First Sunday after Christmas – December 26, 2021
Luke 2:41-52

When someone says, “God works in mysterious ways,” they mean that there are so many things that we don’t’ know about God, who God is, when God works — that we best defer to God’s will and God’s ways and pray for the best outcome. It’s also a way to express amazement at what God has done. I’ll spare you the Latin phrase, but we hold to the notion that God is both hidden and revealed. In the Word made flesh, God has revealed God’s self. And in seeing the life of Jesus and His ministry, we can understand and know God to be the God of love. Yet, even with what has been revealed to us, there is so much about God that we don’t know. After all, we are humans, and there is never any promise that we will know God 100%. We would expect that the almighty and living God would surprise us because God is God, and we are not.

Today’s lection is a story of the surprisingly unfamiliar that is familiar. It’s familiar because we would expect no less from the creator of the world who will surprise us at every turn. Sure, we know God will cause the sun to rise (or that the earth will fully rotate on its axis) and the sun to set each day. But there is a larger part of this world and of our lives that is so unfamiliar. Look at how the text unfolds: “… every year … they went up as usual …” The holy family worshipped the Lord, and they had a familiar pattern of going to the holy city of Jerusalem and participating in the long held celebration of the Passover, passed down from generation to generation.

But then …

And this is the point in the sermon that we have to pause; this is the point in our reading where we have to put a semicolon. God is lurking and is about to do a new thing. And again, we would expect God to do so, turning our understanding upside down, as God triggers a moment of anxiety for Mary and Joseph because they didn’t expect what was happening. Before Macaulay Culkin’s character Kevin McAllister popularized the Christmas movie Home Alone, Jesus was already doing that as he was at home with the rabbis, with the teachers, as a 12-year-old theologian who wanted to learn, who wanted to exegete texts, who was an ambitious young man seeking to be a Master of Divinity, Doctor of Ministry, and Ph.D. in two weeks. Sure, why not? He is the Son of God and Son of Man, after all, right? We would expect no less from him. Mary and Joseph and everyone around them were amazed by this understanding and wisdom, and still he was increasing in “wisdom in years, and in divine and human favor.”

Jesus teaches us what this inflection point in his emerging adolescence was about: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” If only we can be adolescents again — in the in-between of youth and of emerging adulthood, a willingness to live on the edge, while not being sure about doing so, learning while questioning, following while rebelling. Believe me, I’m fine in my middle-age. I love being 45, and I believe this decade is the best. But Jesus’s emerging adolescence, as with any adolescence always has an element of mysterious familiarity and familiar mystery. As a parent of two adolescents, I can testify to this fact, as with others of you who know how it is to raise an adolescent. What would it mean for our faith to be in that similar place into 2022, and in the years beyond? A faith that is not settled, but one that is always learning, continually adapting, increasing in wisdom, increasing in our love for God and with our fellow humans (and thereby increase in divine and human favor). What if we take a cue from our Savior and be in our “Father’s house,” in “God’s house” every day, not just learning, but living; living in God’s love, living for God’s justice, living and loving on the edges of where the Spirit calls us to serve, to be a part of God’s work in the world. That’s the world of the familiar promise of the unfamiliar. The Scriptures have a word for that: faith.

Amen.