God's Intimates (Christmas 2B)

God’s Intimates
Homily delivered Second Sunday of Christmas (Year B RCL TEC)
4^th January 2014: 8:00am Said and 10:00am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
Jeremiah 31:7-14 ; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a ; Luke 2:41-52 ; Psalm 84:1-8

God, give us hearts to feel and love; Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s gospel is a story of terror for any parent—losing your child in a crowded, huge place with little hope of finding him again. Mary and Joseph discover to their horror that their 12 year old son Jesus has disappeared. They search for days only to find him in one of the Temple Courts taking an impromptu course in religious law. The Blessed Virgin greets him pointedly: “Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been looking for you for three days.” He answers sharply, “Why did you look all over town for me? Surely you must have known, Mother, that I would be in my Father’s House.” His barbed use of the word “Father” to mean God here corrects his mother’s loose use of the word to refer to her husband, Joseph. The reply has an edge that those of us who have raised adolescent children will recognize. Mary, like many of us, chooses to ignore her teen-ager’s joke.  She takes it all in with puzzlement. The story concludes with the family’s return home and, “He was obedient to them.”

The story presents the glories and the incongruities of the incarnation, the taking on of human flesh by God in Jesus. God in human form speaks, but as a twelve-year-old boy explaining his behavior to a distraught mother. It sums up the incarnation’s scope: in the words of the Book of Hebrews, Christ shared all our limitations and trials, but “without sin.”

“Sin” here, I think, means deliberate rebellion against or opposition to God.  It doesn’t mean the average human falling short of the mark and the messiness of human life.  

The Council of Calcedon in 451 C.E. defined that Jesus was fully God and fully human.  Not half and half.  Two complete natures united indivisibly in one person.  That union was what led the Council to say it was wholly right to call Mary the Mother of God, and not just the Mother of Christ.   Jesus, wholly divine would not rebel against God.  But Jesus, fully human, most certainly had the foibles and limitations of humanity we sometimes bemoan. 

The incarnation marks a radical continuity between our human lives and God’s, and that implies sacredness in all it means to be human, including adolescence. We often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us without truly being one of us. This “God incognito” paid for our sins and somehow made it possible for us to be more like God, and less like human beings.  That is a total warping of the meaning of the incarnation. God became truly human in all ways (except in resisting God), and that means it’s O.K. to be fully human. In fact, it means God calls us to be fully human, and to do that he calls us to follow his example when he was among us, and not resist God so much. It is only thus that we can find our true and full humanity. 

In Jesus, we see that limitation or weakness do not equal rebellion or resistance. In Jesus, we see that God made us, intends us to be very good, but that God is not yet finished creating us. Jesus calls, “Let God finish.”

God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth shared all our limitations, weakness, and silly quirks.   As a baby, he had diapers (that’s what “swathing bands” were.)  As a teenager, he had acne, and issues with his parents and in establishing his own identity.  Throughout his life, He was subject to natural evil like the rest of us. The most obvious example is his unjust death by torture at the hands of the Roman Empire. But despite this, he never resisted God. He was like us in all ways, save for sin.  Though a typical adolescent in some ways in today’s story, he is unusual in his openness to God.

Just as Jesus accepted who he was and the tasks God had for him, we must accept who we are—gifts, and strengths, disabilities and ugly deficiencies and all. We must accept who others are as well. We must be gentle both on them and ourselves. Seeking to let God finish his creative work in us, trying to amend our lives, both personally and communally, requires an open-ended listening, a total trust that in God’s good intentions for us, in Lady Julian of Norwich’s words, “all is well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Such openness is the difference between true humility and its cheap counterfeit, the pride that demands that we either be the best of all or the worst of all.

A pretty good sign that we are not following Jesus in this is alienation: alienation from our selves; alienation from our bodies; alienation from our conscience, alienation from others.   All these are signs of not accepting who it is God made us to be. They appear when we try to tough it out, and bulldoze ourselves into the better us that we have in mind, rather than following Jesus by emptying ourselves, to let go and let God.

A pretty good sign that we are getting closer to God in this is that regardless of the limitations and hardships we face, we still have a sense of one-ness. Teillard de Chardin wrote, “The surest sign of God’s presence is joy.” This is why one of the key questions asked in any spiritual direction and discernment process is “What puts a smile on your face?” It is a pretty good indication of where your treasure is, and with it, your heart. 

As God became truly human in Jesus, let us accept our own humanity, with all its limitations and failings. And as Jesus accepted the Father's will in all things, let us open ourselves to listen to God and follow where Jesus leads us.

In the Name of God, Amen.