It is somewhat rare that I preach on the Sunday following Christmas. Pastors often travel to visit family after Christmas day, and substitute preachers are in big demand on this first Sunday following the celebration of Jesus' birth. And so I'm not sure if I've ever dealt with today's gospel in a sermon, and I'm not at all sure what I would say.
The first thing that comes to mind when I read these verses is the terror that Jesus' parents must have experienced. I once "lost" one of my daughters. She was still preschool age and decided she would head on to the grocery store, our next stop, on her own. I looked up from the shelves in the drug store to find she was no longer beside me. I looked on the adjacent aisle, and then the next, and then ran back and forth all through that store as a feeling of total panic began to rise up inside me. For a brief moment I think I experienced the most terror I have ever felt. (In desperation I rushed over to the grocery store and found her getting the free cookie the bakery there gave to small children.) Jesus' parents must have felt what I did many times over. Rather than a few minutes, they could not locate Jesus for days.
This is the only childhood story the Bible has about Jesus. And while it does highlight the exceptional nature of Jesus, it also puts his parents through great agony. It's nowhere near so terrifying as Matthew's story of Jesus' family fleeing the slaughter of all the young boys in Bethlehem, but like it, Luke's account of Jesus' arrival quickly takes a troubling turn. Maybe that is why our culture and our congregations, for all the attention we lavish on Christmas, turn away from it almost the moment the day arrives. The Christmas story is not the saccharine sweet thing we want it to be. The story immediately encounters the world's enmity along with hints that following Jesus will demand loyalty exceeding that given to family, country, etc.
Our gospel says that Jesus' mother, Mary "treasured all these things in her heart." I wonder what she found to treasure about this episode. I also wonder if this is the best translation. Another possibility is that Mary "carefully remembered" all these things, and that seems more likely to me. She knew they were important, but I wonder if she would not have gladly given them up in order to prevent what would happen to her son.
I suspect that this sort of "treasuring" is an unavoidable part of faith. In a world that is out of step with God's ways, it is inevitable that taking up those ways will cause us pain and struggles over loyalties. And if we do not realize this, we may have misunderstood the whole Jesus business. Maybe that is why Matthew and Luke (the only gospel writers who mention Jesus' birth) immediately attach dark and foreboding episodes to the story of Jesus' arrival.
It makes me wonder about the careful remembering that I need to be doing, the reflecting on things troubling and disturbing that I need to hold close if I am to understand what Jesus is asking of me.
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