Child of God

A Sermon preached on Christmas II, Jan 2, 2022, at St. Augustine’s and St. Christoph

Jeremiah 31:7-14, Ephesians 1:3-6, Luke 2:41-52

There are quite a few so-called non-canonical or apocryphal gospels, that is ones that are not included in our Bible canon. We know of about 20 complete ones, with about the same number only existing as fragments, and of some “lost ones” – known only by being referenced elsewhere. They were all written much later than the four canonical gospels. You may have heard of the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, or the Gospel of Mary – mostly just collections of sayings. And we also have a few infancy gospels that try and provide details about the life of the child Jesus from the age of three to age twelve, a period in Jesus’ life that is hardly covered by the canonical gospels.

After Jesus’ birth, Matthew just has the flight to Egypt, a story which much elaborated in the infancy Gospels, with them returning home sometime between 4 BC and 6 AD. Luke has two childhood stories: Jesus’ presentation at the Temple about 40 days after his birth and today’s story about a 12-year-old Jesus teaching and learning from the elders of the Jerusalem temple, but that’s it. One of the infancy gospels (the Infancy Gospel of Thomas), actually ends with its own version of this event. There it is the culmination of a process of maturity as the child Jesus comes to terms with and learns to control his divine powers and nature, and to use them for good. On the way however he can be quite nasty and arrogant at times. The author “takes what appears to be a quite radical step of assuming that [Jesus] was not born from the womb as a wise and mature person, but that he started out as a little boy and had to learn to handle his neighbours and himself carefully.”[1]  These stories were very popular in the middle ages, make an appearance in medieval Christian art and one episode, involving Jesus making clay birds, which he then proceeds to bring to life, even made its way into the Quran.

The authors – and the readers – were partially motivated by curiosity: What would Jesus’ childhood have been like? What happened in those intervening 12 years? But they are also about making Jesus approachable, of showing the fully human side of his nature and how he struggles with it. The adult, canonical Jesus is – thankfully – also not a distant, divine, emotionless entity but a real human being who cries, gets angry, occasionally struggles with his calling, and is even willing to be corrected at times. He has to be, or there would be no point to the Incarnation: “He became what we are so that we might become what He is,” is how the 2^nd century bishop of Lyon, Irenaeus of Lyon. The authors of the infancy gospels just went a little too far with that idea and let their imaginations run away with them!

But returning to Luke, what are we supposed to learn then from the only incident from Jesus' adolescence recorded in the canonical Gospels? What does it tell us about Jesus and about us?

This is the first time that we hear Jesus speaking. In verse 49, when he replies to his mother and her very understandable concern with the words “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" Up until now, other beings or people have told us who Jesus is: Gabriel – “He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:32), Zechariah and Elisabeth who call him “Lord,” Mary in the Magnificat (Luke 1:47-55), the angels who tell the shepherds “to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord,” (Luke 2:11) or Simeon who calls him your (God’s) salvation and “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” (Luke 2:32). Now Jesus uses the word “Father” to refer to God, alluding to the sense of family relationship and intimacy he feels and has with his heavenly Father.

In his understanding of his relationship with God and in the way he interacts with the teachers at the temple “sitting among [them], listening to them and asking them questions” (2:46) we are shown a Jesus who, on the threshold to adulthood in the Jewish tradition, already has a strong sense of mission and self-awareness, and a clear sense of his calling. The phrase “in my Father’s house, can also be translated as to “be about my Father’s business.” In his first public utterance he is reflecting on his relationship with God and on the will of God. It is not a coincidence that he has begun to reveal himself in Jerusalem, a place he will later return to, in obedience to his Father, to fulfil his mission on the Cross and truly reveal himself as the Son of God and Saviour. His submission to his parents “Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them,” is already a foretaste of that final obedience and a necessary step in his human development. He still needs to increase “in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour,” before setting off on his final journey to Jerusalem, gathering followers, teaching, and healing on his way.

And what about us? “His mother treasured all these things in her heart.” (2:51) she pondered, that is thought about, their meaning and her son’s destiny just as she had “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” after the shepherds told her what had happened in the fields when the angelic host appeared. I am sure she also pondered what Simeon had meant 12 years’ previously, also in the temple, when he had blessed them and said to Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” (2:34-35)

Mary does what Luke wants us, his readers to do as well: To pause and contemplate who Jesus is and what he came to do. What does it mean that Jesus both shares our human nature and God’s divine nature?  What is his Father’s business? Well, according to the author of the Letter to the Ephesians, these two themes are intimately connected: “He (God) destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” (Eph. 1:5-6) God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus is the Beloved. Through our shared nature and union with the Incarnate Christ, through God’s will and choice, and through our own positive response to that choice we are God’s beloved children. That gift comes with enormous responsibility. If we share in his nature, we share in his mission. But right now, on the 2^nd and last Sunday after Christmas, in this season of great joy for all the people (Luke 2:10) it is enough to give thanks and rejoice and to pray, in the words of today’s collect, that we may grow into the life promised at Christmas:

O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 

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[1] Stevan Davies, The Infancy Gospels of Jesus: Apocryphal Tales from the Childhoods of Mary and Jesus--annotated & Explained. SkyLight Paths Publishing; 2009. xxii

Guidelines

A Sermon preached on Christmas I, 2021 at St. Augustine’s

Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7, John 1:1-18

Our December vestry meeting is always a mixture of business and social. Usually, we have dinner together at the Parsonage, but this year the meeting had to be online yet again. But after we had finished discussing business, we had some online social time including a short quiz that Susan had prepared for us. One of the questions was which Gospels contain a nativity or birth story. The correct answer is just two of the four, Matthew and Luke. A nativity play based on Mark’s Gospel would be very short, just 5 minutes of silence followed by a John the Baptist character jumping onto the stage shouting “repent”!

And John’s Gospel just has the prologue we heard this morning. Robert Vukovic made a good case that this could also be considered as a sort of birth story, or even a pre-birth story, as in poetic language it tells us not only about the eternal Word coming into the world, but also about the Word’s pre-existence: but it still does not lend itself to a nativity play. The prologue is, quoting from a commentary, “a hymn, a poetic summary of the whole theology and narrative of the Gospel.”[1] It begins at the very beginning, with creation. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. …. All things came into being through him” (John 1:1-3) and touches on the fall with the introduction of the darkness of evil into God’s creation – yet which cannot overcome the light of God. We are told that John the Baptist will come first, “as a witness to testify to the light.” (John 1:6-7) The first half of John’s Gospel shows us how Jesus and his teaching is often rejected by many of his own people, especially the religious leaders, and this is summed up with the words “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” (John 1:11) And that rejection culminates in Jesus’ death on the cross. But we are also told that some will believe and follow him, with the disciples at their core. They will be given the power to become children of God, and at the very end of the Gospel Jesus will breathe his Spirit of new life into them. The Word became flesh, was “incarnated” we are told, and in this Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, we can know God. It’s all there, all of Jesus’ life and its meaning in these 18 verses that we are given to read and hear before that story begins!

That is not the case with Chidi. We do not know what his life will be like, what experiences he will have, what highs and lows, what challenges and joys. What we do know is that he will grow up in a very loving family. In bringing him her today for baptism, you, his family are doing two things.

Firstly, you are extending and enlarging Chidi’s family. “Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ's Body the Church,” and that body is all of us. Chidi already was a child of God but now he is getting us as his brothers and sisters in Christ [and we won’t all fight over his toys!]  We, as his church family, will promise to do all in our power to support him in his life in Christ, however that will turn out.

Secondly you are giving him a set of guidelines for the rest of his life. The promises you make on his behalf, and the Covenant we will all join in saying, are principles for him to use as he makes his way through life, values he can draw on when making decisions. At heart the promises are simple: Renounce all that is evil and bad (not that Chidi has yet had a chance to do anything evil or bad … though his parents may have a different view after a sleepless night). Turn to Christ, trust in him and follow him – his teaching, his life and his love. The famous 2^nd century Rabbi Hillel when asked to teach a gentile the whole Torah replied, “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah [Law], and the rest is commentary, go and learn it.”

The Baptismal Covenant is also a sort of commentary, because everything can be summed up in Jesus’s commandment to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves. In a given situation however, we sometimes want more detail – and that is what a commentary is for.

What does our commentary tell us then? First it tells us what to believe in, the God who creates, redeems and sanctifies us. Then it tells us what sort of actions or behaviour follow in from that faith.

To “continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers,” is the reminder that relationships and community are at the heart of what we do. We turn to that fellowship, that community, to learn together and from one another, and of course for mutual support – we are family. And we turn to God, to Jesus our guide, in our prayers, commending difficult decisions to him.  

Our commentary – realistically – also assumes that while we will do our very best not to make mistakes, that we still will make them, and tells us that there is always a way back in repenting and returning to the Lord “whenever [we] fall into sin.” This is important as we have a tendency to dig ourselves even deeper into trouble if we have no way out. Well, the promise here is that there is always a way out.

As this is all Good News, we also promise to pass it on to others - by word and example. Whenever we do that, we make the world a little better, a better place to live in, so it’s good for us too.

We have – and you will, Chidi – run into people that we don’t like and that we don’t agree with. But even then, we are called to “seek and serve Christ in all persons.” That does not mean that we have to do something we consider wrong, but that even when we disagree, perhaps even fundamentally, that we express that disagreement in the knowledge that we are all made in the image of God.

Last and certainly not least, Jesus came to establish a kingdom of peace, justice, and righteousness (Isaiah 9:7). If we follow him and obey him, that is also the purpose of our lives, to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” I don’t know how that will express itself in your life, for example what organisation or cause you may decide to support or even to call into being. There are as many ways of doing this, as there are people.

As I said, we do not have a prologue to Chidi’s life, no advance summary of his story. But I do know that if he strives to live as we will promise for and with him, and if we all strive to help him, that it will be a godly and a good one.

Amen.

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[1] Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel and Epistles of John