December 29, 2024
Christmas 1 Year C
Luke 2:41-51
Epiphany, Winnipeg
December 29, 2024
First, a bit about me. Quite a bit, actually – more than usual.
It’s good to be back, and thank you so much for the way you’ve welcomed me back. I was away for three months, but it really has felt like I’ve come home after being away for a couple of days. You just easily let me slide back in. It felt easy and natural, like I belong here.
Thank you also for supporting me and this whole sabbatical thing. As I sat down to write all this I tried for the longest time to spell out what that thanks might all look like, but I just kept writing a paragraph, hitting delete, writing a paragraph and hitting delete again. So I’ll just say thanks. I’m so grateful that you gave me this opportunity.
Here’s a quick overview of what I did from September 15th.to December 16th. I started out by wondering what on earth it’s supposed to look like when you don’t go to work in the morning. Then, after about a week, I flew off to Norway to walk eight days of an ancient pilgrimage route. I’ll have more to say about all that on another day. But what a time that was. So good.
Then Val joined me in Norway, and we spent another two weeks and a bit traveling further north, visiting a friend, visiting a few churches, and visiting some places where Val has roots.
I feel a deep connection to that place; I felt, and I feel like I belong there. At the same time, though, I don’t quite belong. I’m not really Norwegian; I’m Canadian. The little bit of Norwegian I speak is not nearly enough to fit in, and being a real Norwegian in Norway is not like being a third generation Canadian who still says, “Yay, I’m Norwegian!” I didn’t quite belong. But I really felt like I belonged. Belonging is a complicated thing.
We came back to Winnipeg in mid-October, and from that time on I did a lot of reading and worked on some writing about my pilgrimage. I went to Edmonton for a meeting of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue of Canada, and I preached to a group that included a whole bunch of Anglican and Catholic bishops and a couple of Lutheran ones as well. I felt like I belonged, and why not? We’re all part of the same Body of Christ. But at the same time, we move in different worlds, and we say we’re one in Christ and we belong together but we don’t always belong easily. It’s complicated.
I visited with family in Calgary, visited our son in Whitehorse, went for long walks with Val, and did regular home-type stuff that we all have to do. And I rested. Epiphany is not an exhausting place to work, but I think I didn’t realize how tired I actually was when I started my sabbatical. So I rested.
And I read. Books by Matthew Anderson, a pastor who writes about our relationship with this land we call Canada that some say was settled and some say was stolen. It got me thinking a lot about belonging – do I belong on this land? What does it mean to say that I do? Does this land belong to me? Do I belong to it? I read some things by Stephen Charleston, who is an Indigenous bishop from the Episcopal Church in the USA, and by Katherine Vermette, a Metis author from Winnipeg who’s written some really beautiful and difficult and honest novels that leave me wondering what it means to belong to a big connected community of people with so much love and so much hurt. I read Murry Sinclair’s memoir the week after he died, and I read his son Nigaan’s book called Winipek, and just for fun I read the autobiography of Geddy Lee, my favourite bass player.
All of that reading somehow had me thinking about belonging again. Even my favourite bass player’s autobiography, as he wrote about growing up Jewish in Toronto in the sixties, and always wondering whether he fits, whether he belongs.
Val and I went to Falcon Lake for a few days a couple of weeks ago, and then I came here on Monday the 16th. I was given the new key to the building and to my office – I took that to be a good sign – and then started trying to find my rhythm again.
And, just for fun, in the middle of all that I got COVID again. Why not, eh?
A few weeks ago I tuned in to the recording of Sunday morning worship from here and fast forwarded to communion so that I could see who was coming up to the front. I wasn’t taking attendance; I just wanted to see some familiar faces. What happened, of course, was that I saw a lot of familiar backs of heads, but that was enough to help me look forward some more to being back here. It’s kind of like I belong here. I didn’t always, and in some way I guess I won’t forever, but right now this is the place. It’s where I belong.
In case you hadn’t noticed, this whole idea of “belonging” has been on my mind.
We heard that story a few minutes ago about Jesus in the temple with the teachers there. He’d been there with his mom and dad for the feast of Passover, along with thousands of people from all over the country and maybe even the known world, coming from all directions. On the way home from the festival Mary and Joseph lose track of Jesus in the crowds, and after three or four days of searching they find him in the temple, where he and the teachers are caught up in some really lively conversation. Mary and Joseph find Jesus and say, “How could you do this to us!?” And Jesus just says, “Why were you looking all over for me? Didn’t you know that I have to be in my Father’s house?”
It’s a big change: Five days ago we heard and sang about the infant Jesus, but today we jump ahead twelve years and find him slipping away from his parents because he just has to be in, as he says it, his Father’s house. It’s where he belongs. Not the house back in Nazareth, not his mom and dad’s house, but his Father’s house. He’s not the infant any more, and now he looks more like someone who’s growing up and starting to claim his own space in a life where he’s more than just Joseph and Mary’s boy. He doesn’t just belong at home any more.
It seems like he’s saying he belongs in the temple in Jerusalem. The funny thing is, though, that about twenty years down the road that place will not be so hospitable any more. He’ll march into the temple and make a holy fuss and uproar, and the teachers and leaders will be more interested in getting rid of Jesus than in sitting down for some theological discussion. If his Father’s house is the temple, and if that’s where he belongs…well, sometimes he won’t belong. It’s a complicated relationship.
As this story ends he goes back home, and is obedient to his parents. Maybe he’s back where he belongs: with his family. But that belonging will get complicated too, and one day his own family, his mom and his siblings, will start to think he’s maybe gone off the rails and needs to be stopped. It’s a complicated relationship with this family where he’s supposed to belong. And again, the day will come when he’s welcomed by a crowd, and only a few days later he’s condemned by so many in that same crowd. Belonging is a complicated thing. Even for Jesus. He belongs. But sometimes it just seems like he doesn’t at all.
We’re in these holy days of Christmas, this time when we’re called to contemplate the mystery that God comes to us, and that the healing and renewal and salvation of the world comes into the world as a child who starts out just like the rest of us, as a baby: A child who belongs here, in the world. Jesus won’t spend much time in the temple, that place he calls the house of his Father; he’ll spend most of his time out on the road with all sorts of people; sometimes being welcomed, sometimes being rejected, sometimes being at home, and sometimes having no place at all to lay his head. But that world and that life is where Jesus belongs. When he tells his mom and dad that he’s got to be in his Father’s house, maybe he’s not just talking about the temple. He’s talking about the world, this place where God is always present, this place where Jesus belongs and sometimes seems so out of place, this place where you or I might sometimes feel so at home and where we sometimes don’t feel like we belong at all.
That’s the world and the life where this little Lord Jesus is born, away in a manger, in a little town of Bethlehem, on a silent night or in a town filled with the noise of travelers and pilgrims carousing late into the night. That’s the world and the life where Jesus is born, this is the world and the life where Jesus is born, where the beauty and wonder of it all can make us feel so much like we belong, and where the fear of changing climates or changing politics, or the fear that nothing will ever change, can make us wonder if there will be a place for any of us to belong. That’s the world where Jesus belongs.
No catchy conclusion to a sermon today. I’d just like to invite you, as these next days weeks and months roll by, as a new year gets underway, to consider the ways that you might belong or might not feel so much like you belong, and to consider the ways that that world can be a place to belong and a place where you or I or we can be a little or a lot out of place. And then keep your eyes and ears open for the presence of this child who is born, this twelve-year old who slips away from the family to be somewhere else where he belongs, this one who loves and lives and dies and lives again for this world and this place we call home.