Boy Jesus

Text: Luke 2:41-52

Perhaps, when Jesus and the scholars in the Temple were talking about scripture, they were talking about sea monsters.

In the Hebrew Bible that Jesus knew, there are a lot of sea monsters. As there are in psalm 148 which we just sang. And in Job: the Leviathan that God made for fun.

And other great stories: There are giants in Genesis and Deuteronomy, like King Og (which is a great name for a giant king).

There are battles won with courage, with bravery, with trickery, and with technology (like the one at Jericho). And there are stories of other remarkable twelve-year-old boys, like David, the shepherd who defeated another great giant and who turned out to be a king, or Samuel who was the first great prophet.

The Bible has some terrific stories for a young man or woman of Jesus’ age. Plus, that age is a time of real and intense wondering about God and how the heavens and the earth all fit together. It is not all that surprising that Jesus liked to spend time with the teachers in the Temple, talking about scripture and asking questions and listening to the answers.

This strange interlude on the First Sunday after Christmas falls in the lectionary between two birth stories: the first on Christmas Day with the shepherds and the manger and the second on Epiphany with the arrival of the three kings. So we jump in our readings from birth to emerging adult and back to birth.

This story about young man Jesus appears only in Luke. There is some thought (based on the words and writing style) that it might have been inserted into Luke from some other source. In many ways this story duplicates the one that appears in Luke just before it. That story, in which Jesus is still just a baby, happens in the Temple as this one does. People are amazed at his presence, just as in this one. His parents don’t get it, just as in this one. His mother Mary treasures in her heart the things she hears and sees, just as she does in this one. And in the end, the story notes that Jesus got older and wiser, just as this one does.

So, why is it here? There are other “Jesus as boy” writings, but in books which never made it into the canon of the Bible because of their questionable authority. The best known is called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. In it Jesus does miraculous and sometimes not very nice things, things appropriate to a energetic, curious child who is a little unruly.

These stories are almost certainly written to help people fill in a not very complete picture of the person of Jesus. We know him from the birth stories in Luke and Matthew, and as an adult preacher, but nothing of the years between that in our own lives are so influential and revealing.

The purpose of these stories is not, as we sometimes suppose, to prove that Jesus as a boy was really God. It is rather the opposite: to show that Jesus whom we now know as God was really a boy. Did boy-things. Was 100% human even as divine, even when a young person.

In the story in Luke, Jesus amazes the teachers and confounds his parents. It does not take a divine child to do that. Twelve-year-old children are amazing no matter what. They are as able as young king David or young prophet Samuel. They know lots about many complicated things. They become geeks (even church geeks, like Jesus) or fledgling scholars or jocks—all at once. They read and remember like crazy. They have sophisticated ideas about things. They ask penetrating questions, as I’m sure Jesus did, and listen closely to the answers, and are good at finding bugs and flaws in arguments.

And they can be adventurous and unruly and as oblivious of their parents as Jesus was. And as mysterious to their parents as Jesus was to his. They did not understand him, it says. Others saw in him what his parents did not, as often happens.

What we celebrate in these stories is not the adult Jesus who is teacher and savior and divine presence among us. There are lots of other times to do that. What we celebrate is the child of promise that is in every human young man or woman. We see and treasure in our hearts the amazing present and potential future in these children. None of us know any more than Mary did for sure what will happen. But we expect and pray that every twelve-year-old, not just the divine son of God, will grow in years and, we hope, in wisdom and divine and human favor.

These stories remind us forcefully that Jesus was human as well as divine. It seems weird that we should have to do that. It would seem that we would be called more often to defend the divinity of Jesus, not his humanity. But Christians have long had a tendency to embrace the God side of “God incarnate” and to deny or evade the incarnate side. Early heresies made it as if Jesus were God in human clothing—or like Zeus, a god disguised as something else—and we sometimes speak and act even now as if that were how it worked. Lutherans can claim to be virtuous in this regard, being especially adamant about the 100% human, 100% God doctrine. But not so consistently that we can pat ourselves on the back about it.

There is in church jargon something called the “scandal of particularity.” What this means is that Jesus was not a general God-presence in the world but a particular person in a particular time born to a particular family. It was scandalous because how could the infinite God be in a finite person. He was a particular little baby, with round cheeks or not, bald or not, chubby or not, cranky or not. He was a particular twelve-year-old boy, doing twelve-year-old things, getting into trouble, knowing stuff, fighting (maybe) with his brothers, amazing his parents and astonishing his teachers in a particular way.

There is no scandal in particularity. All creatures, all humans are particular, individual, great and strange. If God is to be human, God must be, for us, a particular one.

It is important to our faith that we do not let Jesus become a God who is just a kind of divine, magical, privileged tourist in our foreign, human land. We need, and thankfully we have, a God who likes to read about sea monsters as much as likes to create them.

A Tough Kid, God Remembers

Text: Luke 1:39-55

The story of the Bible is the story of God. Not the whole story of God, which starts long before us, and ends long after us, and encompasses much more than we will ever know. But it is the part of God’s story that has to do with people on this earth. Can we tell a story of God that has nothing to do with us? Maybe. But maybe not. What we do affects God and changes God; we are part of God’s story. But can we tell our story without God in it? Probably not, being creatures of God; though we do try.

The story of the Bible is the story of God. The story of Jesus is, for us, a big part of that story. The story of the birth of Jesus is a high point in that story. But it is by no means the only point.

And for Luke, at the beginning of the story of Jesus is the story of Mary.

Mary was a tough kid from a rough neighborhood. Joseph, her fiancee, was a carpenter—not an admired craftsperson but low on the economic ladder, a rung below subsistence farmer. She was probably a young teenager, thirteen or fourteen years old. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Palestine. Roman soldiers walked the streets, crucifixion was common for minor crimes, like not knowing your place or talking out loud about a time when Israel would be restored to its former greatness. Or your hope for a messiah, a descendant of great King David, to rescue you.

We rightly celebrate what we see as Mary’s willingness to do God’s will in the matter of the birth of God into this world. But this is not a no-brainer for Mary. It is clear from the story that Gabriel’s announcement is really more like an invitation than a command. It is a mark of Mary’s character that she agrees: I am the Lord’s servant, Mary answers. May your word to me be fulfilled. And she sings a song, called Mary’s song, which we also call the Magnificat.

The miracle of Mary as mother of God is not that she was a virgin. In those days stories of virgin birth were a dime a dozen. The miracle was that God would choose someone with such low net worth in the currencies that mattered: property, heritage, gender, education, and age. The scandal of Mary was not about her virginity but about her lot in life and her political position. We see a poetic beauty in Mary’s story, but people of Jesus time found the whole thing to be, as one scholar said, just another reason to think that Christianity was bizarre. The only status she had in the world was, it turned out, her relationship with God. This would have been a big reason why her relative Elizabeth was so surprised.

Mary’s song starts with Mary. It is all about her at the start. Me, me, me; the word appears five times in the first four verses. Great things for me. All generations will call me blessed, and so forth. Really, this seems fair. Mary is as non-plussed as Elizabeth was and as future readers would be. But these verses are just joyful preamble.

Mary knows, as all prophets know, that calls like this rarely benefit the prophets. God’s choice of Mary does not stem from some special goodness in her, but rather from some special goodness in God. The world is about to change, and Mary has a part. But as a prophet, Mary knows that the going will not be easy. Even as young as she is, it seems to me that she understands that being the mother of Jesus will be hard and come to a difficult end. She answers the call out of courage.

God is using Mary to change the way things go. Something is out of kilter. The poor are hungry and the rich have much. The powerful abuse their power over the lowly. The poor are not poor because they are just unfortunate, victims for whom circumstance has not been kind. They are instead victims of ungodly acts of others. This was not God’s plan for things in the story of God and us. Prophets had condemned Israel for this before, and God had intervened before.

The hungry, the lowly, and the outcast are needy. They need something. For them, the world is broken. Things need fixing up, they need repair. The people need salvation, which means rescue and healing. The poor and lowly need a savior, someone to see that God’s plan is enacted.

The rich and powerful do not. They have no sufficient need to plead for help. They do not welcome the same savior as the poor. They are proud in the imagination of their hearts, says the King James version of the Bible. In their inmost thoughts, says another. In their haughty thinking of their hearts, say one more. This is not about their feelings; the heart was the center of thought. It is how they think. They think they do not need God or to do what God wishes. They give themselves credit. And they do not think that by oppressing and exploiting others they oppose God. Or they do not care. Either way, it’s an issue.

This imbalance between those who need much and those who have much is a central theme of Luke. As we have heard in the Gospel readings all Advent. And of the ministry of Jesus in general. And before that, of the law and the prophets. It runs through the story of God and us in the Bible.

It is political, for it is about power. But it is not revolutionary in itself. Luke is not hoping for the obliteration of one group of powerful, wealthy people to be replaced by some other group of people who then become powerful and wealthy. The hope is that the vertical becomes horizontal. The distinctions we make that allow the rich and the poor to have such different lives are not distinctions that God makes.

In Mary’s song God remembers God’s mercy, and recalls the promises made to God’s people. It is God’s memory that is being celebrated here. And justice is a part of God’s story and of God’s promise to God’s people. It is the prospect of broken justice repaired that is celebrated here.

We think of this song as a hopeful predictor of the future. Mary sings, we think, because she has high expectations for the child she will bear. But as someone mentioned in Bible study last week, the verbs are all past tense. This is a song about what God has already done. It is hopeful. It proves that our hopes are not foolish or bizarre, but grounded in the story of God and us up to now. God has been effective. We trust God will continue to be.

This song is the reading for this last Sunday in Advent because it anticipates the birth of Jesus. But Jesus is not even mentioned in Mary’s song at all. He appears only by reference discovered by the imaginations of our hearts. All the hopes of which Mary sings are met in the coming child. God continues to be with us.

Christians live under a promise of a new way of being. For some, that seems absurd, yet another reason to think Christianity to be bizarre. Things go on, and what has been is what will be. There may be hope, but to the cynical we are whistling in the dark. But it is part of the fabric of our faith, the plot of God’s story, to be naive enough to think that God has something in store for this world that will save it and will heal it.

Thanks be to God.

The Shame on Us Good News

Text: Luke 3:7-18

You brood of vipers! You sons and daughters of serpents! You children of snakes!

What kind of people would find these words to be good news? What kind of person would take the scolding that John gives them and interpret it as gospel? Who after hearing such reproaches would then turn to John for guidance?

Recognized as a prophet, imagined by some to be the savior of Israel, John draws huge crowds in the wilderness. He preached repentance, a change of direction; and he baptized people in the river. All sorts of people came to see and hear and be washed by him. Crowds of Jews and probably pagans, despised and cheating tax collectors, Roman soldiers enjoying the wicked privileges of an occupying army. All came to hear John.

By calling them children of vipers, John shames them. He makes them ashamed of themselves. John is not trying to create ill will among the crowd, within the people of the crowd. Instead, he is exposing what they already know. John is not creating a feeling in the people that they do not already have. He is naming an unpleasant conviction that they already hold but have forgotten, or have hidden, or are denying.

The people are ashamed because of what they have done and allowed to be done. Sorrows they have caused and injustices they have let happen. Injustices caused and sorrows they have not prevented. They should be ashamed. We should be ashamed. Shame on us that people starve. Shame on us that people have no place to live. Shame on us that people wage war. Shame on us that some have very much and some next to nothing. Shame on us for obscene violence.

Shame is not the same as guilt. Guilt is in the acts done or left undone, and the relief is in forgiveness. Guilt is the result of works. But shame is Sin with a capital “S.” Shame is about our being. It is how we are saints and sinners at the same time. Forgiven and shamefaced at the same time. We are forgiven our sins, but we remain sinners.

We can feel—or be—not guilty, innocent, and still feel shame for our group, institution, nation, or the world.

Guilt moves us to remorse and apology. Shame moves us to seek a new way of being. We confusingly use the one word, repentance, for both things. But the repentance that comes out of guilt is regret and the repentance that comes from shame is transformation.

The crowds do not apologize. Instead, they ask “What then, should we do?” It is revealing and important that they do not argue with John. They do not equivocate or explain or defend themselves. They do not mock his unreasonable idealism. Nor do they fall into despair or discouragement. They are ashamed. They know that John knows them. John has spied them out correctly. Their eagerness to know what to do now comes straight from their recognition that John is right. In that case, they ask, what shall we do? What, then—in that case, and in particular—what then shall we do?

John responds in the spirit of the question. His answers have nothing to do with feelings and nothing to do with belief. They have to do with what to do. There are three groups in the passage—perhaps standing for the large variety of sorts of people. And for each, John has a different answer. To the crowd: Be economically fair. If you have two coats, give one to a person who has none. To the tax collectors—who in these times ran a kind of protection racket: do not use your position of authority to rob from others. To the soldiers: do not use your threat of power to oppress the people and exploit their fear of you. John advises in favor of fairness, generosity, and humility and against injustice, greed, and dominance. But not in the general—which gets us nowhere; it is like saying “be good”—but in the specific.

Lutherans make the distinction between law and gospel. But this does not mean that the law—rules of behavior and ethics—are inferior to and superseded by the Gospel, or are trivial in light of God’s grace and forgiveness. There is good news in the law, and the law is useful. There are lots of exhortations and advice and commandments and teachings about behavior in the Bible and are part of our faith.

The law, things that tell us what is good to do, convict us. That is, they remind us that what we are doing is not always so great. In that way, they shame us as John’s words shamed the crowd. They discover us hiding behind ramparts of privilege and wealth, ancestry (“We have Abraham as our ancestor!” the crowd thinks), and also competence, good will and good intentions and fine gestures. All the things we use to duck from our shame. The law does not condemn these things—they are often a part of us—but it does treat them as beside the point. The laws reveal us inside the ramparts, which is both embarrassing and good.

And the law also keeps us attentive to other things and places and people of the world. If we are to share our second coat with people who have none, we have to seek and see those people. If we are to visit the prisoners—a kind of law Jesus mentions—then we have to find them. If we are to avoid cheating people, we have to see how what we do cheats them. We have to be aware of how things work and, in our world, how we are connected. The law is a pointer in the right direction.

The law tells us how to live good. It is a rudimentary but fundamental set of instructions. We need to know this stuff and pay attention to it.

The reason the crowd responds with eagerness and not with anger or dismay is that what John is saying is calling to them. That—a calling—is the root of the word “exhortation” in this passage. The people are ashamed. They—we—know this deeply. We are called to act, moved by what we already know deep within us and from the conscience of our traditions. We are given instructions, which are a gift to us.

These words are good news—gospel—not so much, or not only, because they are a summary of what John has just said. But because they are an introduction to the story about to unfold.

This expectation of a coming guide, a trustworthy companion, and an unfolding of a new world, is what makes Mary and the shepherds and the kings we are about to encounter in the next ten days so joyful. In times of trouble and shame, they represent a hope that we are at the beginning of a new way to live.

Out of the Puddle

Text: Luke 3:1-6
Other texts: Luke 1:68-79

In the middle of today’s psalm there is a hinge. On one side, the song looks back at God’s promises to God’s people. A reminder to us and to God. A quoting of past prophets. On the other side, it looks forward to the fulfillment of that promise. A new prophet. A new way.

The psalm connects the past to the future. The psalm sits in the middle of the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth and their new son John. In the verses before it, the mood is dark. There is sadness in Israel, occupied by Rome, living under a repressive power. There is sadness in the family of Zechariah and Elizabeth, who wish to have a child but cannot. The story is seamed with national and personal doubt, disappointment, and discouragement.

Into this mood steps an angel, Gabriel. Gabriel announces that Zechariah and Elizabeth will have a son, even though they are old. Gabriel announces that their child will restore Israel, even though it is defeated. Zechariah does not believe the angel on either count, and for this he is rendered mute. He cannot speak.

Yet things change. Elizabeth becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a son, and Zechariah, now both humble and joyful, is freed to speak, and he sings the song that is the psalm.

Zechariah sings a song both of memory and of restoration. In the first half, he gently reminds God in our hearing that God had promised to protect Israel and keep it safe from its enemies. He mentions Abraham and great King David. He recalls God’s oath to free Israel so that it might worship in freedom.

Yet, by the time Luke’s Gospel was written, it was pretty clear that things had to change, were changing. Conditions that had prevailed for centuries no longer did. Things that had once worked no longer did. Trying to do the same things over and over and expecting different results had proved fruitless. The Temple in Jerusalem, God’s house, had been destroyed twice, and for good this time. The land which once was Israel’s was occupied by someone else. Jerusalem, the city of David, no longer ruled. Israel was bullied and oppressed. This was not how it was supposed to be.

So in the second half of Zechariah’s song, he explains that the promise of God is to be renewed. His son, John, will be a prophet to the people. Teaching them how—giving them the knowledge, it says—how to restore God’s people. And John does teach them.

John, after he grows up a bit, preaches, it says, a baptism of repentance. It is the right message for the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth and for the times. Repentance means to change direction. To change one’s thinking, or to discover a new way of thinking.

It was no surprise that John was out in the wilderness. For Israel, the wilderness was a fertile ground for transformation. The wilderness was the stage on which the exodus from Egypt was played. In the wilderness the Law was given to Moses and the people. In the wilderness the people of Israel were transformed from a enslaved, nomadic people into a nation with a permanent home. The home the Romans now occupied.

For Israel, the wilderness represented both a reminder of Israel’s beginnings and a reminder that when God steps in, the world can be transformed.

John preaches about transformation—a baptism for the repentance of sins. For us today, and for the people who heard John, the word repentance has many meanings.

It could mean, for one, personal regret—that you were sorry for something you did or didn’t do. Or it could mean that you changed your mind about something, based on new knowledge. Or it could mean (though not so much these days) that you’ve taken part in a rite of penance. A lot of John’s audience would have heard it in theses ways.

But its unlikely that that’s what John meant.

The word that we translate repentance means a change of mind, a change of thinking. But not just the intellectual mind, also the emotional mind and the spiritual mind. For John, the word means a change in the whole being of a person. To repent means to see things in a whole new way. It means conversion. To repent is to be more than fixed up; it means to be transformed.

In trying to explain what John is doing, Luke quotes Isaiah about road building, about trying to get across valleys and over mountains.

We can fall into places as dark and depressed as a ravine. There we find ourselves with all the trash that gathers around us in our lives. Bits of envy and hatred. Pieces of greed and self righteousness. Tangles of worry and obsession.

And we can be flummoxed by obstacles as tall as mountains. Things that once seemed easy seem difficult. Things that were once challenging seem impossible. We are afraid to move ahead, fearful of the beasts that might lie ahead, imaging what will happen. What if we take a risk and get into trouble? We are not so sure we can find a way through.

It happens, to institutions, to systems, to nations as easily as it happens to us.

It is tempting at times like these to fix things with minor adjustments to the way we have always done things. To make improvements. Or to deny the need for repentance.

For John, and for Jesus following him, repentance is not business as usual, only in a better, nicer way. For John, and for Jesus, to repent means to change what is important to you. To turn your back on those things which so far have demanded your loyalty. It is to turn to God unconditionally and to turn away from all that is against God. Not just things that are evil, but all things that make it impossible to turn to God.

Luke was right to quote Isaiah here. For John, trying to change your life in the ways we usually do is like building trestle bridges over the ravines, constructing hairpin switchbacks on mountain roads, and putting better signs at the confusing intersections. What John preaches is a world in which the ravines are all filled up, the mountains all made low, the crooked roads made straight. It is a world transformed.

What makes Zechariah so joyful is not that his son John will berate people about their past evil—although he does, as we’ll hear next week. The song is joyful because the repentance that John will preach promises—as to Zechariah sings at the end—promises to bring light to those those who live in darkness and despair, and to put our feet on the path of peace.

There is a purpose to John’s preaching, and it is not to make us feel bad. It is to encourage us not to sit in a puddle of discouragement and defeat. It is to remind us that we are not condemned to live out everlasting disfunction.

God visits us, it says in the psalm. We can take God seriously. When God comes to visit, the world cannot remain unchanged.