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Monday, Sept 06
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Sunday, December 27, 2009
Luke 2:41-52
Christmas I
Craig Shirley
Have you ever watched the FOX television show “Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader?” It’s a trivia game show that pits adults against actual 5th grade students. It tends to be more than a bit embarrassing for the adults, especially when you see one of the adult contestants straining for a response, while the kid is literally jumping up and down with the answer!
That is the image I get from this lesson this morning from Luke. Jesus is older than a 5th grader – in fact he is about bar Mitzvah /Confirmation age – almost a teenager. And he is confident in this meeting with the church elders who were amazed at his knowledge of the faith. At the same time, he was stretching his proverbial wings – leaving his parents to wonder where he was for three whole days while he did his own thing. A typical teen!
One of the tasks of moving from childhood to young adulthood, one of the tasks of being a teenager is discovering and affirming one’s identity. I have often thought that this story of Jesus would be more appropriately proclaimed on a Confirmation Sunday because it is the only story in scripture that gives us insight into the kind of person Jesus was, how he understood his own identity.
What defines a person’s identity? Family ties, religious experience, a sense of vocation, a personal creed, one’s dreams and ideals. All of these things are a part of our development as human beings.
For Jesus, his family identity seemed pretty clear – at first. He was Jesus, son of Joseph the carpenter. Whether or not he was legitimate was of no significance in that society, just as it is no longer of significance in this society. Joseph was his father, he raised him and they were father and son in every sense of the word. Yet, when his “biological” parents find him in the temple three days after losing him, his mother Mary says ‘Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.”
‘Why where you searching for me?” the young Jesus asks, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Gently but firmly Jesus takes the name father from Joseph and gives it to God. At some time Jesus must have discovered his own unique relationship to God. He cannot have known it when he was an infant in a manger and a baby in his mother’s arms. As years went on he must have had thoughts; and then at this first Passover, with manhood dawning, there came a sudden blaze of realization, the consciousness that he was in a unique sense the Son of God. It must have been a difficult realization for Jesus and an even more difficult one for his parents to hear. It points out the fact that at certain times, God’s call, God’s claim on us, may stand in tension or open conflict with human desires for social acceptance, loyalty to family, economic prosperity, and other worthy ideals. The hard decisions are not those between right and wrong but those that call for us to choose between options, when both represent worthy and worthwhile causes. In this case, Jesus was already reassigning other priorities to his sense of God’s purpose for his life. Yet, he remained subordinate to his parents. He went home and he was “obedient to them” the story tells us.
This sense of call, this sense of vocation, can be a challenge for any young person, and now in our present day society, there are many adults who are experiencing this same sense of having to find their way into a new vocation, a new call. Being laid off from a job is serious and terrifying, but it may just open up new opportunities for life and growth. Rather than being an ending, it could be a beginning.
At the same time, men are particularly disadvantaged today in their formative stories leading to vocational choices. Robert By, author of “Iron John”, says that this stems from the Industrial Revolution when fathers left the house to go off to work. Before then, boys would grow up with their fathers and girls with their mothers. Boys would spend time watching their dads ply their trade, learning how to make their own way, listening to wisdom of older men talk about life through the stories they would tell. But all of that changed in a modern world. Boys had to learn their stories elsewhere, had to discover what it meant to be men in other ways, less adequate ways than from their fathers. Men today are trying to uncover stories of male virtue that will help them discover more of themselves- to seek their true identities.
But it’s not all bad. Because of the changing look and feel of the workplace, women are finding new ways to express themselves vocationally. Sometimes it is this vocational self-discovery on the part of women that causes men such a sense of loss. But opening up professions; from medicine to law to sports has made our world more gender neutral and allows girls as well as boys to dream dreams.
William Willimon tells a humorous story of an older woman, a pastor’s wife, who discovered her calling through an off hand comment from her husband. Willimon had been reading papers from people who were seeking entrance into seminary and when he came across this one, he had to share it; “one woman said that she had been married for about 15 years to a pastor. One afternoon she was sitting on the sofa in the parsonage, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, and reading some trashy supermarket, checkout-line novel. Her husband walked in, the pastor, and said something to her like “you sure don’t look like a pastor’s wife.”
With that, she stomped out the cigarette, threw down her novel and shouted out, “I’m a wife, not a pastor.”
She meant it as a way of telling her husband to back off. But she said that as soon as the words came out of her mouth, “I am not a pastor” it was like this voice in her brain which said, “How do you know that you are not called to be a pastor?”
A voice, just like that – just like the voice that called out to the young Samuel in the dark in our OT story. She said the thing started working on her brain over the next few days. After a period of over a year of struggle with the idea, now she was seeking to enter seminary.
At a very young age, Jesus was able to identify himself as uniquely God’s son. He was uniquely divine, but also fully human. He was seeking to discover and affirm these identities by living out his family ties to the people who gave him life and who raised him, but he also was true to his religious experience – his sense of calling found in being the Word of God, in being obedient to God, His father and ours.
There are two ways of approaching obedience to God. Some define their religious beliefs and practices with lists of things they may not do: “thou shalt not…. Such lists set boundaries, but they do not define goals. A commitment to God that is born of the experience of God’s love and presence is expressed in grateful participation in God’s redemptive work. “All of us – even Jesus – come to know who we are, where we’ve come from, and gain clues about where we are headed by virtue of the stories that shape us. If that is so, then we have to be exposed to the stories that are truest about life. Popular authors know this principle well. For instance: JK Rowling understood it when creating Harry Potter books – a boy with a mysterious past who discovers he is not who he thought he was while a world he doesn’t know even exists knows him to be a hero. The author tells us how he spends his childhood living up to the expectations that others have for him while he discovers who he is through difficult and painful decisions.
Even God chose to trust the human institutions of family, the synagogue, the church and the Holy Spirit working among them all to lead Jesus to know the truth of his life. They all performed well.
The greatest gift, of being called, of living a life that has been summoned, is summed up in the words that Jesus declared that day in the temple, in the midst of the Elders “I must be about my Father’s business.” His words remind you and me that the gifts we have been given are gifts to be used for vocation. Your little life, and mine, is meant to count for something larger than our mere lives. There are some things we have to do just because of who we are: “I must be about my Father’s business.” Amen
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