Sunday, December 30, 2018

Sermon: Christmas Loyalties

Luke 2:41-52
Christmas Loyalties
James Sledge                                                                                       December 30, 2018

Some of you may have heard this story before, but with today’s gospel reading, I couldn’t resist telling it again. I once lost one of my daughters in a drug store. She was four or five years old and standing right there next to me as I looked for some item. But when I looked away from the store shelf to where she had been seconds before, she was gone. I called her name and quickly looked on the adjoining aisles. My panic growing, I traversed the store multiple times, looking down every aisle over and over without finding her. As the minutes wore on, I experienced a feeling of sheer terror.
In desperation, I finally left the store and ran down the grocery store where we had planned to go next. Hoping against hope I ran to the bakery section of the Harris Teeter, where they handed out free cookies to children. And sure enough, there she was, getting her free cookie. She had simply decided that she would go there on her own. Never mind that it was not next to the drug store but at the other end of a strip mall.
If any of you have a had a similar experience, you know how frightening it feels. My terror last but a few minutes, though it seemed much longer. I can scarcely imaging how Mary and Joseph must have felt. According to Luke, they searched for Jesus for three days, retracing their steps to Jerusalem and hunting all over the city before finally finding him.
It sometimes surprises people to learn that this is the only story in the Bible about Jesus as a child. Jesus does come from a humble background, and so makes some sense that little would be know about his early days. Still, stories about great heroes typically include some from childhood, episodes that point to their greatness to come.
I don’t know that it’s taught in school any longer – we live in a more cynical time – but when I was in elementary school I learned the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. Asked if he was the culprit he proclaimed, “I cannot tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” In all likelihood the event never happened, but that is beside the point. The story’s main purpose is to illuminate something about the character of the man, to demonstrate that his greatness was rooted in a deep, personal virtuousness.
Abraham Lincoln has his own childhood stories that give clues as to the man he will become. For that matter, there are stories about the young emperor Augustus, who ruled when Jesus was born, that point to the great leader he would become. Augustus achieved great learning at a very young age, and, in a story that was likely known by the first readers of Luke’s gospel, Augustus gave the funeral oration for his grandmother Julia Caesaris, sister of Julius Caesar, at the age of twelve.[1]
Luke, writing his gospel for Gentile Christians, seems eager to present Jesus as greater than Augustus, filled with remarkable learning despite not having any of the instruction and education that the emperor-to-be had received. Jesus wasn’t simply groomed to be a great ruler. He was born for the role, part of God’s unfolding saga of salvation.
But that is only part of our gospel this morning. Luke could easily have told the story of a miraculously precocious Jesus without the part about Jesus disappearing on his parents. Jesus could have wowed them at the Temple while the family was there for Passover. This part of the story is about something else altogether.

On the afternoon of Christmas day, I looked through my Facebook feed, viewing the many posts that showed people celebrating the day. One friend had posted a collage of family Christmas pictures with a caption that ended “Family… nothing more important!” But I’m not sure Luke, or Jesus for that matter, would agree.
In my imagination, the conversation when Mary and Joseph locate Jesus at the Temple was not a happy one. I think that translators, perhaps out of reverence, too often soften the force of scripture, and I would translate Mary angrily shouting, “Child, why have you done us like this? Your father and I were in agony searching for you!”
Agony sound appropriate to me, but Jesus shrugs it off. “Did you not know…” Luke presents a Jesus who is not only precocious with regards to theological learning, but also keenly aware of loyalty deeper than that of family. And lest we think that this loyalty problem is for Jesus alone, Luke’s Jesus will later say to would-be followers, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
I should add that Middle Eastern speech uses hyperbole in ways that we do not. We should probably hear Jesus speaking of loving father and mother, spouse and children, even our own lives less than we love him rather than actually hate. Still, this is clearly not, “Family… nothing more important!”
Neither Luke nor Jesus are saying that families are bad. After all, Jesus will dutifully return home with his parents and be obedient to them. But the new thing God begins with Jesus will not fit easily into the patterns of the world. And so Luke tells of a king who is born in the most humble and obscure fashion. His birth is sung by angels but announced only to ruffian shepherds. And well before Jesus begins his ministry, Luke lets us know that Jesus will call us to reoriented loyalties.
The Christmas carols loved by so many know this well. They sing of a newborn king, of a Lord, a ruler. They call us to worship, adore, and offer ourselves to this one who comes to be God in our midst. As these carols well know, Christmas is not an end but a beginning. The calls to worship and adore and serve are calls to refocus our lives, to re-center them on Jesus. They are calls to discover life in all its fullness by walking in the way Jesus will show us.
O come, let us adore him, above all others. Let him rule in our hearts, superseding loyalties to race, clan, nation, family, and self. O come, let us discover to true meaning of Christmas as we give ourselves fully and totally to our Lord.



[1] Naveen Sarras in “Preach This Week, December 30, 2018, Commentary on Luke 2:41-52,” WorkingPreacher.org

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