Sunday, December 27, 2015 | 8:00 a.m.

Our Childhood’s Pattern

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 148
1 Samuel 2:18–20
Luke 2:41–52

Don’t take away my time to be a child:
let me breathe the air with you;
give me room to be and space to see;
lend me a name, a voice to sing my dreams.
Tell me, can I share your world?
Share the world with me—
I am one young dream; I need your love.

HALAD Review, Philippines, 1990

One of my earliest childhood memories is as a four-year-old, looking at a children’s storybook based on the Christmas carol “Away in a Manger.” My parents had read it to me often enough that I remembered the words that went with the pictures. What simply amazed me was the verse “but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” I just couldn’t imagine that! I had a newborn baby sister at the time, and she cried when she was hungry or tired or startled or wet or hurt or who knows why. Imagine a baby that didn’t cry!

In the beautiful carol we sing on Christmas Eve with our candles lighted, “all is calm, all is bright.” The manger appears always as a place of beauty, holiness, and light—not a sign of the world’s indifference that relegates a transient family to a barn when a teenage mother begins to feel contractions. The smell of livestock, the messiness of dirt and straw and hair, the red-faced exhaustion of labor, the risky precariousness of giving birth—all is prettified to the point that the sacred meaning of the event can be missed.

Frederick Buechner wrote,

In trying to say too much, piety always runs the risk of saying too little or saying it wrong, and the great pitfall of Christian art, especially when it tries to portray the birth of Christ, is sentimentalism. . . . Neither the holiness nor the humanness of the moment is rendered so much as the schmaltz, and the Incarnation becomes merely a Christmas card . . . instead of the proclamation that the Creator of the ends of the earth came among us in diapers. (Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus: A Life Story, pp. 20–21)

I purchased a ceramic depiction of the holy family on their journey into Egypt. I bought it because the baby Jesus is really cute—he’s sucking his thumb. The family looks like they are having a pleasant outing together in the countryside under a blue sky. In reality, they were a refugee family trying to escape a frightening situation, fleeing in the middle of the night from the wrath of King Herod, who was intent on killing their baby. But who wants to think about that? Buechner says, “As long as [Jesus] stays the babe in the manger, he asks [of] us nothing harder than to love him and accept his love, and the temptation is thus to keep him a babe forever, for our sakes and for his sake too” (The Faces of Jesus, p. 23).

It took some years for me to realize that, of course, Jesus did cry, as a baby and as an adult. The shortest verse in the Bible is “Jesus wept” (John 11:35), which he did over the death of his friend Lazarus. He wept over Jerusalem, imagining its destruction because its residents did not pursue the ways of peace (Luke 19:41–44). And, of course, he would have felt fear. Jesus expressed the full range of human emotions. He enjoyed socializing with friends and had such zest for life that he was accused of being gluttonous and a “winebibber.” He became angry and cleansed the temple when he saw “robbers” ripping off those who came to worship. And he felt physical pain, just as we do. When he hung on the cross, he cried out from excruciating pain and abandonment and shed real blood. Jesus was fully human, as well as fully divine.

Later in our service we will sing the hymn “Once in Royal David’s City.” The hymn was written by Cecil Alexander in 1848 as part of a series of hymns she wrote to teach children the meaning of the Apostles’ Creed. This hymn was to explain the phrase “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary”—in other words, the incarnation. Alexander interpreted the incarnation to mean that Jesus “was little, weak, and helpless, tears and smiles like us he knew.” Then she explained in the hymn why it is important for us to know that Jesus was like us: because “he feels for all our sadness, and he shares in all our gladness.” Jesus was like us in all respects. That is what incarnation means.

The third verse of this hymn refers to Jesus as a youth, saying, “Jesus is our childhood’s pattern; day by day like us he grew.”

We don’t actually know much about Jesus as a child. The thirty-year period between the birth of Jesus to the beginning of his ministry as an adult is sometimes referred to by scholars as “the hidden years.” This story in Luke is the one and only account in the Gospels that refers to his childhood. Now there were legends about Jesus as a boy with magical powers that, wisely, did not get included in the Bible. One legend says Jesus as a child raised a playmate from the dead. Another tells of him stretching a piece of wood to make up for a mistake his father the carpenter had made in cutting. There is good reason why these wonder-working tales were excluded from the Bible. What we do hear about is simply a boy in the process of growing up. New Testament professor John Meier wrote, “The Gospels’ silence about Jesus’ hidden years may have a simple explanation: nothing much happened. The shoot out of the stump of David was sprouting slowly and silently” (John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume One, pp. 351–352).

This is reminiscent of a remark by the philosopher Karl Jaspers: “The truly real takes place almost unnoticed. . . . Those among our young people who, thirty years hence, will do the things that matter are, in all probability, now quietly biding their time; and yet, unseen by others, they are already establishing [themselves] by means of an unrestricted spiritual discipline” (quoted by Eugene H. Peterson in Earth and Altar, p. 20).

As a twelve-year-old, Jesus appears much like other twelve-year-old boys. A teenager starting to spread his own wings of independence. A precocious son who makes his parents proud. A youth interacting with adults, with respect, ease, and curiosity. A young person raised in the faith, now asking religious questions to shape the faith he inherited to be his own. And an adolescent oblivious to why he should keep his parents informed of his whereabouts. He did not understand the anxiety his parents felt when they discovered he wasn’t with them on their journey home from the tsemple.

As parents, Joseph and Mary appear to be much like other parents. At the end of a whole day of traveling with friends and relatives, they discovered that their son was not in the caravan. They became very worried, just as we would. They immediately turned around and retraced their steps, going all the way back to Jerusalem. After three days they finally found him. He was sitting among the teachers in the temple, listening to them and asking questions. The people gathered around were amazed at his understanding and his answers. Once his parents saw him, they were astonished. Their fear turned to relief, then anger. His mother exclaimed, “Child, what were you thinking? Why have you treated your father and me like this? Didn’t you know we would be worried to death? We have been looking all over for you.” A family dynamic we can well imagine.

Frederick Buechner also describes this “as a very Jewish story—our son the theologian, the parents’ discreet but fathomless pride in the accomplishments of their firstborn. You can see it in Mary’s face, in the way Joseph scratches his head in wonderment, in the rapt attention of the elders themselves, one of whom is checking out the boy’s answers in a copy of the Torah” (Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus, p. 26).

What stands out in this story is the certainty of Jesus as a youth, at the age of our young people when they go through confirmation. He is experiencing the confirmation of his parents’ dedication of him when he was a newborn to be a holy servant for the Lord. The early church believed Jesus had a special relationship to God, and this seeps into the story. He calls God “my Father” in a way his parents didn’t understand. But Jesus doesn’t show any doubt that he knows who that Father is.

Mary and Joseph brought up their son within the customs and traditions of Judaism. They presented their son for purification in the temple after his birth. They went to Jerusalem every year to celebrate the Passover. With their son both observing and participating, they read the Hebrew scriptures and regularly recited prayers. We know there is no guarantee that when parents raise their children in the faith that their children will claim that faith as their own. But we also know the likelihood of people becoming believers is higher when they have been nurtured by a faith community from early on. That is why it is so important for us as a church to be very intentional in developing the faith of our children and youth through Christian education, worship, service opportunities, and mentoring relationships.

A well-known painting of Jesus in the temple by Heinrich Hofmann shows the young Jesus standing erect amidst the listening elders, as though he were authoritatively expounding the truth to them. What Luke suggests is simpler. Jesus is listening, asking and answering questions. This story, like the account we read about the servant child Samuel, proclaims that Jesus continued to grow and become strong in stature and in favor with God and with people. He increased in wisdom with age. He was not sent to us fully formed, with complete knowledge and wisdom, but like any person, grew and developed over the years. As our closing hymn says, “Jesus is our childhood’s pattern; day by day like us he grew.”

I have been emphasizing the humanity of Jesus—that he was like us, he experienced what we experience, he felt our feelings, he grew as time went on. But there remains this question: Are we like him? Are we indeed following his childhood’s pattern by continuing to grow and learn in our faith? Are we becoming closer to God than before? Are we more trusting and devoted to God than we once were? Are we developing more maturity and wisdom as we increase in years? Are our hearts opening in greater compassion for others? Are we taking advantage of the gift of being part of a faith community to challenge us as well as support us?

Many people remain stuck at whatever understanding of God and religion they had when they finished confirmation class, at the age of twelve or thirteen. Many may throw out their earlier ideas about God but fail to develop a new and deeper understanding and relationship with God. It is easier to dabble at a surface level of curiosity in various religious traditions than to delve deeply in one tradition. But, as Richard Rohr wrote, “we need the accountability of a single faith community, with all its imperfections, to keep us honest and real. There are no wide and strong branches without deep roots in one specific soil” (Richard Rohr, Wisdom Lineage Summary: Home Base, Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, 22 December 2015).

The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of the importance of going deep if we are to do interfaith work: “Through the practice of deep looking and deep listening, we become free, able to see the beauty and values in our own and others’ traditions.” Matthew Fox reinforced that to get to the point of seeing the beauty and value in others’ traditions, one must look and listen deeply into one’s own. One must practice some path along the journey that leads to depth (Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths, p. 22).

I urge you to sink your roots deep into your Christian faith tradition, even as you may explore the wealth of wisdom to be found in other places. Otherwise, as Richard Rohr warns, you will get trapped in individualism and private superiority without any real testing laboratory in the ways of faith, hope, and practical love. Outside of a concrete faith community of relationships, we can too easily imagine we are more enlightened than we really are, he reminds us. Let us be like Jesus, growing in faith and wisdom day-by-day, learning from our elders. Let us allow Jesus’ pattern of continual growth to be our pattern for the course of our whole life. Amen.