Luke 2:41-52, from the First Sunday after Christmas.

Given the things Jesus would do and say during the life ahead of him, we should not feel surprised that the very first things he says and does in the Gospels are weird and offensive.

Jesus is 12 years old in Luke 2:41-52, and he and his parents have made their annual trek to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, a holy time on the Jewish spiritual calendar that commemorated God’s deliverance of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. It of course would be during another Passover some 30 years later that Jesus would trek to Jerusalem with his disciples to share a Passover meal with them before his arrest, execution and resurrection.

But once this Passover from Jesus’ boyhood is over, his parents, Joseph and Mary, pack up and leave town with their friends and family, assuming the young Jesus had the sense to join the caravan before its departure. But when they go looking for him that night, they find he is missing. A hasty return to Jerusalem and a frantic, three-day search follow, after which Joseph and Mary finally find Jesus sitting in the Temple, happy as a clam and utterly oblivious to their distress, wowing the teachers with his wisdom.

Appalled, Mary gives him a well deserved scolding. “Son, why have you treated us like this?” She demands. “Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”

Jesus, ashamed of himself, apologizes for the distress he has caused his parents, admits he got carried away, and promises never to do it again, right? Wrong. In a move that fans of the “What Would Jesus Do?” slogan might have difficulty explaining, Jesus scolds his parents right back.

“Why were you searching for me?” he asks. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”

Why, indeed? A boy of 12 goes inexplicably missing for half a week in the aftermath of a patriotic celebration in an enemy-occupied city, and the first thing his mom and dad were supposed to assume is that they could find him hanging out, safe and sound, in the first century equivalent of a seminary classroom? And right in front of the adoptive father who has raised him for 12 years and who has been looking high and low for him all this time, imagining every sort of terrible fate that could have befallen him, Jesus has the nerve to talk about being in the house of his father – that is, his *real* father.

I’m frankly surprised Mary and Joseph didn’t wring his ungrateful neck.

And in case you are tempted to dismiss Jesus’ reaction as that of an impetuous tween, consider how, as a full-grown man in the beginnings of his public ministry, he responded in Matt. 12:48-50 when told that Mary and his brothers had come to speak with him:

“‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.'”

There are times when Jesus calls us to imitate him. Having washed his disciples’ feet in John 13:4-11, Jesus tells his disciples to serve one another as he as served them. And a few verses later, in John 13:14, he commands them, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

But there are other times – and this week’s passage is one of them – when we must remember that we are Christians, not the Christ, and that Jesus is our king, not our peer. We don’t always have the right to act like he did.

Toward the end of C.S. Lewis’ story, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” as the coronation festivities for Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are winding down, Aslan, the lion who represents Jesus in the story, quietly goes missing. But the children, Lewis writes, said nothing about it, having been warned by Mr. Beaver that such was Aslan’s way.

“‘He’ll be coming and going,’ he had said. ‘One day you’ll see him and another you won’t. He doesn’t like being tied down – and of course he has other countries to attend to. It’s quote all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you musn’t press him. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.'”

Not like a tame lion at all. And, to echo something else Mr. Beaver says about him way back at the start of the story, not safe, either. An honest reading of the Gospels reveals a Jesus with sharp elbows and an even sharper tongue, a man who could be achingly compassionate in one moment and seemingly heartless the next, radically inclusive toward some people and coldly confrontational toward others.

Which raises some possibly hard questions for you and me. Is the Jesus we know tame and safe? Or does he at least occasionally offend and frighten us? If our relationship with him isn’t at least a little bit uncomfortable at least some of the time, might it be that we don’t know him quite as well as we think we do? When he speaks harshly to the Pharisees, do we cheer him on without considering how much we have in common with them? When he commands us to turn the other cheek or respond in love to hatred, do we assume that we always do? When he says that the first will be last and the last, first, do we figure that we, naturally, are the last who will be first, not the first who will be last?

If you area a saint already, perhaps so. But if not, perhaps your best life still awaits you – the life Jesus is waiting to give you, if only you will let go of the one you are holding onto so tightly.

Next week: Epiphany of the Lord

Luke 1:39-55, from the Fourth Sunday of Advent.

Mary has picked up many titles down through the centuries.

“Holy Mother of God” is among the oldest, appearing in the 1558 Litany of Loreto, along with “Mother of the Church,” “Virgin Most Renowned,” “Queen of Angels,” and many more.

In this week’s passage, though, she comes off more like “Mary the Malcontent.” We don’t typically think of her as a rebel, and the song attributed to her in Luke 1:46-55 doesn’t start out like a rebel’s anthem:

“My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant,” she sings.

“From now on all nations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me – holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm.”

This is the Mary we know, the one who smiles gently down at baby Jesus in every manger scene.

But read on, because there is more than a baby in Mary’s belly. There is fire.

“He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts,” she sings, her voice perhaps sharpening and growing louder. “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.”

For all we know, the next line might even have come out more like an angry hiss than a song: “He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.”

Whoa, there, Mary! I’m sensing a lot of hostility, here. It sounds like you don’t like the status quo, and it sounds like you’re expecting this baby of yours to shake it up. In fact, you sound a lot like Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, in I Samuel 2:1-10. Some highlights:

“My mouth boasts over my enemies, for I delight in your deliverance” (v. 2:1).

“The bows of the warriors are broken, but those who stumbled are armed with strength” (v. 2:4).

“Those who were full hire themselves out for food, but those who were hungry are hungry no more” (v.2:5).

Wait — isn’t Christmas about peace on Earth and good will toward men? Why all this violence-and-vengeance-tinged talk about whacking an out-of-whack world back into whack?

If you’ve been paying attention through these four Sundays of Advent, you know exactly why. Despite the centuries we’ve spent trying to sentimentalize it and, more recently, commercialize it, Christmas commemorates the night God waded ashore in the world and launched an invasion aimed at toppling every kingdom and replacing it with his own.

Every kingdom, yours included, I’m afraid. Mine, too.

But lift up your head, for your salvation is drawing near. Prepare the way of the Lord. He has judged the world, and you along with it, and his judgment is that much in the world needs destroying.

But not you. Your kingdom, yes. But not you. His judgment is that you, beloved of God, need rescuing. And that is why he has come.

Merry Christmas.

Next week: First Sunday after Christmas Day

Luke 3:7-18, from Third Sunday of Advent.

John the Baptist’s message doesn’t sound much like the good news Luke says it is.

Right off the bat, John calls the crowds coming to hear him preach – and, by extension, us – a “brood of vipers” (3:7). In case you’re not up to speed on ancient Middle Eastern salutations, that’s not exactly a friendly one.

The apocalyptic scree continues. Who warned you, John taunts, to run from the destruction that is coming? And don’t think for a minute that your lofty, leafy family tree will keep you safe. It had better start sprouting some penitential fruit right away. The ax is out, sharp and ready, and the fire awaits every unproductive trunk, branch and stick.

And if you think I’m being tough on you, John says toward the end of the passage, just wait until the Messiah shows up. I’m dunking you in water. He will dunk you in Spirit and fire. He will sift you like freshly harvested grain, keeping the kernels and burning the chaff.

Yikes! Are there bells yet? Let’s have some jingly, happy bells. And pitch-perfect angels and gentle shepherds with their even gentler lambs and Mary and Joseph and that cute, chubby baby cooing in the manger. This John guy downright unnerving.

John’s audience apparently finds him unnerving, too. “What, then, should we do?” they wail, bracing, no doubt, for the superhuman acts of repentance they expect John to prescribe. Maybe they’ll have to give up everything, come live with him in the desert and spend the rest of their days wearing camel skin and eating bugs, like he does. Maybe it’s too late even for that.

But the repentance John demands is astonishingly low-bar. Got two coats? Share the one you don’t need with someone who is cold, John says. Got extra food? Give the surplus to someone who is hungry. Are you a tax collector? Start collecting fairly instead of ripping people off. Are you a soldier? Start using your power justly instead of bullying everybody all the time.

If such basic ethics weren’t already common practice among the people who flocked to the desert to hear John, it’s perhaps easy to see why he called them vipers. But I’ll bet that wasn’t the case. I’ll bet most of them were generous and fair and honest at least some of the time, pretty much the way you and I and most of the people around us are generous and fair and honest at least some of the time. John seems to be calling us not so much to do good but to get serious about doing good, to notice the times we don’t do good as much as we notice the times we do, and to get more consistent.

What’s perhaps even more startling is how pervasive John wants this renewed focus on right behavior to be. Tax collecting and soldiering weren’t considered noble vocations in John’s time. You would expect a goody-goody like John to demand that people abandon such jobs and find more wholesome ways to make a living. But John doesn’t seem to be calling for a world without tax collectors and soldiers. He seems to be calling for a world with ethical ones, a world in which God’s righteousness shines everywhere, even into the little corners darkened by deprivation and conflict.

And maybe that’s the good news, here. Maybe the good news is that the Messiah and his terrible winnowing fork aren’t coming after us as much as after the darkness that has enveloped and trapped us. We are vipers, yes. But he is coming to burn away our “viperness” and winnow out the goodness in us that it has corrupted.

Doesn’t that awaken at least a little hope in your heart, at least a tiny bit of longing for what could be once this Messiah finally shows up? Maybe you’ve suspected for some time that he and the transformation and renewal he offers are somewhere “out there,” somewhere holy and wonderful but far too far from the unholiness and mundaneness of your everyday life, somewhere so far away that it might as well not exist at all, considering your meager chances of ever getting there.

The good news of Christmas is that you don’t have to get there. If the Messiah is coming to soldiers and tax collectors in the desert, to shepherds in a darkened field, to a teenage girl’s womb and to a manger in Bethlehem, he is surely coming to you, too.

That’s bad news for your vipery nature. But it’s good news for you.

Next week: Fourth Sunday of Advent

Luke 3:1-6, from Second Sunday of Advent.

They were seven men powerful enough to define their places and their time: Annas and Caiaphas, high priests of the Temple in Jerusalem; Pilate, Herod, Philip and Traconitis, regional governors; and Tiberius Caesar, emperor over them all.

And yet the word of God came to John, a nobody living literally nowhere, a strange wild man of the desert who ate bugs and honey and wore not only the skin of a camel but probably also the look and smell of one.

We should not assume that the word of God did not come as well to the seven superstars whose names open the chapter. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it had many times prior. But we can safely assume that if it did, or if it had, none of them had heeded it. Perhaps they hadn’t even heard it. Power, or rather the illusion of power, has a way of deafening its holders to the word of God.  The word that came to John was a call to confess sin and repent of it. Changing course is typically the last thing powerful people want to do.

And so the word of God came to John and not, or at least not effectively, to anyone who counted for anything by the usual standards of who counts and who doesn’t. And the word that came to John told him – and compelled him to tell everyone else – that the usual standards of who counts and who doesn’t are out of whack and about to be dismantled.

The Lord is coming, John proclaims. The real one, not these pretend ones in their opulent palace halls and temple chambers. In an empire that demanded absolute loyalty to an emperor regarded as a god, there was no way to hear such a proclamation as anything but treasonous, as a call to open rebellion. Prepare, John says. Make this true Lord’s paths straight. And it’s unclear whether these are paths leading from him to us or from us to him. Maybe they are both. But they are paths for invasion, regardless of which way they run.

“Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God,” John says.

What a threat that must have sounded like to those who relied on fertile valleys for sustenance and on rugged mountains and hills for defense and on crooked ways for profit. And what sense did saving all flesh make when the whole empire operated on the assumption that some flesh mattered more than other flesh, that there were rulers and merchants and workers and slaves, and that they mattered in precisely that order.

In short, just who did this invading Lord think he was?

Having read the end of the story, we know that the powers of John’s time didn’t go down without a fight. They lopped off John’s head and nailed his Lord to a cross. They killed the Lord’s followers and outlawed the Lord’s words. But today they are dust and their kingdoms are rubble, replaced by new rulers and new kingdoms that will also one day become dust and rubble.

But John’s Lord lives. The true Lord. Our Lord. And if we are to live at all past the dust and rubble of our mortal lives, we must live in him.

Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight.

Next week: Third Sunday of Advent

Luke 21:25-36, from First Sunday of Advent.

What a jarring way to kick off the Christmas season, eh?

Here we are all primed for stars and angels and shepherds and wise men and Mary and Joseph and “the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.” And yet the story starts this Sunday with that babe, all grown up, sitting on a hill mere hours before his execution and describing the end of the world in violence, cataclysm and panic.

We wish you an apocalyptic Christmas.

Don’t worry. All the merry, cozy, twinkly stuff is still coming. Truth is, we’ve been awash in it since before Thanksgiving, haven’t we? This week’s readings aren’t about depriving you of all that. Nor are they about shaming you for enjoying it. They are about reminding you why it matters so much.

Christmas is holy time and sacred space. And well it should be. But one of the things I love most about Christianity is its utter lack of fussiness about admission to such times and spaces. Yes, plenty of churches will expect you to dress up on the outside and at least pretend to clean up on the inside before arriving at one of their Christmas services. But Christianity itself has no such expectations.

Quite the opposite, Christianity urges you to come as you are, with your dirty, rumpled clothes and equally dirty, rumpled life, be you a tax collector like Matthew, an ignorant fisherman like Peter, a doubter like Thomas, or even a traitor like Judas. Come as you are, Christianity says, and bring your violent, panicked, falling-apart-at-the-seams world with you, because Christmas isn’t nearly as much about your coming to God as it is about God’s coming to you, and coming to you not in spite of your mess but because of it.

It’s easy to get the idea that there’s no place for you by the manger until you can make yourself as happy and peaceful as the shepherds, the wise men, Mary and Joseph all seem to be. Make no mistake, though. The manger lies in the world Jesus described that evening on the Mount of Olives. He knew all about that world before he came. Knew all about you, too. And yet he came anyway, came and laid down his life both for it and for you. The adorers around the manger aren’t smiling in bliss. They’re smiling because their redemption is drawing near. So lift up your head. Yours is drawing near, too.

Next week: Second Sunday of Advent