NOTE: This week’s sermon by Rev. Dr. Charles Qualls incorporates dramatized conversations, bringing the Gospel story to life with a fresh and engaging perspective  

Mary: I don't know where we lost him. What are we going to do?

Joseph: Lost is such a strong word. Maybe he's not lost. Maybe we simply haven't found him yet.

Mary: We've been looking for over a day now. When do you think you'll consider him lost?

Joseph: Hey, he was hanging out some with the Rubenstein boy back in town. We haven't come up on them in the caravan yet. Maybe he's with them.

Mary: Maybe you're right. Maybe he's with the Rubensteins. I just love that Missy. She's such a good mother, unlike me. I can't even come up with a son when he's lost. I'm terrible, terrible I say.

Joseph: Now Mary, I'm sure there's going to be a perfectly good explanation for all this when we find him.

Mary: If we find him, how can you stay so calm at a time like this?

Joseph: Well, panicking isn't going to bring us to him any sooner. Let's keep working our way backward, even if it means going all the way back to the temple.

Mary: The temple? I hadn't even thought about going there. You don't think surely he's still back in town, do you? I just don't know. We won't know until we find him. Mary, go easy on yourself. Let's see where he is. We'll find him. Don't give up and don't think the worst.

Mary: I won't, but when we find him, I'm going to have a lot of questions for that boy.

Joseph: I bet you will.

It can happen so quickly. Those of you with kids know. Those of you who have been kids know. We've all lived some version of this.

I was about 4 or 5 years old when my one and only experience with getting lost happened. We were at the Kmart discount store on Roswell Road in Atlanta. Seems that some of my best childhood stories happened at the Kmart. I have no idea why, but this one was terrifying.

My family was together, my parents were shopping, I thought I was paying attention. Except that something else, something hanging on a rack or sitting on a shelf down at my eye level, caught my attention. I took a couple of steps over to another aisle to get a closer look and that was it.

Some of you have probably watched one of the Home Alone movies. That franchise of stories was based on this very thing. Evidently, my parents were also zoned in on what they were doing. It can happen so easily. And suddenly, I realized I couldn't find my family. I walked a bit, looked where I thought they were. No family. I began a frantic run. I remember it clearly. I began to cry a bit as I stumbled around and around, scared out of my wits. I'm sure I was only alone for a few seconds, maybe a minute at most, but it felt like an eternity. To that point, easily the scariest thing that had ever happened to me.

Finally, a kind adult caught onto what was happening and she spoke gently and took me by the hand and said she would help me. She walked me to the front. Maybe it wasn't the best way to handle it, but that was a simpler day and age back then. A manager got on the PA system and asked if the parents of the lost little boy would come to the front. The sight of my dad walking toward me was one of the greatest sights I had ever seen to that point of my young life until I read the room.

I'd like to think that my ability to read a room has developed and become a little more sophisticated these days, but it didn't take an emotional genius to interpret the look on his face. I was still glad to be restored to my family as he approached, but he didn't look happy.

Temple Priest 01: So, since we have our precocious young friend here, maybe we should see what he wants to talk about.

Temple Priest 02: Yeah, he's been asking us questions about the scrolls in the ancient days. Let's see what he thinks about the current day.

Temple Priest 01: I would have to hand it to him. He's obviously been paying attention to the teachings. Perhaps a little too close attention, I'd say... Okay, boy, what would you propose we talk about?

Jesus: I think I'd like to ask why we haven't heeded the prophets teachings any more closely than we have.

Temple Priest 02: Whatever do you mean, young one?

Jesus: Well, it just feels like we've had all these centuries since they wrote, since they told us what God was concerned about. Yet I don't see any difference today than what it seems like was true way back then.

Temple Priest 01: Can you justify such an insinuation?

Jesus: Well, the prophets told us that a lot of what has happened to us, the oppression we endure, was going to happen because we sort of brought it on ourselves.

Temple Priest 02: Go on...

Jesus: We weren't paying enough attention to God. Our people weren't honoring the Sabbath. They were addicted to violence. They were mistreating the poor and the alien. Those are things the prophets spoke of over and over.

Temple Priest 01: What's your point then, boy?

Jesus: We also had let the law become a substitute for actually being God's people. We've been relying on our heritage for too long. Are there any reforms underway to bring us back closer to who we were intended to be?

Temple Priest 01: The young one would pretend to know more than he does. Would he propose to lead us better than the prophets have under these extraordinary circumstances? Would he pretend to play God and judge us now?

You know, we don't get to know too much about Mary, Joseph, and Jesus in this episode, except that Mary was none too thrilled with her young son once they did find him 3 days later. Jesus seems to have been 12 years old. The Bar Mitzvah didn't exist yet.

Wouldn't it be a happy image to think that Jesus was off playing with his cousins? It wouldn't have been unusual in a caravan of family and close friends for the kids to have traveled together, even under the watchful eye of others in loco parentis, we might say.

That which we struggle to understand becomes a little more understandable. As Mary and Joseph realize a few days into the journey that Jesus isn't with the caravan at all, they backtrack. Can you imagine the anxious, frightful, and frenzied days until they finally arrived and found young Jesus in the temple, studying at the feet of the priests and rabbis, ostensibly, but also possibly, some interpreters think, holding court with them and quite nicely holding his own, the story can be read to suggest. Can you imagine the loss of control, the last shred of illusion that Mary and Joseph had, any final say-so over protecting and guiding their children without flaw?

What about Joseph? We don't get to know much about him, especially in Luke's gospel. Matthew tells us more about Joseph, what little we get. Can you imagine what it might have been like for Joseph, having this special son? What did Joseph teach Jesus? What did he show him how to do? What questions did he field from our young Lord as he experienced life from a vantage point that was different, perhaps, from the other little boys? Joseph had a role in all this. It's just a lesser role than Mary's. Joseph had a role and he was faithful to what God asked of him.

That sublime preacher, Chuck Bugg, wonders where they looked for young Jesus for three days as they searched. For three days, he observes, they evidently looked in all the wrong places. They probably went to where children might like to play. They didn't know yet to look where the outcasts were gathered, to look where the poor needed to be helped, to look where someone was discouraged or needing a new perspective, where people were hurting and in need of some form of healing, to look where the sinners gathered and the tax collectors hung out, and they didn't think to look in the temple at first. They didn't know just yet where Jesus would grow up and spend his time confronting the Church of His day. If we want to look for Jesus, those places are where Scripture actually tells us we should begin our looking.

Walter Brueggemann was right. He said, "There are times in our lives when we have things so planned out and then all of a sudden all those plans are disrupted."

And he says, "If you and I can believe that our lives are disrupted by the grace and the unconditional love of God, then Mary, Joseph, and Jesus' story makes a little more sense."

From here, Jesus will call to all of us and say, "Follow me."

It's so easy to leave him in the manger or as a little boy. We like that Jesus. But here, Jesus served notice that he knew what he had come to do.

Now as a new year begins, maybe our faith grows up a little too. We can get lost so easily, so distracted looking at all the wrong places, when from the pages of our Gospels, and using the voice of the Holy Spirit, Jesus is the only one we should follow, so that we ourselves might not get lost.