Skip to main content
Play Video

click to access archived live stream

First Sunday after Christmas Day, Year C
29 December 2024

1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26
Psalm 148
Colossians 3:12-17
Luke 2:41-52

 

The stories I grew up with included the hardship of WW II and its aftermath, but it was not a story about being born in a barn. It was not a story of poverty, and it was not a story that described our family as having no agency. Rather, it was a story in which, even during difficult times, my ancestors made the best of a bad situation. They were resourceful during the war, and I learned that my grandfather only joined the Nazi party so he would not be drafted into the army during the last desperate days of the war. On my father’s side the story was similar. We had endured hardship but we had made the best of it.

My mother was ill, but I think no one knew this because people did not speak in those categories. Her condition required of her to always assert her importance, her knowledge and wisdom, and that we were a family generally wiser and better educated than most, and much of this was thanks to her. I am not sure when that ceased to be a convincing narrative for me. Probably during my adolescence. It stopped being convincing because it wasn’t true, and it wasn’t true because life is more complex than that, in the same way that my mother was ill but that is not all that describes her.

Realizing that the narrative I had gown up with wasn’t one I could build on, the narrative of the scriptures gained importance for me. Here was a story that included me but that did not depend on me; it also did not depend on my pedigree or any of those other trappings. It was simply a story that invited me, because God so loved the world. That God so loved the world we learned to adapt to a more individualistic point of view, namely that God so loved me, but this application did not deny that God loved the world, rather it was predicated on God’s love for the world.

And in this story I learned that the things that deem important to the telling of our family story, namely agency, honour, and wisdom were not only not prerequisites for being part of God’s story, they were more a barrier than they were an asset. For God chose what is foolish to shame the wise, God always cared about outsiders, widows, foreigners, the poor, and I learned that what is up in the world is of no importance to God. I have not yet fully grasped this because I still long to be someone, but I know that it is true.

But it has helped me to tell the story of my family and to a lesser extent my own story differently. There is no need to prop up false façades, for the family that matters the most is the family of God.

In this way, Jesus’ reply to Mary and Joseph, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” expresses exactly this. It is not only that Jesus is thinking, as we may have in similar circumstances when we were children, “Why are you so worried? I was not lost. The whole time I knew exactly where I was,” but it is also a preview of a later episode when his mother and his brothers come to him and upon hearing of their arrival and request to see him, Jesus only says, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” (Luke 8)

There is a further irony in the story. The very first time that Jesus speaks in Luke’s Gospel, he asks why his parents were searching for him, when searching figures prominently in Luke’s Gospel, though it is God who is doing the searching. Think of chapter 15, of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, The Prodigal Son. The primary point of these stories is that there is joy in heaven over any sinner who repents.

And this is what Jesus says to the religious establishment who take offense at his social contacts, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.” (chapter 5)

But searching for sinners is not a way to climb the social ladder. Networking is done with peers, or better with people of power and influence who can aid my own career. Jesus chosing the last, the lost, the least, and the little is not the story of my family, but it is the story of the family of God when the Church embraces the Gospel.

This is underlined by another detail of our passage. While it is the temple where Jesus has remained and where Mary and Joseph find him, Luke does not use the word for temple. Rather, the Greek text reads something like, ‘Did you not know that I must be in the essence of things that concern my Father?’ The King James version translates, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” And the father referenced is not Joseph.

If we consider the Gospels also as the story of the Holy Family, which they undoubtedly are, we see that the story told here is one that includes details most of us would omit if they were part of our story. Probably not the part about the angels or the scholars from afar, but likely that no one wanted us, that there was no room in the inn, that shepherds, not family, were the first to congratulate, or that Jesus was born in a stable and laid in a feed trough.

However, a family that tells such stories, and that includes Christ’s Body the Church, has come to understand what Jesus is about and the life he lived among us. Such telling changes priorities. We no longer have to keep up appearances.

Later, Paul will say about Jesus and his relationship to the Father, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

The telling of the story in this way, and the story is our story – that is what we celebrate at Christmas – is an expression of an orientation not to family, kindred, or nation first, but to God, to living in God’s presence and to the doing of God’s will.

We see that when Jesus stays behind for his Father’s business, it is expressive of the orientation Jesus would show in his entire ministry, to seek first the Kingdom of God, which is what he teaches us in the Sermon on the Mount.

In his ministry Jesus will call individuals to leave father and mother for his sake (Matthew 19, Mark 10). And soon followers will say that we need to obey God more than human authority.

Perhaps this is the reason we hear this story today. To save us from thinking Christmas is only about the family and not about the Body of Christ, or about the world. I believe we are given the story the Gospels tell so we can practice telling it, and tell it as our own story, so that our lives may be joined to the life of Jesus.

Amen.

Christoph Reiners

Pastor Christoph was ordained in Vancouver in 1994 and has served congregations in Winnipeg and Abbotsford before coming to Our Saviour in the fall of 2016.