Good morning. Today's reading comes from the Gospel of Luke. Every year Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. When Jesus was 12 years old, they attended the festival as usual.
After the celebration was over, they started home to Nazareth, but Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents didn't miss him at first, because they assumed he was among the other travelers. But when he didn't show up that evening, they started looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they couldn't find him, they went back to Jerusalem to search for him there.
Three days later, they finally discovered him in the temple, sitting among the religious teachers, listening to them, and asking questions. All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. His parents didn't know what to think. Son, his mother said to him, why have you done this to us?
Your father and I have been frantic, searching for you everywhere. But why did you need to search? He asked. Didn't you know that I must be in my father's house?
But they didn't understand what he meant. Then he returned to Nazareth with him and was obedient to them. And his mother stored all these things in her heart. Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and all the people.
This word is true and can't be trusted. So when I was a kid, my dad was a youth minister at the church that he's pastoring right now. And Wednesday nights, you know, kind of traditional old school, normal Baptist church. Wednesday nights was, it was Wednesday nights.
It was like full tilt boogie, all the things, the staff was like all hands on deck. And my parents very, very rarely took one car to church. It was always two cars. And I was about a year old and Wednesday night was a normal, crazy Wednesday night with all the things.
My parents get home after church and whichever one of them walked in the house, I walked in the house and they go to each other and they realize that neither one of them had one year old Chad. And so after a kind of quick freak out, my dad called Miss Bobeth. That's, I don't know what kind of name that is, but it's kind of cool. Bobeth.
So he calls Miss Bobeth who watched the nursery. So yeah, I waited for y'all. Y'all never came. And I kind of just figured y'all forgot him.
He's on the couch right now eating potato chips. And so mom or dad went back over there and picked up their one year old son. And I think many of us have loose kid stories. Y'all remember the leashes when those were popular?
I got some great leashes. Y'all, I'll tell you now, I got some leashes. Yeah. But today we're wrapping up our conversations from the Gospel of Luke and these stories of Jesus's birth and his childhood.
And today's the last one. We meet an adolescent Jesus and we see Mary and Joseph. We kind of get a peek into their life a little bit. And this story is both normal while also being unusual.
We get to see anxiousness and fear in Mary and Joseph. We also see a little bit of exasperation in them. And inside of the story is a great lesson for us as we get closer and closer to Christmas. So this is just trip to Jerusalem.
You know, we don't know that much about Jesus's younger life. And at some point in time, the family settled in Galilee, far to the north. They probably had a solid four to five day each way journey going to Jerusalem. All Jewish men are required to be in Jerusalem for the festival, for three festivals a year.
And these aren't like the corn dog festival. It's like times of specific sacrifices and worship and these sorts of things. And a lot of Jewish men would literally come in just for the sacrifice day and then go back home. But what Luke continually does in his Gospel, especially in these these nativity stories, is he builds up the idea that Jesus came into a very pious, a very reverent family.
You know, Galilee is a region is known for the way that they adhere to the law, the way they think about God, the way they take seriously their practices and the behaviors. We also see that Joseph brings the whole family with him for this day. So Jesus, Mary, we don't know about other, there were some of those other kids there yet. We know Jesus had brothers and sisters.
But they're also just focusing just far away from the controversy that happened. Sometimes we see this as a simple family who wants to focus on what it means to follow God well. But what's also going on is we can infer that there's perhaps a special part of this trip with Jesus. It mentions how old he is.
And what's ironic and I think is probably what's going on here is it was appropriate for Jewish fathers to bring their sons and present them at the temple at around the age of their puberty. It's when they are introduced to the Torah, to the law of God and when they become Jewish men, they become responsible for their own faith. We know about Bar Mitzvah, we've all seen the wedding singer. This is where that Bar Mitzvah tradition comes from.
So you find Jesus's father bringing him to the temple at the age of this happening. He's being presented and that's going on. So this trip is special in their minds. And on their way back home, Mary and Joseph discover that he's gone.
Now we can look at this and assume that they're horrible parents. We also think about your whole family, probably your whole extended family. The text tells us it's also with all of the people from their village. So imagine a pack of 100, 200 people all traveling together.
You know, think about when you have kids that are pre-teensed, middle school age, you're going to vacation with a few other folks. They don't want to ride in a car with Mom. And after a couple days of realizing we've not seen the oldest yet, let's try to track him down. They realize that Jesus hadn't gone feral here.
But they're like, OK, we've got to go find out where he's searching for him and they realize that he's not here. We have to go back to Jerusalem. And it's at this point in time that this normal story begins to start being unusual. Jesus is found sitting at the temple, having conversations with other religious leaders.
And it's a scenario that can make for pretty interesting painting. Geotto, he's an Italian master. He has this painting of this Bible story today. What I think so unique about this is you can see here, you know, Jesus is the middle, has the gold halo around him.
Geotto's already kind of making a sump to fear that the 12-year-old boy is divine. But we also see here he's assumed the classic posture of a teacher sitting down in the middle with people gathered around him listening. We also begin to ask, if this point's going on, Jesus has been gone for three days. Mary and Joseph probably just didn't walk up on the random moment he starts talking.
We realize that Jesus has been in a conversation in a teaching moment, being who he is, doing the Jesus stuff for several days already. We also see that whole asking questions thing. And we can read that and kind of quickly glance and think that Jesus is trying to find stuff out. But the classic way of teaching, we see Jesus do this all throughout the gospels and his adult ministry.
But we also find this is just part of ancient education and practice is that teachers would teach others by asking questions, like probing into the soul. What do you think about this? What does that make you think about this? This is a method of rhetoric of teaching.
And Jesus does this. He's been doing this entire life. Being now just a tiny little picture is an adolescent, Jesus already being Jesus. Jesus doing this stuff we expect him to do.
My mind goes to Colossians chapter 1 where we read about who Jesus was before this moment, who Jesus is in this moment, and who Jesus is in now after this moment. It says this, Christ is a visible image of the invisible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created in a supreme, overall creation. For through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth.
He made the things we can see and the things we can't see, such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities and the unseen. Everything was created through him and for him. He existed before anything else and he holds all creation together. And this amazement that Luke talks about, this wonder that the religious leaders had, it's the same language that Luke uses throughout the rest of the gospel to describe people's reactions to when they see the miracles of Jesus.
It's the same idea that he uses in the book of Acts to describe the way people react when they see the miracles of the apostles. This amazement, it means to stupeify. Literally, it means to put it in our 21st century vernacular. It means to blow their mind.
It talks about when God intervenes in our world in a way that causes bodily response. It's when we see something that we absolutely cannot believe. It does not make sense, but it can't be ignored because it happened right in front of us and we've seen it with our eyes. And that's where we find ourselves in that story this morning.
So just two questions I want to ask. Our home sheet this week is really focused on these questions. You can grab that at my family. I got life or you can pick up a paper copy on the desk behind the way out.
Just two questions to think about. And the first one is this. Where are we looking for Jesus? A lot of times I think we can pull the same stunt that Mary and Joseph did.
You know, we know he's not around, so we start looking on our terms. We look for where we expect to find him. It's like, as he with the Smiths, three families up the line. I can see dawling around somewhere.
We look for Jesus, but we only look for him on our terms on our expectations, on the places where we assume he's going to be. And the story that we read today, it has some complexities to it, but the way that Jesus responds to his parents and they finally come together, it's almost like he's saying, hey, sorry, you got a little freaked out, but you should have immediately known where I was. Our reading, most translations I say in my father's house, that's a little simplified. What Jesus really says in the original language is, I'm about my father's business.
It's a business. We think about that. Jesus is in the temple where they believe the physical manifest presence of God was. And he's engaging people about the truth of his father, about the truthful realities of the world around them.
You know, many times we know we need Jesus. So many times we know we want to experience Jesus, but how many times are we looking for Jesus, but we're unwilling to go into the presence of God because we know the truth might sting us a little bit. Our terms or his terms, those are two very different things. And if we're committed Christians, this goes deep.
There's the difference between good and right. If we're serious about this deeper journey with Jesus, it means us understanding the difference between permissible and called. Mary and Joseph traveling, can't find him, but he had good intentions. He had the right intentions.
He wasn't being reckless or wasn't being absent in mind. Did Jesus have a space that he needed to be? How are the ways where we sometimes act lazy in our life because we know that we're not doing anything necessarily wrong, so we think we're okay. What begins to happen is we begin to develop an inattention to the presence of God in our lives.
And when that happens, we might begin missing out on what unique call he might have for us. A call given by God specifically to us in who he made us to be and who the capabilities and the passions that we have with all the fullness of who Jesus is, all the power Jesus carries we miss out on that because we're not looking. We're looking on our terms, not his terms. And the second question I think this passage really calls us to do is this, where do we find a greater invitation to trust?
We go back to the whole, Jesus had blown their minds things. Astonishment and the amazement, that's really a word that these religious teachers have. And that tends to happen whenever we encounter Jesus and he starts doing Jesus stuff in front of us. When our minds are taken and they're absolutely stretched by the work of God, by the power of God so much that we can't get our head around it and we realize that through the whole spirit we're being taken to a place that's beyond our own broken realm of comprehension.
And Jesus was calling these religious leaders, it wasn't an invitation to understand, but it's an invitation to trust, to know that his ways are not our ways, that his ways are better than our ways. We've spent advent reading stories about how people encounter Jesus and the encounter this morning that we're really invited to is that encounter that those religious leaders have to set aside the ways that we think we can explain things and just simply sit at the feet of Jesus. And the Jesus we're paying to is that same Jesus that we read about in Colossians, I want to put that passage back up, don't let's read that again. The Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
He existed before anything was created and he's supreme over all creation. He through him God created everything and heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things that we can see and the things we can't see such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers and authorities in the unseen world. Everything was created through him and for him and he existed before anything else and he holds all of creation together.
A 12 year old boy hanging on Jerusalem and he holds all things together. Over advent I've been reading St. Athanasius's classic book on the incarnation, it's written in the third century and Athanasius was kind of infamous in many ways. The biggest controversy in the church in the third century was an argument over is Jesus divine or human and the church called all of the bishops together to debate the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus.
I got so passionate at one point I'm at the age of God on the floor and punched another bishop in a brawl ensued. Like the God's kind of a baller but he said this, Jesus became himself as an object for the senses so that those who are seeking God in normal things might apprehend the Father through the unnormal things Jesus did while in the body. Are we looking for Jesus among our own junk? In our own terms.
In ways that we can understand and in ways that we can explain. Looking for Jesus in a way that might not sting that much that we can handle. Or are we looking for Jesus in the full power and the truthfulness of all he is? Deep in this invitation to trust.
To trust him and how he's going to take care of us while we're part of the process. To trust him that he has something better for us. To trust him in the place that he's taking us. To trust him in the person that he wants to make us to be because it's the person that we have always intended to be.
Trusting in Jesus in the full power of God who has always been here. Who created this earth and the very energy that created the spaces that we live in is the energy that he offers to us. The power that he offers to us. The love and the care and the attention that he offers to us.
Friends, let's pray together this morning. Father, let us encounter you honestly. God in the spaces that we have empty. God in some of those spaces we know about fully aware of.
We offer them easily. We have to go to spaces where we defend. We might be in moments of personal protection. I've got to hold on to this.
God, he said, I mean, God, some of these might be spaces that we don't even know about yet. The Lord, we know that we can only find the power and the healing, the presence that you want to give us by just entering into this journey with you, God. God, every one of us in some way is walking back to Nazareth right now and needs to turn around and encounter the risen, the creating, and the love of your son, Jesus, God. So as we continue and worship, let us just hear that call.
God, give us ears to hear, eyes to see these invitations, these ways you're moving and growing inside of us. We'll give us the strength and the courage to say yes when we hear and recognize it. We're thank you for your graciousness and your love and powers and embodies the very fabric of this place we are and God's because of that we can trust you. If the God let us hear that voice hear those words.
Let's just pray. Amen. Let's stand and continue singing together.