A Process of Becoming

This is the message given in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish on Sunday, February 5, 2017.  The Bible verses used are Luke 2:39-52.

            Our sermon series is “Beyond the Manger”, looking at the early life of Jesus.  When we left Jesus last week, he was about two years old.  He and Mary and Joseph went to Egypt to escape King Herod, who wanted to kill him.  After Herod died, they went back to Nazareth and, we assume, tried to pick up their lives again.

            The next thing the Bible tells us is ten years later, when Jesus was twelve.  And we’ll talk about that story in a minute, but don’t you wonder what happened to Jesus in those ten years?  And don’t you wonder what Jesus was like when he was a kid?  Was he like any other normal kid?  Did he run around with his friends?  Did he play with toys and misbehave and get into trouble occasionally? 

I mean, I know we’re talking about the divine Son of God here, but still, we say that Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine.  A little kid misbehaving once in a while is not sin.  A little kid misbehaving once in a while is a little kid being a little kid.  It’s what they do.  Sometimes it’s how they learn.  Mary and Joseph obviously knew who their child was, because the angel Gabriel and the shepherds and the rest had told them.  But would an outsider, just observing Jesus growing up, have known there was something different, something special about him?  Or would Jesus have looked like just another little kid running around Nazareth?

We’ll never know, of course.  So now Jesus is twelve.  And understand, a twelve year old back then was considered a lot closer to being an adult than a twelve year old is today.  He would not have been considered an adult yet, but he would not have been that many years off.

But Jesus was still growing up, and he was living with his parents.  And every year, when the time of Passover came, they would go to Jerusalem to celebrate it there.  That’s what good Jews did, at least the ones who lived within a reasonable distance.  I’ve read that it was about a five day trip from Nazareth to Jerusalem.  By this time, Mary and Joseph probably had some other children, too, because we know from other passages of the Bible that Mary and Joseph did eventually have other children.  They go to the Passover festival, they do all the things they’re supposed to do, and they head for home.  Jesus is not with them, but they’re not too worried about that.  They’re in a big group, and Jesus is not a little kid any more.  He’s around somewhere.  They’ll find him later.  

But then, night falls, and they cannot find him.  They go around to all the people in the group.  “Have you seen Jesus?”  No one’s seen him.  So they head back to Jerusalem, and can you imagine how panicked they must have been?  I mean, it would be horrible to have your child be lost under any circumstances, right?  But you’re the parents of the Savior, the Messiah, the divine Son of God.  And you’ve gone and lost him!  What’s God going to say about that?

They search.  And think of how hard that search would’ve been.  Jerusalem was a city.  You read wildly differing estimates of how big it was, but it’s not like it was a small town.  And of course, you had no mass communication back then.  You could not put out an Amber Alert or something.  You could not even put someone’s picture on a milk carton.  All Mary and Joseph could’ve done was go house to house, building to building, asking people if they’d seen Jesus.

It took three days.  Three days of wondering where Jesus could be.  Wondering if they’d ever see him again.  Maybe wondering if, somehow, this could be part of God’s plan.  Then, they find him in the temple courts.  We don’t know why they went there, but they find Jesus there.  And he’s talking with the teachers like he’s their equal.  Asking them questions, responding to their questions, and amazing everyone with his understanding.  And when his parents tell him how worried they’ve been, he says, “Why were you searching for me?  Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”  But of course, Jesus went back to Nazareth with Mary and Joseph and continued to mature and grow in wisdom.

As usual, there are a lot of things we can take from this story.  But one of the things that has always interested me about Jesus is this:  at what point in his life on earth did Jesus really understand who he was and what he was supposed to do while he was here?

Some might say that he knew from the moment he was born.  And I cannot dispute that because, after all, we are talking about the divine Son of God here.  If you believe that even as a baby Jesus knew who he was and how his life was going to go I have no basis to argue with you.

What I suspect, though, is that Jesus had to go through a process of understanding who he was.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I still believe, as I said a couple of weeks ago, that Jesus was the Messiah, the king, from the moment he was born, just like the wise men said.  And he may have had some sense of that right away.  But I think he still had to grow, he had to develop, he had to mature.  After all, it was not until he was about thirty years old that Jesus started his ministry.  I have to think that he made good use of that time.  I think there’s some sense in which Jesus had learn how to be who he was supposed to be, who he was sent here to be.

I think there’s even a sense of that throughout Jesus’ ministry.  Early on, he has times when he gets angry and frustrated with people, including the disciples, when he tells them things and they just don’t get it.  But by the end, Jesus appears to be more sad when people don’t understand.  He’s resigned to it, understanding that that’s simply the way people are, that it’s really not their fault, and that, in the final analysis, that’s why he was sent here to save us--because we’d never be able to do it on our own.

I think there’s a sense in which that’s the journey we all go through as we go through life.  We start out with some sense of who we are.  But we need to grow.  We need to develop.  We need to mature.  We need to learn how to be who we’re supposed to be.  We need to learn how to be who we’re created to be.

And that’s not always an easy process.  It was not always an easy process for Jesus, and he was the divine Son of God.  It’s certainly not an easy process for you and me.  A lot of stuff happens to us along the way, and sometimes that stuff knocks us off the path of becoming who we’re created to be.  And sometimes it can take a long time to get back on that path.

As many of you know, it took me a long time to figure out how to be who I was created to be.  And I’m not saying I’m there yet.  Certainly I have a lot of things to improve, a lot of things to work on.  But what I mean is that I was forty-seven years old before I became a pastor.  And before that happened, I did a lot of things to try to find some sense of meaning, some sense of purpose in my life.  Some of them were work-related and some of them were not.  But I had a sense that I was not yet who I was supposed to be, that there was a hole in my life, and I was trying to fill it with all sorts of things.  I had to learn how to be who I was created to be.  And it was not always an easy process.

Now, the point here is not to hold myself up as a role model.  The point is that this is something that happens to a lot of us.  We take a long time to learn how to be who we were created to be.  And it’s a struggle sometimes.  We know there’s a hole in our lives, and we try to fill it with all sorts of things.  And sometimes we get angry and frustrated, both with ourselves and with other people.  And sometimes we get sad.  And sometimes it takes us a long time to get on the right path.

And so, for me, thinking about Jesus’ life in this way gives me a lot of hope.  I hope it gives you hope, too.  Because if even Jesus had to learn how to be who he was supposed to be, and if even Jesus struggled to do it sometimes, then it’s okay for us to struggle, too.  It’s okay for you and me to have trouble figuring out who we were created to be.  It’s okay if we need to grow, to develop, to mature.  And it’s okay if we don’t have it all figured out by the time we’re thirty.  It’s okay if we don’t have it figured out by the time we’re forty-seven.  It seems to me that Jesus was continuing to grow, to mature, to develop, right up until the end of his life on earth.  And I think you and I can expect to do that, too.

But think about what helped Jesus in his struggles.  It’s what he told Mary and Joseph when they found him in the temple.  He needed to be in his Father’s house.  He needed to stay as close to God as he could.  He knew that if he did that, God would help him figure it all out.  God would show him how to be who he was supposed to be.

And that’s what we need to do.  We need to stay as close to God as we can.  If we do that, God will help us figure it out, too, just as God the Father did for Jesus.  God will show us how to be who we’re supposed to be, who we’re created to be.  And then, it’s just a matter of following where God shows us to go.

            Life is a journey.  It’s a process.  And sometimes it’s a struggle.  But if we stay close to God, God will help us through those struggles.  God will show us show us how to be who we’re created to be.  God will be there every step of the way, just like God the Father was for