The Good Book- G is for Growing Up- Rev. Wendy McCormick
G is for Growing Up
Rev Wendy McCormick
June 9, 2024
Luke 2:40-52
The amazing cellist YoYo Ma was recently interviewed by Terry Gross. She asked him about his childhood, and he replied that he is living his best childhood now, at 68 years old. As a child prodigy, he had a very unusual childhood, playing for princes and presidents and being introduced to the world by none other than Leonard Bernstein, beginning when he was just 4 years old. He told Terry he had not one but two tiger parents. By 15 he was enrolled at Juilliard. So he certainly had nothing remotely close to what we might call a “normal” childhood.
YoYo Ma comes across as a very thoughtful, mature, balanced and thoroughly delightful person. And his accomplishments and contributions go far beyond cello performance. So for all the negatives we may hear about tiger parents, he seems to have turned out great both as a musician and as a human being.
We can’t say the same for every child prodigy. Whether high intelligence, musical genius or unusual athletic prowess, exceptional children grow up differently than other kids. Some of them, like YoYo Ma, seem to grow into their full humanity as well their talent while others really struggle. Consider this description of tennis star Andre Agassi from a summary of his autobiography: “Andre Agassi had his life mapped out for him before he left the crib. Groomed to be a tennis champion by his moody and demanding father, by the age of twenty-two Agassi had won the first of his eight grand slams and achieved wealth, celebrity, and the game’s highest honors. But . . . . off the court he was often unhappy and confused, unfulfilled by his great achievements in a sport he had come to resent.” American professional golfer Lexi Thompson was the youngest to ever qualify for the US Women’s open – she was 12. Two weeks ago, at the age of 29, she announced her retirement from professional golf due to issues of her mental health. I don’t know much about her, but maybe being thrust into all the demands of professional golf at the age of 12 has caught up with her.
And then there are young men being signed for gazillions of dollars to play basketball or other high-paying professional sports right out of high school. The human brain is not meant to have the judgment and maturity at that age to handle that kind of money and all the attendant realities, so not surprisingly it doesn’t always go well. It must be very difficult to both encourage and develop an exceptional talent and to keep that young person’s best interests first and foremost.
Today we consider the story Anna Carter Florence calls “G is for Growing Up,” in which she asks what it might have been like to parent that very exceptional child, Jesus. For most of us, it’s a familiar story of Jesus at about 12 years old. And it is the only story we have besides the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke about Jesus before his public ministry began at the age of 30. Lots and lots of room for imagination.
But first we pause for a very important theology lesson.
If you’re thinking, hmm, Jesus wasn’t really an exceptional child, he was JESUS! And Jesus is God.
Or if you were taught as many of us were that Jesus was there with the elders in the Temple poring over the scriptures because he already knew his destiny, you might think he wasn’t really a 12 year old child at all – not like we’ve all been 12 year old children, not like any 12 year old child we’ve ever known.
Right?
But at the heart of our faith is this assertion: We believe in Jesus Christ, fully human, fully God, as we say in our Presbyterian Brief Statement of Faith. Not 50-50 but 100% of each. Maybe hard to get our heads around, but this is the heart of the Christian faith. In the early centuries the church struggled and argued about this -- mostly human and kinda God --- mostly God and kinda human --- nope. Fully human, fully God.
If you google church heresies, you can read all about this and find all sorts of permutations of the struggle. Even though it is long ago “settled theology,” as far as orthodox, traditional Christianity is concerned, and even though Christians no longer debate fully-human-fully-God, people still struggle with it and come up with their own explanations. Explanations that were long ago named heresies.
The one that is very much alive and well is the heresy called Docetism – from the Latin word for “to seem” or “to appear,” Docetists believe that Jesus only seemed or appeared to be human, but he wasn’t human the way, say, you and I are human. He was God. He wasn’t like us. He was perfect, so choices and decisions weren’t hard for him. He was God so he already knew everything that was going to happen. He was almost like an actor, playing out a pre-determined script. He SEEMED to have feelings and emotions and to experience pain, but it wasn’t real. Cuz God.
The bottom line in this very common but technically heretical view is that Jesus is not like us.
And if you push that to its logical conclusion, then, frankly the whole thing falls apart. If Jesus isn’t fully human, the word made flesh, as human as you and I are, then so much of power of the gospel crumbles. For one thing, we don’t need to follow, we just need to assent, to believe. When we suffer the depths of human pain, Jesus may care but Jesus doesn’t really know. It takes away the power of Jesus being one of us. And of course it takes away the responsibility.
And if you read the gospels already sure that Jesus only seems human, then it colors all your interpretation. You read it that way and find all sorts of evidence in support.
But here we have that rare story about Jesus growing up. A fully human 12-year-old boy. And it invites us to remember being 12 and to think about 12-year-olds we have known. The age Jesus is in our story is the age of rites of passage in many cultures, and it is the age of the bar mitzvah and now also bat mitzah in Judaism. It’s around the age many churches think about confirmation. It’s an age in which children are beginning to form what will be their adult identity and purpose. They may feel very grown up, and they may say and do some very mature things. And yet in other ways they are still very much children. When I remember being 12, I remember how large and in charge I felt, but when I look at a photo I see that I was sooo young!
Twelve-year-olds need really good guidance --- not too heavy-handed and controlling --- but also not too hands-off and permissive. In that same interview with Terry Gross, YoYo Ma talked about reading the biography of Pablo Cassals when he was about this age. The greatest cellist of the previous generation, Cassals was YoYo’s hero. And even though he was meeting him in the pages of a book, here was someone who could understand what it was to have one’s entire identity from a very young age be “exceptionally gifted cellist.”
YoYo Ma says it changed his life when he read that Cassals said his identity was not first cellist, second musician and third human being, but precisely the opposite: first human being, second musician, third cellist. That important revelation early in adolescence shaped YoYo Ma’s life. As the world can see, he is indeed an exceptional cellist and also an exceptional human being, perhaps because he got the order right way back when.
Perhaps that day in the temple for Jesus was kind of like YoYo Ma encountering Pablo Cassals --- it was the elders in the faith, the scribes and teachers of the law who could understand the passion Jesus felt for the tradition, for the scriptures, for the heart of the identity of God’s people, Israel, who could appreciate his deep and clear thinking about the scriptures and the faith. Those deep roots in scripture and tradition would be essential to his ministry years later.
The story is familiar – everyone packed up to head back from Jerusalem to Nazareth – which is quite a ways – about a 2-3 hour drive on modern highways so certainly several days journey back then. But Jesus stayed behind in the Temple. Did he lose track of time? That does happen with things about which we are passionate. Did he forget when they were to leave? Did he think about his parents being worried? Apparently not. Did he think about getting in trouble?
And how about those elders? Didn’t any one of them ask, where are your parents? Do they know where you are? Are you supposed to be somewhere? Do you need to send a text? Or were they equally caught up in how exciting it is to have a precocious 12 year old clearly on track to join the discipline you care so much about, to be a leader of the faith for the next generation.
The heart of the story is that his parents were indeed worried. Very worried. And by the third day of searching they were frantic. In some sort of twisted ancient Home Alone story, they had managed to pack up and travel a full day’s journey before realizing Jesus was missing. To our ears, that’s the scandal – what kind of parent doesn’t know for a full entire day that their child is missing. But, as the story points out, people travelled in large caravans of friends and relatives and neighbors. It would have been easy to assume that a 12-year-old boy was with his friends somewhere in the large group. At the end of that first day’s travel, perhaps when they stopped for the night, his parents searched in earnest and their worst fears were realized.
It is the nightmare of any parent or grandparent and indeed of anyone who has ever been responsible for a child for a day or even an hour. Losing the child. It puts a knot in your stomach just thinking about it.
Retracing their steps back to the big city and searching increasingly frantically, Luke says it took them three days to find him. That’s a long time. A long time to worry and to imagine the worst. According to Luke, Mary, the mother of Jesus, had known since her pregnancy that this child was exceptional. We can imagine that she didn’t know exactly what that meant, he says she kept all these things in her heart, pondering, treasuring them. So these parents knew they had an exceptional child. But knowing your child is exceptional doesn’t eliminate the tasks of parenting or the importance of it. If anything, you’d want to be more careful, not less, to not LOSE this exceptional child who you heard when he was a baby was destined for the rising and falling of Israel.
There are perhaps two kinds of reunion between a lost child and the parent. If the child knows she is lost, she is just as frantic as the parent, and the reunion is one of mutual relief. But if as in this case the child does not feel lost and is in no way worried about where his parents might be or how or when he is going to get home, then the reunion is one of, “oh hi mom” --- to which she replies, “are you kidding me? We have been frantic! Why have you done this to us?”
And so Jesus says something to the effect of – oh mom, chill out, you should have known I would be here. Where else would I be?
It says they didn’t understand. I guess not. But neither did they leave him there. They took him home. Back to Nazareth. Back to finish growing up. Probably back to continue learning his father’s trade of carpentry. Perhaps back to reading with a flashlight after lights out or sneaking out to talk to the teachers about the scriptures when he was meant to be doing chores.
We know so very little about those parents. We know they were poor working people, that they didn’t come from the educated classes. We know they were faithful, and they were tuned into angels and dreams and God’s ways of communicating with us. We know that Mary expected great things of her child, as so many mothers do. But we also know from this story that it could not have been easy. Perhaps amazing things would unfold like she sang about in the Magnificat – perhaps God would use her humbly born child to bring down the mighty from their thrones, to raise up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things as she sang during her pregnancy. But she couldn’t know all that would unfold.
In the meantime, he needed to grow up, like all children do. And for that he needed parents. Parents who didn’t always understand.
But thanks to them and likely to other relatives and friends whose names are long lost to history, Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and his fellow humans. Maybe it gives us pause to give thanks for those who have helped us attain whatever modicum of wisdom and stature we have. Maybe thinking about what it’s like to be 12, what it’s like to clash with your parents, what it’s like to be excited and engrossed by something, helps us to lean into the fully human Jesus, especially when we turn the page and it’s some 18 years later as his public ministry begins. Maybe we allow ourselves to imagine what might have happened in between. And what it might have been like for those who had watched him grow up to see those next three years unfold, especially when the religious leaders who had been so impressed by him eventually turned on him.
And mostly what it might mean for us to lean into our own fullest humanity as we follow the one we confess is fully human, fully God.
Chapters in “A is for Alabaster”, by Anna Carter Florence, published in 2023 by Westminster John Knox, provide the source and inspiration for this sermon series.
