G is for Growing Up
This is the sermon I preached on Sunday, August 4 at St. Timothy Lutheran Church. The text is Luke 2:41-52. This month, all the texts I’ll be preaching from are in the New Testament. Today’s is from the Gospel of Luke. The title is “G is for Growing Up.” And who might we be referring to? We have, in today’s gospel, our sole encounter and picture of Jesus as a boy, a twelve-year-old boy. Like any boy of that age, he could be precocious and at the same time disobedient. What, you say? Jesus, the Son of God, disobedient? Yup! Joseph and Mary were faithful Jews. They went up to Jerusalem every year for the Passover, one of the pilgrimage feasts. That was no easy feat. Travel was considered dangerous, so people traveled in groups. It would have taken them four or five days to get to Jerusalem from Nazareth (R. Alan Culpepper, Luke, New Interpreter’s Bible). So many days out of one year just for travel time to celebrate this feast. But they were faithful, godly people. The year before