Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas, January 5, 2025

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

One of the mysteries of the New Testament and of our faith is that we really don’t know all that much about this person named Jesus. We have a couple of birth narratives from Luke and Matthew, then only Luke has two additional infancy scenes plus the one we heard today when he was a 12-year-old. Mark and John skip childhood altogether. Most of what we know about Jesus is from his last one to three years when he was a full-fledged adult. As someone who loves a good biography, I would not give any of these gospels a very good review on this point.

To know what some early believers thought about Jesus, you have to look outside of the canon to writings that were not believed to have the same authority as those that made it into what we know as the New Testament. The picture these other texts paint can be pretty outrageous with Jesus coming across as a miracle worker or as spoiled and petulant - cursing to death children who bump into him or striking with blindness neighbors who complain to Mary and Joseph about his behavior. These stories are from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, not to be confused with the regular old Gospel of Thomas. This early 2nd century text also includes the story we read in Luke this morning about the boy Jesus in the temple. Clearly there was a tradition that said he was wise beyond his years and was aware that his place was in "his Father's house."

We don't often get to hear this story since we don’t always get a second Sunday after Christmas. It all depends in the day the week on which Christmas falls which then determines when Epiphany is, and sometimes there is only a single Sunday between the two. The last time I preached on this text on the 2nd Sunday after Christmas was in 2009 before I was even in seminary! I'm glad to finally be able to revisit this text because, even though it is brief, it causes me to wonder about a few things.

I can't hear this story of the earthly parents of Jesus being three days out on their journey home without thinking of the 1990 film Home Alone which many of you may have in your Christmas movie watching rotation. Yes, the situation is a little bit reversed with 8-year-old Kevin begin forgotten at home as the family rushed to get to the airport to fly off to Paris for the holidays. And it wasn't three days but a matter of hours before it dawns on Kevin's mom that something is amiss. Unfortunately, she was in the air somewhere over the Atlantic by then. Kevin is home alone, as the title tells us, doing what 8-year-olds would do with such freedom - watching movies maybe he shouldn’t, eating all the ice cream his belly can hold, and staying up to all hours. Yes, it’s all fun and games until the burglars show up.

I'll leave it to you to fill in the rest, but the point is that Kevin is doing what would be expected of a child his age, but Jesus? I mean, how many 12-year-olds do you know who would stay behind in church to come to bible study? But we are already in on the secret of the Jesus story. He is not an ordinary boy. Over the past couple of weeks, we have heard the miracle of his conception and birth, of angels and shepherds, and this evening we'll hear the story of the Magi traveling from afar to bring exotic gifts to the infant king. From where we sit, maybe Jesus was exactly where we would expect him to be.

But shouldn't Mary and Joseph have known, too?

Let's go back and set this scene. Jesus and his family have travelled to Jerusalem for the Passover celebration. This is their annual practice, and they make the 85- to 90-mile journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem with their extended kin to observe this remembrance of the delivery of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. After the 8-day festival, they gather the animals and the tents and the extended family and begin the journey home. And it isn’t until a full day into the trip that Mary and Joseph notice that in all the hustle and bustle of the travelling caravan, Jesus is missing. They haven’t left Jesus home alone; they’ve left him at their holiday destination!

But before we rush to judgment about distracted or neglectful parents, that whole clan traveling with them were kin. It was a natural assumption that Jesus was somewhere among all the people heading back to Nazareth. In the context of this journey, Jesus was surrounded by adults who took responsibility for him. It was natural for children to be taken under the wing of neighbors and relatives along the way. This is not the surprising part of the story.

No, the surprise is two-fold: that Mary and Joseph didn't think that he might be in the temple, and secondly, that the religious leaders indulged his curiosity and engaged with him in discussing Jewish texts.

If I try to put myself in Mary’s shoes, I can't help wondering if maybe with the passage of years she wondered if all she had been told in the beginning was just some kind of dream or lost in the mists of memory. She was just raising a regular boy who ran around with his friends and tormented his siblings. The words of the angel Gabriel and the prophets Simeon and Anna were a distant memory. So maybe she didn’t have any reason to suspect that they would find him in the temple.

Except if you look closely, you see that our reading today begins, "Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover" (2:41). While it was required to go to Jerusalem for the three major festivals during the year, it wasn’t like everyone could drop everything for a several-days' journey every year, but Luke says that Mary and Joseph did. It was a sign of their piety, a piety they passed on to Jesus. Viewed that way, it does make sense that he has a curiosity to learn Torah, to understand his Jewish identity.

And what of those rabbis and religious folk in the temple with this boy?

"After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers" (2:46-47). I can't help wondering if they had heard the stories of a child who had been born under mysterious circumstances, of Herod's rage at the threat of a new king. Did they wonder if this was the messiah? Were they there two decades later when the adult Jesus taught in the temple and took a whip to those who corrupted this same temple, his Father's house?

We can't know these things. What we can know is that Jesus knew where he belonged, and maybe Luke includes this story to point us to those later episodes in the last week of Jesus’s earthly life when he crammed as much teaching as he could into those sessions in the temple precincts before, finally, the authorities had heard enough.

None of us sitting here may have been born miraculously or been labeled daughter or son of God, and maybe no Magi came to offer us strange gifts, but we are all children of God. Did you hear how the letter to the Ephesians opens?

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. (1:3-6)

Beloved. Chosen. Destined.

Jesus may have been the particular Son of God sent for the salvation of humankind, but we, too, are part of this story. We, too, are about our Father’s (or our Mother's or God's or their) business when we come here to listen and learn, to love and serve, to welcome those children - even the 12-year-olds - with their questions and curiosity.

Luke includes this story of the Boy Jesus in the Temple not just as an early epiphany of who the boy is but as an example for us, too, as we sing with the psalmist

How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts! *
My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. (Psalm 84:1)