in a rusty holden?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

FIRST SUNDAY OF CHHRISTMAS

(December 29^th) 2024

 

 

READINGS:

 

Psalm 148

Colossians 2: 41-52

Luke 2: 42-52

 

 

Although I recall rarely attending church in my childhood, at least until I was sent off to a church-based boarding school at some ridiculously early age, (my parents being true to the British traditions), I nevertheless recall some bible stories from my loosely religiously based correspondence education.

The story of the child Jesus in the temple was not one of them. The Jesus I encountered, if I encountered him at all, was likely to have been meek and mild, or as the hymnist put it, in a much loved carol that we are not singing today, “Christian children all must be /
mild, obedient, good as he.”

I am not sure how far I would have travelled had I retorted, during a correspondence lesson about meek and mild Jesus, “yeah, sure mum,” (or indeed “mother,” as she insisted), “you mean meek and mild like the little fellow who caused his parents to turn back after three days of arduous journeying because he had chosen not to hop in the car for the five day journey home?”

Admittedly some concern would probably need to be raised with Oranga Tamariki when parents head home and don't notice for some three days that their oldest child is not in the back seat of the Holden.

Luke alone tells us this story. For any of us who have experienced the shock of realising we lost a kid in the shopping centre the sinking feeling that Mary and Joseph must have  felt as they realise Jesus wasn’t in the back seat is a shock not easily forgotten. Anne Is always quick to point out that she has never had this experience, but I have to confess that my now 30 something-year-old daughter was indeed left behind in a department store in Adelaide, when the chaos of keeping an eye on six energised children became too arduous for her frazzled parents. She seemed to survive the misadventure – we found her happily sitting on a counter consuming aeroplane lollies or something similar, supplied by the retail stuff, entirely unconcerned about her missing parents.

But why does Luke tell us the story? It is the only story from the period between the infancy of Jesus and his adulthood that made it into the canon, that is to say the gathered works that became our scriptures. If you should ever Google “infancy stories of Jesus” you will find there were many circulating, but they were not considered solemn or in some way edifying enough to become scripture. Yes even they point to something about the life-transcending nature of the child born in Bethlehem.

Myths, in the true sense, are never designed merely for entertainment but as vehicles of a deeper truth. I have a hunch Luke told us this story for two reasons. 1) Because it was true and too well known to be suppressed, and 2) because it serves to remind us that Jesus was precisely not mild and obedience at least in the sense that the actually quite profound hymn-writer Cecil Frances Alexander appears to convey. (Alexander was no slouch as a hymn writer, and I suspect her mind was focused more on the obedience of the later, adult Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, than on the strong-willed child who chastised his parents for not working out where he was, after costing them an extra six days journey).

For those of you who know my love of travelling Australia, incidentally, that roughly translates as driving from Melbourne to Alice Springs before noticing that the kid isn’t in the back seat and having to turn and go back. And, as Bishop Kelvin Wright points out in this week’s gospel conversation, it is also a wry indicator that Jesus does not, will not turn up in the places most likely for a young, perhaps early adolescent and growing boy. I regret to say that were my children lost they would be unlikely to be found in a church engaged in deep intellectual conversation with the clergy.

So Luke wants us to know that Jesus does not fit neatly inside the cardboard boxes of our expectations. He never has and never will. When we have tried to make him the blonde-haired blue-eyed hippie, or perhaps 19^th century poet of much western Christian art, he has eventually broken out to become an archetypal Middle Eastern shepherd figure, in reality a carpenter, more closely aligned to the texts in which we find him.

When we have attempted to make him some sort of a moral teacher chastising those who deviate from middle class niceness, we find him hanging out with hypocrites and has prostitutes, not, admittedly condoning their vocations, but making clear that in his view it is the systems of exploitation rather than the desperate choices of those on the edges of society that are his deepest concern.

As we move into a new era of being church, of being Christ-bearers in a post Christendom era (thank God) I suspect we must learn to extrapolate from this and other infancy stories of Jesus not some heavy and rather joyless finger wagging his finger, but demonstrating eagerness to explore truth, justice, and compassion, the hallmarks of righteousness, to use a biblical word, that is taught in the temples and churches or faith when they are on course.

I suspect the child Jesus was not sitting at the feet of the temple teachers discussing the finer points of temple liturgy or of meek and mild good manners, but exploring the deep questions of why there is suffering in the world, suffering in our neighbourhood, and how we might bring light to those who walk in darkness.

May God help us to search and apply answers to those questions, answers that Jesus was no doubt very keen to share with Mary and Joseph as they turned and headed once more back to their home in Nazareth.