But, let s be honest, at least part of the appeal is their inability to talk, right?

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1 Aaron Coyle-Carr Wilshire Baptist Church 30 December, 2018 Dallas, Texas God Grows Up Luke 2:41-52 If I ve learned anything during Leanna s pregnancy, it s that people love babies. And even more than loving babies, they love to tell you how much they love babies. If I had a dollar for every time I ve heard that recently, Henlee would already have her college fund started. And it s got me thinking, why only babies? I ve never heard, Oh, I just love teenagers! Let me teach her to drive! Nor have I heard, Oh, I just love six-yearolds! Let me spend three days explaining in excruciating detail how every appliance on the planet works. There is an almost universal love for babies, and since I still have a few more months before committing to the, my baby is the cutest thing on planet earth, bandwagon, I ve been thinking about why it is that we love babies so much. There s a lot to like about babies! Most of them are cute, and many of them are cuddly, and they give us an excuse to be a caregiver, which is an experience lots of human beings really enjoy. If you hang out with babies over long periods of time, you get to watch them grow, develop, explore in both the world around them and the beautiful architecture of their unique souls. But, let s be honest, at least part of the appeal is their inability to talk, right? Listen, I know babies can communicate. But I think babies win the popularity contest over inquisitive six-year-olds and surly teenagers in part because they are, for a year or more, incapable of speech. And as such, they cannot talk back, express opinions contrary to our own, or demand anything more complicated than food, sleep, and clean diapers. You know who else fits this description? Baby Jesus in the manger. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if we don t particularly love Baby Jesus because he, like all other babies, is mute. We can sing lots of wonderful carols and fawn over the baby and delight in the gift of our salvation, all without any of those inconvenient demands the

2 grown-up Jesus makes on us. The baby sits and smiles serenely, reminding us of God s love, and never once asks us to love our enemies or give all that we have to the poor. But Baby Jesus is an ironic place for us to focus our attention for many reasons, not the least of which is that Luke s version of the story features serene, mute, cuddly Baby Jesus for less than one chapter. After the Christmas story, we only get eighteen short verses about Jesus as an infant, and then we slam into Luke 2:40, which comes right before this morning s reading: The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him. We re less than two chapters into this story, and Jesus is no longer the baby in the manger. He s a walking, talking, growing human being. Did you know that, of the four canonical gospels, Luke is the only one that shows us what Jesus growing up years looked like? Matthew skips from the exile in Egypt all the way to Jesus baptism. Mark and John skip everything before Jesus adulthood. Only Luke shows us adolescent Jesus, and he shows us a pretty interesting scene. We learn first of all that the Holy Family has a regular custom of going up to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. In our era of growing anti-semitism, let s never miss a chance to remind ourselves that Jesus was an observant Jew his entire life. Well, on one such Passover trip, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus get separated from each other. Now, given the dangers of travel in those days, and the importance of Passover, it was common to travel in large groups, so we shouldn t imagine Mary and Joseph as negligent parents. They must have assumed that Jesus was just walking with that nice couple from down the street. It s not until after an entire day s worth of traveling that they notice something is wrong. Jesus is missing. So, they run back to Jerusalem and spend three days frantically searching for him in one of the few situations where the question, Have you found Jesus yet? actually makes any kind of sense. Meanwhile, those of us raised on the movie Home Alone are expecting some pretty major hijinks--maybe Jesus galloping around town on a camel or gorging himself on hummus and falafel to celebrate his newfound freedom. In reality, it s quite the opposite. Jesus spends the three days it takes his family to find 2

3 him in and around the temple, listening to the various rabbis there and asking them questions. Mary and Joseph, when they finally arrive, have a question, too. Only theirs is not concerning a finer point of Torah interpretation. It s the frantic exclamation of a parent feeling the double rush of relief and anger: Child, why have you treated us like this? I wonder exactly how that scene went down. Did Mary hear the Pharisees and rabbis as they gushed about the curiosity of this precocious boy? Did she notice the way that the assembled scholars were looking at him? Did she perceive the care and attention that Jesus was devoting to listening to these learned men in the Temple? Can she be open to this new direction Jesus is growing into? Or does her anxiety make her want to lock Jesus into the past, when things were simpler, easier, quieter, maybe even more wonderfully miraculous? Lutheran bishop Craig Satterlee describes the scene this way: Maybe Mary and Joseph simply failed to see that their baby was growing up. [And,] like Mary and Joseph, we cannot or do not want to see that our Jesus is growing up even as we grow up. Our Jesus is growing beyond our childhood, beyond our children s childhood. Our Jesus is growing beyond our expectations. 1 There s a lot that can be said about this seeming misadventure in the temple, but what I think truly needs to be said in this moment is that this is a story of Jesus growing up. What s more, it s a story of what happens when Jesus grows in a direction that the people around him did not anticipate. That never happens to us, does it? Perhaps you ve been in a relationship with someone who refuses to let you be a dynamic, three-dimensional person with the ability to change and grow. It s suffocating, isn t it, always having to be the person they remember you being or imagine you to be or simply want you to be. Maybe that s what Jesus feels like when we spend so much time obsessing over the baby in the manger. It can be a hard thing to wrap our brains around, but if we re going to deal honestly with this 1 Commentary on Luke 2:41-52, Working Preacher, December 30, Emphasis mine. 3

4 text, we have to deal honestly with the fact that Jesus grows up, which is an unsettling thought for some branches of Western theology. Following the insights of Platonic philosophy, theologians in the West have often spoken about the impassability of God, a notion that, since part of the whole God business is perfection, there is nothing lacking in God, and therefore nothing for God to grow or change into. And yet, if Jesus truly was a person, as all the ancient creeds attest, then he grew and changed and developed as a human being. And if Jesus Christ is God, as all the ancient creeds attest, then, on some profound level, God grew up. When it comes to the first person of the trinity, maybe grow is just a metaphor. The medieval Christian theologian and philosopher Anslem of Canterbury famously declared that God is, that than which nothing greater can be conceived. 2 Which means, if your finite brain can imagine something, it can also imagine something even bigger; therefore, you haven t yet reached the fullness of God. The fullness of God exists outside of our ability to imagine it, and is greater than anything we can conceive of, so maybe growth is simply what happens when we develop the capacity to further plumb the depths of God s existence. C.S. Lewis put it this way in his third Narnia novel Prince Caspian. When Lucy, one of the original characters from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, meets Aslan, the lion, again after hundreds of years apart, she exclaims, Aslan you re bigger! That is because you are older, little one, answered he. Not because you are? I am not, but every year you grow you will find me bigger. 3 Maybe growth is just a feeble human attempt to use our finite language to describe our everexpanding awareness of the infinite. Or maybe Jesus really does grow the same way we do. Maybe the incarnation really is that miraculous. At the end of the day, all I really know is that there is an infinite depth and complexity to this God we 2 Proslogion. 3 Prince Caspian. 4

5 worship, and we should never find ourselves content with whatever status quo our relationship with God finds itself in. There is always, always, always something deeper, something truer, something even more real, waiting to be revealed to us in the depth of God s being. I don t know about you, but that sounds an awful lot like good news to me. Otherwise, the God I worship is so bland, boring and small that I never discover, learn or experience something new. The very first things I ever learned about God are that there are only things there to learn. And my childhood faith, as beautiful as it was, is also the faith that must sustain me completely into my adulthood. That s a sad theology. But a God who is dynamic, passionate and infinitely deep? Give me that God. Let me spend a lifetime falling ever deeper in love with someone who contains infinite depths! The problem is, like Mary and Joseph in the Temple, sometimes our experiences of the unfolding depth of God surprise us in ways that make us uncomfortable or upset. As Bishop Satterlee says, The good news for us in this week after Christmas is that, like Mary and Joseph, our search has ended. Jesus shows us the way to God. The scary part, perhaps, is that our search doesn t end where we expect. 4 Sometimes falling deeper and deeper in love with God leads us to places we did not anticipate. God asks us to love or forgive someone that we previously thought unlovable or unforgivable. Falling deeper and deeper in love with God causes us to question the old things that we thought about God or the old things that we thought God wanted from us in our own lives and in our public lives. Falling deeper and deeper in love with God can cause us to question our old beliefs, our old prejudices, our old habits. But it happens to all of us, not just those we disagree with theologically. We spend a lifetime falling in love with God, and we re bound to uncover dimensions that challenge us, surprise us or force us to reconsider our own theological opinions. Whoever we are, whatever our theological persuasion, Jesus is leading us to unexpected places. 4 Commentary on Luke 2:

6 Which, when you think about it, is actually good news, too. As painful as it might be to learn something new that challenges our preconceived notions about God, it s a pretty good hint that we re moving in the right direction. Left to our own devices, most humans probably imagine a God who s closer to the 20 th century Coca-Cola depictions of Santa Claus than the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Experiencing a God who grows, a God who continually draws us deeper and deeper into the divine depths, means that we re not worshipping a God entirely of our own creation. We value our own comfort and safety too much to do this work ourselves. The end of a year is always a good time for introspection, and one question I think we need to add to our annual inventory is this: has our experience of God grown in any way in the last year? Is our faith continually growing up? Have we uncovered anything deeper, truer, more real? Have we looked for Jesus in unexpected places, or in the same old boring ones? Have we left the baby in the manger yet again? beyond surface things, to take you to unexpected places? Try a new spiritual discipline or deepen an existing one. Cultivate a spiritual friendship with someone you trust. Read an interesting book. Come to a Wednesday night class. Volunteer a few hours of your time with one of our many missions partners. Listen to the stories of someone who s experience of God is different from yours. Do whatever it takes to ensure that your experience of God is not stagnant this year. Friends, in the remaining days of Christmastide and throughout 2019, I urge you not to be content with the baby in the manger. Begin there, absolutely, but don t get too comfortable with the mute infant. Jesus grows up, and his own growth calls us deeper and deeper into the richness of the divine life. The baby in the manger is a beautiful place to start, but true love for the baby in the manger includes allowing him to grow up and to become fully who he is and who he must be. May we have the courage to look for the growing Jesus, even in unexpected places. Amen. What if 2019 could be the year you allow your experience of God to grow deeper, to move 6