Luke 2:41-52
Well, there you go! As far as the church’s calendar goes, twelve years have now passed between yesterday morning and today! Our lovely, snuggly, cosy Christmas story is replaced with a family tale about a young boy getting separated from the group on an annual holiday, and the chaos that ensues in order to find Him.
It’s a strange story to include so early in Luke’s Gospel, but it’s one I really like and also goes some way to explaining why Luke’s Gospel is my favourite. Luke is full of little stories like this, particularly at the beginning. Over the past few weeks we’ve heard about Elizabeth and Zechariah, about the baby leaping in her womb. We’ve heard about earthly conversations with heavenly beings between the Angel Gabriel and Mary. We’ve heard about Mary’s song; this deeply personal, powerful outpouring of faith that I said last week was my favourite passage of scripture. We’ve heard about smelly shepherds and all singing, all dancing choirs of angels. And each of these biblical accounts are only found in Luke’s Gospel. He’s the only one who feels it’s important to tell the detailed story in this way.
Today’s story is no exception and in my mind at least, it goes to further press the claim that at some point in his research for writing this Gospel, Luke may well have spent some time with Mary, the mother of Jesus. Perhaps whilst he was waiting for St Paul to get out of jail in Jerusalem, he popped down to Mary’s for a cuppa and had a chat with the woman who had been there from the very beginning. Who knows? It could have happened that way.
Once, when I was a young boy, my middle brother and I got lost in the local high street. I say we got lost, we knew exactly where we were. But we didn’t know where our grown up was.
Mum had been very clear to us two….
“Stay here in this shop until I get back. I’ll be 5 minutes.”
So we waited and waited, and then, after about 4 and a half minutes we decided not to wait any longer.
We left the shop and decided to walk the short distance to the place where Mum said she would be. The only trouble was, that there were two ways to get there. Which one should we take?
We made our decision and it proved to be the wrong one. Mum wasn’t in the shop she said she’d be in. Most probably she’d come to look for us, but taken the other route. So back we went to our original shop. But Mum wasn’t there either. Presumably we passed each other on differing routes for several minutes like some kind of farcical 90’s sitcom.
We stopped and thought. I wouldn’t say we were panicking, but there was a degree of uneasiness setting in.
“How will be find Mum?”
“Where might she be?”
“Will we ever eat lunch again?”
You know, the usual thoughts….
Suddenly we had an idea. We needed a safe place. Somewhere that we could go to in order to ask for help and get us reunited with Mum.
There was one obvious place to go to in the High Street.
No, not the police station. Worryingly that thought didn’t even cross our minds.
No we went to the NatWest bank, because that’s where our Auntie worked!
Perhaps needless to say, we were eventually reunited with a frantic looking Mum, who I thought at the time was worrying unnecessarily, but looking back now and with the benefit of knowing how I felt the other week when my 3 year old ran off in Sainsbury’s and I briefly lost her in amongst the Christmas puddings and Mince Pies, I think Mum handled it quite well.
Here’s the thing. When my brother and I were lost, we went to a safe place.
When Jesus got lost, I think He went to a safe place.
I’m not sure we should take Jesus’s glib response to His anxious parents at face value in this one.
“When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”
That’s the closest thing Jesus gets to a telling off in the bible I think!
“Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he was saying to them.”
To me, that sounds like the benefit of hindsight looking back at a family story and thinking “Of course Jesus would have been in the temple. Where else would He have been?”
But let’s not overlook the fact that in a moment of feeling lost, Jesus sought out the safest place He knew; to be with God and those that love Him.
God is our safe place. The Church, this church in fact, needs to be a safe place. A place where the lost feel as though they can go in order to get themselves reacquainted with their misplaced paths. A place where people come to for help and encouragement, perhaps staying for a long time or perhaps not.
I can think of lots of ways the church can be a safe place. I’m sure you can think of ways too!
As we gather together for the last time in 2021 in a world that feels distinctly unsafe to many, let us work towards becoming as the kind of safe place that the Natwest Bank in Orpington High Street was to two young boys in 1998.
Amen.
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