"Holy Family Dynamics" - Christmas 1C

Saint Luke 2:41-52

The Saturday before last my partner and I went downtown to the Christkindle Market in Daley Center.  By Chicago standards it was a mild Saturday evening and the place was packed.  It was cheek to check packed.  If someone would have fallen down or had passed out the market would have been closed by the time they were found.

Times like that always make me smile and remember what I was told to do as a little kid if I got lost.  My Uncle Herb’s first rule on becoming separated was that I was to “stop and stay”.

The theory behind this is simple: If two people are wandering around looking for each other it becomes like Brownian motion - two people, in this case, just wandering around and perhaps even passing each other without either one knowing it. While if one just stops and the other does the searching all the searcher has to do is retrace his or her steps and allowing for a reunion to take place more quickly. 

This is exactly what today’s gospel is about. 

But I must warn you that I have read countless sermons and articles on this reading and most of them have missed how very human the whole business is while they focused on the divine.
The facts are simple.

Mary, Joseph, Jesus and a whole group of relatives, friends and neighbors from back home are making their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem in a first century tour group for the Passover.

The city is as crowded as the Daley Center was and somehow, someway, Jesus becomes separated from his parents.  The text says only that he remained in Jerusalem but whether it was by accident or choice remains unclear.  What is clear is that the whole party was a day’s journey out of town before it was discovered that Jesus was missing.

Anyone who is a parent or who has ever been charged with the care of a child knows all about the mixture of fear and anger Mary and Joseph must have felt.  The overwhelming fear that some harm may have befallen their son mixed with the anger of a parent who says: “I hope he’s okay because when I find him, I’m going to kill that kid!”

That last option was not open to Mary and Joseph because of the divine nature of this story.  While they were frantically searching every wagon and asking every relative and friend if they had see Jesus  Mary was remembering the visit from the solitary angel named Gabriel, the shepherds, and finally the multitudes of angels who hailed her son’s birth.

Joseph was remembering his visit from that same angel, and three years later, the wise men. \

I cannot believe that at this moment Mary and Joseph were serene people of prayer with hearts and minds at peace.  No, they were remembering and they were worried because it was not just their son but the son who had been entrusted to them by God who was missing.

There is only one thing to do but make the long journey back to Jerusalem.  Two exhausting days of traveling and worrying.  Two sleepless nights spent tossing and turning.  Then another day searching in shops, and markets, and anywhere else they could think of asking everyone they had met if they had see their son.  Frantically they searched for Jesus.

Finally they try the temple maybe to look and maybe to pray. And when they do, lo and behold, there is their son sitting among the teachers asking questions and amazing eavesdroppers with his understanding.

Mary is not as impressed as the other and instead expresses her relief and frustration in one loaded sentence: “My child, why have you done this to us?”

Do you hear the guilt in that question?  It is almost as if she is saying:  “Why have you done this to us?  Why have you made us suffer so?”

Then Mary continues: “See how worried your father and I have been looking for you.”  Now she is bringing Joseph into it.  “Its bad enough you have done this to me but look at what you have done to your father. You know he was never sure about this whole business in the first place and now you’ve made him a nervous wreck.”

This is real family dynamics at its best. Not Holy Family dynamics but real family dynamics because all of us in this room have been involved in the same type of situations and conversations.

Every child who has ever stayed out too late or forgot to call home to tell his or her parents where they were or that they had arrived safely has heard, “We were so worried.”

And every parent has had to endure the kind of answer Jesus gives.  “Why were you searching for me?”

You can almost hear Joseph, can’t you?  “Why? Why? I’ll tell you why! What did you expect us to do? Were we supposed to go home and wait for you to show up?  You’re twelve years old pal!”

To add fuel to the family dynamic fire that is now raging Jesus says: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house. But they did not understand what he said to them.”

And neither do we because we load so much theological baggage onto this encounter that we fail to see the reasonableness of his response.

What was he supposed to do, check into an inn? He was a little young for that and besides, his previous experience with inns and innkeepers had not been that pleasant.

No, when he was separated from his parents he headed for the safest place in town, the temple. Here is would be sheltered, secure, and cared for until his parents showed up.

This is the only story we have of Jesus between the time of his infancy to his adulthood. So, it leaves one to wonder why it, above all others, is remembered.

I have no proof of this but I think that, as he grew, Jesus told this story to any who would hear to remind himself just how much his earthly family loved him. That even though his family may not have understood what he was up to, or even approved of what he said or did, they still loved him enough to search every nook and cranny of Jerusalem until they found him.

And I think he told us to remind us that there wasn’t anything in this life that he did not experience.  He told it to remind us that now God knows that even the simplest of family outings can turn into disasters of frustrations and frazzled nerves. 
Several years ago someone gave me a sermon preached by Dr. Frederich Niedner of Valparaiso University.  In this sermon he quoted from a seven year old child’s letter to God:

Dear God,
 I worry about you since you must not have a family the way we do. You must get real lonely. How about sharing my family? They argue a lot but they’re good to have mostly.
     Love,
     Ann Marie

  “That’s it,” Niedner wrote, “we argue a lot but we’re good to have mostly.  In Jesus God did come to make a home with us and be family with us. Here we discover that our love and our capacity to forgive is bigger and stronger than all our arguments put together.”

That is what Jesus taught at twelve and teaches still. There will be times when we feel like we have been left behind.  There will be times when our lives and schedules will be as crowded and confusing as the Christkindle market during Advent or Jerusalem at Passover. But it is just there where God has promised to be with us.

Jesus came to remind us that we are part of God’s family - God’s confusing and confused; God’s wandering and wonderful family; God bemusing and blessed family - all wrapped up in the love of God who came to be family with us in Jesus Christ our Lord.

That is the best news for all of us who have ever been caught us in the same crazy family dynamics that the Holy Family was on their annual outing to Jerusalem. Don’t you think?

Thanks for listening.

__________

1. St. Luke 2:48b (JB) [JB = The Jerusalem Bible]

2.  St. Luke 2:49a (NRSV) [NRSV = The New Revised Standard Version]

3.  St. Luke 2:49 (NRSV)