Christmas 2
January 3, 2010
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 84
Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a
Luke 2:41-52
Growing up is hard to do, isn’t it. Especially when you’ve got a mother like Mary. And I dare say that many of us have had a mother like Mary. Many of us parents have had a child like Jesus, too. And many of us have been a child like Jesus. Today Luke gives us a unique look at Jesus. Luke shows us Jesus’ initiation into adolescence. And we all know that being an adolescent, or the parent of an adolescent, is never easy. Any parent can tell you how difficult it is to deal with children whose bodies are rapidly morphing into adult forms; whose child minds are beginning to think adult thoughts; whose desire for independence can test a saint, even a saint like Mary.
We might wonder why Luke chose to tell this story of Jesus. It’s not a nice one. Then, again, who we are as adolescents is seldom who we become as adults. And we can thank God for that. I mean, imagine what the world would look like if it were run by adolescents.
In today’s gospel account of Jesus in the Temple Luke shows Jesus to be disobedient, disrespectful, and quite full of himself. A typical adolescent. And Luke is not afraid to paint a realistic portrait of a boy who is taking his first big step on that journey which leads to manhood. And it’s not hard for us to imagine what that journey through adolescence will look like for Jesus, and for his parents. But all of us must take that journey if we hope to emerge into the mature life of an adult.
Adolescence is such an important time in our life. In fact, it is critical time for testing the waters of adulthood. Testing the waters allows us to make our mistakes, to live by trial and error; to succeed and fail at new things we try. It is the time to challenge rules and break down barriers which stifle our growth so that we can grow our own life while we are still living in the safety net of family and friends who serve our better good. Most parents do not willingly accept, or give into the testing of adolescents. In fact, if we had total control over the situation we wouldn’t even allow it.
But there seems to be a built in mechanism which is triggered at some point in a child who is on the verge of adolescence. And for all the trouble it makes for us we might have to call that mechanism a “smart button.” Because the adolescent body and mind knows that remaining a child is no longer an option and adulthood cannot be avoided. Even God’s son could not remain a child. Especially God’s son. The boy Jesus had adult work to do, and he would only had a few years to do it in. He had to grow up fast in a culture that still marks the beginning of manhood at around 12 years of age when boys begin to study for their bar-mitzvah.
Luke obviously recognized the importance of this moment in Jesus’ life. He saw a message in it which he believed would lend great credibility to Jesus, and make Jesus more credible to us. We see the adolescent pushing the boundaries, testing the waters, but then we see the boy stepping back to become the obedient child to his mother. Luke wants us to see that this moment of independence is an important step in Jesus’ initiation into adulthood, but he is still a child, not ready for prime time, still needing the advice and consent of his family and community. And the clear message Luke give us in this story is that Jesus is very much like us. Like each of us, Jesus must also journey through this period of adolescence to find out who he is and explore the possibilities for who he might become.
Adolescence is all about growing. Growing up, growing apart, and growing into the mature person God made us to be. The difference is that Jesus already is that person he was meant to be. But he must also become the God that he is in the man he will become. On the other hand, we who are completely human never stop growing into the mature life God is calling us to live. You might say that Christians live in a perpetual state of adolescence. In fact, one of the most important messages in a service of burial is that we will never completely be the person God made us to be; our life will only be completed in God on that day we make our transition from this world to the next. While we live in this world Christians never stop testing the waters of faith that enable us to grow into more mature believers. And we are always ready and willing to step back to answer the call of obedience to a God who really cares about us and wants us to listen to him.
In Luke’s account of Jesus in the Temple, Jesus is 12 years old going on 20. But he is not 20. Nevertheless, he decides not to join his companions on the journey home. Instead he stays at to return to the Temple. Like most adolescents, he wants to do what he wants to do. He gives no thought for his own safety or his parents’ concern for him. He only knows that his experience in that Temple speaks deeply to him; it invites him into a world much larger than the one he knows, and he wants to be with people he yearns to become.
For three days Jesus gets to test the waters to see what it would be like to be 20 years old, to argue with learned elders over scripture. Jesus becomes so completely engaged in his new life that when his anxious parents return to the temple to fetch him home, Jesus cops the typical attitude of an adolescent testing his parents. We know it well by its tone and content. “Why did you come looking for me?” “What are you worried about?” “I know what I’m doing.“ And typical of most teenagers, I can imagine Jesus telling his friends about the incident; how stupid it was for his parents to come after him, how unfair it was for them to intrude into his life, how embarrassing it was for him. Nevertheless, after Mary scolds him, Jesus does what he knows a 12 year old boy should do. He obeys his parents. But not before he has taken that first giant step toward his adult life.
Next Sunday you will get some idea of the way Jesus moves into that future and the new relationship he obviously develops with his mother along the way. It’s another great story which shows us a very human interaction between a young man and his mother. When the wine runs out at the wedding in Cana, Mary will ask Jesus to perform what will be his first known miracle. She will ask him to turn the water stored in large wooden vats into wine. Jesus will tell her “No,” and chide her at being so presumptuous. And then, like any good mother who knows her son better than he knows himself, she is so sure he will do what she asks, she tells the guests that they must do what he will tell them to do. We learn that a son’s obedience to his mother is never completely severed; it just takes on a new dimension. Turning the water into wine becomes Jesus’ idea. And Mary is willing to let him take the credit for it.
As I hope you can see, I love this story of Jesus in the Temple and the subsequent story of a young adult Jesus believing he is his own man. They are so human and real to our experience of adolescents and emerging adulthood. And the story of the wedding at Cana reminds us that signs of maturity can be found in the ways parents and their adult children negotiate new ways to be in relationship.
Most of all I love these stories because their message is so fundamental to God’s purpose in creating us for life on this planet. We are meant to grow. We are meant to grow up, we are meant to grow mature, and we are meant to grow into ever new and deeper relationship with each other and with God. But growing in any form is hard work. It can be painful and it can make for uneasy and unpleasant moments and periods of time in our relationships. Growing also takes time; you can’t hurry it because growing is a process; it happens in steps and stages—often two steps forward, one step back.
Growing requires submission to superiors who can put the brakes on us when we are moving in wrong direction for our life, and who can also help us accelerate when we moving in the right direction. Growing requires obedience, too. Listening closely and paying attention, not only to our parents, or superiors, but also to the greatest authority who seeks our attention: God. And we need God most of all if we are to grow into the person God made us to be. We also need the people God places in our life who serve God’s purpose for us. But the hardest part of growing up and growing mature and growing to God, throughout our life, is in discerning the right voices to listen to; the right superiors to obey, the right people to follow, the best steps to take, and all with a sense of timing which keeps us centered in God’s time for the ways we are meant to grow and mature.
The question is, how do we know when we are growing or not? How do we know when we are becoming stagnant or regressing or growing in wrong directions? It’s helpful, I think, to look at the meaning of the word “grow,” itself. To grow means to move forward, to progress, to advance to an improved state. So, in a sense, we are not growing at all unless we are improving the content and quality of our life for the better.
How we measure our growth depends upon our rule we use to measure it. When we measure growth by God’s rule for improvement, that looks a lot different from the ways the world measures growth by improvement. Improvement by the world’s standards often means growing our money, accumulating more material possessions, landing an enviable job even if we hate it, marrying up, gaining more status or prestige and the like. All of these are measures of improvement by the world’s standards; the question is, are they necessarily measures of growth by any standard of maturity. I don’t think so, not by God’s standards. They do not measure whether a person is growing into the life God has given them to live. That requires a different rule of measure.
God’s standards for measuring growth and maturity are captured in the final words of our gospel lesson today. Luke tells us that after Jesus’ first encounter into adulthood he “increased in wisdom, in the fullness of his years, and in divine and human favor.” These are the measures of maturity by which God monitors our growth. Wisdom cannot be measured by our intelligence; it can only be measured by the ways we reveal God. Maturity cannot be measured by the accumulation of our years, it can only be measured by the ways we grow into God’s likeness. God’s favor or the favor of others cannot be measured by how popular or well-known we are; it can only be measured by the good that we are and the good that we do for others.
Growing to God is what makes people of faith different from people who grow by any other standard of measure. When we apply God’s measures for growth and maturity we are bound to find places in ourselves where we are still children; both childlike and childish. We also find places of maturity which demonstrate our growing to God. But mostly we are bound to find ourselves in chaotic and unpredictable places of adolescence. And that is not a bad thing. We find our sharpest growing edges in periods of adolescence, and we find our best hope for change and transformation. Adolescence engenders the greatest potential for growing into the person God created us to be, and for serving God’s best purpose for us in this world. People of faith who regularly go through periods of adolescence know how hard it is to take that first step. And we know that once we do, our growing to maturity will be difficult and messy and painful at times. But one thing we can be sure of: as long as we are growing to God, we’re going to be all right.