Of the four Gospels in our Bibles, only Luke mentions Jesus’ childhood, giving us two stories. (The Infancy Gospel of Thomas tells stories about Jesus’ early years, but they are clearly invented – showing a petulant child using magical powers to get his way until the neighbors must ask his family to move to another village because their son isn’t safe to have around.) We don’t often read Luke’s stories because they fall between Christmas and Epiphany when many of us are traveling, and the church is busy with other things. So today we enjoy this story and unravel it a little to see what it teaches us.
It’s clear that Jesus came from a pious family. They travel to the Temple in Jerusalem every year to celebrate the Passover. (We also learn that they are probably poor. There are three festivals each year requiring Temple attendance – Passover, and the two harvest festivals. One of these falls in spring at the time we call Pentecost and the other comes in the fall, now called the festival of booths. Jesus family attended only one, either because they couldn’t afford to go three times or because they weren’t farmers and so didn’t have harvest to tithe.)
Jesus’ family travels in the company of family and friends, telling us that Jesus grew up in a community that valued their faith and traditions. There was a village raising him to be a good Jewish man. At twelve he would have been considered a man religiously, having studied scripture throughout his life and now taking his place among the men as a reader in the synagogue. Clearly, he cared about scripture because he spent several days in the Temple listening to the scholars’ debate what tangled passages might mean and joined in the conversation. Luke wants us to know that Jesus had the authority of knowledge behind his teachings.
This story tells us that Jesus is also human. He may be religiously mature at 12, but he’s still a boy. His parents are happy for him to walk home with his friends, but when they camp for the night and can’t find him, they are naturally upset. They walk a full day back to the big city to look for him – for three days. Eventually they find him talking with the scholars in the Temple. No word here about where he slept or what he ate all that time. And when they do find him and share their frustration and fear, he brushes them off. “Didn’t you know I had to be here?” As if it would be normal to look for a boy among the powerful scholars. There are volumes written about how Jesus was human but without sin. Whenever I read this story, I’m convinced that’s a lot of men talking after the fact. Any mother knows that this was a naughty boy. If one of our children did something like this, they’d never again see a video game and they’d be grounded until graduation. Maybe it’s okay for Jesus to just be human. Later in life we’ll see him angry, frustrated, tired, but also loving and laughing and human in many other ways.
Our story tells us that Mary treasures these stories from her son’s childhood, and surely remembered them twenty years later when he began his public ministry. The roots of that ministry were planted in these early years. They are deep in scripture and in the faith community. The are fed by his mother’s vision for justice and by his father’s struggle to support his family in the poverty of being a carpenter in hard times. Jesus’ faith comes from his life and his message grows out of his experiences. That message is also formed by his deep conviction that God is a part of that life and always fully present in it.
We’ve talked often about how hard life was in first century Palestine. Encouraged by their religious leaders, the people longed for a Messiah who would come from God to rescue them. They were waiting for God to clean up what was a big mess in daily life. It’s sometimes convenient for people in power to suggest that they can’t do anything about what’s broken in society but must wait for God to make improvements. Jesus had a very different message. He told people that God’s love was already powerful among them, and they didn’t need to wait. A new way of living – a Godly way of living – was available to them right now. Then he showed them what that looked like: those with bread shared with the hungry; those with two robes gave one away to clothe a neighbor; people ostracized because of illness could be healed and re-enter the community; those who lived in the margins (women, beggars, slaves) could be treated with respect and given dignity. Jesus challenged the authority of those who had the opportunity to make change and protected their own power rather than healing the community.
The story of the earliest followers of Jesus is the story of those who took his message seriously and lived by it. They formed communities that cared for one another. The story of Christmas as we tell it is about waiting for God. It’s also about noticing that God is already here. God isn’t delaying the time when God will fix the world for us. God is waiting for us to live in a different way. When we remember the invitation to love one another, we create that way of life. We talk at Christmas about God taking on human flesh and living among us. Today we are that human flesh and we make God visible in our lives through our actions.
In our time we continue the work of first century Jesus followers through many small acts of kindness. We believe we bring light to the world in simple ways that have big impact and we celebrate that every Sunday. One difference between our time and the first century is that we have vastly more power than most of those folks ever imagined. Yes, we work in small, personal ways, but we also have influence on policy – we have a voice and a vote and the freedom to use both. In our century the message of Christianity to government and society has been highjacked by the Evangelical movement. Theirs is a message of protecting wealth and giving power to the few. They want to create a rulebook which controls individual choice and flaunts our common responsibility to care for those who struggle. It’s a message of exclusion and judgment.
In my childhood mainline Christianity had influence and it’s time that we took it back. What we can’t do as individuals, we can do through community and government. We can reclaim the vision of Jesus that’s not about judgment but about justice, not about power but about equality and dignity for everyone. Jesus wanted to level the field so that everyone ate and had health care, everyone could succeed so the community was lifted up together. His encouragement to “love one another” is how we love God. Sometimes we’re told that vision isn’t realistic and will never work in the “real” world. I say it’s not a failed vision, it’s a forgotten vision and it’s time we remembered. It’s time to make some holy noise and get in some good trouble to change what’s “real.”
This doesn’t mean that God has abandoned us to take care of ourselves on our own. It means that God has always been here within us, always moved among us. God acts through us to re-create life in the image we call holy. That is the celebration of Christmas that lasts all year.