The Untied Church of Christ

"The Untied Church of Christ"

Luke 2:41-52
December 27, 2009

Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And
when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival
was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but
his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a
day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends.
When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. 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. When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to
him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been
searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me?
Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand
what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was
obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus
increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.

The really interesting thing about today’s Scripture text is how unlike it is from anything
else we have in our Bible, in our canonical Scriptures, especially in terms of Jesus.
You see, it’s the only story we have of Jesus being a young person, a young child.
The other Gospels don’t give us much information about the early life of Christ—Mark
and John skip over his birth and childhood altogether, while Matthew only gives a birth
story, and a story about him and his family fleeing to Egypt, while Luke gives us a birth
story and this wonderful little nugget of a story, a story about his parents losing him in
Jerusalem during Passover, and searching for three days, only to find him in the
temple, the place they had originally been. And in that temple, they find Jesus there,
pontificating with the best of them, being the wunderkind, doing midrash, talking and
arguing about Scriptures with the rabbis, as if he had always belonged there, as if this
was the place he had always was meant to be. The painting on the cover of your
bulletin this morning captures some of that, this young Jewish boy talking with his elders
as if he knew was he was talking about, as if he had the authority to do so. Years later,
of course, he would be back in those walls, teaching again, teaching as if he knew was
he was talking about, but this time Roman Empire would be the ones listening, and they
would use the tremors he had caused in the Jewish community as a pretense to kill him,
But that would be later—at this moment, Jesus is still a boy, and there is still some
growing up to do here for him, and though we tend to de-humanize Jesus—that is, we
tend to forget that it even the savior of the world has to grow up, and will enviably make
some missteps, like being irresponsible and not making sure his parents knew where
he was at.   Anne Lamott takes a rather offbeat look at this story in her book Plan B:
Further Thoughts on Faith (Riverhead, 2005). She examines this story just after she’s
had a terrible argument with her 13-year-old son Sam. On that occasion, she had
asked a minister friend for some parenting advice.

Lamott’s friend quips, “In biblical times, they used to stone a few 13-year-olds with
some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were
usually in the first row of stone throwers and had to be restrained.”

This leads Lamott to wonder how Mary coped when Jesus was 13: “Here’s what I think:
She occasionally started gathering rocks.”

Lamott isn’t being sacrilegious. She has every respect for Mary as a mother and as a
person. She’s simply being incarnational.

If we really believe in the Incarnation, this doctrine of Jesus becoming human, we have
to admit that Jesus was an adolescent once. Speaking as the mother of an adolescent,
Lamott recalls how young people of that age can pre-sent a very different picture to
their parents than they do to other adults. Sometimes those other adults have no
conception how that polite, well-spoken child can be such a trial at home.

In her own words:“But at the same time he’s blowing the elders away, how is Jesus
treating his parents? I’ll tell you: He’s making them crazy. He’s ditched them. They can’t
find him for three days. Some of you know what it’s like not to find your kid for three
hours. You die. Mary and Joseph have looked everywhere, in the market, at the video
arcade. Finally they find him, in the last place they thought to look — the temple. And
immediately, he mouths off: ‘Oh, sorry, sorry, I was busy doing all this other stuff, my
Father’s work. Like, Joseph, you’re not my real father — you’re not the boss of me. I
don’t even have to listen to you.’ “And what is Mary doing this whole time? “Mary’s got
a rock in her hand.”—Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, (New York:
Riverhead, 2005). (Homiletics Online)

Indeed, I have no doubt that my mother, and I suspect your mother, had a few moments
where she was too starting to gather rocks, or wanted to anyway. As a kid, I was the
kind of child that other parent’s pointed to and said, “you know, you should be like
Kevin, he’s so polite,” which, of course, led to a very lonely childhood. But I do
remember one time when I really acted up, which really was very unusual, and I had so
infuriated my mother that she was running around the house chasing me, and I finally
escaped to the yard and just stayed out there for a couple of hours trying to avoid her,
hoping the fury would pass, but, no, no, mom was just gathering her rocks, waiting for
me to make my inevitable return back to the house, during which I endured one of the
most memorable spankings of my life.

I don’t know if Jesus received a spanking for what seems like a bit of back-talking, but
being 12 is no sin—it’s just being twelve, and even Messiah’s, as gifted and intelligent
as he was, even Messiah’s get to be 12 years old. We must never strip Jesus of his
humanity, make him some sort of a divine robot that never made a misstep, or whose
mind is never changed or challenged. Jesus was as human as we are, and could do a
bit of back-talking as well, even in this moment where he was telling the truth—this was
his Father’s house, and he was doing his Father’s business—but even then, Mary and
Joseph deserved some head’s up on where he would be.

Nonetheless, what he was teaching in that temple was probably a mixture of old and
new—scholars rightly remind us that Jesus was as Jewish as it gets, he was a boy, a
man rooted deeply in his parent’s faith, his nation’s faith, and so when he was with
those rabbis in that temple during that little escapade, and later in this life, he was often
just teaching what the rabbis had always taught, or the best of them, anyway. The over
focus on right beliefs and the pretenses of faith, without the love undergirding it all,
those realities are with us today, as they have always been—they have been the
enemy of the Christian faith, the Jewish faith, and any faith that asks people to live their
faith more than talk about faith. Sometimes simple truths are the hardest to get, and
our pretenses about the difficulties involved in believing and faith get in the way of the
obvious. There is a wonderful story about when Albert Einstein was making the rounds
of the speaker’s circuit, he usually found himself eagerly longing to get back to his
laboratory work. One night, while driving to yet another dinner, Einstein mentioned to
his chauffeur (a man who somewhat resembled Einstein in looks and manner) that he
was tired of speechmaking.

“I have an idea, boss,” his chauffeur said. “I’ve heard you give this speech so many
times, I’ll bet I could give it for you.”

Einstein laughed loudly and said, “Why not? Let’s do it!”

When they arrived at the dinner, Einstein donned the chauffeur’s cap and jacket and
sat in the back of the room. The chauffeur gave a beautiful rendition of Einstein’s
speech and even answered a few questions expertly.

Then a supremely pompous professor asked an extremely esoteric question about
antimatter formation, digressing here and there to let everyone in the audience know
that he was nobody’s fool.

Without missing a beat, the chauffeur fixed the professor with a steely stare and said,
“Sir, the answer to that question is so simple that I will let my chauffeur, who is sitting in
the back, answer it for me.”

You see, sometimes the stock speeches, the stock sermons, the empty religious
platitudes won’t work, the stuff we say off the top of our heads won’t fly, but, on the
other hand, if we are like Jesus, if we dig a little deeper, and we do the work of distilling
those simple truth down to their essence, we can cut through the platitudes, the
religiosity that plagues so much of organized religion, and give the simple answers that
have so much depth—in the end, Jesus gave an answer that had been echoed by the
wisest of the rabbis, that the essence of how to live one’s life can be put down to two
great commandments—love God and love each other. That’s it, and the rest, the rest
is just commentary, just midrash, just an attempt to explain how to do such a radical
thing as live out these two simple commandments.

And yet, from the first day that Jesus began his teaching ministry—and we have to
assume that this moment in Luke is the time when it all began—we have tended to do
what all religious people do, of Christian and non-Christian faiths—we’ve always
seemed to find a way to divide up the world with our commentary on the only two
principles that really matter. Jesus just wanted to set us free, like so many of the
Jewish rabbis wanted, like all great religious people of any faith—set us free to be
lovers of God and lovers of each other. It all comes down to that—setting us free, and
it began in that temple thousands of years, when this precocious little boy began to
speak, and he spoke like so few people had ever spoken, and he lived a life that so few
people would had the courage to live, and he told us the truth, and it has made all the
difference to the world, to me and to you, and to millions that don’t even know what he
taught and how he lived.

This past week I was asked to do the funeral service of someone who is not a member
of this congregation, and the funeral home director sent me the obituary, and in that
obituary the church that was listed was First Congregational UNTIED Church of Christ,
untied rather than United Church of Christ. I just laughed at that mistake, but, you
know, I’d like to think that this little mistake was awfully telling, even if unintentionally
so. I would like to think that, in our better moments, we were a untied church of Christ,
people who had been set free from our mistakes, from our shadows, or at least, set
free having them dictate our lives. And I’d like to think that we had been untied from
the empty religiosity and platitude spewing that forms so much of the Christian church
nowadays, though I know I am probably as guilty of it as the next preacher.   I’d like to
think, in our better moments, that were being set free by God, by the Christ, and that
we were in the midst of setting each other free, untying each other, and untying the
world from the negative stereotypes that seem to plague the church’s image nowadays,
stereotypes that have some root in reality.

Now, I know that we don’t do it all the time, and that we are like all institutions—actually,
we’re like all people: we often fail our own words, our own values, we often don’t live up
to what we say we believe—but I can’t help thinking we’re on the right track, in general,
when we actually do the right thing in this world, when we focus on the working of
setting ourselves and others free. How popular that message is…well, I don’t know, but
it wasn’t all that popular in Jesus’ day either—people are often more captivated by
learning how to tie better knots than untying the ones that have kept people enslaved
for so long, and maybe that is just human nature, I don’t know for sure.   I do know this,
though: like Mary, like all human beings, really, I am tempted by the invitation to pick up
the rocks and deal with the problem that way, with my disagreements with others that
way, but that wasn’t Jesus’ way and I hope it never becomes our way. I can’t help but
think that when 12 year old Jesus was sitting in that temple with those old and wise
rabbis, that he was slowly giving birth to the answer to that age old question of how we
are to live our lives, and what came out of those years of learning under the tutelage of
the best of rabbis, was this—love well, and love deeply, and love God, and love each
other. All the rest, my friends, all the rest is just commentary. Amen.