Incarnation - God Identifies Even with Adolescence

The Rev. Robert P. Travis

Second Sunday of Christmas Sermon  – 7:45 (exclude parenthetical sections), 9 and 11:15am Service, Church of the Ascension, Knoxville TN - RCL  1/4/2015

Text: Jeremiah 31:7-14, Psalm 84:1-8, Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a, Luke 2:41-52

Sermon Text:

The great miracle of the incarnation,

which we focus on and celebrate for such a short time

during these 12 days of the Christmas Season,

is that the Word of God,

the second person of the eternal Trinity

Humbled himself to become one of us,

Human in every way.

And by humbling himself,

He gave us the greatest glory,

By giving us the gift of connecting his divine nature,

To our humanity.

In today’s gospel we see His incarnation

in one of the most humble ways.

That of the adolescent.

(I love this Gospel story,

and have meditated on it

over and over for many years,

especially since it was central to the

Journey to Adulthood program I used to run

In the beginning of my ministry.

So I’m excited to get to share it with you today.)

How many of us look back on the time

when we were 12,

In Junior High or Middle School,

And think, “that was the best time of my life!”

Or “I was really at my best when I was 12?”

I certainly don’t.

I found it to be a trying time,

A time of beginning to question who I am,

An uncertain time,

of wondering almost constantly what others thought of me, and feeling insecure,

A time when I began challenging my parents,

And started to see the ways

that they were less than ideal.

The awesome thing about the story

of Jesus in the temple,

Is that we see the word of God,

Identifying with us in that very time of adolescence,

That so many of us found difficult.

(First off, let’s set aside the notion that

Mary and Joseph did anything wrong by

Not keeping track of Jesus this time

when they went up to the festival in Jerusalem.

The story carefully tells us

that they went up to the festival every year,

so by the time Jesus was 12,

they had done this a number of times,

and it was becoming the kind of routine experience,

where as a family people

tend to rest on their assumptions,

and everyone knows what they are

supposed to be doing.

It was customary to travel with a group of people,

and to rely on the group to watch out

for each others children

And it was also customary that

around the age of 12 or 13

An adolescent boy would take on

new responsibility as a

Young adult in the synagogue and temple worship,

Much like the Jewish tradition we know about today

in the celebration of a bar mitzvah.

So Jesus would have naturally been given a greater amount of independence

on this journey to the festival,

And since the group of travelers watched out for each other’s children, it was normal for Mary and Joseph to assume that Jesus was in the group of travelers when they all left Jerusalem together.

So can’t you just imagine Joseph or Mary saying,

“what do you mean he’s not with our friends and relatives? He should have known we’d be leaving together!”

and their search for him became more frantic.)

After Joseph and Mary discovered Jesus missing,

They went back to Jerusalem

and searched for their son

For three days!

And you can imagine, if you’ve ever lost a child, even for a few minutes, that at the end of three days they were at their wits end

and emotionally as well as physically exhausted,

and maybe had very little hope left

of finding their son.

So what else was there but

to go to the temple to pray,

As they had given up on their efforts

to find him on their own.

So can you imagine, as they walked in the temple,

And heard what sounded like that familiar voice,

And then turned a corner and saw their boy sitting with the teachers, how shocked they must have been?

At that point they were most probably not impressed,

Or even paying attention to the amazement

That the teachers were showing at their child’s understanding and his answers.

No, they were shocked, astonished,

and his mother says to him,

Something that in my experience would not have been nearly so calm and polite

as we sometimes read it.

“Child, why have you treated us like this?”

(there might even have been some expletives in there, that the early scribes edited out of Mary’s account)

The way Jesus responds is to me

nothing less than awesome,

because it sounds so much like any young teenager,

who has that new-found confidence of being right.

“Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

(there is so much in that one statement,

that Jesus makes,

that shows us how much he lived

in our very condition.)

And of course, much like we as parents are,

Or as our parents were to us,

We know how in their anxiety and exhaustion,

His wise statement did not sound so wise,

Or even make much sense.

And we read, “they did not understand

what he said to them.”

But Jesus knew that all he could

do was go with them,

And do his best to be obedient to them.

And the good news is, that Jesus grew in wisdom,

And grew physically, and grew in favor with God and other people, which describes how we all must grow from our adolescence onward into adulthood.

It gives me great comfort to know that our Lord was a sassy, albeit precocious adolescent,

That he upset his parents,

and caused them great anxiety.

That even though he was the Son of God,

He also went through life just like we have to,

And that sometimes those things He was so sure of about himself, didn’t make sense to anyone else,

Even his own mom and dad.

(today as we celebrate the new lives

of these children in our community,

as we baptize them into the name of this same Jesus.

I can say that we are giving them a great gift,

That of being able to identify with a God who is not

Just out there and transcending everything,

But a God who was and is just like they are,

That the struggles they will have growing up,

He had as well, and the challenges

Joys and sorrows of being in the families they are in,

He shares with them in his own experience.)

Jesus incarnation is a great gift to all of us.

He shows us that he knows

all the ups and downs of our lives,

even the awkwardness of adolescence.

By knowing our lives,

Jesus also glorifies them,

And takes the very ordinary aspects of life,

from how we relate to our parents,

to what it takes to grow up

he takes each of those

and makes them holy and good.

Thanks be to God,

For the wonder of his love in becoming one of us.

Amen