Sermon — January 2, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
A few weeks ago The Washington Post ran an article with the headline, “The teens who hated Abercrombie are the adults shopping there now — and they can’t believe it either.” It was the kind of article that pads the Style sections of the Times and the Post and the Globe from time to time: completely pointless, offensively frivolous, and endlessly fascinating. The article transported me immediately back to the years I spent wandering bored in the Burlington Mall, caught up in all the complexities of adolescent identity formation as my big sister asserted her independence by buying clothes my parents didn’t like and I asserted my independence by saying she looked ridiculous—and by the way, the music she liked was awful.
(Sorry, Shelley.)
This process of self-differentiation is the bread and butter of adolescent life. At a certain point in life, we all try to discover or create our own authentic selves, separating ourselves from the ideas and habits we’ve inherited from our families and rooting ourselves in new sources of meaning for our own lives. The new friends and trends can vary in how well they’re serving us; in other words, rebelling against your parents by taking up religion or chess is probably better than getting into drugs or golf (just kidding). In an ideal world, this journey away from parents or family ends up where it began, with a newer and stronger relationship in which a young person can relate to their parents on their own terms, no longer either completely dependent on them or in rebellion against them. But assuming you make it through intact, this self-differentiation is a completely normal and healthy process.
In fact, it’s part of what’s going on in our Gospel reading this morning, as we see twelve-year-old Jesus acting like a twelve-year-old. His parents, observant Jews like him, have brought him up to Jerusalem as always for Passover, and on the way back down to Nazareth, he ditches them. He quite literally separates himself from his family of origin—not only his parents but his relatives and family friends—and joins himself with a family of choice, with the scholars and sages and teachers sitting in the Temple.
In a sense, it’s the ideal teenage rebellion, from his parents’ point of view; if he’s going to run away, could there be any better place to find him than hanging out with the rabbis, talking theology? And it ends in the perfect way, with a thoughtful, obedient Jesus returning home with Mary and Joseph. But of course, it must have been terrifying at the time. I can’t imagine the feeling of realizing suddenly that your child wasn’t there and then searching the city for three days before you found him.
I don’t want to minimize the theological and narrative importance of the story by just turning it into an example of a modern psychological process. It’s a hugely important text in its own right. It’s the only story Luke tells—in fact, it’s the only story in the whole New Testament—of Jesus between his infancy and the age of thirty. And it’s not exactly a 21st-century teen drama: this is not a moody Jesus, running away from his parents to buy something at the Jerusalem Abercrombie and Fitch, but a balanced young man, astounding the crowds with his precocious wisdom and calmly asserting that he hasn’t run away from his family at all; he’s sitting, right there, in his Father’s house.
But in a way, it’s that same process, of discovering and embracing who he is, on his own, not through his parents. Throughout Jesus’ infancy in the Gospel of Luke, Mary and Joseph observe all the traditions of their faith, circumcising Jesus and bringing him to the Temple after forty days for Mary’s sacrifices of purification. They’ve taken him up to Jerusalem for all the major festivals of the faith, as any observant Jews would. Now, at twelve, Jesus has taken that identity on as his own, and when we see him emerge in eighteen years it’s as a preacher and religious teacher, but first as a pilgrim traveling to John the Baptist in the wilderness, being baptized, and hearing a voice from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22) That’s the identity in which all his ministry is centered, from his birth to his death, and it runs through that moment when he’s twelve years old, sitting in his Father’s house. He is, above all else, a child of God; he is, uniquely, the Child of God.
Last week, I prayed for the repose of the soul of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died early last Sunday morning. If you don’t know, Tutu was an Anglican bishop in South Africa, first as Bishop of Johannesburg and then as Archbishop of Cape Town. He was a leader in the South African anti-apartheid movement, and later in the Truth and Reconciliation process that sought to repair South African society after the end of apartheid, rather than ripping it further apart. More recently, he had taken stands in support of same-sex marriage and the place of LGBT people in society and in the church: famously, in 2013, he said bluntly that he’d “rather go to hell than to a homophobic heaven.”
Archbishop Tutu’s stands against apartheid and against homophobia and heterosexism shared a common theological language. He called them “heresy” and “blasphemy,” writing, “Apartheid’s most blasphemous aspect is … that it can make a child of God doubt that he is a child of God. For that reason alone, it deserves to be condemned as a heresy.” He spoke in similar terms of the Church’s treatment of its gay and lesbian members: “We reject them, treat them as pariahs, and push them outside of the confines of our church communities, and thereby we negate the consequences of their baptism and ours. We make them doubt that they are the children of God, and this must nearly be the ultimate blasphemy.”[1]
It’s ironically and refreshingly rare to hear a church leader make an argument for social change in such explicitly theological terms, rather than in the generic-and-only-vaguely-religious language of love or justice. Tutu’s arguments for liberation flowed directly out of the first three chapters of the Gospel of Luke. Jesus’ identity as the unique Child of God was revealed to Mary by the Angel Gabriel. (Luke 1:32) We see it as the core of his self-understanding in this snapshot of Jesus at the age of twelve, as he sits in the Temple. It’s proclaimed publicly to the crowds by a voice from heaven at his baptism.
But it becomes ours in our baptism. As St. Paul reminded us in the Letter to the Galatians last week, at the moment when you were baptized, you were adopted as a child of God, a joint-heir with Christ to all the riches of God’s grace. (Gal. 4:7) And in fact, in the very Incarnation God has, in a sense, adopted all of humanity, bringing human nature itself into the very inner life of God.
This is exactly what Desmond Tutu meant. When we try to exclude one another from the family of God, for whatever reason, we blaspheme God by claiming the authority to throw them out of a household of which we are not the heads. And it goes both ways. Liberation from apartheid had to be followed by Truth and Reconciliation. This didn’t mean accepting the evil of apartheid; it meant overthrowing the system without demonizing its supporters and beneficiaries, because not only the Black South Africans who had been so cruelly oppressed but the most hardened white supporters of apartheid were and are the children of God.
And so are you.
It probably goes without saying that not everyone in the world has been accepted, loved, and nurtured by their families of origin. But however loving or unloving, however disdainful or affirming, our own families may have been or be, we are all children in the family of God. We have all been given a seat next to Jesus in the Temple by one who will never take it away. We have been adopted as children by one who would rather die for us than leave us behind—who will turn back, always, and search for us, not for three days or three years or thirty years, but again and again throughout our lives, as we, like Jesus, “increase in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” (Luke 2:52)
So may we have the grace and the courage to remember, whenever we have been rejected or neglected, that we have been adopted into the family of Christ; that we are siblings, seated with Jesus in the Temple; that we are the children of God; and so are the ones who have rejected and neglected us.
Amen.
[1] For both quotations, see Adriaan van Klinken, “Desmond Tutu’s long history of fighting for lesbian and gay rights,” The Conversation, February 17, 2020.