Sermon Tone Analysis
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Scripture
Luke 2:41-4
Introduction/Background
Thank you for the invitation to preach this morning.
I have heard it said that i will preach at the drop of a hat and I bring my own hat.
This, I must say, is a bit better than the last time I preached here.
Today, in the liturgical traditions, is known as the Holy Family Feast Day where the Holy Family is held up as a model for all families.
Frankly, I don’t know if they should be.
The Biblical family models are not always the best.
As far as I know there is no family here today that counts the son of God as one of their family members.
if you do please have him come up here and preach!
I can imagine the conversation between Joseph and Mary can’t you?
Joseph have you misplaced Jesus?
What did you do withe the Son of God.
I guess you could say that Mary was the first person to have found Jesus!
Really, though, if you understand how they traveled it wouldn’t be hard to understand how this could happen.
Nazareth was a 3 or 4 day walk to Jerusalem.
Men were required to go to Passover each year if they lived within 15 miles.
Children and women were not required to go.
So Luke makes the point here that Mary and Joseph were exceptional Jews.
Jesus is about to be or has been Bar Mitzvaed, which means he has become a man.
This happened around 12 to 13 years old.
So this was probably his first trip to celebrate passover.
They would have traveled in a caravan with other people from Nazareth.
yes they would have walked.
You had to be wealthy to afford a donkey or horse.
Those images you see of Mary riding a donkey to Bethlehem are bogus, they are Biblically and culturally incorrect.
Mary would have walked, according to Luke, for 4 or 5 days to get to Bethlehem from Nazareth.
Of course in Matthew they lived in Bethlehem and didn’t settle in Nazareth till coming back from Egypt.
We have totally screwed up the infancy stories of Jesus, but that’s another sermon at some other time.
So, it would have been a large number of people walking and the men traveled separate from the women.
Jesus was soon to be or was already considered a man so they weren’t exactly looking out for him.
it wasn’t till the end of the first day of travel when the families cam back together that they discovered Jesus was not in the caravan.
Exegesis
So that’s one day out, then one day back and one day looking for Jesus and they find him in the temple talking with the teachers.
This is the only story we have of Jesus as child.
Neither John nor Mark have the birth stories.
Matthew has nothing like this, this is only found in Luke.
The absence of any history of Jesus from birth to 30 bothered many of the early Christians and we have all kinds of apocryphal writings about Jesus.
The most detailed is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
Whoever wrote this had a wild imagination.
Jesus is working weird miracles, making a board longer for something his dad was working on when he cut it too short.
At 5 years old He makes clay birds out of mud and makes them fly, he gets mad at a teacher kills him and then raises him from the dead.
really weird stuff.
A legit question would be why didn’t the gospel writers include this information?
Because I think Jesus grew up just like any Palestinian Jewish boy.
There really wasn’t anything remarkable.
it is not easy to understand the humanity of Jesus.
We want to turn him into the Jesus of John’s gospel.
But we must remember, Jesus had to learn to walk, be potty trained, he had to learn a trade and like all Jewish boys he had to learn to read Torah.
There is a great scene in the Passion of the Christ where Mary is following Jesus as he is carrying the cross and he falls.
She suddenly has a flashback to when Jesus is a toddler, just learning how to walk and she catches him before he falls down a flight of stone steps!
The idea of incarnation is hard to wrap your head around.
How can somone be totally human and totally God at the same time?
Not goin to try to explain that, because it can’t be.
It’s a mystery.
St Augustine once wrote, “if you can understand it, then its not of God.” Frankly this is why Joseph and Mary did not understand what Jesus said.
They didn’t get it either.
So another legit question is, “Why did Luke include this story?”
Well, let’s unpack it a little more and see what we can find out.
First, culturally, it is not unusual for Jesus to be sitting at the foot of teachers or Rabbis.
He would have been educated at home by his Father and at the synagogue.
it says he is listening and asking questions.
He’s the one doing the learning, 18 years later he would be the Rabbi.
However, it does sound as if he is a little precocious doesn it?
They were amazed at his understanding and answers.
So we see a very human Jesus here, in fact so human he has upset his mother and father.
But I think it is verse 49 that is why Luke tells this story.
49 He said to them, “Why were you searching for me?
Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
Jesus understands his identity know.
All adolescents struggle with finding an identity.
in fact some of us as adults are still struggling with that.
I didn’t figure it out until I was 44.
So what we have here is the story of the day when Jesus discovered who he was.
But notice, it did not make him proud, because he went home and he was obedient to them.
It says Mary treasured these things in her heart.
I think the use of that word is a poor choice.
The greek literally means to “mentally store up.”
I think ponder would be better.
Her’s why, she didn’t understand.
She had to mullit over so to speak.
And Maybe she remembered the words of Simeon, also in the temple and jesus dedication and circumcision at 8 days.
Luke 2:22-
In the Church of the Holy Sepluchre in Jerusalem (explain).
Maybe the crucifixion wasn’t the only sword.
Maybe this day was a sword as well, when Jesus found his identity in his relationship with God the Ftaher.
She probably did realize that things would not be the same.
Application
Ok so what relevance does this story have for us in the 21st century?
We live in a culture that is success oriented.
Our identities are wrapped up in our roles, not who we are, but in what we do.
I am sure you know people when they retire are totally lost, because there identity was wrapped up in what they did.
You know 37 days after Bear Bryant retired he died.
maybe coincidence, maybe not. he was Bear Bryant the coach at Alabama.
Here’s part of his obit from the NYT:
Mr. Bryant created national headlines only a month ago when he ended his 38-year career as the most successful football coach on any American campus, and one of the most colorful.
He quit with a record of 323 victories, 85 losses and 17 ties at four schools: Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M and, for the last 25 years, at his alma mater, Alabama.
Six of his teams at Alabama were rated No.1 nationally by the wire-service polls.
And, when Alabama defeated Auburn, 28-17, on Nov. 28, 1981, for his 315th victory, he surpassed the record that had been set early in the century by Amos Alonzo Stagg.
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