{"id":2838,"date":"2014-01-06T23:01:19","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T06:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/?p=2838"},"modified":"2014-01-06T23:01:19","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T06:01:19","slug":"christmas-2-my-fathers-house-luke-240-52","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/?p=2838","title":{"rendered":"Christmas 2 – “My Father’s House” (Luke 2:40-52)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A-15<\/a>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, amen. The text for the sermon is the Gospel, which was read earlier.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure everyone has heard the phrase, \u201cOut of the mouth of babes.\u201d It has origins in Psalm 8:2: \u201cOut of the mouth of babes and nursing infants\u2028You have ordained strength,\u2028Because of Your enemies,\u2028That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.\u201d<\/span><\/i> That psalm has always seem to been the case, because kids, namely little kids, tend to say the darndest things. Looking at today\u2019s text from Luke, we see that case proven once again.<\/p>\n

The last we saw of Jesus, He was brought to the temple to be circumcised and dedicated. Today when we see Jesus, He is 12 years old. The Holy Family is off to Jerusalem for their annual celebration of the Passover festival. Everything was like it had always been for as long as they had come to Jerusalem: celebrate the Passover and return home. Why should this year be any different?<\/p>\n

The Feast had ended and the Holy Family had packed everything up on the means of transportation and joined the caravan of family and friends and departed Jerusalem. People would peel off along the way, returning to their respective towns and would resume their daily lives. For Joseph, that meant he would return to his work as a carpenter. You can imagine that there was a fairly large number of people in the caravan, people traveling with other friends and family, as this might be one of the few times a year that you would see everyone. For you to be traveling with another part of the caravan wouldn\u2019t be out of the ordinary. And so Joseph and Mary travelled home a day\u2019s journey and discovered that Jesus was nowhere to be found. Back to Jerusalem they go.<\/p>\n

Even after the Passover busyness had ended, Jerusalem was still full of people and that meant because of the crowds, it would take a while to find Jesus. After the first day of searching, no Jesus. After the second day of searching, no Jesus. Surely their luck was going to improve on the third day. Luke doesn\u2019t record when on the third day they found Jesus, other than the fact He was found. Where He was found might have seemed like an unlikely place for some, but the obvious place for others. He was found in the temple.<\/p>\n

While Jesus was in the temple, just what was He doing? According to Luke, Jesus was \u201csitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.\u201d<\/i><\/span> Now, the first part of what Luke says wasn\u2019t surprising. Jesus was 12 years old. That meant He would have been of the age of study so listening to the teachers of the law and asking questions would not have been out place. However, it\u2019s the second part of Luke\u2019s account that is out of place. Everyone who heard Jesus was amazed at His understanding and answers. Jesus was nothing more than a mere child. He had no right to be doing anything other than listening and definitely not doing anything resembling teaching.<\/p>\n

What Luke does offer is a glimpse of Jesus beginning to make the break from some familial claims in order to commit Himself more closely to God. Here is the successful movement of Jesus out of the crib and into the world. He leaves the circle of His parents and the protection of His mother\u2019s arms and enters a great big world of need. It might have been easier to stay sheltered in the warmth of parental attachment than to enter the world of sin and death. But Jesus has come of age. He has found His voice and taken His place. And that voice and place, we learn, are \u201cin my Father\u2019s house.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Remember earlier when I said \u201cout of the mouth of babes?\u201d That\u2019s Jesus at the temple. When Mary makes a fuss of looking for Jesus and how they were treated, He responds, \u201cWhy were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?\u201d<\/i><\/span> In these short utterances of Jesus we see the beginning of His break away from familial attachments in order to identify more intimately with God the Father. He is doing so in the immediate presence of His parents, presumably for the first time. His commitment to the Father now transcends His love for the family. Jesus knows that He is here for a purpose \u2013 to do the Father\u2019s will.<\/p>\n

Jesus\u2019 words not only convict Mary and Joseph, but they also convict us.\u00a0We too try to search for Jesus and can’t find Him.\u00a0We find ourselves with Mary and Joseph in that we too are looking in the wrong places.\u00a0Jesus said, \u201c I must be in my Father’s house.\u201d <\/i><\/span>Never the less, we look among the things of this world.\u00a0We look to earthly security, wealth, power, popularity, and so forth.\u00a0We look for Jesus everywhere He is not.<\/p>\n

Today, we must be our Father\u2019s house looking for Jesus. We need to look for Him in worship, where His Word is proclaimed, and His gifts are given \u2013 in the absolution, in the waters of Baptism, and in the Holy Supper which He lays before us every Sunday for our refreshment, and for our forgiveness, and for our blessing, and our strengthening.\u00a0Here, in His holy Word.\u00a0Here, in His body and blood is where you need to look.\u00a0Here in the fellowship of His people \u2013 His holy body – is where He is to be found, and nowhere else.<\/p>\n

All the work that Christ does for the Father culminates on the cross. That’s where the true intersection takes place between God and man.\u00a0It takes place in Christ on the cross. Holy, perfect, and almighty God Himself gave up all of heaven in order to come down to this fallen and sinful world and take on our fallen and sinful flesh.\u00a0However, Christ\u2014in the flesh\u2014did what fallen and sinful man can never do, no matter how hard we try.\u00a0Christ Jesus lived the perfect life.\u00a0He kept every one of God’s laws perfectly.\u00a0He did this for us, in our place, precisely because we cannot do this. Christ Jesus took every single sin of the entire world upon Himself, taking every single one of those sins to the cross so that they would be put to death, once and for all.<\/p>\n

This account of Jesus today gives for us a wonderful illustration of Jesus and His dedication to the work of His Father, even from the earliest of ages. He is about the Father\u2019s work from the very beginning of His life until His death. In today’s Gospel, we might be tempted to say that Jesus was lost.\u00a0In fact, Jesus was exactly where He was supposed to be.\u00a0It was really Mary and Joseph who were lost.\u00a0In a similar way, we are also lost \u2013 lost in our trespasses and sins.\u00a0It is God who finds us and places us among the things of the Father.\u00a0There the Holy Spirit works faith and makes us people of the Father.\u00a0Since Jesus said, \u201c I must be in my Father’s house,\u201d<\/i><\/span> that means we are with Jesus.\u00a0That is exactly where we are supposed to be. In Jesus\u2019 name, amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus, amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, amen. The text for the sermon is the Gospel, which was read earlier. I\u2019m sure everyone has heard the phrase, \u201cOut of the mouth of babes.\u201d It has origins in Psalm 8:2: \u201cOut of the mouth of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15607,9016],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christmas","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2838"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2840,"href":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2838\/revisions\/2840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revtucher.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}