Epworth United Methodist Church

Epworth United Methodist Church
Rev. David Weekley, Pastor
12-27-09
Luke 2:41-52

What’s Your Status?

As some of you know, I sometimes dabble on the website community known as “Facebook.”

When I connect to Facebook and go to my “wall” a question pops up, ‘What’s your status?’

The question really means something like, “What’s going on in your life?”

But the question took on another meaning when I viewed a young college student lamenting going to Christmas parties to hear over and over again parents asking each other about the colleges and universities their college-bound children were applying to; the student spoke about how bad it makes him feel when state universities are put down.

I wrote back to him and said he was viewing some pretty immature parents trying to gain social status through their children’s college applications.

Afterwards I thought about the word, “Status”: it can have many meanings, from something as innocent as “What’s new in your life” to this whole artificial thing known as “social status” that too many people take seriously, from the labels on their clothes, the cars they drive, to pushing their kids to go to the schools they hope will give them [the parents] social status.

After this experience I started thinking about Jesus’ social status.

If social status in the way our culture defines it is held in such high regard by many parents and young people these days, perhaps it is no wonder that church attendance and membership is in decline everywhere you look: who wants to be seen with a “loser”?

But wait one minute!

According to every poll recently taken about what people appreciate, value, and try to emulate through the people they associate with, things like fleeting interpretations of social status are nothing compared to valuing people who are really smart, even oddly smart.

Mental_floss magazine is dedicated to seeking out those who are thought of as “quirky and smart” in our culture.

It recently chronicled what they named as ‘The New Einsteins’- geniuses who are able to think outside the box and arrive are unimagined places.

Here’s a few of their choices:

· MIT physics professor Marin Soljaaic was tired of waking up in the middle of the night to the chirping of his cell phone’s low battery alarm. He thought that since our phone can do just about everything else, why not have them plug themselves in when they need charging? So he invented “WiTricity,” the first step towards wireless electricity. Magnetic coils can resonate at a frequency that makes other coils across the room resonate. So now there is this wireless transmission of energy that can help our phones recharge themselves without having to wake us up!

· An anonymous Doberman/Border collie mix dog made this Einstein list by performing successful cancer surgery on its owner! The dog was obsessed with a mole on its owner’s leg, sniffing at it for months until eventually biting it off! The woman’s doctor later confirmed the mole was cancerous and that her dog may have saved her life. Tumors release toxins, and it turns out that these toxins smell enough for a dog to small them. So today, trained dogs have detected lung and breast cancer with almost 90% accuracy.

Now, go back in time with me a little more than two thousand years.

The Passover festival in Luke 2 was like a gathering for religious Einsteins, geniuses of the faith.

People poured into Jerusalem from all across the land.

They shared meals that stretched into the hours, even rivaling some of your mochi parties!

Conversations focused on theology, culture, and religious life.

As the annual event drew to a close, everyone began to head out to travel the long distances to home: everyone but Jesus.

Probably travelling in a large crowd of family and friends, his parents were already a day away from Jerusalem before they realized their son was missing Joseph and Mary’s clan would have been watching each other’s kids along the journey- this was not uncommon for how extended family operated at that time in the near east. [it’s like the original, “Home Alone” story so popular as a Christmas movie today!]

As it turns out, the people who were actually watching Jesus were all the brightest and the best of Jerusalem’s religious, theological leadership.

Long after the crowds had left the Passover conversations continued as a 12-year-old asked and then answered difficult theological questions.

In that temple, Jesus, even as a 12-year-old, taught not only the elders of his own day but he taught us: those of us who claim as our status to be Christ followers in a postmodern culture today.

One thing we know about this time in the temple is that Jesus taught with authority.

UC-Berkeley chemical engineer Jay Keasling is one of those named as “new Einsteins” in mental_floss magazines. He defines genius as, “someone who is extremely bright, extremely creative, who thinks completely outside of the box.”

Well, this is clearly a definition that fits 12-year-old Jesus.

Jesus was a genius, and the all the gospels are filled with examples and stories about his outside the box thinking; it is perhaps the very thing which led to his arrest and crucifixion.

Jesus had no patience whatsoever with fleeting social status.

Mark uses an interesting wordplay on the word ‘authority’ in order to call attention to the uniqueness and impact of Jesus’ teaching.

Synagogue-goers were “astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.

The point is that Jesus had an actual authority that was very different from those in the role of spiritual authority.

His teachings had a far greater impact than theirs.

He was able to forgive sins [Luke 2:10].

He had rule and reign over evil spirits [Luke 6:7]

His authority among people was lived out through the experience of being with them, not over them [Luke 10:42-43]

Today we may personalize this idea of Jesus authority by asking ourselves a few spiritually formative questions:

· Why do I trust the authority of Jesus?

· What are the most obvious ways Jesus’ teachings have changed me over this last year?

· If I did not trust Jesus’ authority, how would my choices have looked different this past week?

· In what areas of my life am I not giving Jesus the authority I need to in order to truly change for the better?

Mary was probably as embarrassed as she was shocked to discover her son was missing, and still at the temple, studying and talking with the elders as one who had authority even among them.

In response to her surprise at finding him still there, Jesus simply asked, “Why were you worried and searching for me? Didn’t you know that I must be here, in my God’s house?”

Jesus was consumed by scriptural education; we know this because the gospel tells us the religious leaders were amazed both by his understanding and his knowledge [Luke 2:47].

You see, this is a two-part statement: Jesus could answer questions posed by the temple rabbis because he knew the Scriptures. But he also showed understanding, which likely came from the questions he asked.

In rabbinical education, little value is/was placed on simply possessing information about God and Scripture.

Rabbis wanted to know if students had internalized, owned, wrestled with and understood the information Scripture provided

This was demonstrated through questions, not answers.

This 12-year-old Jesus did not just know about God, he knew God.

Somehow in the education that was part of his divine-human experience, Jesus had come to personalize and internalize who God was/is.

This may lead us to questions of our own this first Sunday in Christmas:

· What does Sunday worship feel like to us: more information to acquire? Something to get through on the way to our traditional lunch? Is the message just something to endure, or is there something to learn?

· Which is a more truthful expression for us: “I know about God” or, “I know God”?

· Do we chase answers for the spiritual questions we do not have answers to?

Are we in touch with our doubts, and are we trying to address them?

As Jesus grew older we are told he grew in wisdom and understanding, and in the love of God.

So, as followers of Christ, how are we doing?

Are we getting wiser? Are we gaining love?

Although these things are sometimes to measure in terms of our spiritual status, we can take a look back over the last couple of years and ask how we have changed.

Let’s try it:

· How has God made me wiser today than I was two years ago?

· How have I matured over the last two years?

· How has my reputation with others changed these last two years?

· Is my reputation better, worse, or the same?

· How would my family, friends, and church say I’ve grown over the last two years?

Christian therapist Henry Cloud offers a simply paradigm for understanding Christian growth: Growth= Grace+Truth+time.

The genius of Jesus is that he is full of grace and truth.

Over time, we should be able to see Christ’s life and teaching causing us and our church to grow and to change.

The new Einstein’s of mental_floss magazine are discovering how to grow organs, cure plagues, sniff out tumors, and help the blind to see.

Jesus desires that we should accomplish much simpler, yet equally profound things: deepening our souls and changing our lives.

Are we giving Jesus, our Christ, a chance to change our status, our understanding of what status really is; a chance to change our worlds?