Rev.
Matthew Versemann
Waverly,
Iowa
2nd
Sunday @ Christmas
January
2nd, 2011
“God – The Junior Higher!”
God’s PEACE is ALWAYS YOURS in Jesus!
Hear the Word of God from Luke 2,
“The child grew and became strong, and filled with wisdom. And
the favor of God was upon Him. And Jesus increased in wisdom, and in stature,
and in favor with God and with men.”
DEAR FRIENDS IN CHRIST,
It’s bad enough losing your car keys, your wallet, your glasses,
or the remote control; but can you imagine “losing the Son of God”?
You parents know the anxiety. You turn around at the grocery
store, and your child has wandered off. Your attention is diverted for just a
moment at the mall, and you lose your kid in the crowd. Can you imagine how Mary and Joseph felt
after losing the Second Person of the Triune God for an anxious three days in
Other than Jesus’ birth, the only recorded events that we have
of Jesus’ childhood are when He was circumcised on the 8th day; when
He was presented at the temple at the age of 40 days; when He and His family
rushed off to Egypt when He was 2 years old or younger to escape Herod; His
return to Nazareth from Egypt, and now, when Jesus was 12 years old, and was lost,
and then found, in Jerusalem.
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It was the custom in Jesus’ day that 12-year old Jewish boys
would travel with their dads to appear before the “Teachers Of God’s Word” in
the temple, and they would be questioned about their understanding of the Word
of God, to see if the parents had done their job passing on the faith to their
kids. It was sort of like confirmation questioning and confirmation rolled into
one. And then beginning at age 13, they were considered adults, and would take
their place with the men of
Now, before I get into the heart of our text, I want to
challenge your thinking a bit. Diana
West, in her book – The Death Of The Grown Up –
argues: “There was a time, literally,
when there were no teenagers”. And what she means is this: If you go back in our history before W.W.II,
or virtually any other culture in the world prior to the late 20th
century Western culture, you were either a ‘child’ or an ‘adult’, and adulthood
began around age 13 or 14 - the concept of ‘teenager’ or ‘adolescent’ didn’t
exist. And during your childhood, rather than being coddled, or having your
every whim met instantly by mommy and daddy, you were treated as an ‘emerging’
or ‘apprenticing adult’, and then you were considered to have entered
adulthood, and expected to take your place among the men and women in the world
and in the church, when your education and childhood ended around age 13-14.
In the same way, when Luther taught confirmation he expected the
parents to come with the children to confirmation, because it was their
responsibility to pass on the Christian faith. The pastor was mainly teaching
the parents, so they would be prepared to teach the kids. The reason that the
children came along to confirmation is that they were treated as “apprenticing
adults”, who would be working soon, getting married soon,
and passing on the Christian faith to their own families soon.
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But somewhere along the way – most believe
it was before W.W. II – we adults and our culture punted the ball – and an
entirely new sub-culture called ‘adolescence’ began. Rather than viewing the ‘teen
years’ as a time to treat children as ‘emerging adults’, and to prepare them to
serve God in their lives, families, churches, and culture; a new concept emerged
called ‘adolescence’ which is more about satisfying yourself, rather than
living for Christ. I define it many times in my sermons as the temptation
to: be your own god, do your own thing,
define your own reality, and please your nerve endings.
So what led to this? In many ways it
is the absence of Godly Fathers, the weakness of parents and churches that only
want to entertain our children, and the culture’s constant emphasis on “Instant
Gratification” that led us to lower our expectations of our children, and
consign them to this new sub-culture called “Adolescence”.
John Stonestreet
blogs on Breakpoint.com, ‘Today…adolescence is considered a fixed stage of
development. We now expect students to lose their minds from ages 13 to 18, and
to behave badly. “Kids will be kids,” we say… But in other cultures,
“teenagers” were marrying, farming, fighting wars, writing books, and in one
case, even bearing the Messiah.”
Stonestreet defines THE 6 MARKS OF AN ADOLESCENT
CULTURE as:
1. The Demand for
immediate gratification. We
want what we want now, and we won’t wait or work for it. Spiraling credit card
debt, addiction to new technologies, bouncing from church to church, abandoning
marriages—the list goes on and on.
2. Absence of long-term thinking about life and the world.
Hand in hand with the demand for Instant Gratification is a distraction from
the real issues of life that matter. Ours is a culture largely ignorant of
economics, history, or logic, but we are fully up to speed on American Idol.
3. Motivated by feeling
rather than truth. This is a key
indicator of a volatile person, and of a failing culture. Truth is murdered by
feelings.
4. Wanting grown-up
things without growing up. Ironically,
despite our addiction to all things adolescent, we still expect to be treated
like adults. We live in a culture of kids and adults shacking up and having sex
outside of marriage, and wanting everything from BMW’s to
5. Expecting bailouts
rather than accepting consequences. ‘Not thinking before acting’ is a trait of adolescence, as is ‘making
excuses’. Bad mortgage decision? The government should help. Sexual
immorality? Birth control, abortion, and HPV vaccines.
Falling grades? Reduce standards. Poor behavior? Get a prescription. Once we accept adolescence
as normal, we are then forced to excuse poor behavior. “They’ll grow out of
it,” we suggest – but a quick look reveals that “we” are not.
6. And finally, Focusing on appearance rather than
depth. Seen in everything
from fascination with celebrity, to the way presidents and churches are chosen,
cultures that choose style over substance quickly become silly cultures. Neil
Postman wrote in his book: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in
the Age of Show Business. Worse still, silly cultures are easily deceived
and destined for tyranny. History proves this.
The National Academy of Sciences now
defines adolescence as “the stage between the on-set of puberty (around 11 or
12) up to age 30.” The iconic adolescent is the teenager who talks back to his
parents and says, “If you’re going to make life so hard, then I might just leave
home when I turn 30.” It’s time for us parents to stop coddling our children as
adolescents, and begin treating them as “apprenticing or emerging adults and
Christians”.
Now let’s bring this back to Jesus. At
age 12 – Jesus, the Junior Higher – appears before the teachers of God’s Word,
in the temple, to see if He had learned his lessons well enough in the home,
and at the synagogue; a kind of ‘final exam’, before he became a man at age 13.
And what they found, utterly amazed them: His answers,
His grasp of God’s Word. Who was this kid?
He was the very Word of God in the flesh, not just ‘full of answers’,
but full of grace and truth! He was the
wisdom of God on high, now here in the humble form of an ‘almost teenager’.
At this point, Mary and Joseph were
probably at their wits’ end. Can you imagine going down to the local Fareway Store, and having all the shoppers whispering,
‘Those are the parents who lost God’? They had probably traveled to
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Think about that for a moment. They must
have had their sinful doubts too. Because if they were absolutely convinced
that Jesus was God in the flesh, they wouldn’t have been anxious. He can take
care of Himself. Can God be lost? Not
really!
And guess what? When they get to
When they finally found him, we see that
Mary too was a sinner. Rather than putting the best construction on everything,
she starts to chew Jesus out. “Son, why have You
treated us like this? Your father and I have been searching for you in great
distress.” Like Mary and
Joseph, we too are prone to forget who this Jesus really is. We also trip over
God, when He comes to us in weakness.
We see the Water of Baptism, and we trip
over Jesus really is God, and He is able to save people in any way He chooses.
We say things like: “How
can simple water do such great things?”
Forgetting, that, “it is not the simple water that does them,
but the water included in God’s command, and combined with God’s Word,” “For
nothing is impossible with God.”
We see simple letters, syllables, and
words on pages of paper; or the vocal cords of a sinful pastor telling us “in
the stead, and by the command of Jesus, I forgive you all your sins,”
and we also, like Mary and Joseph, forget that Jesus is God in the flesh; if He
says that those plain words from Scripture or the vocal cords of a sinful pastor
carry My forgiveness to you; than they do. Stop trying to “box Jesus in” as to
how ‘you think’ God has to act. Let God tell you how he has or hasn’t forgiven
you.
We see the bread and wine, and we trip
over the ‘ordinariness’ of it all, and say things like: “This can’t be the body
and blood of Jesus.” But if Jesus is capable of fitting Himself into an embryo
that is much smaller than that one inch wafer you receive in communion; and if
He can place Himself into the embryonic waters of Mary’s womb; than you and I
do well to take God at His Word: “This is my body given for you; this is my
blood shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins.”
It really shouldn’t surprise us that
they found Jesus in the temple. This was His Father’s House. Mary and Joseph had
too low of an expectation of their “almost teenager”. And Jesus reminded them,
“Mom and dad, you must understand, I’m not just an adolescent, or your kid”;
but I am the emerging Savior, that God told you I was. Jesus said, “Didn’t
you realize, I must be about My Father’s business.”
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But how exactly would He do it? Galatians 4, “Born of a woman, born under
the Law, to redeem those who were under the Law.” Jesus was the
only faithful child God had left; so He sent Him to take the place of all of us
rebel children under the law. Jesus not only got conception and birth right,
but He got childhood right, the teen years right, and adulthood right to give
us His righteousness. Think about that – whether you’re a tween,
a teen, or an adult, the Lord of all became subject to earthly parents and what
God demanded of you in His law, TO SAVE YOU. He lived willingly under their
authority. He obeyed them. When they said, “Clean your room”, He did it - so
that you could be counted righteous in God’s sight, as having obeyed your
parents, even when you didn’t. But Jesus not only saved us from the bad, He
saved us for the good. When you’re truly repentant of your disobedience, then
you clean your room out of your love for Jesus, and your parents.
When Jesus’ parents said, “Take out the
trash.” He took out the trash, and He did it with love, honor, and respect; so
that He could give us His righteousness, in place of our rebellion. And when
His Heavenly Father, asked Him to “take out the trash” of our sins, all the way
to Calvary. He obeyed! Why? Because He had a long-term goal. He knew what this
life was truly all about: All of us, living with God, forever, in paradise. Rather
than being stuck in the adolescence of pleasing himself, He said, “Father,
not my will, but yours be done.’ And Phil. 2 adds, “And
being found in human form, He made Himself nothing, and taking the very nature
of a servant; He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on
a cross.”
Even Jesus’ teaching in the temple at
age 12, and getting chewed out by His mother, illustrates what Jesus came to do
for you. Where you got life wrong, Jesus got life right for you; and He
received our punishment and spanking from His heavenly Father. He was then
grounded in the tomb for our sins. This amazing love, should change the way
teenagers and adults, view life; as a
gift of God, delivered to us with bloodied hands, so that we view all of life
as sweet service to Him, as view taking as many people with us home to heaven,
to live with God, as our life’s goal.
In closing, there was one other time in
Jesus’ life, where Mary lost her Son, for 3 days. On Good Friday, the little
Lord Jesus laid down His sweet head on a bloody cross and died, to forgive us
for all of our bratty rebellion. But three days later, Mary found her Son
again, risen from the dead, and doing the will of His Father: giving life to a
world full of sinful rebels. He did this so that we could receive a place back
in the Father’s family, and fulfill our created purpose: to live under Him, in
His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and
blessedness. This is most certainly true! Amen!