Sunday 29th December 2024
1 Samuel 2 , vv 18-20, 26
Psalm 14
Col. 3, vv 12-17
Luke 2, vv 41- end
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
Preparing for today reminded me of two times when as a parent I shared something of the worry that Mary and Joseph must have felt when Jesus goes ‘missing’ for four whole days. There was the time when our daughter was a baby, just a few weeks old, and her two sleep-deprived parents had been to supper at Mary-Roses parents. On the way home a phone call from her dad asked me if I’d forgotten anything. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said, feeling puzzled, only to hear a baby crying in the background and to realise that we’d left our newest arrival behind with her grandparents! A few years later came the first time we decided our daughter was old enough to walk into Lewes on her own. As a father I wasn’t anything like as relaxed about her being out of my sight as Mary and Joseph are about allowing Jesus to be on his own; I remember anxiously shadowing her until she got level with the church and then being spotted and deciding I had to give in and let her go on her way alone. But Mary and Joseph have no such worries about Jesus being out of their sight; they travel for a whole day before it occurs to them to ask where Jesus is and then discover they’ve left him behind. And it takes them a further three days to find him in Jerusalem -teaching in the temple! They clearly have complete confidence in their community. They know they can trust the adults around them to keep their child safe.
The trust that Mary, Joseph and Jesus had in their community as a safe space for children and the vulnerable to run freely contrasted for me with a report on the radio a few days ago; children in a school were telling the reporter how unsafe they felt in the modern world, and particularly how social media was affecting their mental health. They spoke of artificial intelligence apps being used to doctor their images without their permission and of being bullied online by people they didn’t know. Listening to that report 21st century society didn’t seem to be a place where you would want your child to be out of your sight for four minutes, let alone 4 days! The children in that news report clearly didn’t feel that they could necessarily trust all the adults they came into contact with; for them the communities they shared with adults seemed places of threat and danger.
It's always dangerous to try and make direct parallels between a world that existed a thousand years ago and our own; the community of traveling extended families that makes it possible for Mary and Joseph to be so relaxed in the disappearance of their child simply doesn’t exist in our twentieth first century world of family break up, suspicion generated by conspiracy theories and the pressures of social media . And we know now that our own institutions haven’t always been safe spaces for children and the vulnerable. Acknowledging that the church in the c20th hasn’t kept some of its children safe has been one of the most painful discoveries we’ve made in recent months and years. But in many ways, that’s the point of today’s readings ; to show us a different approach to nurturing not just our children but every member of our community; to remind us of what we as church communities should aspire to in our care for children, the vulnerable and one another. In the OT Samuel’s parents have entrusted his upbringing to the temple, and in Luke Jesus is encouraged to grow and learn there. In both cases it’s clearly the role of the community in general and the Temple in particular to provide children with space to grow and learn in safety and love. Everyone in those early communities shares in the protection and education of its children. In both Solomons and Jesus’s case it’s clearly accepted that it takes a whole community to enable children to grow in spiritual and emotional independence. And in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, we discover the values which should shape those communities, the values which Christ came into the world at Christmastime to reveal.
Luke is too careful a writer to include pointless details, which makes me wonder if we’re meant to see those three days of separation as Mary and Joseph search for the boy Jesus in Jerusalem as foreshadowing a second period of three days separation that Mary will endure some thirty years later, again in Jerusalem; that time between the terrible separation of the crucifixion and the extraordinary joy of the reunion which will come with His resurrection. It may not be till then that they understand his true nature, even though Jesus makes it explicit to them here that God and not Joseph is His Father. Jesus’s response to his worried parents, ‘Did you not know that I must be in my father’s house’ is his way of telling them and us that the incredible truth is that the young boy who has worried his parents so is also the ‘Word’ we heard about on Christmas Day, the Word who was ‘in the beginning with God’. This is the ‘Word’ we heard of in the Prologue to John’s Gospel; God in the world in human form, bringing light and love to the darkness. And this is the same Word that we hear about in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, the Word St Paul tells us has to be evident in all we say and do, when he tells us to ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly’.
St. Paul makes it clear that what he means by us allowing the word to dwell in us richly; it means to ‘clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.’
These qualities are as important now as they were thousands of years ago in creating safe communities like the ones in which Jesus and Solomon grow to adulthood; communities where adults and children can grow and thrive mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically. And these are the qualities which Christ came into the world to share. When we sing for the thousandth time those familiar words from ‘O Little town of Bethlehem’:
‘Cast out our sin and enter in;
be born in us today’
We’re asking for our own natures to be transformed; for the ‘compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience’ which St Paul identifies with the love of Christ to become central to who we are. Children and adults who live in loving communities where everyone is clothed in love whether at school, in church or at home thrive now just as they did in Jesus’s time. When adults teach and practise compassion, kindness, humility and patience they create communities which, like the one in which Jesus can become separated from his parents for four days without coming to harm, are safe, loving and full of opportunities for growth and discovery, not just for children, but for everyone.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.