Every parent believes their child is special.  Most parents like to brag at least a little about what their children are doing.  During the Christmas season it is especially common to receive evidence of this parental quest to celebrate something special about each of their children.  It is known as the Christmas letter.  In an effort to keep in touch with extended family and friends this letter provides the challenge of selecting one or two events from the past year that distinctively provides an insight to the character and aspirations of each family member.  I always struggle trying to decide how much to read into the various reports of dance recitals, middle school sporting events and 4H awards.  It is hard to know much about another’s life with only one or two stories every year or two.

Of course, some children are truly special.  They stand out not because of what they became as adults but for what we could see in them at a very early age.  The most impressive of these young people are known as child prodigies.  Some of the most famous figures of history were first recognized while quite young.  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played the harpsichord at the age of three, could read and play music by five and had his professional debut a year later at age 6.  Mozart went on to become one of the most prolific composers of all time.  Clearly his father recognized in him some very special gifts and provided the appropriate instruction to develop those gifts.  Most of us know Pablo Picasso as a famous Spanish artist but one of his most well-known pieces of art work, “The Picador” was created in the late 19th century when Picasso was only 8 years old.  He began regularly exhibiting his art by the age of 15.  And sometimes the child prodigy matures in surprising ways.  The great jazz artist and producer Herbie Hancock played classical piano with the Chicago Symphony at the age of 11 and then in his teenage years discovered jazz.  Of course, it is often the case that it is only many years later that most people would agree that they should have seen the markers and indications of where a young person’s life is leading. 

This, of course, is not only true of those who make their mark in history.  Most every parent at some time or another pauses to consider whether their child is exhibiting any likely mark that suggests a future destiny.  Each time I encounter the Gospel lesson for today, I feel a lot like a distant relative who is provided a birth announcement and then one or two Christmas letters over the next decade or so. 

Christmas is the birth announcement.  And the details of the events surrounding this first Christmas letter are limited to only two of the four Gospels and these two nativity stories differ significantly in their focus and content.  Like I mentioned a moment ago, what details are mentioned and which are ignored often says a lot.  The familiar Christmas story we heard read again this Christmas Eve from Luke tells of angels and shepherds but makes no mention of the Wise men.  The other gospel with a birth narrative is Matthew who focuses rather significantly on the Wise Men but makes no mention of the shepherds or a manger.  The Matthean Gospel tells of Joseph and Mary fleeing into Egypt to protect the new born child from a blood thirsty King Herod and then returning to raise Jesus in Nazareth of Galilee.  Luke highlights different events, focusing instead on the dedication and circumcision of Jesus after which the story then jumps to our lesson for today.  In the two days since Christmas Eve, twelve years have passed in the telling of the story of Jesus.  Many scholars have read all kinds of different meanings into the fact that we hear so little about Jesus’ childhood.  Some suggest that this is because he was not a particularly distinctive child.  He was, after all, supposed to be fully human and humanity’s daily routines and struggles are not all that exciting. Others have argued that the missing stories are a way of preserving Jesus’ humanity because any action would have been interpreted in so many different ways who could have known what it really meant.  At any rate, today’s Gospel lesson is set 12 years after the events reported just two nights ago. Today’s story, in fact, is the only story of Jesus’ childhood preserved in the Gospels.  This is a rather significant fact that did not escape the attention of many in the early Christian church.  About 100 years after the death of Jesus a variety of writers took it upon themselves to create, perhaps with the help of some oral tradition, additional stories of Jesus’ childhood.  Much like the stories of other great figures of history, it is difficult to know how much of each story retold is based in fact and how much is legend.  This appears to be a very human endeavor, that is true even of figures from American history.  We are pretty sure, for example, that George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree but we are not so sure about his throwing a coin across the Potomac River.  Likewise, we are pretty sure that Johnny Appleseed did not plant every apple tree west of the Appalachian Mountains but we also do know that John Chapman planted thousands of apple trees over the course of his life.  Beginning about 100 years after Jesus died, a variety of stories were written about his childhood years which are now identified by scholars as apocryphal writings.  That is to say, writings of questionable authority.  There were stories of Jesus helping around his father’s carpenter shop and miracles performed while playing with his toys.  Some of the stories may have been grounded in real events while others clearly reflected the wishful thinking of those who believed in him.  The only childhood story to make it into the Bible is our lesson for today.  Jesus at the age of twelve going to Jerusalem with his parents to celebrate the Passover.  It used to be thought by some scholars that this story was a retelling of a bar mitzvah journey until research determined that there was no ritual like a bar or bat mitzvah in the first century.  Furthermore, the bar mitzvah age was and is 13 years and one month, not twelve. 

So what is the purpose of this one story about the adolescent Jesus?  Why in the Christmas letter of the Gospels was this one story remembered and retold when all the rest were forgotten or ignored?  Every parent has the one or two stories they tell about their children.  Unfortunately the stories are usually not the stories the child would choose but rather a story somehow significant to the parent for what the child would probably consider to be all the wrong reasons.  As I looked at the stories selected in Christmas letter this year I noticed that one of the common threads in almost all of them was a desire to reveal something human and yet special about the child.  That often takes the form of some incident that is potentially embarrassing exactly because it is so human.  We know nothing with historical certainty about the childhood of Jesus.  Was he a perfect child who never did anything wrong?  He was, after all, the son of God.  The one who had no sin.  Yet he was also born into our world as a human being. We do not know whose memory of Jesus is at the source of this story.  Was it one of his relatives, a close family friend or maybe even his mother?  What we do know is that our lesson for today places Jesus in the complex setting of a world where even when your actions are perfectly good and well intentioned the results may not be perfectly good.  

Our text tells us that Mary and Joseph brought Jesus every year, to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem.  A good thing.  Jesus was a young boy on the edge of adolescence traveling to Jerusalem with the women and children but perhaps expecting to return walking with the men and boys, he was on the brink of this 13th year.  So it is not surprising that on the return trip home, Mary assumes Jesus is with Joseph and the other male travelers while Joseph assumes Jesus is with the women and children.  We can almost hear that fateful moment when husband and wife said to each other, “I thought he was with you.”  Any parent who has had the experience knows how the initial reaction to the missing child, especially if they are an adolescent, is anger at their irresponsible behavior.  This anger gradually grows into rage at the inconvenience and trouble they are causing you. But as the search for the missing teen yields no solution the rage moves increasingly toward panic and fear as you begin to imagine the worst that could have happened while clinging to hope.  Somewhere around this time you also begin to pray for the safety of the child and you begin to want to make deals with God.  Three days looking for a child, even a perfect child, will put a parent through a lot of emotional and psychological trauma.  Then comes the conclusion to the search.  The parents rightly exclaim, “How could you have put us through an experience like this?” to which Jesus replies, “What did you expect?”

There is amazing honesty and truth in this story for each of us.  It is very unlikely that any of us spent the last few days looking for Jesus.  We pretty much expect him to be where we left him Thursday night, in the manger.  But the humanity of Jesus we celebrated Christmas Eve is now about to break in upon us.  The baby does not stay in the manger and the good feelings we had about Christmas are being revised with our New Year’s resolutions.  Does it matter if we know so little about the childhood of Jesus?  What is the moment that defines a life?  What is the moment that defines each of our lives?  Our lesson for today points to the moment that will give ultimate meaning to the life of the Christ and our lives.  It is a moment that can be seen only from the comfort of our future position.  “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”  Was this the ah-ha moment when Jesus realized he was the son of God or is this the obvious clue for each of us to keep our eyes on this Jesus?  The story is a story.  It is not a historically detailed news report, but there seem to be lessons learned.  A missing child is safely found.  The safety of God’s house is the place to be.  The son was obedient from that day forward.  And he increased in wisdom and divine and human favor.

Our lesson for today is a Christmas letter with just one highlight from a busy life.  It is dangerous to read too much into one incident.  But there is meaning in each story we choose to retell, maybe even hope.  That’s what this morning is all about.  The meaning and hope we find in the story of a child.  The meaning and hope we find in the lives of the young people around us.  The meaning and hope we keep finding in the way God enters our world.  The way God taking the moments of doubt, anger, anxiety, loss and uncertainty and leads us back to the place we should have expected to be after all.  What did you expect?  It is only in God’s house, at God’s table of grace that we will ever truly find the Jesus we seek.  What did you expect?  It is a Christmas letter, a story about a God who so loved the world, that he…Well, you know where the story began, don’t forget how it ends.

Amen