Scripture: Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2: 41-52

“‘Why were you looking for me?’ he replied, ‘did you not know that I must be busy with my Father’s affairs?’”

-- Luke 2:49

I wonder what Joseph thought of that response? Probably by now he was used to the anomalous nature of his young son, and had had opportunity many times during the twelve years of Jesus’ childhood to appreciate that this child was not his son at all, but the Son of the Holy Spirit of God. He had accepted that explanation from the angel in a dream when his young fiancée became mysteriously pregnant and so he should not have been unduly surprised now. Annoyed, and vexed, but not surprised! Mary was clearly annoyed and vexed.

The Victorian Christmas Carol, “Once in Royal David’s City,” includes the lines, “Christian Children all must be, mild, obedient, good as he.” It clearly conveys the middle class ideal of childhood behavior in the 19th century, behavior we haven’t seen for a long time in our children, who are encouraged to be the opposite of mild and obedient, loud, assertive and confident of their gifts and talents. (The words given in the New Century Hymnal are, “So like Jesus we should be, serving God obediently,” a change that brings the hymn deftly up to date, and pretty much anticipates the point of this sermon). This fact of the difference between Victorian and current childhood ideals, puts today’s vignette of Jesus’ childhood in our culture rather than the culture of “Once in Royal David’s City.” We can easily imagine one of our current children, aged 12, rather than being “mild and obedient” saying to his parents, “Chill out! Don’t you know that I have important business to attend to?” Such a one would mean something different of course from what is at stake in our story, but we would not be surprised in any case to hear it from a 12 year old, on the cusp of adolescence. The notes in the JB say, “…Jesus is asserting his own personal duty to his Father (Mt. 4:3ff.) and, in the interests of that duty, an absolute independence of creatures (Jn. 2:4; Mt. 12:46-50).” In his case he really does have work of overriding importance to do, unlike our children who usually just do not want to be disturbed.

The Christmas carol I have mentioned also includes the line, “For he is our childhood’s pattern,” referring to the well-known moral teaching that we should imitate Jesus. “What would Jesus do?” we are told to ask when we face a moral challenge. That too needs careful parsing, and I believe our text from scripture shows us the way. It tells us first about Jesus and then about how we might follow him fruitfully. It tells us that he put God first in his life, and everyone else, even his parents, came after that.

During WW2 one pastor stood out in the extremely dangerous context of totalitarian Germany, the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He left us a magnificent example of how to follow Christ in dark times, as well as many piercing theological insights. One of his most challenging insights is that church-based Christianity is passé and that the Spirit of Christ must now be borne by those who inhabit the ordinary world, as incognito Christians, living simply, honestly and compassionately. He had good grounds for such a view in the deeply compromised churches and clergy of the Third Reich, pastors who preferred the applause of the crowd and the approval of the police to the word of God’s truth, who, like the false prophets Jesus speaks of, wanted to be spoken well of by everyone because they were so nice, laughed when their people laughed, cried when they cried and never reminded them of the Cross. I have friends today who after a life lived in the service and fellowship of the church do not participate any longer. They quote Winston Churchill who apparently said that he supports the church like a flying buttress not a weight-bearing pillar, that is, from without not from within. I do not fault them.

Bonhoeffer did the same, and when his bishop visited him a few days before his execution for participating in the plot to murder Hitler, and tried to console him with the words, “ I hope Dietrich you will regain your faith before you die, “ replied that the only threat to his faith at that moment was the fact that while he was in prison his bishop was still free. The point is that this Dietrich was a troublemaker and the bishop took that fact as an indication that he was no longer a Christian, or at least did not live as a Christian. Christians do not make trouble. So the Christianity of the churches had been deeply compromised and Bonhoeffer believed that from then on one had to live the Christian life as much apart from the churches as within them. In some contexts he called this “religionless Christianity” and in others he called it “living for others.” In this connection he described Jesus as the “man for others,” and this is the idea I want to take up now.

Our text for today modifies that idea in an important way without negating it; living as a Christian still entails living for others, but as the 12 year old Jesus shows us, we must first live for God before we can live for others. Jesus is unique and so it is always difficult, probably impossible, to take him as an example to follow, but we can, I believe, be instructed by the broad contours of his conduct. In our story Jesus placed his duty to God before his duty to his parents in a radical way. Imagine the anxiety he caused his parents. Every parent’s nightmare is that a child will disappear in a crowd, be left behind and never seen again. I understand that in a central area of San Jose at this season there is a display of Christmas trees from all kinds of organizations, and amongst them stands a tree to the memory of children who have disappeared. Imagine Jesus’ parents’ relief at finding him after a three-day search. Hear the rebuke in his mother’s words, “My child, why have you done this to us. See how worried your father and I have been, looking for you (2:48),” to which he answers in terms that might be taken as less than respectful, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be busy with my Father’s affairs? (2:49).” He was first a person for God before he was a person for others, even his dearest and nearest human others. His duty to God took precedence over every other relationship.

So this story speaks to me firstly about the priority of our relationship with God, and secondly about how difficult, even impossible, it is to judge the quality of someone else’s Christian life. If we were to judge the 12-year-old Jesus by the standards of our church culture’s piety we would surely say that he was cruel and inconsiderate not to have warned his parents before disappearing. We would have agreed with Mary that that was a downright inconsiderate thing to do. He caused them three days of anguish, and we can hear the anger latent in her words when she addresses him. But all such judgment is culture-bound; even our idea of love, which we all assume is the essence of Christian living, and all assume that we can recognize when we see it, is in large measure culture bound. The Apostle Paul never ceases to remind us that some Christians live out the faith one way and others the other; as, for example, in the case of the Christians in Rome, some of whom ate meat and others did not. Paul said that we were not to judge one another but to accept the fact that there are different ways of living as a Christian as there are different cultures and different people. Most people have their own relationship with God to which they are faithful, and its expression might not coincide with my expectations.

Amen.