2 CHRISTMAS, YEAR B
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY
4 JANUARY 2009
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Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84; Luke 2:41-52
You’ll have noticed that there are three choices for gospel readings for this second Sunday of Christmas. We don’t pick and choose very often in our tradition; we usually have one gospel for the day and it’s the preacher’s job to deal with whatever it is. But not today. Today I got to choose. And I chose the reading from Luke’s gospel.
When I told our parish secretary, Linda Caradonna, my choice so she could put it into the bulletin, we started talking about it. (There’s more that goes on in our church office, you see, than merely typing and answering the phones and sorting mail.) She and I talked about the story which is found only in Luke’s gospel, the story of the boy Jesus staying behind in Jerusalem to talk to the Temple teachers after his parents and the rest of their group had finished their pilgrimage and had begun the long journey home, and after a day’s walking his parents discovered Jesus wasn’t with the group and they were worrying about where he was and then they had to walk all the way back to look for him, and traveling was dangerous in those days, safest only for whole groups of people. And when after three days they finally found him, his mother exploded with, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been frantically looking for you!”
Jesus dutifully went home, then, with his parents, and that’s the last we hear about him for a long time. There is silence in the Bible about the rest of Jesus’ childhood.
Linda and I talked about all of that. “Well,” she said, “no wonder we don’t hear any more. His parents probably grounded him!”
That could be. I’d never thought of that! Maybe so. And I suppose this could be just an old family story, as in, “Remember the time when….?” Mary remembered it and treasured it in her heart, but basically maybe it was just an incident that stood out for her in what appears to have been Jesus’ otherwise unremarkable, quiet, ordinary childhood.
Mary treasured this story. And so do we. Especially in our search, often, for details about Jesus’ formative years about which we know so little. Why DO we know so little about Jesus’ youth? Was it so unremarkable that nobody bothered to remember or mention it? If unremarkable, then was it also unimportant? What do we make of the quiet, unremarkable times of our OWN lives? Are THEY unimportant because they are so ordinary? What significance is there to the ordinary times of Jesus’ life or to ours?
A side-bar, for a minute, that sheds a bit of light on Jesus’ early years.
There is some interesting digging that has gone on recently around an ancient town just a few miles from Nazareth, a town called Sepphoris. It lies in ruins today but you can see Nazareth from the site. Sepphoris was once a Jewish city and probably was a center of learning for the Pharisees, those super-pious, learned lay religious leaders we hear so much about in the gospels. We have come to know the Pharisees as annoying opponents of the adult Jesus, following him around, pestering him, testing him and ultimately responsible for his downfall and death.
But in fact, the Pharisees were quite reform-minded. They tried to connect the ancient law of Moses and their tradition to the changing times. Always hard to do in any age, adjusting tradition to fit current times. Jesus, it seems, was taught by the Pharisees. He no doubt debated and conversed and hashed things out with them as an adult. But his contacts with the Pharisees were most likely nowhere near as nasty as the gospels tell us they were. By the time the gospels were written, you see, decades after Jesus’ death, there had developed a rift between the traditional Pharisaic Jews and the new Christians and the gospel writers wanted no part of the Pharisees, didn’t want to acknowledge Jesus’ relationship with them. So they’re portrayed rather unfairly in the gospels as villains. A Dutch scholar, Jean-Pierre Isbouts, has written about all of this in a new book about the young Jesus and the “lost years” of his youth that we so often wonder about.
Back to today’s gospel.
We know for sure that Jesus’ parents were observant Jews who followed the religious rituals of their faith. Their son was circumcised at the right time, Mary was purified at the right time after Jesus’ birth, Jesus was presented at the temple at the right time, and they made the required pilgrimages to Jerusalem every year. It would appear that they made sure Jesus observed the public worship and rituals, too. And on the other hand, it would appear that he was also brought up to be loyal to his parents and his family at home, that one slip-up in Jerusalem notwithstanding. We know that somehow he received careful instruction, we suspect most of it likely from the Pharisees in his neighborhood. We can imagine that this quiet routine was unremarkable. Perhaps Jesus’ “missing years” are important for their very ordinariness. Jesus was going about the business of growing in his own faith, “increasing in wisdom,” as Luke’s gospel puts it, “increasing in wisdom and in years.” And to grow in that way required steady, quiet routine, unspectacular formation at home and close to home. Just as it does for us and for our children.
Today’s gospel points us to the twin loyalties that were crucial to Jesus’ formation: loyalty to God through public worship and religious observances, the rituals that his parents made sure they and he took part in, and loyalty to God through life and training and work at home and in his local community.
It is no different for us. And that, I think, may be the quiet, undramatic, unspectacular point of today’s gospel reading. The importance of those dual aspects of our lives and our children’s lives as growing Christians: the steady discipline of coming to church for corporate worship and commitment to its mission and participation in its ongoing work and mission AND our lives in our households and communities, the routine business of faithful living and learning and growing, “increasing in wisdom and in years” day by day, week by week, year by year.