Year B
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 84:1-8
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Luke 2:41-52

May the words of my mouth… O God… speak your Truth…

According to the Oxford English Dictionary… a nuclear family is the family group made up of a father… mother… and their children… and has been regarded as a basic social unit… and an extended family is made up not only of the parents and children… but also blood-relatives and married relatives living nearby… though we know that there are single parent households… and blended families… and families of choice…

The popularity of the western nuclear family… came about in the early 20th century… prompted in part… by the business practices of Henry Ford… who introduced the “eight hour day and $5.00 week”… and later the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt… both of which enabled more and more families to become economically independent… and to own their own homes… and although nuclear families are known into antiquity… it’s really extended families which have long been the basic family unit… and we know of some it-takes-a-village examples… and it was in this kind of extended family unit that Jesus and his family were traveling… after they celebrated the Passover in Jerusalem… 

When I was growing up… my family… my aunt’s family… and my uncle’s family… with its six parents and us five cousins… made up our extended family… and we celebrated religious and secular holidays together… and us kids stayed over at each others’ homes during the summer… we went to day camp together… and we traveled and took sightseeing trips together… and I also counted myself fortunate too… because New York City was a 40-minute and 65^₵ bus trip away… and starting probably when I was about twelve years old… I made countless trips into THE CITY… to wander around… go to the stores and museums… and Central Park… shows on Broadway… the Jewish delis… and Chinatown… I was stepping out… and these experiences helped me feel more comfortable forging out on my own… helped me expand some boundaries and become more self-reliant… 

And the summer after I graduated from high school… I was able to spend eight weeks in Israel… one hundred and twenty mostly college freshmen and I spent two weeks taking courses at Tel Aviv University… we spent three weeks on an archeological dig in Beersheba… we toured the country for two weeks… from the Dead Sea in the south to Haifa in the north… including a whole week in Jerusalem… both the modern city and the ancient one with its markets and religious sites… including the western wall of Herod’s second Temple… and at the end we had a whole week on our own… 

And I made some friends that summer… Jewish kids who lived not too far away from where we did in New Jersey… and at Christmas break that fall… I embarked on an imperfect plan… I told my parents that I was going to take a train up to Boston to visit some of them… even though none of them knew that I was coming… and after I arrived in Boston… with enough chutzpah for two of me… I simply called one after another… and said that I was in town… and could I stay with them and visit for a day or two…

I had not considered that some of them might themselves be away on Christmas break… or that they’d say No… and I certainly had no money for a hotel… it was quite brazen of me… but several were there… and were happy enough for me to crash on their couch or in their dorm rooms to make a visit happen… and I had managed… figuratively at least… to slip away from my parents and strike out on my own… 

When we were in Jerusalem… we prayed at the Wailing Wall… and if the feeling there at the Temple Mount was even a small fraction… of what it was when Jesus lived… it’s no wonder he was touched so deeply by what he experienced there…

Luke’s is the only Gospel with stories of Jesus as a boy… the Angel Gabriel had already  told Mary that Jesus would be called the Son of the Most High… and that God would give him the throne of his ancestor David… and Jesus is carried into the Temple before he can walk… there Simeon recognizes him as the fulfillment of God’s promise… sees something in him that amazes even his parents… and tells them that this infant is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel… and in today’s Gospel… twelve-year-old Jesus is back in the Temple… asking questions of the teachers… and being in conversation… and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding… 

In his book… A Rabbi Talks with Jesus… Jacob Neusner makes the point that in Jesus’ time… Torah was understood to take precedence over genealogy… and while this Jewish understanding never became license to abandon one’s family… it did underscore the seriousness of Torah study… and in another book… The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times… by Ivan Marcus… we’re told that in Biblical times… it was being twenty-years-old… that marked an Israelite boy’s time of maturity… and even after the rabbis introduced age thirteen for the first time to go along with signs of physical maturity… twenty continued to be significant as the minimum age… for example… to buy and sell real estate… it’s not clear when the significance of age thirteen first emerged… and we don’t know what it implied about how a boy could act religiously before be reached thirteen… so this would make Jesus’ appearance in the Temple at age twelve… and his conversations with the teachers that much more astounding… and while it may not have excused his impatience with his parents… it may explain why… because of his compassion for their distress… that he then went down with them and came to Nazareth… and was obedient to them… and why his mother treasured all these things in her heart… 

John Shea writes… that too many people equate holiness with perfection… no negative feelings… no hurtful words… no lying… kids always obedient to their parents… and parents always understanding their kids… and if there is friction… the Holy Family resolves it in half an hour… like one of those nonsensical family comedies on TV… so if Mary and Joseph… who were fully human… and the fully human part of Jesus… made up the Holy Family… then in ways we may feel uncomfortable acknowledging… the Holy Family was imperfect too…

There is palpable sense of holiness in some physical places… because of how they were created or because they are naturally occurring… like Navaho sacred circles… or Stonehenge… or Lourdes… or Mt. Sinai… in Israel I felt as though I could almost cut the holiness with a knife…

But we also know that there is no place where we can go where God is not… and so we are all part of the Body of Christ… of the extended human family… we know that Jesus’ message was and is for all people… and Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us that Jesus is Sophia’s child as well as Mary’s son… whose first awareness of his truest parentage… comes to him in his Father’s house… at twelve years old… pushing the envelope to grow fully into his potential… and so it is the same for us as we discern where and when and how… we feel God’s presence… and hear God speaking to us… and what we choose to do… to accept God’s invitation into Wisdom… and to nourish that conversation ourselves… Holy God… help us to make it so…