Second Sunday After Christmas B, January 4, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God with us, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

The Gospel of Luke contains the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the Bible – and I’ll tell you, it baffles Biblical scholars. We know that ancient biographies commonly told stories of heroes in their youth to demonstrate that there were signs of greatness early on. There are some fantastic stories about Jesus’ magical powers as a youth that didn’t make the cut when the scriptural canon was being set. But none of the other three Gospels that did make it into the Bible have any stories from Jesus’ youth, and Luke’s intention is not clear. Is Luke demonstrating that Jesus was like other heroes, fulfilling a divine promise clear in his youth? Or was Luke demonstrating that Jesus was NOT like the others because he didn’t start out knowing everything? Was he a child prodigy, teaching the teachers in the temple? Or was the young Jesus an ordinary adolescent, not telling his parents where he was, doing something quite dangerous getting separated from his family, worrying them sick for the better part of a week? The answer to all these questions seems to be yes.

So Luke seems to be using a literary convention that matters to him and to his cosmopolitan audience to conclude his two-chapter prologue. But in this little passage, this pericope, [1] Luke works in three important ideas that he wants the hearer to understand about Jesus. Here are three things to think about from this pericope in the Gospel of Luke.

First, as I said last week, Luke goes to great lengths to describe the preparation for the ceremony of Jesus’ circumcision, his dedication in the temple, the devout and righteous blessing of Simeon, the praise of God for Jesus from the prophet Anna. That passage – that pericope – ends with “When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.” Then we learn that every year Jesus’ family went to Jerusalem for the festival of Passover. Jews living within about fifteen miles of Jerusalem were expected to go to the temple three times a year: for Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread; for Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks – or Pentecost; and for Succoth, the Feast of Booths. Nazareth was more than four times that distance away. The image presented of the temple in Jerusalem by Luke is very positive and Jesus’ parents, very devout.

Second, Jesus’ parents search and find him sitting among the rabbis, learning from them and asking questions, and demonstrating his own understanding of scripture. Here is a thoroughly Jewish Jesus, well-educated and grounded in his religious tradition. When Jesus asks his mother why she was searching for him, his question, literally translated, reads, “did you not know that I must be in that belonging to my father?” This is the dramatic center of the story and these are the first words that Jesus speaks in the Gospel of Luke. The Greek words do not include the word “house” as in “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (NRSV) nor do they include the word “business” as in “Did you know that I must be about my Father’s business?” Nor does the Greek include any indication of a proper noun (capitalizing father). Much is made about the tension between Joseph as father and God as father, and that can be there, but it’s not necessarily there. The word father is the same – and there’s no reason to believe that what Jesus is doing doesn’t belong to Joseph. That Jesus must be “in that belonging” to his father can mean in that Jewish tradition, in that sacred Jewish place, in that educational Jewish dialogue. The point is, according to Luke, Jesus was really Jewish.

A third thing to think about in this passage is here in just a glance, but it is a theme that Luke takes up again and again, and that is the theme of losing and searching and finding with an expansive idea of family. Here is a story of Jesus not being in close enough contact with his parents to know that they were leaving or to let them know that he was staying – we don’t really know which. All we know is that Mary and Joseph assumed that he was with their departing caravan and they didn’t realize that he wasn’t until they were a whole day’s journey away. If this sounds implausible to you, it’s either because you don’t come from a large extended chaotic family, or your family has a much better grip than most. In my family of origin, I think each one of us four children got lost or left behind at least once. Each adult thought that a particular child was with another adult or being watched by older kids. It’s a wonder that we all made it out of childhood!

The theme of searching and of finding gets reprised in Luke in the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin and the prodigal son. Later in this Gospel Jesus rejoices about a rich man named Zacchaeus promising to give half of his possessions to the poor and pay back four times the amount if he has defrauded anyone of anything, Jesus says that the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost. The theme of family gets defined and redefined in stories about leaving home, or not being welcome at home. It is in Luke that Jesus’ disciples let him know that his mother and brothers are searching for him and he famously replies, “my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” This is a comforting idea to people who have left or been rejected by their families of origin because of their understanding or misunderstanding of who (and Whose) they are.

As I said last week, Jesus’ wider definition of belonging – of family — is Good News to any who need to be welcomed into a more expansive, a more inclusive household of God. In Luke, Jesus employs an ever-larger definition of family, a definition of belonging and beloving that doesn’t depend on biology, or inheritance, but on adoption by grace of those who listen deeply and behave lovingly. Maybe getting a glimpse of that idea that we belong and are beloved in the household of God is gift enough for this eleventh day of Christmas. Or maybe it’s more than we could have thought to ask for.

Our fourth reading for today – our cantata text — picks up the themes of losing and finding and belonging to Jesus. It seems like the German Lutheran predecessor to the great African American spiritual, Give me Jesus. I had ideas about singing that spiritual for you, but a head cold got the better of my voice this week. Do you know it? “In the mornin’ when I rise, give me Jesus. When I’m lost and all alone, give me Jesus. And when I come to die, give me Jesus. You may have all this world, give me Jesus.”

Don’t lose sight of the detail that Joseph and Mary, searching and searching for Jesus found him on the third day, breaking open and sharing the Word, just like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, despairing about the loss of Jesus, found him on the third day, in the breaking open and sharing of bread. Setting the opening aria for a tenor voice makes it clear that a sword has not only pierced Mary’s soul, but Joseph’s soul as well. Finding Jesus, according to our cantata text, is a matter of rising up to go to his Father’s house, his temple, where you will find him visible in the Word and he will refresh you in the sacrament – the bread – so must you in penitence and faith, engage in a most intimate and tender action – the kiss. In Lutheran theology, the emphasis is on penitence and belief; in Anglican theology, the emphasis is on coming together for worship and participation – engagement with the sacraments – both emphases are here in the tenor recitative.

Finally, I invite you to notice in the last chorale, the reference to Jesus, the Redeemer (the Christ) guiding us to the springs of life – for refreshment, for clarity, for vitality and animation. Bach, you probably know, is German for brook or stream. Bächlein is German for brooklet or rill, Lebensbächlein, living water. The promise is that Jesus will lead the way to the living springs of water. The hope is that, having been led to the living springs of water, the living springs of water flow through us so that others can also drink. The hope is that each spring of living water flows through us and beyond us.

Listen to this “Love Poem to God” from Rilke’s Book of Hours:

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea. [2]

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