Oh Grow Up!

Sermon based on Luke 2: 41-52

Charles J. Tomlin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Sunday after Christmas, Year C

December 27^th, 2009

Can you remember when you were 12 years old?

I became 12 years of age in May of 1969.   That was the year of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, the year of Woodstock, and it was year Richard Nixon was elected President.   The average price of gas was 35 cents per gallon; the average income was under 8,500 dollars; the average new house was 15,550 dollars and the average new car cost around 3,200 dollars.    (While I do remember some of this, like the moon landing and the price of gas, I found the statistics at a website).  For our family, it was also the year we got our first color TV and I was in the 7^th Grade at Harmony School.   Thinking about all this now makes me realize that I am truly 52 years old.  Life has changed a lot since then.

In today’s Scripture, when Jesus was twelve, he matured in a very dramatic way.   You know the story.  The Scripture tells us how Jesus’ family made a Pilgrimage to the temple.   It must have been quite a trip for Jesus’ family who lived about 125 miles away and had to travel on foot.   Though not a vacation, it was as close what any family of that time would call a “family vacation”.   But what makes this “road trip” so special and memorable is that something dramatic and dangerous happened on that trip.  That’s how we remember things too isn’t it?   Most of life passes by, in and out of our memory, but there are some unique events that linger and we never forget.  

And who forget the time you nearly your child.   I know that Teresa and I will never forget the day in Germany we thought we’d lost our daughter.  She wasn’t 12, but she was 4.   The last moment we saw her, she was playing just outside our apartment on a warm spring day.   The next moment she was gone.  We called.   We checked the neighbors.  We worried.   We called the police.   Finally, some 5 hours later, she showed up at our door.  She had gone into another apartment close by to play with her friend “Maxie”.   I was relieved to find her, but I was also upset.   I made Ahnabeth go with me to the police station to make a report and made her apologize because I had to get their help.

When I first had the story of the “lost” Jesus taught to me, it was suppose to be a story to illustrate how brilliant and even divine Jesus was even in his very young, child-like, human body.  Perhaps that is still part of the story, yet I think the text itself tells us that something else is going on.   The final verse may give us the best commentary when after giving the story it adds that “….Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.”    While this may be true, we can certainly add that at this moment, he wasn’t in good favor with his mother.

What is happening to Jesus in this story is a very human thing that happens to each of us, but it doesn’t happen to every child in the same way.   Jesus is growing up.   While the story may have some interesting things to say about how Jesus uniquely grew up, it also speaks to some very interesting ways we all grow up.    And this brings us to our question for today, this Sunday after Christmas: What does it mean to “grow up” and mature?   And also, can we learn anything from this story for our own lives so that we too might grow spiritually in the coming year?  

For one thing, people grow up best in the “hidden”, “no-where”, “out-of-the-way places” and in the most “simple” places in our lives.

                                      

What do we know about Jesus’ formative years?  Practically nothing.  Most of the events that made Jesus, Jesus, are hidden from us, and perhaps rightly so.   Jesus grow up out of public eye in such normal, common and ordinary ways that most of what happened to him and made him who he became, probably would not even have been noticed.   This “hiddenness” of childhood can be a good thing too, can’t it?

Isn’t this where a child can build his or her best foundation to be a person---in those simple, ordinary and out of the way experiences?   Humans grow best not through the strange, unique, exceptional, or special, but we are made who we are by the small things like family, love, work and daily care.

All of us knows the tragedy of “child stars”.   Because they are selected, they are caught up in a “strange” world of privilege which normally ends up robbing them of their “normal” childhood which each of them needs so desperately.    Michael Jackson said this happened to him.   The Olsen Twins said it happened to them.   It probably happened to Tiger Woods and it can happen to almost any child who is treated in such a way that they lose their sense of reality and responsibility.

And where do our children get this sense of reality and responsibility?   Have you ever been at school and I parent comes in irate because the teacher says their child misbehaved and needed to be punished.   The parent goes to the teacher, complains to the principal or either doesn’t care at all.  Either extreme is dangerous.  It is dangerous because a child has to learn to feel, experience and know life through their own successes, failures, flaws and talents.  

I remember how our daughter learned about fire.   She used to have the sweetest phrase…… She would put her hand up close to the fire, then back off and say, “It buRNNNNNNS!  Do you know why she said that?  One day I watched her curiously put her finger up close to a candle.  Though I didn’t want her to get badly hurt, I warned her, but did not prevent her.  Sure enough, she cautiously tried it and you know what happened next.   It BurNNNNNNNS!  

What a simple, ordinary, but necessary experience for a child.  To learn about the pains, hurts, dangers and realities of life in a home where there was love, forgiveness, and responsibility.  It’s the kind of atmosphere that allows a child to learn and to grow.

But still, some people don’t grow up well.   Some children are either underprotected or overprotected.  Some children are over disciplined and others are under disciplined.  Where is the instruction manual?  Where do we draw the line in ways that helps the child grow, is “wisdom” and “stature”, and “in favor with God and people?

If Jesus had anything going for him, it was that his family lived the life of simple people.   Greatest is normally formed not out of what we have in life, but greatness is normally formed out of what we learn to dream.

Secondly, you don’t have to be a perfect family to be a happy, or holy family.  

Several years ago I had an associate pastor whose mother was Jewish.   When we had time to talk Scripture, Pastor David, with his Jewish background had some interesting insights on Scripture, which of course, for the most part is Jewish.

One passage David had great insight upon was this text in Luke 2, when Mary goes searching and frantically finds Jesus in the temple.   He said he heard his own mother’s frustration and fear in Mary’s emotional words as she says, “Son, why have you done this to us?  Behold, your Father and I have been looking everywhere for you thinking you were dead?”   There’s power, emotion, and all kinds of signs of an imperfect home these words.   First of all, why is Mary doing all the talking and not Joseph?  Secondly, what was Jesus thinking?  Even if he is about his other “Father’s business” shouldn’t he have asked permission first?   Lastly, Jesus is bright and different and this can cause the greatest conflict of all.   Later on, Mary and the rest of the family deem Jesus crazy.   We can only imagine that they also had other conflict with him and his calling, just as the brothers had with Joseph, called the dreamer.   What made Jesus different also made for tension, drama and, as the text says, sorrow and dread.  

Whereas Jesus is our sinless savior, this does not have to mean he was a perfect child coming from a perfect home.   We know, right from this text that Jesus was a good child, but he wasn’t always the kind of child a family wanted or needed.   We also know that Jesus grew up in a home that had its challenges.   For one thing, the father seems completely passive in this moment and nothing else is said about Joseph, as if he was sickly or died.

Whatever we can say about Jesus growing up to be Jesus, he didn’t have a perfect home life.  We can clearly read conflict in his home which continued throughout his ministry.   But there is good news here, isn’t there?  Greatest does not grow in perfect homes, but it most often grows in homes where there are honest struggles, challenges, difficulties and at times, even failure.  The challenges and conflicts of a home can make a child strong, as long as there is real love and true faith in the mix  (Don't misunderstand this to mean that conflict alone makes for growth, it doesn't).  Faith and love help us swim through the problems rather than sink in them when even as we struggle, grow, develop and learn we keep the faith and live in love.

There is one more truth we need to see in this story.   We see that children grow up best in “hidden places” and that they don’t’ have to have “perfect places” but finally, there also needs to be in their lives a “God place.”  

Children don’t automatically grow up to love God, especially in this world. Without the help of their parents and family traditions and responsibilities, children get lost very easily.   Jesus got lost, but the good news is that it was a “good kind” of getting lost.   What it shows us in the normal propensity of a child to wonder, experiment, seek adventure, ask questions.   But that Jesus was in the temple had as much to do with his earthly family who nurtured him as it did with his heavenly father who was calling him into his “business”.

Does your child have a place for God in their hearts and lives, because you’ve made that place and space possible?   How do we do this? It’s not that difficult.  We can best give our children a God space in their lives, when they see the God space in our own lives.   Children learn what should be important to them by observing what is important to us.  


The pastor of the National Cathedral, John Chane, shared a heart warming story in his Christmas sermon about his seeing "a young father who walked stiffly down the sidewalk tightly holding the hand of his young son who was no more than five years old. The father who seemed to be in his mid thirties was on his way for coffee at the local coffee shop. The father looked very distant, removed and weary, his eyes fixed away from the delight of his young son.  Seeing them would make you wonder if Christmas would come to them this year, or if sadness and disappointment would be their visitors instead of joy, wonderment, and the hope of better things to come in the new year. On first glance looking at father and son their relationship appeared pretty fragile!

And then the little boy stopped walking and seemed to balk. His father, quite annoyed, looked angrily down at him and said, “Come on, Timmy. You’re holding me up.” And he grabbed the boy’s hand harder and literally began to drag Timmy along the sidewalk. Unfazed by his fathers anger and detachment, the little boy, with a radiating smile on his face, said, “Daddy, do you know why I’m holding your hand?” And his father gruffly said, “No, Timmy, I don’t!” And the little boy replied buoyantly, “I’m holding your hand because I love you!” And at that moment the boy’s father stopped dead in his tracks, looked down at his son, and then picked him up in his arms, hugged him tenderly kissed him on the cheek and said, “And I really love you, too.”

Timmy with his small arms wrapped tightly around his father’s neck snuggled him and then kissed him on the cheek. And at that moment Christmas came in spite of anything and everything. And it would come because of the unfailing love between a father and his son; a love that could not be broken by hardship, disappointment, and the distressing news of the day about the economy, unemployment, lost nest eggs, war, a planet in danger of dying, and the volatility of the Middle East. 

This is how God's presence works in our world.  When his love enters and guides our lives everything looks different.  Will you have a God space?  A “God space” grows within us as we commit to give ourselves to the greater purposes of our lives?   It’s amazing how little we grow spiritually when we are only concerned with ourselves?  It’s just as amazing to realize how much we grow spiritually when we open our hearts toward the “Father’s business” of loving others.       Amen.