Luke 2:21-24
Christmas 1
December 30, 2018
William G. Carter
After eight
days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus,
the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. When
the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they
brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it
is written in the law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male shall be designated as
holy to the Lord”), and they offered a sacrifice according to
what is stated in the law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves or two young
pigeons.”
Here we are on the sixth day of Christmas. Somewhere
there are six geese a-laying as we sing some of the Christmas carols that we
couldn’t squeeze in last week. In a few minutes, we will baptize a little boy
named Declan.
I imagine the day will come, sometime in the
future, when the young lad will look at his father and say, “Why did you do
that?” His father will say, “What? Why did we baptize you?” And the boy will
say, “No, why did you name me Declan?” Oh, let’s think for a few minutes about
the things we do to our children.
Declan is a noble name, an Irish name. According
to my sources, it either means “full of goodness” or “a man of prayer.”[1]
Either one is really good. Our great hope is that he will grow into his name.
Declan’s middle name is Arthur, taken from his
great grandfather. A graduate of Duke, great-grandpa Art was an extraordinary
golfer. Art won the Masters in 1959 and made over forty holes in one. (Declan,
no pressure there!)
Today his parents present him to be baptized.
Declan has no choice over that, either. It’s not up to him to decide that today
is the day when he joins the Christian tribe. Today his parents, his family,
and all of you hand him over to God. We trust God to honor this covenantal
promise, to be at work in his life, to guard him from evil, and to be both “full
of goodness” and “a man of prayer.” We look forward to the day when he claims for
himself his full identity as a child of God.
Right now, of course, he had little clue what
that means. His parents are choosing all of this for him.
The Bible passage we heard resonates with this.
The baby Jesus is presented in the temple. He is only eight days old. The
shepherds have gone back to their fields. The angels have returned to heaven.
Since Joseph and Mary are only seven miles away in Bethlehem, they decide to
take their child to the temple in Jerusalem. That’s what the scripture told
them to do.
If they have been home in Nazareth, that wouldn’t
have been practical. Nazareth was a four or five day walk to Jerusalem. The
rituals would have been done closer to home, in a much smaller synagogue, by a
rabbi not quite as notable as the professionals in the Holy City.
So the child is circumcised, just as it says in
the twelfth chapter of Leviticus: “On the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin
shall be circumcised.” This unusual procedure is not done for sanitary reasons.
Rather, it is a commandment from God that marks him as a child of God. No
little infant boy would ever choose to be circumcised. No clear-thinking grown-up
man would ever choose it for himself, either.
Centuries later, the Christian people saw all
kinds of significance in this event. The Orthodox church declared this is
evidence that Jesus truly was a human being; he had a physical body and it was
cut. The Roman Catholic church delighted that this was the first time Jesus
would have his blood spilled, a sign of his sacrificial death on the cross.[2]
The Jews would tell Orthodox and Catholic to settle down. This is the moment
when Jesus becomes part of the tribes of Israel.
It means that his education starts now. His
parents will teach him the psalms, the same psalms that their parents taught to
them. “These are the words of prayer,” they will say: “The Lord is my shepherd,”
“my help comes from the Lord,” “My God why have you forsaken me,” “Hope in God,
for I shall again praise him.”
Joseph and Mary shall teach him the stories that
give the little boy his identity:
- In six days, God
created the heavens and the earth, and rested on the Sabbath.
- And God said to
Abram, ‘Your children will be as numerous as the stars in the sky.’
- A new pharaoh arose
who did not know Joseph, and we were slaves in Egypt…
- God brought us out
with an outstretched arm,
- and God gave the
scripture as a lamp for our feet.
No one knows these truths until they are told
from one generation to the next. No one knows automatically that God is
concerned with justice and all evil doers will perish. They must be instructed.
Otherwise they are left to their own whims, their own distortions, their own
screwy ideas. To belong to God means that we will be taught the truth about who
God is, what God cares about, and what God wishes to get done – through us or
in spite of us. It is a lifelong commitment with eternal significance.
I guess that’s why, when my daughters were young
and they complained, “Why do we have to go to church,” I often retorted, “We
are going so that you learn who you are, and so you can make your way through a
world like this.” I would never back off and allow them to decide for
themselves. That would make me an inept parent.
It’s fascinating to me how the Gospel of Luke
insists Jesus was a Jew. He may have been born in a barn and visited by ranchers,
but he was raised in the promises of God. Luke begins his book by telling about
a priest named Zechariah and his vision in the temple. He ends the book in
chapter 24 with the disciples meeting regularly to praise God in the temple.
In between, Jesus is saturated in scripture. He
teaches in the synagogues, he tells the truth about God, and he knows the
tradition so deeply that he becomes a prophet within his own tradition. Nobody
gets that way without being shaped, being formed, by a way of life that is far
greater than one’s individual opinion.
One of my minister friends talked about doing away
with the Christian Education committees in her church. A few of us sat up
straight and said, “What?” She smiled and explained, “The work before us is so
much more than education; it’s actually formation.”
“We teach Bible stories,” she said, “but it’s always
to the end that we shape values, nourish trust, discern the truth, and engage
in God’s work in the world. We want to do so much more than teach Bible facts
that kids might forget or adults dismiss as myths. We are trying to shape
souls. We are working to help our people look more like Jesus.”
So they did away with a Christian Education
committee? She said, “We call it the Christian Formation committee, because that
is the work for all of us from cradle to grave. All of us are Christians who
are still becoming Christians.” I think she’s right about that.
One more thing, she said: “When the children see their
parents are still growing in their own faith, they tend to take it more
seriously for themselves.”
The brief little Bible story that we heard today
tells us a great deal about the decisions that Joseph and Mary made for Jesus.
They are Jews, and they are present their son to be a Jew. They pledge to raise
him within their faith, to teach him who he is. And they do this, even though
they are four days away from home, far from family and familiar surroundings,
even though they don’t have a lot of money.
That, by the way, is also in the text. When a
child’s birth was celebrated in the Jerusalem Temple, the scriptures declared, “You
shall offer a lamb to be sacrificed as a gift for God.” However, if the family
cannot afford a lamb, the book of Leviticus offered an alternative: “a pair of
turtle doves or a couple of pigeons.”[3]
According to Luke, that’s all that Mary and Joseph could offer. They didn’t
have much, but they had their faith, they had their pride, and they had their first-born
son.
They named him “Jesus.” Not Joseph Junior, but
Jesus. The name was given to them by the angel of God, but according to the
story, they were far too modest to tell anybody about that. Jesus is a human
name, a common name. In Hebrew, it’s essentially the same name as Joshua. You
can hear it: Yeshua/Jesus, Joshua.
There were, and still are, a lot of people named
Jesus or Joshua. When I was a kid, I opened a pack of bubble gum cards and
found one for an outfielder for the San Francisco Giants. His name was Jesus
Alou. You’ll never guess who he was named after.
Jesus is a big name, a really big name. In Hebrew
it means, “he rescues, he delivers, he saves.” Imagine him growing up and
knowing that was his name! Imagine the day his momma told him where the name
came from. And after a lifetime of learning the scriptures and reciting the
prayers, imagine the day when he decided to grow into the fullness of his name.
Jesus … he rescues, he delivers, he saves.
In light of him, and in his name, we can reflect
on the things we do to our children. Some things are admirable, some could be
mistakes, some may take some therapy to undo, and some might turn out better
than we could have ever imagined. Most parents make the best decisions they
can, and time will tell how things will turn out.
I am convinced one of the best things we can ever
do is to give our children the knowledge of God. When we baptize our children,
we place them into the hands of the Love that holds all things, bears all
things, and endures all things. And we do this in the name of Jesus, in the
rescuing, delivering, saving name of Jesus.
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