Christmas 2, Year A
January 2, 2010
Luke 2:41-52
There are some dates that tend to make us stop and think about years past. Days when it’s almost impossible just to live in the moment. Birthdays, anniversaries of significant events, and, of course, holidays. This Christmas, as always, I find myself doing a lot of reflection on Christmases past.
There was the year that I spent the week of Christmas in Oregon with my grandparents and it snowed so beautifully and I stayed with a handful of cousins in the attic room that provided as much mystery and adventure as the wardrobe to Narnia. But that experience can never happen again because my grandparents are gone now, and my cousins are grown and scattered, and the house has been sold to some other family that is probably celebrating Christmas in some other way entirely.
And there was the year that my cousin died and mom was gone to Arizona to be with her sister and celebrating Christmas didn’t feel right at all.
And there were the many years that it was just my immediate family opening presents in our cozy robes, my sister and I wearing Santa hats and distributing presents, then spending hours lying in front of the fireplace playing our new games and watching the colors spark when we fed it wrapping paper. But my mom is gone now and my sister lives halfway around the globe and my fireplace is a gas one and the floor is too hard for lying on.
Even though each Christmas is unique (no matter how many traditions you might carry over), each Christmas also contains all the Christmases past.
But each Christmas also brings, for me, anyway, a bittersweet reflection on the Christmases in my future. Before we know it, our kids will be teenagers and we’ll be lucky if they still want to spend time with us. And then someday they’ll head out on their own for good and celebrate Christmas with their own families.
It makes me want to hang on to certain moments in time and not let go.
So each Christmas not only contains all of the Christmases before it, but it also contains all the Christmases to come. Once a year, it seems like, we’re in what I imagine God’s time must be like, where everything is somehow all wrapped up together.
This experience of Christmas makes me sympathetic to the plight of Mary and Joseph in our Gospel story this morning.
We’ve been hearing pieces of the Christmas story for weeks now. In Gospel readings and our Christmas Eve pageant enactment we’ve witnessed so many marvelous bits about the birth of this holy child, Jesus. Both Mary and Joseph have received separate visits by an angel who told them about the holy child Mary would soon bear. The shepherds have been visited and serenaded by angels and made their pilgrimage to see the baby. And Mary “treasured” it all and “pondered it in her heart.” Mary and Joseph have been visited by the wise magi who follow a brilliant star to pay their baby homage as the King of the Jews. And we didn’t get it in church, but there’s another piece that comes before the story we get this morning. It’s a beautiful bit, where Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem eight days after his birth to present him to the Lord. While they’re there, they run into a righteous old man named Simeon who declares to Mary and Joseph that their child is the “salvation which God has prepared.” They also are greeted by a prophet named Anna who praises God for this child who will redeem Jerusalem.
Suffice it to say, Mary and Joseph would seem to have a lot of reason to think there is something very different and special about their son Jesus. And yet in our reading this morning it’s like they’ve forgotten all of that and they just think Jesus is the average teenager. When they find him in the temple with the teachers they are “astonished” by his understanding. When Jesus says that it made perfect sense that he would be in his “Father’s house,” they do not understand what he means.
It’s odd. After everything they have seen and heard, after angels’ visits and testimonies by shepherds, magi, and prophets, why are Mary and Joseph so surprised by Jesus feeling so at home in the temple? Why are they so astounded by his calling God his “Father”? How can all that they’ve experienced have slipped their minds? How can they not have thought ahead about what their sweet little baby might become someday? About what this baby might require of them and of the world?
Or maybe it makes perfect sense. Just like each year at Christmas I expect that it will be all goodness and light and the kids will want to revel in the beauty of it and not just tear through the presents. Just like each year I am surprised by how sharply the smells and noises remind me of the people that aren’t with me to celebrate. Just like each year I am left just a little bit sad that I have one less Christmas ahead of me. Each year it surprises me anew that every Christmas contains all of the Christmases before and all the Christmases to come.
So maybe it makes perfect sense that Mary wants to hang on to Jesus in his sweet little crèche scene, innocent and safe and mute and unchallenging. And maybe it makes perfect sense that she wants to forget about all of the foreboding predictions about him. That she wants to ignore the folks that tried to claim Jesus as belonging to the whole world and not just to her. But she can’t hold him back from all that comes after any more than I can perfectly recreate a Christmas past or stop the intrusions of Christmases future.
Just like my own little baby, the little baby in the manger is going to grow up and become a teenager, then an adult. But Mary’s fears for her baby’s future have got to contain much more than the average parent’s worry about puberty and peer pressure. Even at this early stage, Mary’s unconscious must have had a sense of the sacrifice that Jesus would make.
And so Jesus asks Mary a question. Or at least, he directs it at Mary, who is trying with all her might to hold onto her sweet baby and keep him safe (and what parent can’t relate to that?). But it’s also a question for us gathered together here this morning who are trying to hold on to the smells and laughter and beauty of Christmas just a little bit longer before our ordinary responsibilities come back to claim us. Those of us who want to wall off Christmas so that it contains only the safe and comfortable.
"Why were you searching for me?" Jesus asks. Why are you so surprised by me, given what you’ve heard and seen and known about me? Why are you still expecting me to be understandable and domesticated? As Madeleine L’Engle writes that “an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol.” That kind of a God we expect, the kind we could predict or even fathom, would be no God at all.
And not to skip ahead too far, but Jesus’ teenaged question for Mary in the temple sounds a lot like the question the women looking for Jesus at the tomb after his crucifixion get from the angels: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Do you not know? Do you not understand? Were you not paying attention to everything Jesus did and said and all that came before?
From our story this morning, it’s obvious that even Mary and Joseph, the closest people to Jesus at that moment, didn’t really understand (or maybe didn’t want to understand) who he was. Or what he would become. Or what would be required of him. And of them. The disciples were in the same boat a couple decades later, fighting against Jesus’ predictions of his own death, struggling against this foreign concept of a suffering servant Messiah. Not getting that what Jesus had to offer went beyond his lifetime. Beyond their lifetimes.
And here we are, still struggling with the same questions. Who was Jesus? Who is Jesus? What does it mean for God to come among us in this way? Why did he have to die? What does his resurrection mean? What does he require from me? There’s a lot about our encounters with God that might be easier to forget.
And yet, every year’s Christmas contains and reminds us of that very first Christmas. And so we get the comfortable beautiful part. The one where Jesus sleeps, for a moment in time, peacefully under the watchful gaze of his parents surrounded by all of his enthralled admirers. But we also get the part that is harder and more complicated. Again, from Madeleine L’Engle, “that tiny, helpless baby whose birth we honor contained the Power behind the universe, helpless, at the mercy of its own creation.” The baby Jesus isn’t just something sweet for us to remember from year to year at Christmas time but already contains everything. All of the Christmases that have been and all of the Christmases that will ever be. And all of the Good Fridays and the Easters and the other days, even the ones that seem utterly ordinary.
And just as I can’t keep my own children as they are now but have to give them the space and the freedom to become whoever they will be, even if it means that they won’t always be with me on Christmas, we also have to let Jesus out of the cradle so that God can show us what love really is. Love that is so great that God limited God’s unlimitedness, God took on the flesh of mortality, accepted all the pain and grief of humanity, submitted to betrayal and death and failure. Which turned out, finally, not to be death and failure after all.
No Christmas will ever be the same from year to year, and yet, they are all wrapped up together in this incredible mystery of love. It is God’s gift to us on this 9th day of Christmas and on every day before and after throughout the year.
January 2, 2010
Luke 2:41-52
There are some dates that tend to make us stop and think about years past. Days when it’s almost impossible just to live in the moment. Birthdays, anniversaries of significant events, and, of course, holidays. This Christmas, as always, I find myself doing a lot of reflection on Christmases past.
There was the year that I spent the week of Christmas in Oregon with my grandparents and it snowed so beautifully and I stayed with a handful of cousins in the attic room that provided as much mystery and adventure as the wardrobe to Narnia. But that experience can never happen again because my grandparents are gone now, and my cousins are grown and scattered, and the house has been sold to some other family that is probably celebrating Christmas in some other way entirely.
And there was the year that my cousin died and mom was gone to Arizona to be with her sister and celebrating Christmas didn’t feel right at all.
And there were the many years that it was just my immediate family opening presents in our cozy robes, my sister and I wearing Santa hats and distributing presents, then spending hours lying in front of the fireplace playing our new games and watching the colors spark when we fed it wrapping paper. But my mom is gone now and my sister lives halfway around the globe and my fireplace is a gas one and the floor is too hard for lying on.
Even though each Christmas is unique (no matter how many traditions you might carry over), each Christmas also contains all the Christmases past.
But each Christmas also brings, for me, anyway, a bittersweet reflection on the Christmases in my future. Before we know it, our kids will be teenagers and we’ll be lucky if they still want to spend time with us. And then someday they’ll head out on their own for good and celebrate Christmas with their own families.
It makes me want to hang on to certain moments in time and not let go.
So each Christmas not only contains all of the Christmases before it, but it also contains all the Christmases to come. Once a year, it seems like, we’re in what I imagine God’s time must be like, where everything is somehow all wrapped up together.
This experience of Christmas makes me sympathetic to the plight of Mary and Joseph in our Gospel story this morning.
We’ve been hearing pieces of the Christmas story for weeks now. In Gospel readings and our Christmas Eve pageant enactment we’ve witnessed so many marvelous bits about the birth of this holy child, Jesus. Both Mary and Joseph have received separate visits by an angel who told them about the holy child Mary would soon bear. The shepherds have been visited and serenaded by angels and made their pilgrimage to see the baby. And Mary “treasured” it all and “pondered it in her heart.” Mary and Joseph have been visited by the wise magi who follow a brilliant star to pay their baby homage as the King of the Jews. And we didn’t get it in church, but there’s another piece that comes before the story we get this morning. It’s a beautiful bit, where Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem eight days after his birth to present him to the Lord. While they’re there, they run into a righteous old man named Simeon who declares to Mary and Joseph that their child is the “salvation which God has prepared.” They also are greeted by a prophet named Anna who praises God for this child who will redeem Jerusalem.
Suffice it to say, Mary and Joseph would seem to have a lot of reason to think there is something very different and special about their son Jesus. And yet in our reading this morning it’s like they’ve forgotten all of that and they just think Jesus is the average teenager. When they find him in the temple with the teachers they are “astonished” by his understanding. When Jesus says that it made perfect sense that he would be in his “Father’s house,” they do not understand what he means.
It’s odd. After everything they have seen and heard, after angels’ visits and testimonies by shepherds, magi, and prophets, why are Mary and Joseph so surprised by Jesus feeling so at home in the temple? Why are they so astounded by his calling God his “Father”? How can all that they’ve experienced have slipped their minds? How can they not have thought ahead about what their sweet little baby might become someday? About what this baby might require of them and of the world?
Or maybe it makes perfect sense. Just like each year at Christmas I expect that it will be all goodness and light and the kids will want to revel in the beauty of it and not just tear through the presents. Just like each year I am surprised by how sharply the smells and noises remind me of the people that aren’t with me to celebrate. Just like each year I am left just a little bit sad that I have one less Christmas ahead of me. Each year it surprises me anew that every Christmas contains all of the Christmases before and all the Christmases to come.
So maybe it makes perfect sense that Mary wants to hang on to Jesus in his sweet little crèche scene, innocent and safe and mute and unchallenging. And maybe it makes perfect sense that she wants to forget about all of the foreboding predictions about him. That she wants to ignore the folks that tried to claim Jesus as belonging to the whole world and not just to her. But she can’t hold him back from all that comes after any more than I can perfectly recreate a Christmas past or stop the intrusions of Christmases future.
Just like my own little baby, the little baby in the manger is going to grow up and become a teenager, then an adult. But Mary’s fears for her baby’s future have got to contain much more than the average parent’s worry about puberty and peer pressure. Even at this early stage, Mary’s unconscious must have had a sense of the sacrifice that Jesus would make.
And so Jesus asks Mary a question. Or at least, he directs it at Mary, who is trying with all her might to hold onto her sweet baby and keep him safe (and what parent can’t relate to that?). But it’s also a question for us gathered together here this morning who are trying to hold on to the smells and laughter and beauty of Christmas just a little bit longer before our ordinary responsibilities come back to claim us. Those of us who want to wall off Christmas so that it contains only the safe and comfortable.
"Why were you searching for me?" Jesus asks. Why are you so surprised by me, given what you’ve heard and seen and known about me? Why are you still expecting me to be understandable and domesticated? As Madeleine L’Engle writes that “an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol.” That kind of a God we expect, the kind we could predict or even fathom, would be no God at all.
And not to skip ahead too far, but Jesus’ teenaged question for Mary in the temple sounds a lot like the question the women looking for Jesus at the tomb after his crucifixion get from the angels: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Do you not know? Do you not understand? Were you not paying attention to everything Jesus did and said and all that came before?
From our story this morning, it’s obvious that even Mary and Joseph, the closest people to Jesus at that moment, didn’t really understand (or maybe didn’t want to understand) who he was. Or what he would become. Or what would be required of him. And of them. The disciples were in the same boat a couple decades later, fighting against Jesus’ predictions of his own death, struggling against this foreign concept of a suffering servant Messiah. Not getting that what Jesus had to offer went beyond his lifetime. Beyond their lifetimes.
And here we are, still struggling with the same questions. Who was Jesus? Who is Jesus? What does it mean for God to come among us in this way? Why did he have to die? What does his resurrection mean? What does he require from me? There’s a lot about our encounters with God that might be easier to forget.
And yet, every year’s Christmas contains and reminds us of that very first Christmas. And so we get the comfortable beautiful part. The one where Jesus sleeps, for a moment in time, peacefully under the watchful gaze of his parents surrounded by all of his enthralled admirers. But we also get the part that is harder and more complicated. Again, from Madeleine L’Engle, “that tiny, helpless baby whose birth we honor contained the Power behind the universe, helpless, at the mercy of its own creation.” The baby Jesus isn’t just something sweet for us to remember from year to year at Christmas time but already contains everything. All of the Christmases that have been and all of the Christmases that will ever be. And all of the Good Fridays and the Easters and the other days, even the ones that seem utterly ordinary.
And just as I can’t keep my own children as they are now but have to give them the space and the freedom to become whoever they will be, even if it means that they won’t always be with me on Christmas, we also have to let Jesus out of the cradle so that God can show us what love really is. Love that is so great that God limited God’s unlimitedness, God took on the flesh of mortality, accepted all the pain and grief of humanity, submitted to betrayal and death and failure. Which turned out, finally, not to be death and failure after all.
No Christmas will ever be the same from year to year, and yet, they are all wrapped up together in this incredible mystery of love. It is God’s gift to us on this 9th day of Christmas and on every day before and after throughout the year.
Have been avidly reading L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series and just started reading some of her memoirs - her ability to connect science, the creative process and Christianity is really powerful. I like the quotes you used.
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