Dr. Dale Miller, December 31, 2006

Another Year, Another Resolution

Luke 2:41-52

Somewhere in my elementary school years I found myself accompanying my parents to a church in my mother's hometown of Franklin, Indiana. It was the Sunday after Christmas, the Sunday before New Year's Eve. We arrived at the church in time for church school. I was shuffled off to the appropriate classroom for my age group. The teacher handed out slips of paper and a pencil to each student. She then asked us to write a personal resolution for the New Year. My first thought was, "Get me out of here!"

I figured out that we were going to have to share these resolutions with the other students. That meant that my resolution wasn't going to be very personal. So what could I write? What resolution could I as a ten or eleven year old write down that the other kids wouldn't make fun of? My mind went blank. Eventually, the teacher told us to put our pencils down. I was right. She started asking each student what he or she had written. Perhaps since I was a guest she wouldn't ask for my answer. Well, no such luck rolled my way.

I heard her say, "Well, what did our little visitor write down this morning?" I looked at the blank piece of paper and sputtered, "Nothing." Instead of accepting this answer, she responded, "Why didn't you write anything?" I looked at her knowing that anything I said would not be appropriate. I straightened up in the chair and defiantly replied, "I believe if you're going to make a change in your life, you just do it. You don't have to write it down." There was a long silence. Finally, I heard her say, "You are the youngest cynic I have ever met!"

I didn't know what a cynic was, and I knew it wasn't good, but then again it sounded like a cynic is what everyone became when they got older. So, I must be older! "World's Youngest Cynic" became a badge of honor indicating emotional and intellectual maturity!

In our scripture reading this morning, the young Jesus, his mother, Mary, and his father, Joseph, have been to church. They didn't go just to the local synagogue in Nazareth, but to the temple in the holy city of Jerusalem, for the annual celebration of Passover. Mary and Joseph took seriously the spiritual nurture of their child.

Jesus took everything in with an interest and inquisitiveness he had not shown before. They had talked of that as they left Jerusalem for the return trip to Nazareth. The road was crowded with pilgrims. Jesus, they assumed, was walking with another family or with some of this friends. The youth often grouped together. Passover was a time to meet new friends and renew old acquaintances.

Mary and Joseph had gone the whole day and not thought much of it, but that evening, when they were making camp and Jesus did not return, they became alarmed. They began to search for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him there, they returned to the city in a rush.

They searched for one whole day, then another. Jerusalem was a big city. Any parent knows how Mary and Joseph must have felt. They were absolutely frantic. Finally, out of desperation, they went to the temple. It was the last place they had thought to look for him, but there he was, sitting among the rabbis, listening to their talk and asking them questions.

The rabbis were obviously pleased. "All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers." When his parents saw him, they were amazed, too. The question his mother asked him was one that any mother might have asked: "Child, why have you treated us like this? Why did you do this to us, Jesus? We've been looking everywhere for you."

The anguish in Mary's question has to do, not only with the fact that Jesus had not thought of them, but also with the realization that their child had broken through to a new level of maturity. It wasn't only that Mary and Joseph had lost him for three days. They had lost him, in a different way, forever.

Jesus responded to his parents, "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" I am your child, said Jesus, but I am also the child of God. You taught me that! Did you not know that I must be about God's business? I am not sure Mary and Joseph ever reconciled themselves to Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God.

This is more than story about raising a child. It is more than an account of the faith development of Jesus. This is also a story about the struggle and development of our own faith. The baby Jesus whom we adore at Christmas-time is warm and cuddly. We feel good about him. We sing songs to him and exchange gifts in his honor. We keep the season for him. He is a Jesus who needs us.

All too soon Jesus begins to grow up, until one day we lose him. He just disappears. We don't know where he is, or how to find him. The Jesus that we had cared for is lost to us. And when it finally dawns on us that he might be in church, and we might look for him there, the Jesus whom we find is different. He is a grown-up Jesus.

Anne LaMott tells in her book, Traveling Mercies, about her little seven-year-old boy who says, "Mom, I don't want you to tell me that you love me anymore. That's mushy and gushy and I don't want you to tell me that any more." She said, "What am I supposed to say to you?" He says, "I want you to tell me you like me." She says, "Well, I'll try."

So when she tucked him into bed that night, she said, "I just want you to know, son, that I like you." He said, "I like you, too, Mom. I like you, too." It's not easy growing up.

Jesus isn't just a cute baby for us to cut into a stained glass image. Jesus is a powerful revelation about God's on-going activity in the world. God has loved the world for a long time, and God's love erupted into the world in a powerful way in the life of Jesus. God spilled out love in the form of a human to show us that compassion cannot be contained. Justice cannot be stopped. Love will not be limited.

The birth of Jesus means that we who follow God, who recognize God's activity in the life and ministry of Jesus, and who see what Jesus did as a part of who God is, follow the way Jesus revealed God's love. We are summoned to offer the opportunity to participate in this love. Following Jesus aligns us with God's presence and makes us disciples.

Being disciples does not set us above or apart from the rest of the world. Discipleship is not a Christian bubble that isolates us from the concerns of our community or the unresolved places in our lives. Being a follower of Jesus is not a vaccination against evil. Neither does being a disciple mean that we are protected from harm, calamities, or the bad things in life that happen because life happens.

This is a hard lesson for us to learn. Once our minds and hearts go to Bethlehem, it is very difficult to tear us away. Christ is born, but wars persist, marriages still struggle, and often times the job is no better on the twenty-sixth of December than it was on the twenty-fourth. Joy, cheer, peace, and goodwill are blessings of the Christmas season, but then we discover we have to reclaim them every day of our lives.

As disciples of the grown-up Jesus we have tools that we can use to deal with the problems and possibilities that life offers us:

• We have the tool of patience, when our partner is cross with us or we drop a plate of Christmas fudge on the floor.

• We have the tool of forgiveness, that we can use when we have messed up or when someone else steps on our toes.

• We have the ability to step back, and not be brash or hasty, but reminds ourselves of the cool love of Christ that gives us another set of responses. When angers flair and differences of opinion and perspective rise, we have a choice other than returning anger for anger.

The difficulty lies in the fact that in January it is hard to go back from the manger to our work feeling that something has happened to us, that we are redeemed, and that a whole set of discipleship tools has been given to us.

In the ancient Western calendar the New Year did not happen in January, but in March. There is some sense to March. There is a sense of new life that we can see in the fields, feel in the air; and in harmony with the natural elements of spring and resurrection when we can affirm there is something new happening, there is a new and renewed chance. But, here we are on New Year's Eve calling upon ourselves to feel personal renewal.

In the bleak midwinter we often feel that the world has not changed. The duties that we have gently pushed aside so that we can enjoy the holidays are now waiting for us to get back to them on Monday morning. What is transformed, what is capable of transformation, so that where we left off is not the same place as where we now begin, is of course ourselves. We have come from an encounter with the world of the possible in the midst of the impossible.

We, like the shepherds, have seen God face-to-face and have prevailed, that is to say, have survived to tell the tale, moving about not knowing that our faces shine with the encounter, bearing the mark of our encounter forever, and marveling in the darkest nights of our soul at that wondrous star-filled night.

So here we are, called to begin where we left off and yet to make a new beginning. We are called to let Jesus grow and mature within our minds and hearts. It is an old choice and a new chance for us and for the world.

Christmas and creation are part of the same process of God; they have everything to do with one another. They each speak of loving purpose and renewed hopes. The joy of our gospel is that it is a gospel of second chances, new opportunities to claim the love of God, new opportunities to share and express that love in the world, and new opportunities to discover who we are and what we can become in Christ.

The routine beckons; the familiar haunts require our attention and our presence. Before too long the memory of this holy time will disappear and be packed away with the paraphernalia of the season. Yet by God's grace we will be open to God's most remarkable gift to the world.

The world will not change until and unless we change. The spirit of Christmas cannot be borne out into the cold January air, unless we are borne out by it and indeed born again by it. We may, we must, return to our lives, but we need not return as the same tired creatures, care-worn and spirit-lost, for we have seen wonderful things that have come to pass, strange and mighty sights that will never let us look at the skies in quite the same manner as before.

Every baby that comes into the world, every man and woman born of woman is no longer of the same old flesh, but a promise and token of Christ. To deny them is to once again deny him room, while to love and cherish them is to receive a new Christ in each of our lives and world.

Christ's presence has hallowed all that we are and every place that we are, and by his grace the world and we can never be quite the same again. Therefore we begin. In leaving the manger we grow up and embrace the world for the sake of a mature Christ and for our own maturity of soul as well.

Our resolve comes from within our very being, not from a hastily written resolution. Perhaps saying that makes me the world's oldest cynic. Perhaps this belief allows Jesus to be something far more than an infant cradled within my heart, as necessary and as wonderful as that is. Being a grown-up disciple is even more wonderful.

In its maturity, Nardin Park United Methodist Church is the place where we feel safe to express our thoughts and opinions even when they are different from those of others.

• This is the environment in which we experience not only permission but also encouragement to talk about our feelings.

• This church is the home base where we learn to offer and to receive forgiveness graciously.

• This is the place where we can ask questions and express our doubts.

• This is the body of people who are concerned about more than liking people; we want to love people.

Bring on 2007! It's going to be a great year!