they were losing. On the other side are people who feel that the ones who were elected in 2016 are acting out of self-interest rather than for the public good, who see progress not as an enemy of an eroding culture, but the evolution to something better, and who are afraid of going backward.
I have grown to see that these surface concerns, diametrically opposed to one another, are symptoms, not the disease. Deeper down, there is a sense of alienation, both from our fellow human beings and from any deeper purpose or meaning that our lives might have. All of the purpose and meaning collapses in such a system to us/them, black/white, win/lose ways of thinking. In such a system, what we think, what we desire, becomes the highest good for us. Theologians for the past 500 years have correctly identified what we think is the “highest good” is our gods. So, in a very real sense, we have created gods out of our own ways of thinking on both sides of this political and cultural divide.
As such, the deeper concern, at least from my vantage point, is that all of us have become disconnected from God, through our fears, and as a result disconnected from one another. Some of us have even done so in the name of religion, to the point that we don’t recognize that we have started serving other gods, ones of our own making. All of this only serves to deepen our disconnection from God and from one another. In the anxiety swamp that arises before us as a result of our own ways of thinking, we drown slowly and our gods cannot and will not save us.
The irony is that even as we search for meaning and purpose it eludes us. Even as we try to find God in all of this, we don’t realize that God is not the one that is lost, we are. Our frantic search betrays us as lost, even as we claim to be searching for God. We fail to see where God is, and we continue to search, even though God is close at hand all along. In doing so, we are not far different from Mary and Joseph in our text for today.
On the surface, they are faced with the problem of a lost child, Jesus. On a deeper level, they are faced with a lost mission. This story comes in the same chapter and on the heels of the story of Jesus’ birth. In that story, we are not the only ones who hear about the special significance of this child. As if the angels announcing this birth to Mary and Joseph separately are not enough for them, this story has the news recounted to them by visiting shepherds, who themselves heard the announcement from a heavenly chorus of angels. Mary and Joseph know that the child they are raising is not theirs alone, but belongs to something greater. As opposed to the popular Christmas song, Mary DID know that her baby boy was destined for something far greater. She sings a song in Luke 1 all about it.
So, when Jesus is lost, it is more than just a missing boy, though any parent would tell you that is enough to send them into a panic. When Jesus goes missing, so does hope, so does a particular kind of future for which they held high expectations. When Jesus goes missing, the very real fear that Mary and Joseph have somehow botched their mission goes with him. They are raising Jesus not just for themselves, but for all Israel. But even Mary and Joseph do not know how wide Jesus’ mission will become. They, themselves are still captive to the notion that the Messiah, the anointed one of God, has come for Israel alone. They, too, are still captive to us/them kinds of thinking. In that, their search for meaning and purpose is limited, like ours. Jesus is on a mission, even at age 12, far wider, far grander, than Mary and Joseph can possibly imagine.
This text is unique in all of the biblical literature, in that it is the only one depicting Jesus as a growing child, no longer a baby, not yet a man. Apart from that, this text has much in common with the themes and the theology of Luke’s narrative of Jesus. Here we see Jesus and his family observe the Jewish rituals (Luke is particularly fond of using the story to show Jesus as an observant Jew of the first century). In this case, Jesus is brought to the Temple at age 12, a time when later Judaism would celebrate his becoming a “Son of the Covenant” or Bar-Mitzvah. But at the same time as Jesus is shown being obedient and observant of the laws and rules, he is also shown defying them. He doesn’t stay with his parents and the group of travelers, he DOES go to the Temple and sit and listen to the teachings and rather than doing so quietly, he teaches (by asking questions, which was an accepted form of teaching in that time and place). When his parents do find him, they begin to tell him that he has worried them, and he answers by telling them that he is connected to another “Father” beyond these earthly parents, whose business and whose house he must attend to. There is much in this story, and much that Luke will develop throughout the rest of his Gospel.
Jesus is connected to something that God is doing, beyond our own fears, and even beyond our hopes. In this text, Jesus is not lost. He is simply not where his parents expect him to be. Jesus makes it clear, when they encounter him in the last place that they look that it should have been the first place, the place they should have expected him to be. God, in Jesus, dwells among the people, not as a resident power in the Temple, but rather in the Torah, debated. God is present through the word. And Jesus is so much more. Jesus is “word made flesh”, God choosing to close the gap and separation between God and humanity, not by forcing us to come to God, but rather through God choosing to come and dwell among us. Jesus is paradoxically disconnected from his parents in this text so that he can live out his vocation, connected to his Abba, and living out that connection with and for all of humanity. This text foreshadows Jesus future ministry, and above all his death and resurrection.
For it is there, even in death on a cross, that Jesus completes the process of joining the divine presence and life with humanity. But taking all of what it means to be human into himself, Jesus is ensuring that there is no place, not even death, that is beyond God’s experience, and therefore beyond God’s ability to enter with us, and heal us. Jesus is, in himself, God’s mission to heal humanity from within. Jesus is truly, in the cross, God with us to the end, and beyond the end. Jesus is God with us in life, in death, and in the promise of life to come.
In our world, the search for God and the search for meaning have become a pivotal aspect of our culture, either as we pursue it or avoid it. People are at the same time hungry for God and for something spiritual in their lives, and also despairing of ever finding that, especially within the organized religious establishment. People flock to churches and do not find God even there, at least not the God of the cross, the God of authentic humanity and authentic divinity. Yet paradoxically, Luther writes of that God as revealed/hidden. God is there, putting the religious establishment on notice and puzzling even those of us who think we know what God is up to. God is there, in the middle of our mess, and just when we think we know where to look, God eludes our gaze again.
In the shadow of the certainty and the captivity of the baby Jesus in a manger, this story serves as a stark reminder that “God with us” is not domestic or safe. We will seek and seek in vain, only to find God with us all the time. But God is with us to challenge us to grow in ways we often don’t want or think we need. And God will always direct us to the notion that there is a deeper way for each of us to be human, and that by being human in just that way, there is a deeper connection to our Abba as well.
But finding Jesus, thusly, comes at a cost. It costs us our ability to think of a world in binary ways. We are no longer allowed nor able to put God on our side, no matter which side we are on, if that side does not also include the committed love of those whom we would rather hate. We are no longer able to disconnect from even one other human being. We are no longer allowed to imagine those who are alien to us to be presented as a problem, unless that problem is how we best love them and serve them. We are no longer to dismiss portions of our population as deplorable without also loving them and serving them as well. Jesus’ way of being connected to God is all embracing, all encompassing. Jesus’ way of being connected to God tears down the walls of fear and builds up the house of love, both of creator and creation. Jesus shows a hidden God made visible in extraordinary love, and if that is not the Jesus we find when we seek for God, when we ourselves are lost, then we have not yet looked for Jesus in the first place where we should. He is in our midst, God with us, healing us from within.