Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on Sunday, January 5, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, the Second Sunday after Christmas. We don’t always get a second Sunday after Christmas (sometimes The Epiphany occurs beforehand), and since there are three options for the Gospel, it’s even rarer to hear the episode of the finding of the boy Jesus in the temple. But it’s one of Our Lady’s “joyful mysteries,” and this is Year C in the lectionary (focusing on Luke’s Gospel), so I welcomed the opportunity it presented to consider what to do with Jesus’s childhood and the many years of silence in the Gospels between his birth and the beginning of his public ministry.

Collect: O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings:  Jeremiah 31:7-14; Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a; Luke 2:41-52

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

When I would hear this Gospel as a kid, I used to think Mary and Joseph were being too hard on Jesus: I mean, didn’t they know? Why didn’t they check on his whereabouts before they just up and left? And what’s the big deal anyway, it’s not like he was in any real danger, he was in the temple.

When I read it now, however, many years later and as the parent of a toddler, my sympathies are entirely reversed, and frankly Mary and Joseph seem far too calm. “Gone for four days? We’ve been worried sick! What have you been eating? Where have you been sleeping? Don’t you realize this is how kids get abducted, or worse? And what is this attitude, ‘We should not have worried’ – I don’t think you fully appreciate the gravity of the situation. No more trips to Jerusalem for you, young man. If you so much as leave the house without permission you’re grounded through next year.”

Truthfully, there are a lot of questions this episode raises. Why did Mary & Joseph not think twice about leaving with the caravan despite not knowing where Jesus was? Was this normal in that day and age, for kids to wander all over a caravan? Should we suppose that the young Jesus was a sociable kid who made friends easily, and that’s why they didn’t worry about him, because they assumed he’d made friends with the other families going their way? Or should we suppose instead that he was quiet and liked to keep to himself, and Mary & Joseph didn’t worry about him because they knew by then that he liked to find places away from the noise? 

And really, where did he sleep for those four days in Jerusalem? Did the temple staff just let him make himself at home? Was old Simeon still alive maybe, or Anna, or was his uncle Zechariah on duty in the temple again, and did one of them recognize him and make room for him? Or did he sleep on the streets in some alley or under a baker’s awning?

And how big must this caravan have been anyway, for Mary and Joseph not to have known its full breadth? Was there a lot of commerce like this between Nazareth and Jerusalem? Or did the Holy Family have to travel with several caravans, changing maybe at Jericho or up at Beth-Shan or Jezreel, and it was at the transfer point that they noticed him missing? 

Were the caravans full of pilgrims only, or were there traders too, or traveling artisans? Was Joseph carrying samples of his workmanship, hoping to drum up business in Jerusalem or among his fellow travelers? 

What did the travelers talk about on the way? Did they talk about Herod’s new reconstruction of the temple? Did they think it bold and powerful, or flashy and monstrous? Did they appreciate the increase in grandeur and scale, or were they offended at the expense, the labor, the national impoverishment it required to build?

Did they comment on the latest ecclesiastical fashion they saw there? Did they keep humming tunes from the services on their way home, or did they prefer the tunes from the hearths of the inns and the campfires? Did they make their own entertainment on the way? Maybe the played instruments. I’m sure they must have played games.

There are questions of wider politics, too: Herod the Great had died not long before, and these were the early years of Roman governors in Judea. Was there still some hopefulness among the people, some sense that peace might prevail? Or was the writing already on the wall, and dread beginning to spread that this could only end in violence? Was there pride, that even now Judea retained certain trappings of self-rule? Or was there resentment that Judea did not even rate full provincial status in the administration of their overlords, but was rather, bureaucratically, a dependent of the province of Syria, former realm of the hated, Hellenistic Seleucids?

Today’s episode from Luke’s gospel of Jesus’s life at 12 years old contains tantalizing hints at broader life in the larger world of the 1st century Eastern Mediterranean, as well as precious clues about Jesus’s personality and the Holy Family’s home life. But as it is, this is the only such glimpse we get. Between the visit of the Magi, which we will celebrate tomorrow on January 6, and Jesus’s baptism by John in the Jordan, which we’ll get next Sunday, we have absolutely nothing apart from today’s episode. That’s over thirty years of silence.

What are we to make of this? Especially today, on the last, twelfth day of Christmas, when the songs of the angels are still ringing in our ears and we are full of wonder and delight at the newborn Lord? Most of the time, I think we just appreciate it as a nice family sort of story, and then fast forward to the really juicy bits when Jesus’s public ministry begins.

If pressed, we might say it’s a useful story because it illustrates that Jesus had a human childhood. Even though he was obviously special, seriously precocious in matters of religion, he was still a kid with an independent streak who occasionally got into trouble with his parents. That’s relatable, and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that.

But I don’t want to let us off the hook that easily. The clues and questions and tantalizing glimpses of a larger, broader life, I think make an important point: Jesus is the incarnate Son of God, as much in the manger as on the cross, and he is just as equally so in all those thirty years of silence. 

Jesus was just as equally the Son of God in all those thirty years of silence as in the episodes that are recorded in the Gospels. And because of that, all those years, invisible to us, are nevertheless central to his identity as a human person, central to the offering he makes of his life upon the cross, central to the life that rises from the dead and opens the gates of heaven. These are the landmarks of his public ministry, the mighty acts whereby he works salvation for the world and makes all things new. But even as he binds Satan and harrows hell, in there somewhere is still the kid who made his parents worry by hiding out in the temple for four days.

Do you hear why this is important? I’m a priest, I like church, you know by now I’m an ecclesiastical maximalist,  “more is more” as far as I’m concerned. So you might be surprised to hear me say, “Church is not the interesting thing about the Christian religion.” What we do here Sunday by Sunday and day by day is certainly the chief expression of our religion, where we speak most clearly and celebrate most beautifully the central mysteries of our faith. But where it chiefly happens is in you: in your lives, in your homes, in your families, at your work, in your world; where, day by day, you live your lives as people transformed by grace, called to new life, who bear witness in your loves, in your duties, in your recreation, that God in Christ has rescued us from the kingdom of death, and that we now have joy, hope, a future, in him.

Then, when you come to church, you bring with you everyone you have met, everyone you have loved, helped, laughed with, rolled your eyes at, injured, insulted; everyone you have worked with, needed something from, encountered. You bring them all here, with you, to the altar; and you offer them, with Christ’s own offering of himself, to God. 

So, here in church, we join the high priestly offering by which the world is reconciled to God. But it cannot happen without your life out there in the world: your day to day, boring and mundane maybe to you, invisible to the rest of us here in church, is actually the front line of the Christian religion. It is not invisible to God. And when you finally appear before him, and all the angels thunder their celestial “Te Deum” at your welcome through the gates of pearl, it will be as the person who was bored on a Tuesday at work; who chose to say the Our Father instead of honking your horn, who threw a fabulous Christmas dinner party for 12, who made some hard decisions with your ailing mother, who went out hiking but got caught in the rain, who put the left-handed scissors in the right-handed pail in kindergarten.

Do you hear what I’m saying? Much of our lives feel invisible to formal religion and matters of theology. There are no church holidays for Jesus’s graduation from high school, and no doctrine about his success or failure as Joseph’s apprentice. And yet, just as on the cross he offered the whole of his life to the Father, not just the bits we can read about, and therefore offered the whole world; so it is the whole of our lives that God redeems, not just the religious bits. And because he redeems the whole of our lives, his grace, his joy, his mercy, his peace, can break out for us in what might feel like the unlikeliest places. That in turn helps us to offer those unlikeliest places back to God the next time we pray or come to church. And so our disparate and fragmented world is stitched back together, slowly but surely, as a little yeast leavens the whole loaf.

I hope this is some encouragement: your life, especially when you are not in church, not praying, not otherwise religiously employed, is dear to God; it is not foreign territory to him. It is all a part of the story, all a part of the life He is working in you — and therefore it all belongs to the arena of divine agency and gift.

Let the finding of the boy Jesus in the temple be an invitation to you: to widen your horizon of where you see God at work; to live your own day to day as the place where God reveals his mercy and truth; and to bring it all back here to the altar, where we offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving, are fed by the fruit of the tree of life, and are finally found by God and brought home.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.