Doormat or Dynamite?

 

Two familiar passages today; in the first, we see Joseph confronting his brothers many years after they sold him into slavery and told his father he was dead.
And in the second, Jesus is preaching to the crowds in what is often called the “Sermon on the Plain”;
Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount that we are so familiar with from Matthew’s gospel.

Let’s look at the Old Testament story first.
You know Joseph’s story, of course;
born into the most dysfunctional of dysfunctional families, his father and grandfather both liars and cheats.
And Joseph himself was the spoilt favourite –
his father had two wives, you may remember, Rachel, whom he loved, and Leah, whom he didn't but was tricked into marrying anyway.
He also had a couple of kids by Leah's and Rachel's maids, Bilhah and Zilpah, but Rachel, the beloved wife, had had trouble conceiving,
so Joseph and his full brother Benjamin were very precious,
especially as Rachel had died having Benjamin.
He, it seems, was still too young to take much part in the story at this stage, but Joseph was well old enough to help his brothers –
and, we are told, to spy on them and sneak on them to his father.
And stupid enough to boast of self-important dreams.

It's not too surprising that his brothers hated him, is it?
Obviously, he didn't deserve to be killed, but human nature is what it is,
and the brothers were a long way from home
and saw an opportunity to be rid of him.
At least Reuben, and later Judah, didn't go along with having him killed,
although they did sell him to the Ishmaelites who were coming along.

Joseph has a lot of growing up to do,
and it takes a false accusation and many years in prison to help him grow up.
But eventually he is freed
and given an important post in the Egyptian administration,
preparing for the forthcoming famine and then administering food relief when it comes.

And so his brothers come to beg for food relief.
And at first Joseph is angry enough with them to first of all insist they bring the youngest, Benjamin, with them next time they come –
he had stayed at home to look after their father –
and then to plant false evidence that he had stolen a gold cup.
He says he will let the others go but keep Benjamin as his slave,
but the other brothers explain that it will kill their father if he does so.

And at that something breaks inside Joseph, and he makes himself known to his brothers, forgiving them completely for all they had done to him –
pointing out, even, that God had used this for good,
as he had been able to organise the food relief,
knowing there would be five more years of drought and famine to come.
And he sends for his father to come and bring all the households and settle in Egypt.
The family is reunited and –
for some generations, at least –
they all live happily ever after.

Five hundred years or so later, the son of another Joseph is preaching to the people.
And what he says is completely revolutionary.
Here is a modern paraphrase:

“If you are ready to hear the truth then I have this to say:
Love! Love even your enemies.
Treat even those who hate you with love.
If anyone mouths off at you or treats you like dirt, wish them all the best and pray for them.
If someone gives you a smack around the ear to humiliate you, stand tall and stick your chin out, and invite them to have another crack.
Absorb the hostility –
don’t escalate it.
If someone nicks your coat, just say, ‘Hey, if you’re needing that, you’ll be needing these,’ and hand over your hat and scarf as well.
Give to everyone who asks something of you, and don’t go hassling people to give back what they’ve got from you.
Live generously, and don’t go keeping score and looking to balance the ledger.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

It’s all pretty familiar, isn’t it?
We are perhaps more familiar with the version given in St Matthew, but it’s pretty much the same sentiment.
Jesus goes on:
“If you want to know how to treat someone, just ask yourself what you’d be hoping for if you were in their shoes.
Treat others the way you’d like to be treated, not just the way you are treated.
It’s not as though you’d deserve a medal for loving someone who loves you.
Anyone can do that!
You won’t find your name in the honours lists for a good turn done to those who are always going out of their way to help you.
Any crook can do that!
And if you only ever give when it looks like there’ll be something in it for you, what’s the big deal?
Every business shark knows how to make an investment, but it’s not exactly evidence of a generous spirit.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

The thing is, of course, that we don’t do it!
None of it.
We know it in our heads, but we haven’t made it part of us.
We’re taught to stand up for ourselves, we’re taught to look out for number one.
Even though we’re taught to share, we understand that we may have our turn on the swings in the playground, or whatever.
Maybe as adults, we reckon we’ve a right to our turn at the remote control….

But from what Jesus is saying, we don’t.
We need to put other people first.
We need to allow other people to walk all over us, to hit us, to steal our possessions.
It does sound as though we’re supposed to be doormats, doesn’t it?
As though we need to just stand there, being totally passive, allowing other people to run our lives for us.
No wonder we don’t do it!

But are we supposed to be doormats?
I don’t think so!
Jesus wasn’t, after all.
Yes, he allowed himself to be arrested and crucified, he refused to defend himself at his trial.
But before that we see him arguing with the Pharisees and teachers of the law.
He doesn’t say “Oh well, I expect you’re right,” but tries to show them what he is all about, what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.
He took up a whip and drove out the traders in the Temple –
was that being a doormat?

You see, it’s not just about standing there and taking it.
It’s about being positive, as well.
“Be different!” says Jesus.
“Love your enemies and do good to them.
Lend freely, and don’t go looking for returns.
God will see that it’s worth it for you.
You will be God’s very own children.
God is generous to those who don’t deserve it,
even if they’re totally ungrateful.
God forgives whatever anyone owes.
Do likewise:
treat people the way God treats people.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

“Treat people the way God treats people.”
Of course, there are those who go around saying that God hates this group of people, or that group.
There are those who would like to exclude all sorts of people from God’s love.
But that’s not what the Bible says.
Our Methodist doctrines teach that everybody, no matter who, can be saved.
“And every offender who truly believes,
that moment from Jesus a pardon receives!”

God doesn’t hold things against us.
It worries me, you know, that people’s whole careers can be ruined because of a thoughtless tweet they may have published ten years ago.
People move on.
I don’t know about you, but there are things I’ve thought or said in my past that make me cringe to think about them now –
had there been social media when I was young,
I’d probably be utterly disgraced now!
And you can probably think of occasions in your own lives, too.

But the thing is, God doesn’t think of them.
“So far as the East is from the West,
so far has God put our transgressions from us,” says the Psalmist.
And Jesus reminds us, here as elsewhere,
that because that is so, we need to forgive, too.
Think of the story we call the Prodigal Son.

The son who asked for his share of inheritance and went into the world to have some fun,
and when he was in the gutter decided to go home again.
And the father ran to meet him, and put on a massive celebration for him,
and had obviously been longing and longing and longing for his son to come home again.

But the father couldn't make the son come home.
He had to wait until the son chose to come home of his own free will.
What's more, the son had to accept that his father wanted him home again.
He could have said "Well, no, I don't deserve all this,"
and rushed off to live in the stables, behaving like a servant,
although his father wanted to treat him as the son he was.
The son had to receive his father's forgiveness, just as we do.

And don't forget, either, the elder brother,
who simply couldn't join in the celebrations because he couldn't forgive his brother.
How dare they celebrate for that lousy rotter!
I don't know whether he was crosser with his father for having a party, or with his brother for daring to come home.
I feel sorry for him, because he allowed his bitterness to spoil what could have been a good time.

And that is exactly what happens to us when we do not forgive one another.
We allow our bitterness to spoil what could have been a good time with God.

I often think forgiveness is the Christian’s secret weapon.
All of Jesus’ teachings in the passage we have been looking at this morning seem to be about forgiveness.
If someone hits us, we forgive them, rather than hitting back.
If someone steals our coat, we forgive them, and perhaps even offer them more of our clothes.
And so on.
After all, that’s how we’d like them to treat us, isn’t it?

But as you know, and as I know, the world isn’t like that.
And we tend to conform to the world’s standards,
rather than God’s standards.

But what if we didn’t?
What if we really did do as Jesus tells us?
What if we really treated people the way God treats them,
the way we would like them to treat us?

The first Christians were known as the people who turned the world upside-down.
But that was two thousand years ago, and over the centuries we have watered down Jesus’ teaching.
We have got used to it, and we don’t see how revolutionary his teaching actually was.

Joseph, as we have seen, was able to forgive his brothers –
it took him awhile, but when he got there, he really forgave them.
He saw how God had worked everything together for good, and not only forgave them, but invited them to come and settle locally.
He really is the poster child for forgiveness.

Jesus promises us that if we give generously –
and I don’t think he means just material giving, but giving of ourselves, of our time, of our love, of our forgiveness –
then God’s generosity to us will know no limits, either.

What do you think, I wonder?
If you did as Jesus says in the gospel reading –
would you turn into a doormat?
Or could it be, possibly, just might, it prove to be dynamite,
something to turn the world upside-down?
Amen.

A tree planted by the water

 

From our first reading this morning, the passage from Jeremiah chapter 17:
“I will bless the person
    who puts his trust in me.
He is like a tree growing near a stream
    and sending out roots to the water.
It is not afraid when hot weather comes,
    because its leaves stay green;
it has no worries when there is no rain;
    it keeps on bearing fruit.”

And in the Psalm we read together, we are told that those who delight in the law of the Lord “are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in due season.
Their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.”

Some time ago I saw a documentary about the Kalahari desert in Africa, which is one of the driest places on earth.
But water still flows under, and very occasionally on top of, the dried river beds, and you could see, from drone footage, exactly where the rivers run, because they are lined with green trees,
and it was those trees that enabled giraffes to live there,
as they could feed on the leaves.

Israel is pretty dry, too, I understand –
the Negev, do they call the desert there?
Anyway, the whole thing of irrigation, and planting trees by the river, has a great many echoes in the Bible,
so I imagine it must have been very much a thing,
especially back in the days before modern irrigation techniques were able to make the desert, quite literally, blossom like a rose.

One of my favourite passages is in Ezekiel,
where that prophet has a vision of a stream of water beginning in the Temple in Jerusalem and flowing down to the Dead Sea,
becoming wider and deeper as it flows, full of fish, fertile, bringing fertility to the whole area, including the Dead Sea.
And we are told that “On each bank of the stream all kinds of trees will grow to provide food.
Their leaves will never wither, and they will never stop bearing fruit.
They will have fresh fruit every month, because they are watered by the stream that flows from the Temple.
The trees will provide food, and their leaves will be used for healing people.”

Zechariah also mentions this river, but says half of it will flow to the Mediterranean and half to the Red Sea.
He doesn’t put trees alongside it explicitly, though.

This river appears, according to the book of Revelation, to be in the heavenly Jerusalem rather than the earthly one we know.
The writer has a vision of the new Jerusalem, and in part,
“The angel also showed me the river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, and coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb and flowing down the middle of the city's street.
On each side of the river was the tree of life, which bears fruit twelve times a year, once each month;
and its leaves are for the healing of the nations.”

But the point of the passages in both Jeremiah and the Psalm is that it is we who are –
or who can be –
like the tree planted by the water.
It is we who can bear fruit all year round, who can stay green and fresh even in times of drought.
And at this point we all start to wriggle and feel uncomfortable and think, “Oh God, I’m not like that at all!”

And, of course, we aren’t like that.
At least, most of us aren’t.
Some of us are, and you will know who those people are in your life.
But they won’t know it –
partly because if they did know it, they might start thinking what great people they are, and then, of course, they wouldn’t be.
Because the whole point is, those of us who do bear fruit, or green leaves, or whatever, are the ones through whom God’s Spirit flows.

Jesus said that if we abide in him, we will bear much fruit, and apart from him, we can do nothing.

We know, too, what the fruit is that we are going to bear –
those lovely, life-enhancing qualities that St Paul lists in his letter to the Galatians:
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
And I am sure there are others –
Paul’s lists are apt to be descriptive, not prescriptive!

But to get back to our passage, Jeremiah also points out that people who do not trust in God are like desert shrubs –
small, stunted, good for nothing much at all.
A far cry from the lush trees growing by the river.
And we may well know people like that, too;
people who do make a fair fist at being human,
but oh, how much more they could be if only they trusted Jesus!

And, you know, it’s not just us as individuals, but us as a church.
As a church, we can be lush trees growing by the river;
at that, we can guide people to the source of living water, Jesus himself.
We can cry out against injustice where we perceive it;
we can stand by our American friends who are really worried by this new regime; by our Ukrainian,
Russian,
Palestinian,
Israeli,
Sudanese,
Somali
or Syrian friends whose lives have been devastated by war;
we can cry out against the conditions that mean people need to use the food banks –
and, indeed, donate to them;
and so on –
you can watch the news as much as I can!
Or, alas, we can be small and stunted and good for nothing much –
but I’m sure this church isn’t like that!

And Jesus himself had some pretty harsh things to say to people –
and, presumably, churches –
who only trusted themselves, as we heard in our Gospel reading.
We are more used to the version of this teaching given in Matthew, I think, probably because Matthew’s version is so much easier.
We can think of ourselves as poor in spirit, as hungry and thirsty after righteousness –
but we are manifestly rich and well fed,
just like those whom Jesus condemns here.

I imagine Jesus does not condemn us just for being rich and well fed and content –
after all, that is largely an accident of birth.
Had we been born in another country, at another time, things might have gone very differently for us.
But it’s the “I’m all right, Jack” mentality that so often goes with being rich and well fed that is to be shunned at all costs.
We may be all right –
but there are plenty of people who aren’t.
We may be going home to a big Sunday lunch,
or we might be planning to go out for brunch,
as there are so many good restaurants in this area that serve it on a Sunday.
We’re on our way to the country for a week!
But what of those whose cupboards are bare, who depend on the food banks for today’s meals?
What of those who are homeless and begging in the streets?
These appear to be the ones who, in this passage, Jesus is praising and blessing.

I’m not saying, of course, that we should be giving to every beggar on the streets –
there are better ways of
helping to relieve homelessness and hunger.
I know some of you have donated to the Brixton Food Bank recently –
Robert took a car-load from here over to the hub at Brixton Hill just the other day.
Please go on doing this as and when you can afford to –
it is more necessary than ever, alas.

But it isn’t so much what you do, as your attitude.
Remember Jesus’ story of the rich man ostentatiously giving huge amounts to the Temple, and then the poor old beggar woman giving a tiny coin?
It was, said Jesus, the woman who had given the most;
the rich man wasn’t going to miss what he’d given, but that coin might have meant the woman going without her supper that day.

But how do we become that sort of person?
I know I’m not!
The sort of person who resembles a tree planted by the water,
bearing fruit and leaves all year round –
well, that’s not me!
I’m far too selfish and lazy and greedy and so on….
But then, we all have our faults.
And if I were to try to conquer mine in my own strength, I’d just be setting myself up for failure.

The thing is –
and this isn’t easy, either –
it’s about letting God grow us.
We are to produce fruit, and fruit isn’t manufactured, it’s grown.
Leaves aren’t stuck on the tree with Blu-tak, they are grown, too.

Some years ago now, a friend gave me a small flower-pot containing an aloe vera shoot. These days, it’s huge – at least three large plants, and I ought to repot it. But I’ve done nothing to make this happen – given it a few drops of water from time to time; plucked a leaf when I’ve needed some aloe vera for something, and that’s it. It has grown.

Plants grow.
Flowers grow.
Fruit grows.
Leaves grow.
We can’t make them grow, and we can’t make ourselves produce the good qualities that are required of God’s people.
But we can allow God the Holy Spirit to flow through us,
to fill us,
to indwell us,
to enable us to become the people God designed us to be.
And if we do that –
and, let’s face it, we’re not going to be able to do that every moment,
but the more we try to allow God to work in and through us, the more successful we will be –
if we do allow God the Holy Spirit to flow through us, we will gradually become a tree planted by the water side.

Amen.

Extravagance

 

 

I suggest you listen to the beginning of the recording, at least, as I included what would have been the children's talk had there actually been any children in church!

I wonder how many of you went to a Christmas party? We invited someone to lunch on Christmas Day, but the only other party we went to was Brixton Hill’s big annual Christmas dinner. For reasons I won’t go into now, that was a bit of a disaster, with food having to be cooked on one site and brought round to the other. Mostly by R! But there was plenty of food; most people were able to take a “goody bag” home with them.

That’s one of the things about parties, or weddings,
or any other big event that you’re hosting, or your church is,
have you got enough food and drink for everybody –
to the point that, very often, there is far too much, as there was at Brixton Hill this year!
And I do know we got it right when it came to buying the sparkling wine for our daughter’s wedding, many years ago now,
but I also remember worrying lest we should, perhaps, have got another case….
As it turned out, there was plenty –
we were even able to take a couple of bottles home with us!

But it seems to have been very far from the case for that poor host of the wedding at Cana we have just read about.
As I understand it, back in the day wedding feasts lasted two or three days, and a host would expect to have enough food and drink to cater for the entire time.
But something had gone badly wrong here.
We don’t know what had happened, or why –
only that it had.
Such embarrassment –
the party will be going on for awhile yet, but there is no wine.

But among the wedding guests were a very special family.
Mary, the carpenter's widow from Nazareth, and her sons.
Cana isn't very far from Nazareth, only about twelve miles,
but that's quite a good day's journey when you have to rely on your own two feet to get you there.
So it's probable that either the bride or the groom were related to Mary in some way,
especially as she seems to have been told about the disaster with the wine.

And then comes one of those turning-point moments in the Gospels.
Mary tells her eldest son, Jesus, that the wine has run out.

Now, as far as we can tell, Jesus is only just beginning to realise who he is.
John's gospel says that he has already been baptised by John the Baptist,
which implies that he has been out into the desert to wrestle with the implications of being the Messiah –
and the temptations which came with it,
and John also tells us that Simon Peter, Andrew and some of the others have started to be Jesus' disciples
and had come with him to the wedding.
But, in this version of the story, Jesus hasn't yet started to use his divine power to heal people and to perform miracles,
and he isn't quite sure that the time is right to do so.
So when his mother comes up and says “They have no wine,”
his immediate reaction is to say, more or less,
“Well, nothing I can do about it!
It isn't time yet!”

His mother, however, seems to have been ahead of Jesus for once, on this,
and says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you!”
And Jesus, who was always very close to God,
and who had learnt to listen to his Father all the time,
realises that, after all, his mother is right
and the time has come to start using the power God has given him.
So he tells the servants to fill those big jars with water –
and they pour out the best wine anybody there has ever tasted.
As someone remarked, right at the fag-end of the wedding,
when people are beginning to go home and everybody has had more than enough to drink, anyway.

I don't suppose the bridegroom's family were sorry, though.
Those jars were huge –
they held about a hundred litres each, and there were six of them.
Do you realise just how much wine that was?
Six hundred litres –
about eight hundred standard bottles of wine!
Eight hundred....
you don't even see that many on the supermarket shelves, do you?
Eight hundred....
I should think Mary was a bit flabber-gasted.
And it was such good quality too.

Okay, so people drank rather more wine then than we do today,
since there was no tea or coffee, poor them,
and the water could be a bit iffy,
but even still, I should think eight hundred bottles would last them quite a while.
And at that stage of the wedding party, there's simply no way they could have needed that much.

But isn't that exactly like Jesus?
Isn't that typical of God?
We see it over and over and over again in the Scriptures.
The story of feeding the five thousand, for instance –
and one of the Gospel-writers points out that it was five thousand men, not counting the women and children –
well, in that story, Jesus didn't provide just barely enough lunch for everybody, quite the reverse –
there were twelve whole basketsful left over!
Far more than enough food –
all the disciples could have a basketful to take home to Mum.

Or what about when the disciples were fishing and he told them to cast their nets that-away?
The nets didn't just get a sensible catch of fish –
they were full and over-full, so that they almost ripped.

It's not just in the Bible either –
look at God's creation.
You've all seen pictures of the way the desert blooms when it rains –
look at those millions of flowers that nobody, for a very long time, ever knew were there except God.
Or look at how many millions and millions of sperm male animals produce to fertilise only a few embryos in the course of a lifetime.
Or where lots of embryos are produced, like fish, for instance, millions of them are eaten or otherwise perish long before adulthood.
And millions and millions of different plant and animal species, some of which are only now being discovered.

Or look at the stars!
All those millions upon millions of stars, many with planets, some with planets like our own that may even hold intelligent life.....
God is amazing, isn't He?
And just suppose we really are the only intelligent life in the Universe?
That says something else about God's extravagance in creating such an enormous Universe with only us in it!
Our God is truly amazing!

Scientists think that some of the so-called exoplanets they have been discovering lately might contain life, although whether or not that would be intelligent life is not clear, and probably never will be.

So how did God redeem such beings, assuming they needed redemption?
We know that here, his most extravagant act of all was to come down and be born as a human baby –
God, helpless, lying in a makeshift cradle fashioned from an animal feeding-trough.
Having to learn all the things that human babies and children have to learn.
Becoming just like us, one of us, knowing what it’s like to work for his living, what it’s like to be a condemned criminal and to die a shameful death!

But God, God who could only allow Moses the teeniest glimpse of his glory, or he would not have been able to survive it, and even then his face shone for hours afterwards, this God became a human being who could be captured and put to death.

You know, sometimes I think the main function of the church is to help us cope with God.
Perhaps the church, quite unwittingly, limits God, or, like Moses, we’d not be able to handle it.
St Paul prays that we might know “what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.
God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.
And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

The Church, which is His body.
And yet we –
we the Church –
are so bad at being His body.
We limit God.
We limit God as individuals, saying “Thus far shall you come, and no further!” We don’t allow God access to all of us, to every particle of our being.

And we limit God as communities, as churches;
We tell God what to do.
We tell God who God may love, and who is to be considered beyond the pale.
We judge, we fail to forgive, we withhold, despite the fact that Jesus said
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged;
do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.
Forgive, and you will be forgiven;
give, and it will be given to you.
A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,
will be put into your lap;
for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

And yet we still hold back from God, both as individuals and as communities.
I don’t mean just money –
although we do that, too, despite the promise that if we:
“Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts;
see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

But we hold back ourselves from God.
We aren’t –
well, I know I’m not, and I dare say I speak for you too –
we aren’t really prepared to give ourselves whole-heartedly to God.
After all, who knows what God won’t ask of us if we do?
We might even have to give up our lives, as Jesus did!
Or worse, perhaps God would say “No thank you!”
Perhaps we would be asked to go on doing just exactly as we are doing –
how disappointing!

But I wonder if it’s really about doing.
Isn’t it more about being?
Isn’t it more about being made into the person God created us to be?
Isn’t it more about allowing God into us extravagantly, wholeheartedly…. I would say “completely”, but I don’t think that’s quite possible.
God is simply too big, and we would be overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, Jesus came, he told us, so that we can have life, and have it abundantly!
Abundantly.
Can we let more of God into our lives, to be able to live more abundantly?

Do you dare?
Do I dare?
Do we dare?
Amen!

It takes a Village

 

Some years ago now, Robert and I went to Avignon for a holiday during the first week of January.
As holidays go, it was a dismal failure, because I had flu, the hotel was horrible, and it snowed!
But one thing was very good, and that was that in the Town Hall, they had a Christmas crib.

Now, when we think of a Christmas crib, we usually think of a stable, with Mary and Joseph, the Christ Child, the shepherds, an ox and an ass, and perhaps the wise men if it’s nearly Epiphany.

But in France, and particularly in the South of France, they do things a bit differently, and their Christmas cribs show the whole village of Bethlehem, as they imagine it.

The one in the Town Hall was huge!
They do have the Holy Family, but they also have all the villagers going around their daily visitors;
you might have a milkmaid flirting with the baker’s boy;
someone fishing from a bridge;
someone else with a cart full of wood,]the old men sitting on a bench watching the world go by,
a couple of women gossiping outside a shop, and so on.
The more you look, the more you see.

I wish I could show you some of the pictures I took of it,
and of one I saw in an exhibition of cribs in a church in Alsace last year!
I love this Provençal tradition.
You see, unlike many crib traditions, it reminds us that Bethlehem was, and is, a village, and Mary and Joseph were not isolated.
We tend to think of them as travelling alone –
just Mary, Joseph and the donkey –
but of course they would have gone to Bethlehem with a group of other travellers;
it wasn’t safe, else.

And realistically, the manger would have been on the step separating the animal part of the house from the human part,
and there would probably have been a great many women,
mostly relations, helping Mary with the birth and afterwards.

We don’t think of animals as sharing living-space with humans, as we only do that with our pets,
but of course the cattle and horses or donkeys would have helped keep the house warm in the winter, and was the norm back in the day.

Yes, there were signs that this wasn’t just another human baby being born at a most inconvenient time.
Yes, the shepherds came to visit –
but they might well have been family, don’t you think?
And yes, Anna and Simeon did respond to the promptings of God’s Spirit,
and knew that they had seen their salvation.
But from the human point of view, Mary and Joseph were just doing what all Jewish families did –
they had their son circumcised at eight days old, and then, at forty days old, they took him to the Temple to redeem him from God –
the first and the best of everything belongs to God, so that parents would redeem him by paying a small sum and having ritual prayers said over him, these always invoking Elijah.
Everybody did that, if they could.

And then they went back to Nazareth –
again, travelling in a party for safety –
and Jesus would have grown up in an extended family, lots of aunts and uncles and cousins around, and, in due course, brothers and sisters.
He would have learnt to roll over, and to sit up,
and in due course to stand and walk, and talk, and be potty-trained;
he’d have had to learn when not to talk,
and when he needed to sit still and listen.
He’d have gone to school with the other kids his age,
and learnt to read and write, especially the Scriptures.
He’d probably have hung round Joseph, and learnt basic carpentry, even before his formal apprenticeship when he was 13 –
and, at that, he probably learnt some interesting words to say when he hit his thumb with a hammer!

And each year they would go to Jerusalem, to the Temple.
Again, they would travel in groups and caravans.
At first Jesus would be carried on his father’s back,
and then kept close to his parents,
but as he grew older, he’d be off with his friends,
running ahead and being told not to go out of sight,
or lagging behind and being told to keep up.

They’d gather round the camp fire in the evening and sing the traditional songs.

And then the kids were coming twelve years old.
Now, in Jewish circles, you were considered a man at the age of 13,
and from then on could be asked to read, and comment on, the Scriptures at any time.

These days they have a ceremony called a “Bar Mitzvah”, or a “Bat Mitzvah” for girls,
where the child in question reads a passage from Scriptures, translates it, and then preaches on it –
my daughter went to a friend’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah last term, and was very impressed by her performance.
They also have a party, either immediately afterwards or later the same day.

In Jesus’ day, they didn’t have the ceremony, but every boy –
not girls, back in the day, alas –
every boy approaching his 13^th birthday knew he could be called on at any time after his birthday.
Their teachers would have been focussing on this during the school year,
and probably some of the boys were getting nervous.
It was probably their last school year –
they would be leaving soon to work with their fathers, and learn their father’s trade.
They weren’t children any more –
at thirteen, they would be considered men.

That year, they all went up to Jerusalem as usual, and attended the Passover festivities, and then gathered together to go home again.
And it wasn’t until next day they discovered that there Jesus wasn’t!
His parents had assumed he was off with his friends as usual,
but suddenly, horrifyingly, nobody had seen him.
His parents rushed back to Jerusalem –
they didn’t like to go on their own, but this was an emergency –
and found him still in the Temple, deep in discussion with the scribes.

You see, as Jesus had studied the Scriptures, he became engrossed in them.
God helped them become real to him.
And, of course, Jesus had endless questions.
I'm sure his parents did their best to answer him, but perhaps they didn't know all that much themselves.
And his teachers, perhaps, didn’t have the time they would have liked to answer his questions –
or perhaps he wanted to go more deeply into these things than they cared to do in an academic environment.
And when he reached Jerusalem that year, he found all that, for then, he was seeking with the scribes in the Temple.
They knew.
They could answer his questions, in the way that the folks back home in Nazareth could not.
They could deal with his objections, listen to him, wonder at his perspicacity at such a young age.

I hope the scribes didn’t laugh at him;
it's not clear from the text, but they might have.
But probably not, if his questions were sensible and to the point.

And Jesus, typically adolescent, totally forgets about going home,
forgets that his parents will have kittens when they find he's not with them, forgets to wonder how he's going to get home,
or even where he's going to sleep –
or, perhaps, thinks a vague mention of his plans was enough.
Anyway, Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Zach will put him up, he’s quite sure.

And when his parents finally find him,
like any adolescent, he says “You don’t understand!”
And, rather rudely, “I have to be about my Father’s business!”

Poor Joseph –
not very kind, was it?
We aren’t told what happened next,
whether they hurried to catch up with their original caravan,
or had to wait until the next one was going in that direction.
We aren’t told whether Jesus was grounded for a few days when they did get home, or what.

Come to that, we aren’t told whether he actually knew anything about who he was.
He’d probably grown up in the normal rough-and-tumble of village life,
but then, when they started studying the Scriptures in good earnest,
something came alight in him.
He began to catch glimpses of God,
of That Which Is,
of the Thought that Thought the World…
and he longed and longed to know more.

Later on, of course, he would realise that
searching the Scriptures was not enough.
Remember what he said to the Pharisees:
“You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life;
and it is they that testify on my behalf.
Yet you refuse to come to me to have life."

He knew that you needed more than just the words on the page –
but at twelve years old, this was what had intrigued him, fascinated him, to the point of ignoring anything else.

But why does this matter?
For me, it’s about Jesus being human as well as divine.
He didn’t come fully formed from his father’s head,
like some of the Greek or Roman gods are alleged to have done.
He didn’t grow up in splendid isolation, just with his parents,
and later, with his mother alone.

Even if, as it appears from Matthew’s gospel,
the family had lived in Bethlehem until they had had to flee into exile,
they would probably have resettled in Nazareth because they had family there, rather than just choosing it at random.

The thing is, he grew up in the midst of other people.
They say it takes a village to raise a child,
and Jesus grew up in that sort of village!
He had lots of examples to follow,
both of how to behave and of how not to.

I hope he didn’t know how special he was, not until much later.
But he did grow up loving God.

It’s not always easy, at this distance, to see the human Jesus, is it?
We see him as divine –
and so he is,
but he is also human.
His experiences may not have been exactly the same as ours,
as he grew up in a very different culture.

All the same, if he was 13 years old today, he’d be glued to his phone,
getting WhatsApp messages from his friends every few minutes,
gradually being allowed more freedom to go out with his friends, and so on, like my grandsons, who are 11 and 14, so just that sort of age!

And when my daughter was adolescent, I spent a LOT of time with this story!

(You may want to listen to the audio at this point, as I spent a few minutes talking about the fact that Jesus comes to us as communities as much as, if not more so, than as individuals)

And I do think it’s important to see Jesus as human as well as divine, because it makes him –
at least, I find it does –
much more approachable, much more real,
much more able to empathise with me, and plead my cause with God.
On Christmas Day, K reminded us, at Brixton Hill, that God came down into the mess and muddle of this world.
He’s been here; he knows what it’s like.
He’s not just the baby in the manger;
he’s not just the adolescent boy following his obsessions to the exclusion of all else;
at that, he’s not even the still figure on the Cross.
He is any and all of those things, he is Jesus Christ,
and he is our Lord and Saviour.
Amen.