This week sermon looked at two texts, one from Luke and one from Colossians. Alongside of the reality that we don’t know much about how Jesus grew up is the picture of who he grew up to be: who he became. How do we continue to become, to grow?
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One of the realizations that repeats itself for me during Christmastide is that we only know a small slice of Jesus’ life. The gospels are not exhaustive biographies, running over into two or three volumes. They weren’t trying to tell us every detail. They were telling the heart of the story that mattered to them. Mark, for instance, starts with John the Baptist standing out in the desert. John spends half of his gospel telling the story of the last week of Jesus’ life. Matthew and Luke highlight different details about Jesus’ birth, as we have read over the past few weeks, but it takes one verse in Luke for Jesus to grow up, which Lynn just read. I will repeat it the way I learned it as a kid:
And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and people.
Jesus didn’t come into the world fully formed, physically, emotionally, mentally, or physically. He had to grow and grow up, like every other human being. He had to become the person we see in the gospels, which meant he had to choose to grow and learn from the people around him and the things that happened to him.
I wish we had more stories about when he was a kid. Many years ago, a singer-songwriter named Rich Mullins wrote a song called “Boy Like Me/Man Like You” and he wondered,
well did you grow up hungry? did you grow up fast?
did the little girls giggle when you walked past?
did you wonder what it was that made them laugh?
did you ever get scared playing hide and seek?
did you try not to cry when you scraped your knee?
did you ever skip a rock across a quiet creek?
Jesus had experiences, encounters, and conversations that shaped him. Out of those things he chose to be the messiah he became, even as he came into the world as the incarnation of God. He experienced emotions, tragedies, accomplishments. He grew in wisdom and stature.
Maybe this is a funny thing to say about the Christ Child, but he had to learn that the world didn’t revolve around him.
What I mean by that is he had to learn how to live in community, how to be a We and not just an I, how to grow into the person who said that the two great commandments were to love God with all of your being and to love your neighbor as yourself.
In our second passage, which is part of Paul’s letter to the church in Colossae, which was a town in what we know as Greece, he was writing to people whose circumstances were quite different from the way Jesus grew up, even though they were not so far away geographically. Paul wrote, as he did in most all of his letters, to challenge and encourage people to grow in their faith. He knew, as we do, that we are all wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy of being loved, and he knew that we have to choose to do something with that love if it is going to make a difference in our lives and in the lives of those around us.
And he used the metaphor of a wardrobe—of clothing—to talk about it:
Dress in the wardrobe God has picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.
That is the translation from The Message, which works to say things in contemporary language, and sometimes gets a little too hip. That last sentence can also be translated, “And cover everything with love, which is the bond that leads to maturity.”
To mature is to grow. We, like Jesus, have to learn that the world doesn’t revolve around us. We, too, are shaped by our experiences and relationships. From those things and the way we choose to internalize those things, we become who we are—and that becoming continues until we die. We may stop growing in stature—in fact, we even start physically shrinking a bit as we age (in height, anyway)—but we do not have to stop growing in our capacity to incarnate God’s love among and between us. We can continue to mature, if we choose to continue to learn all that God’s love has to teach us.
Paul listed attitudes and actions as though they were garments: compassion, kindness, humility, grace, forgiveness, love. It strikes me that none of those things can be reduced to a single garment.
His metaphor of a wardrobe reminds us that we need to dress for the occasion, for the moment, much like we dress for the different seasons. What we wear in the summertime is not adequate for our winters. To put on our big coat in August makes no sense. Misty and foggy days like today, with temperatures that are not at an extreme make hard to know what to wear, so we dress in layers.
We clothe ourselves to match our circumstances. So it is with the way we respond to and live with one another. Compassion is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Neither is kindness, or humility, or forgiveness. We try things on and sometimes they don’t fit. We wear the wrong thing and learn not to dress that way again. And, though the world does not need more fashion critics, we need to grow in trust so we can help each other by saying what looks good and what outfits might need to be retired.
That’s why clear and open lines of communication are important. That’s why we don’t give anonymous feedback. We speak the truth in love. And we have to learn how to do that and practice with each other.
We have to learn and grow and mature, just like Jesus did. As we mature, we create a greater capacity for us to grow together—and by that I mean both grow at the same time and grow closer to one another.
I will close with the words our scripture readers say at the end of each reading: May God grant us wisdom to learn from these words. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
