While there is disagreement on the numbering of the Ten Commandments, there is no argument about the first commandment, “I am the Lord, your God. You shall have no other God’s before me.†The Hebrew scriptures tell the story of a people who abandon child sacrifice, the worship of idols, of objects, of the “high places†and Asherah poles. Christianity took this further still, declaring that God’s presence was not located in Jerusalem’s Temple, a building destroyed during the lifetime of that first Jesus community, but that God’s presence was to be found where followers broke bread together, and in the face of neighbors, of the poor and of the oppressed.
There is some irony, then, to the ready embrace of idols by a certain segment of Christians, the American flag, statues of men who committed treason as they defended the sin of slavery. But the greatest irony of all is that some worship the very book that tells them not to worship anything but God. They worship the Bible, believing that this human-made jumble of ancient texts is inerrant, despite the countless contradictions, the glaring errors. Some go further still, making the Jacobin-era editors of the Authorized Version, commonly known as the King James, conduits for divine translation. Their God is stuck four centuries in the past, for while the language is sometimes poetic, it is often wildly inaccurate.
I could speak for days about this heresy, and particularly about the hypocrisy of selective literalism, in which some texts, especially those that make women subservient to men and condemn members of the LGBTQ community, are to be taken literally, while we are not meant to take other texts, about shrimp and mixed fibers and tithing and feeding hungry people, literally.
But I don’t need to go there this morning, for the greatest lie the Bible ever told is right there in today’s text. “Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them.â€
Now, teenagers are an invention of the developed world. As is true in lesser developed nations today, life in ancient Palestine was short, rough, and violent. You married early, worked forever, then died, sometimes from starvation, sometimes from disease, sometimes at the end of a Roman sword. That you became a man at the age of twelve is preserved in the Bar Mitzvah tradition in Rabbinic Judaism. Jesus goes to Jerusalem for Passover for the first time as a man.
I’m not really trying to say that Jesus was a moody teenager in a bedroom with black walls and a warning sign on the closed door. And there was that whole “honor your father and mother†commandment, though that seems more oriented toward the interdependence of family and tribe than toward literal obedience. No, I’m just thinking that the Jesus I know from the gospels marches to the beat of his own drum, or to God’s drum that only he fully hears, and that a twelve year-old kid who gives a saucy comeback to his parents when he’s been missing for three days is probably going to drive them a little crazy at thirteen too…
But we completely and willfully miss the point on this story, domesticating it, because we want our faith to be comfortable and easy. This story is not meant to be comfortable and easy. It is not a diary entry from Mary’s journal covered in unicorns and glitter or the journal of teenage Jesus, graffiti and teen spirit, the smell of Axe and angst. This is a story being told by people who already know how it ends. This is a story of foreshadowing, an overture. Jesus is gone. They find him on the third day. When they do find him, he explains that he has been in his Father’s house, and he sure isn’t speaking about Joseph.
That this reading is paired with a story of the boy Samuel is no accident, for like Jesus, Samuel has been destined since birth for great things, for God’s service. Hannah had no children in an age when a woman’s worth was determined by her ability to produce a male heir. We see this theme again and again in the Hebrew scriptures. Hannah promises God that if she has a son, she will dedicate him to the Lord’s service as a nazirite. This term can confuse the modern mind, for it sounds like Nazareth, the childhood home of Jesus. It is actually unrelated. A nazirite was one who has been set aside, consecrated to Yahweh, whether male or female. The rules for nazirite status are found in the Book of Numbers. A person could be a temporary nazirite, taking the vow for a fixed period, or a permanent nazirite, like Samson or Samuel.
They were called to abstain from the fruit of the vine, not just wine but also grapes and grape juice and even grape leaves. They were not to cut their hair. Most difficult of all, they were never to be in the presence of a corpse, which would make them unclean and force them to restart their period as a nazirite. The oral Torah reports that Queen Helena was near the end of a seven year commitment as a nazirite twice when someone died in her presence, meaning she spent 21 years as a nazirite before her vow was fulfilled.
Being a nazirite was a sacrifice, a discipline, a commitment, a lifestyle. It is a mistake to understand Hannah’s decision to set her child aside as a nazirite through the lens of modern Western individualism. This was not a be yourself culture where Samuel might grow up to be a physicist or basketball player or ballet dancer. This was a world of subsistence and service.
These are not stories of domesticity. These are stories of letting God be God, not about human plans and human action, but about divine plans and divine action, stories of sacrifice and displacement and something more powerful than us, of a story that is still playing out, the story of the boy Samuel in the Tent of Meeting, for the First Temple had not yet been built, of Jesus in the Second Temple, for it had not yet be destroyed. This is a story of submission to something more powerful than self, more powerful than nation. It is not fluffy and cute and comfortable.
Today’s gospel is crucifixion and resurrection, reminding us that this baby, like Hannah’s son, is destined from birth to play a role in God’s story. Lest we miss the point, Luke uses the exact same phrase in both stories: Mary treasured these things in her heart.
But before we get all glum, before we throw out this story, no longer fun and cute, before we skip over difficult texts about the sons of Eli, we should remember that the authors already knew more of the story, knew what was coming. Looking at one episode, isolated from the story, as we do Sunday after Sunday, is meaningless, or worse still, gives a perverted meaning. This is why it is critical that we remain immersed in scripture when all too often we find ourselves walking away, turned off by the selective literalists, by the Bible-worshipping preachers of hate. Are we really willing to surrender God’s story to those who would misuse it?
You have to know scripture to catch the fact that Mary treasures in her heart both the words of the shepherds and the words of twelve-year old Jesus.
You have to know scripture to know that Samuel who hears voices and has bad news for the sons of Eli would one day anoint a young shepherd boy named David. You have to know scripture, live with scripture so that when Jesus is found on the third day, you immediately think of that other third day.
This is not worshipping a book. It is worshipping the author of the book of life itself, the one who is writing the story, a story in which you play a part, one character in a cast of billions, a story that calls us to be our best, to shine bright and love hard, to find our nirvana not in idols but in love for our fellow humans and for that same God that Jesus calls Father.
Amen.