Christmas 1C

This is the story of Christ as a child, this is it. The only one in the bible. Apparently it isn't all that important for us to know about Jesus and his first step or Jesus and his schooling or Jesus and his years of teenage rebellion or conformity. We know that Jesus was born a lowly birth in a manger that nevertheless fulfilled the prophecy of the Messiah that was promised in the Hebrew texts. Then, in today's text, we learn that his family went to Jerusalem for Passover, a common pilgrimage for Hebrew people and we are told that he stayed behind in the temple with the teachers, the rabbis, showing great potential and wisdom. Then Jesus is gone and we don't really know much else about him until his ministry starts about 20 years later.

If this is the case then, why this story, why one piece of Jesus’ childhood and life with Mary and Joseph? Perhaps we get this brief glimpse in order to understand that Jesus was really a kid, really the child of human parents, really rebellious and really loved by Mary and Joseph. Maybe it is important to see Jesus as part of a family. We use a lot of family language in church and encounter it a lot in the bible and the even church sets aside today as the feast day of the Holy Family.

Some of you might know that there is a movement in the church to change some of the language we use in church. To remove some of the references to family. The hope is to keep from damaging people's spirituality by bringing to mind painful family experiences. While this is good intentioned and certainly it is a good idea to be more careful and inclusive, I wonder if it isn't slightly mislead because it seeks to smooth things over instead of addressing the truth about families. Many families are broken in many different ways. I would say that every family is at least a little broken. Either by big things like violence, or substance abuse, by things like divorce or death or by more everyday things like anger, mistrust, envy, fear, even just simple lack of communication.

Partly for this reason, I have always been kind of fascinated by the idea of the Holy family. We certainly lift it up as the perfect family. With pictures of mother, father and baby Jesus sitting in harmony, cast in a heavenly light. But really this only an ideal. The holy family had a rough start. As a teenager Mary was pregnant and unmarried and Joseph, according to the law at the time, was legally able to cast her away from him, even to demand her death. So the holy family started out like this: Mary, young and expecting a baby as a single mother at a time when that was positively unheard of and unacceptable and Joseph as a man with a ruined reputation and a very difficult choice to make. Not quite the picture of the Holy family that I got on many Christmas cards in the mail this year.

The Holy family was in a pretty difficult place at the beginning and in many ways Joseph was the only one in the story with much of a choice about anything. He could have walked away or worse. It took great love to reach out to Mary and to her child. But he, nevertheless, held her and loved her and raised Jesus as his own with love and tenderness risking many things for the sake of his family.

This one story about Jesus getting lost and staying behind at the temple gives us some pretty good insight in the Holy Family. Mary and Joseph got scared, so scared that they went back to Jerusalem in a bit of a panic. And this going back to look for Jesus was no simple task.

When they went up to Jerusalem they traveled with a large group of friends and extended family from their hometown. These other travelers provided protection and legitimacy. The roads were not a safe place. People who traveled alone were either in danger or dangerous and so setting out alone was not an easy endeavor for them. In addition to the danger this journey caused Joseph to humble himself and to put love over public appearances because having a twelve year old son that defiantly stayed behind in the city was not socially acceptable in a society that expected men to be lords of their houses and to be in control of their families. So, for probably not the second or even the third time in his experience as a father Joseph acted with love, faith and forgiveness and set out with his wife in search of their son.

We hear in so many places in the bible that God is like a father. Not everyone here comes from a perfect home, not everyone here even really knows their father or their mother. Some of us have been hurt by family and the idea of family has failed us. Certainly families today do not look like commercials and television shows make us think they should. So sometimes when we hear that we should think of the other children of God as our family it seems strange at best.

I don't want to liken something as broken as many families are to my relationship with God but perhaps that is just what our relationship should be likened to.

In our story today Joseph isn't some ideal for us to all strive to in family life, while it would be nice if we all could have ideal families. Rather Joseph stands to show us what Jesus knew father to mean. For Jesus a father was someone who, through divine love, moved beyond hurt, broken relationships, social expectations, doubt and fear in order to provide hope, love and safety to his children.

When we use family language in church we often try to keep it very clean, try to make-believe that a family is a group of people who always get along, who fit some kind of norm and for whom nothing is ever disordered.

The people who hope to change the use of family language are right. There is a problem with this use of the idea of family. But the problem is not that families are imperfect and so people can not relate to the idea of a father's love. The problem is that we forget that the whole reason we need this example to help us understand God's love is because families are imperfect, people are imperfect and God loves us and works in our lives anyway, even in spite the brokenness.

The love of God the father is perfect in a way our human fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, even selves never are. This means that as broken as we can be as a human family God never stops reaching out for us, never stops pulling us toward him as his children, never stops calling us by name and never stops returning to search for us

Jesus refers to God as his father and it is really only in this little section of the bible that we get any idea of what he is making a comparison to. Today we get an example of what a divine father does. He risks his life, safety and reputation in order to care for his child, his family.

This is what God's love is and this is what Jesus was doing when he lagged behind in the temple. When his parents asked he said he was doing the work of the father. Beginning in the church and moving throughout the world, the work of the father that Jesus was born in a manger to do and that he grew as a faithful child to do, is the work of sharing God's transcendent love with all people. This is what Joseph was doing when he responded to God's call to be adoptive father, protector and tender caregiver to the child Jesus and this is what we are called to do as we live among our brothers and sisters and, even in the midst of brokenness, proclaim God's perfect love.

Amen