Sermon preached on Sunday, December 26, at Deer Isle Sunset Congregational Church …

How quickly they grow up. It seems like he was born — well, just yesterday! — and now he is already twelve years old and giving his mother fits. It was a holiday trip, mom and dad and the kids, and on the way back home, a sudden moment of parental panic. Where is he? Has anybody seen Jesus? So it’s turn around, make the day long trek back to Jerusalem, and search for their lost son. They find him still at the Temple, hobnobbing with the Jewish teachers, and Jesus is like: “What’s the problem? Everything’s cool. Didn’t you know this is where I need to be?

It’s a rare glimpse into Jesus’ domestic life. Most of us parents will recognize the storyline. Your child is growing up. He is asserting his right to make his own decisions. She is beginning to stake out her own independence. It is a rare glimpse because the four gospels have very little to say about Jesus’ birth and even less about his childhood. This story about the Passover trip Jesus’ family made when he was twelve is the one and only story in all the gospels from Jesus’ boyhood. So why do you suppose Luke includes it?

We have to remember that the gospels are not biographies, but evangelical tracts, written, as John puts it at the end of his gospel, so “you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through your faith in him you my have life.” The compiler of each gospel chooses to include certain stories and sayings, not for the sake of getting the record straight, but for the sake of conveying the power and meaning of Jesus’ message and the power and meaning of Jesus’ life for their hearers, and for us.

You may know that only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, include any stories about Jesus’ birth and childhood. Matthew’s gospel includes Joseph’s dream about the child soon to be born to his fiancée, the story about visitors from the east paying homage to the infant Jesus, and the story of the family’s flight to Egypt to escape Herod’s violent intentions.

Matthew chooses these stories carefully, highlighting the central themes of his gospel. He focuses on Joseph because Joseph comes from King David’s family and Matthew wants to identify Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promise of a descendant of David who would one day come to save God’s people, one who would be called Immanuel, God with us.

The worship of the visitors from the east, who were likely astrologers from what is now Iraq, underlines Matthew’s affirmation of Jesus as savior not only for the Jews, but for the whole world. From the beginning, Matthew wants us to know, foreigners, Gentiles, outsiders are showing interest in Jesus.

And the flight to Egypt? Well, who else came out of Egypt? Matthew wants to paint Jesus as a new Moses, a new savior of his people, one whom God calls out of Egypt to lead them to a land of promise.
Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth is entirely different on every point except place. Luke includes the angelic visit to Mary telling her the meaning of her imminent pregnancy. He includes the announcement of Jesus’ birth to a band of shepherds out in the fields tending their sheep. He includes the visit of Jesus’ parents to the Temple to dedicate week-old Jesus where two old worshippers recognize him as the promised Messiah, and he includes today’s story about twelve year-old Jesus.

Luke highlights the shepherds because they are poor, because they lurk near the bottom of the Jewish social ladder. Luke wants his hearers to know that Jesus brings good news to all who are poor and oppressed and outcast. Mary’s song of praise, the focus of Vicki’s sermon last week, spotlights the same theme: a world set right by turning it upside down.

By focusing on Mary, rather than Joseph, Luke also takes special notice of another marginalized group — women. Throughout his gospel, Luke draws attention to women who play important roles in Jesus’ life and story. Luke wants us to know that Jesus comes to lift them up, too.

Mary’s song and Zechariah’s song earlier in the gospel and the exclamations of old Simeon and Anna in the Temple all elaborate Luke’s portrayal of Jesus as the herald of a new age, the long-awaited age when God comes at last to save and to bring peace.

Which leaves our story, the visit of twelve-year old Jesus and his family to the Temple. Why does Luke include this story? You remember that Matthew wants to paint Jesus as a new Moses. Well, Luke wants to paint Jesus as a new Samuel! The lectionary makes no mistakes in pairing these two stories, the stories we heard read from 1 Samuel and from Luke. There are some remarkable echoes of the one in the other.

Both stories feature mothers, mothers who bear sons under extraordinary circumstances — Hannah, who has been long childless, and young Mary, who has never known a man — and the song of gratitude and praise that Mary sings is very much patterned on Hannah’s own similar song of praise.

Both stories tell of sons chosen and destined to fulfill a special purpose willed by God, and both stories describe the boys, Samuel and Jesus, as growing and gaining favor with God and with people.

So who was Samuel and why would Luke want to cast Jesus as a new Samuel?

Samuel was a key figure in the history of the people of Israel. If Moses made them a people and gave them a homeland and if David made them a nation state of consequence, Samuel was their conscience, the leader and prophet who reminded them what it meant to be a people loved and called and purposed by God.

Samuel was born into a chaotic moment in Israel’s history, a time of great violence and rampant corruption. It was the waning of the era of the judges, men and women of unusual charisma or strength or faith, men and women like Samson and Gideon and Deborah who would momentarily rescue God’s people from their enemies only to see them slide back into lives of treachery and idolatry and cruelty and deceit. It was said of that day that “everyone did whatever they pleased.” Even the religious leaders, even the sons of the priest into whose care Samuel was given, exploited their position for financial gain and carnal pleasures.

Into this time of chaos and desperation and darkness, Samuel brought light, God’s light. Samuel listened when God spoke and Samuel spoke God’s will to the people with an authority and authenticity they recognized. It was said that when Samuel spoke, all Israel listened. Samuel called the people to repent, to give up their idols and their false and cruel ways, and to faithfully love and serve the Lord their God.

And when the people of Israel clamored for a king, to be “just like all the other nations,” it was Samuel who gave them first Saul and then David, but only after Samuel sternly scolded them for their request because they are not like all the other nations, because they already have a king, because their king, their one and only king, is the Lord!

Samuel was an uncompromising servant of the Lord’s way, a faithful prophet who spoke God’s word with authority, and a kingmaker, shepherding the people through a period of unprecedented change.

And that, Luke wants you to know, is who Jesus is. Jesus listens to God and speaks God’s will with an authority that comes straight from God. Jesus is a faithful prophet who calls out the corruption and hypocrisy of the religious establishment and invites people to love God sincerely and completely and to show it by their love and care for each other.

And Jesus is a kingmaker, too, proclaiming that the kingdom of God is at hand, that God is coming to rule, to set things right, to bring peace to the earth. But there is one difference between Jesus and Samuel. Like Samuel, Jesus is a kingmaker, but unlike Samuel, Jesus is himself the king. He too reminds the people of who their true king is, but he is himself that true king. Jesus is our savior and our Lord.

There is one more parallel between the stories of Samuel and Jesus, something both Hannah and Mary must do. As our children grow up, what is one thing that all parents must do?. They must let go.

Hannah literally let go. When God answered her prayers and gave her a son, she kept her promise and dedicated that son, Samuel, to the Lord, placing him in the priest Eli’s care to live and serve in God’s sanctuary.

Can you imagine? Praying and waiting and waiting and praying for years to be able to bear a child and when at last you do, you give him up? I find it so poignant how every year at festival time, maybe it was Passover, when Hannah and her family traveled to the sanctuary to make their annual sacrifices, Hannah would bring with her a little robe she had sewn for Samuel, the boy who was her son and yet now was God’s son.
Mary had to let go, too. Maybe that’s what she was thinking about when Luke says, “she treasured all these things in her heart.” Maybe she was thinking about what Jesus had said to her, “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” Maybe she was thinking that he was right, that she had to learn to let him go.

Later, after Jesus had begun his public ministry, she had to let him go again. Once she came with his brothers to see him only to hear him say to those around him: “My mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God and obey it.”

And later still, Mary had to let Jesus go as she stood at the foot of a cross and watched him die.

If Samuel was to fulfill God’s purpose for his life, Hannah had to let him go. If Jesus was to fulfill God’s purpose for his life, Mary had to let him go. And if Jesus is to fulfill God’s purpose in our lives, we have to let him go. The baby born in Bethlehem is a sign of God’s promise to us, a promise of joy and of peace on earth, but if that promise is to be fulfilled, we must let Jesus go. We must let the baby grow up.

And that will not always be easy, because Jesus is going to say things we are not ready to hear, and Jesus is going to go to places to which we are not ready to go, and Jesus is going to ask things of us we are not ready to do. But if the promise is to be fulfilled, we must listen to him, and we must follow him, and we must remember that Jesus is not merely our savior, not merely our teacher, but our Lord. Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords. Hallelujah!