I preached this sermon at my home church, the congregation where I grew up, but where I have not worshiped more than a handful of times in the last ten years, on the Sunday after Christmas, December 30th of last year. The text is below.
As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Colossians 3:12-17)
Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it.Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor. (Luke 2:41-52)
Good morning.
I will tell you, for the more than ten years now that I’ve been occasionally offering sermons somewhere besides here, I have been searching for a “good morning” as enthusiastic as the ones I remember from my childhood here, and I have never found one. Which is another way of saying: Oh, it is good to be here with all of you, in the light and the smells and the weight of the air of this place, which I have carried in my memory for a long time.
The funny thing about time, you know, is how it passes, even and especially without announcing what it’s doing or how it’s changing you, how it embeds deep within you just those things that it carries you further away from—people, places, events, even your old selves.
Thoughts like these always find me at this time of year, in the awkward, quiet days between Christmas and New Years Day, when the end of the calendar year and the beginning of the Christian liturgical year have together exhausted December, and the demands that I resolve to do or be something new with this next twelve-month parcel of future force me to consider what I have done and been with the last twelve-month parcel of past. And the truth is that I don’t always remember. Even this year, in which I got married and got ordained to the ministry, in which I cried and laughed, in which I sought and found and forgot and was found by God, has largely faded into anecdote, and what feels most real is the stack of dishes in my sink and the to-do list on my office desk. So much has happened to me, so much that seems the sort of thing that would really brand itself on the memory, and yet much of the time it may as well not have happened at all for all it touches my day-to-day.
The poet and essayist Christian Wiman, in his collection of meditations called My Bright Abyss, tells the story of a spiritual experience he had when he was twelve, at his Baptist church in a tiny, blighted town in West Texas. He stood during the altar call, he says, but instead of going forward to the altar he bolted from the sanctuary and was found curled into a ball in the church basement, sobbing and murmuring incoherently. And though the adults around him found the experience profound, though it certainly sounds profound to talk about, Wiman himself hardly remembers it, and has even tried to rationalize it away, as theatrics on the part of a bored preteen primed by his upbringing for spiritual drama, despite not being dramatic or inclined to shows of emotion. It does not make sense, he observes, for something so evidently significant to fade like a dream; but it has.
It may be, then, that Mary’s consternation at Jesus’ theological precociousness and wilful behavior is more sympathetic than it seems at first blush. Luke reports that, when Mary and Joseph find Jesus in the temple after three frantic days looking for him, Jesus expresses surprise that they didn’t know right where he was, and they didn’t understand what he was saying to them. What do you mean they didn’t understand!?, I always thought, as though I never forgot anything important, after everything that his birth entailed how could they not understand, had they just forgotten?
Well, maybe they had. Maybe it is not unthinkable that, twelve years on, Mary should no longer be thinking about the circumstances of her son’s birth, the angel, the tension with Joseph, the labor among strangers, the shepherds, the wise men. Maybe it is only human nature that, after twelve years of laundry and cooking and worrying and teaching and minding her very real and tangible son, the angel’s words are no longer at the forefront of her mind. Maybe she wondered if she had dreamed the whole thing.The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.
The nature of and the problem with time is that it passes, carries us without hurrying and without pause away from each thing that happens to us, even the great joys, even the utter desolations, even the miracles, even the moments in which we are touched by the very finger of God. The thing happens, and then it all moves on. Hannah had her miracle son and gave him to the temple, and that joy and heartbreak move steadily into the background in the rhythm of the yearly visits and new coats and Samuel’s growth in wisdom and stature, from longed-for infant to prophet. Mary was visited by an angel and then there was nine months of feeling her body change, of morning sickness and backaches and dealing with everyone muttering behind her and Joseph’s backs; there was a birth, angels, strangers, but then months of sleeplessness and spitup and years of learning to walk, run, talk, argue, help around the house, know the scriptures. Years of a family. Jesus was a miracle baby, and then he grew up. The thing happens, and then it all moves on.
What is most startling in the gospel reading today—startling strictly in the sense that we do not expect it, not in the sense that we ought not—is that the miracle comes up again. In staying behind at the Temple (where did he sleep?, I find myself wondering with a retroactive anxiety that may have welled up in Mary and Joseph too, what did he eat?), in declaring that he has, of course, been in his Father’s house and about His business, Jesus makes clear that, though the circumstances of his birth may have passed out of mind in the business of living and the infidelity of human memory, those circumstances have not stopped being real. Jesus is exactly who they were told he would be. The presence of God, the real and inarguable presence of God, has been there the whole time. Ordinariness can no more separate us from God than any of the more impressive created things Paul dismisses in Romans. On Christmas, that day two thousand years ago, the story we have heard so many times that it may even feel closer to us than this past Tuesday, God entered the ordinariness of the world, its dust and boredom and fatigue as well as its pain and grief, and God has never left it.
God has never left it and has never left us, no matter how distant those precious moments in which we would swear we felt the warmth of the divine hand on our faces become.
Reflecting again on his experience as a child in his church, Wiman finds another way to understand the faded memory: “It was too real,” he writes. “Not in the way that some traumas are too real and thus buried within us, but in another, cellular sense, some complete being that I cannot remember because I can’t stand apart from it… If eternity touched you,” he says, “if all the trappings of time and self were stripped away and you were all soul, if God ‘happened to you’—then isn’t it possible that the experience could not be translated back into the land of pumpjacks and pickup trucks, the daily round wherein we use words like self and soul, revelation and conversion, as if we knew what those words meant? Maybe I didn’t in fact ‘forget’ it. Maybe it happened—and goes on happening—at the cellular level and means not nothing but everything to me. Maybe, like an atavistic impulse, I don’t remember it, but it remembers me.”
Time will pass, intensity will fade. And we will never stop being the people sitting in darkness who saw a great light. “Immanuel,” God with us, is a nickname and a truth. We who have been touched by grace, to whom the Holy Spirit has been given, we will go about the lives we live as best we can and we will still be the ones touched by grace, to whom the Holy Spirit has been given. We do not have to remember the miracle; the miracle remembers us, and the grace with which God upholds us upholds us still. The life we have been given is what enables us to live in all of the ordinariness that God has chosen to come into, that God loves.
There are two very common translations of Jesus’ account of what he had to be doing in Jerusalem while his parents were trying to find him: “In my Father’s house,” and “about my Father’s business.” I will not make this a Greek lesson, but it is worth knowing, I think, that both options are extrapolations from a somewhat ambiguous original, which is something like “In the… mmmmmmy’know… of the Father.” Which, frankly, issues of memory aside, also makes it eminently reasonable for Mary and Joseph to not have understood what he was saying, since he didn’t really say it. But if I may return to sermonizing on it: The Greek is ambiguous in a way that makes it capacious. There are no clear lines around it, and anything might fit inside. What was the Father’s that Jesus was engaged in? Being present in the place of worship? His back-and-forths with the teachers and scribes there? Some other thing not contained in the text? Even: A way of being?
There is nothing we can do about the slide back into the ordinary that this week always is, away from the flickering candlelight and feeling of the Christmas Eve service and back to work, the turning of the calendar page and trying to remember to write “19” on checks, but the miracle of the Incarnation is no further from us than it was five days ago. It has permeated even the ordinariness of every day; it was always so. The life that Paul commends to the believers at the church at Colossus is very ordinary—but without the grace we have been given, it would be impossible. It is intensely communal and communally focused: mutual teaching, mutual admonition, mutual love, mutual forbearance, kindness, humility, patience, but it was nothing extraordinary. There is nothing exciting in it, no flashes of light, no divine proclamations; yet it depends completely on the Christmas gift and the Easter sacrifice, on the visitation of God continuing to work itself out in our cells, in our bodies as much as our spirits, in our speech and the works of our hands. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, Paul says. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. Clothe yourselves with love. These things, too, will have us about our Father’s business, living in the ordinary world which is, thanks be to God, also our Father’s house.
My friends: The Word was made flesh, and it dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory: It was here, and it has made our ordinariness hold the Holy, though we may not always see or know it. This year, then, whatever we do, in word or deed, may we do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Amen.
NOR ANY OTHER CREATED THING 