Laguna Niguel Presbyterian Church

First Lesson – Colossians 3:12-17

Second Lesson - Luke 2:41-52 – Searching for Jesus

Pastor Sara McCurdy – December 29, 2024

Luke tells us in his prologue to the Gospel that he has decided to write an “orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us.” He does just that in the passage for this morning because Luke 2:41-52 is the closing passage of Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ birth. The beautiful passages we have heard over the Christmas season began with Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that her child will be called Jesus. And so up to this point he has been called Jesus and holy. But now, in an orderly manner the birth narrative comes to a close, and only now is Jesus called God’s son. Listen to the word of the Lord for you this morning:

Luke 2:41-52

Jesus is missing and the search is on. Have you ever experienced something like that in your life? Spiritually speaking that is - that you have lost touch with Jesus. Searching for Jesus – searching for grace perhaps within yourself or in a relationship. Maybe, even feeling rather desperate for God’s grace to be present. Perhaps trying any number of things to fill that Spirit created place inside of you. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until we rest in you.” St. Augustine’s famous words. Oh, we search diligently in hope of finding a solution for our restlessness - hoping to fill the emptiness inside when Jesus appears to be missing. Some of us go for another glass of wine, or a bag full of cookies, excess shopping. A woman who visited our Grief Share group told us that she spent over $100,000 dollars on clothing and travel after her husband died. The dis-ease she felt must have been very painful. Some of us binge on a tv shows hoping to avoid the dis-ease created by grief. Searching for peace – for Jesus. There is a restlessness inside of us until we find communion with our Lord.

You, O God, are the air I breath. I’m lost without you. I’m lost without you. And boy, can we human beings get lost. There’s a spiritual hunger within us. That’s just how we are created. A spiritual yearning that must be satisfied.

In this passage, when Jesus was 12 years old, he must have experienced that kind of Spiritual hunger after attending the Passover festival in Jerusalem. Perhaps the Passover festival awakened within him a yearning for more, more prayer, more knowledge, more of his Father’s presence and more of his Father’s love. And he must have felt a good deal of urgency responding to this call of the Spirit, enough to risk causing great anxiety for his parents, Mary and Joseph.

The story of the boy Jesus after the Passover festival in brief is this. The family went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. It was a long trip, and they stayed several days. When the festival was over, they started their journey back to Nazareth – a three-day trip on foot.

Luke who tells the story, says that they were in a caravan or group of travelers. Many families would have gone from Nazareth to Jerusalem for Passover. Traveling together afforded safety in numbers. Adults enjoyed talking with each other and children enjoyed playing together along the way.

But at the end of the day, after walking around 20 miles, husbands and wives started looking for each other and parents started looking for their children. Mary and Joseph searched and searched.

Any parent knows how that feels. At first, you’re mildly aggravated. Then you’re worried. At some point a kind of panic sets in. Once Mary and Joseph scoured every corner of the caravan, they realized that Jesus just wasn’t there so, tired and worried they began the long trip back to Jerusalem. Luke says it took the three days to find Jesus.

They tell their son how worried they were. “Child, Mary says, why did you do this to us? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” They found him in the Temple – in God’s house. “Did you not know, says Jesus, that I must be in my Father’s house?” Jesus just like us was created with deep sense of spiritual yearning but he knew exactly where to go to have it satisfied.

Jesus made a choice to stay behind with the teachers in the Temple based on his spiritual yearning and a deep sense of who he was. Daily we have the opportunity to make choices based upon who we are. When you are feeling restless, searching for something to fill your innate hunger where does your deep sense of who we are lead you?

Father Ronald Rolheiser is a Catholic Priest who wrote a book entitled The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. He writes “it is no easy task to walk this earth and find peace.” He contends, much like St. Augustine, that men and women alike, are “forever restless – so over charged with desire that it is hard to come to simple rest.” He believes there is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. Freud, Jung, great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology and religion all attempt to name and analyze the desire that stirs the human soul. All talking about an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a loneliness, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience.

Rolheiser’s message is that Spirituality is ultimately about what we do with that universal dis-ease. What we do with our longings. What we do with our fire, how we channel it, is our spirituality. Spirituality is what we do with our unrest. So, everyone has to have a spirituality, and everyone does have one, either a life giving one like searching for God in the Temple or searching for Jesus in the church, in prayer, in scripture or a destructive one – drinking a little too much, or unhealthy eating, overspending. God has created us for God’s self, and we will be restless until we find our rest in God, Father, Son and Spirit.

Mary and Joseph practiced piety in their lives and in their home. They went on an annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem at Passover. But at this point in their journey, they and their friends in the caravan were unsure of Jesus identity. They did not fully know that he was the Son of God. They did not automatically search for Jesus in the Temple.

Jesus knew who he was. He knew he was the Son of God so on a deep sense of knowing who he was he went to his Father’s house. “I must, he said, be in my Father’s House.”

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until we rest in you.” You know who you are. Most of you have stated publicly that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior. You know who Jesus is - that he is the Son of God. He is your Lord and Savior. On those occasions when Jesus seems lost in your life or when you simply feel restless, there is no need to get lost. No need to search for Jesus elsewhere. He is here in the pages of scripture. And in this sanctuary every Sunday morning. He is always waiting for you to find him, wherever you happen to be –inviting you to end your search in Him. Amen.