Turn Around and You're Grown (A Sermon from First Church in Cambridge)

First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
28 December 2003

Mary Luti

Turn Around and You're Grown

In the 1960's, there was a Kodak commercial that ran during "The Wonderful World of Disney." It was a photo sequence of a baby girl that captured her progress from infancy through girlhood, adolescence, young adulthood and marriage, ending with the young woman coming home from the hospital with a baby in her arms. The pictures were accompanied by a song called, "Turn Around":

Where are you going my little one, little one?
Where are you going my baby, my own?
Turn around and you're two,
Turn around and you're four,
Turn around and you're a young girl
Going out of the door.

Where are you going my little one, little one?
Little pigtails and petticoats,
Where have you gone?
Turn around and you're tiny,
Turn around and you're grown,
Turn around and you're a young wife
With babes of your own.¹

That commercial was pure (hetero-)sexism and over-the-top sentimentality, but it sure hit a parental nerve. People blubbered openly when it ran. Little ones do grow up, everyone knows; and they do it, it seems, when you are distracted for a split second.

Kodak, of course, wanted us to freeze this swift passage of time on their brand of film. I don't know how much film that commercial ended up moving for Kodak, but people sure do remember that song! In a brief internet search I discovered that on websites dedicated to all things motherish, "Turn Around" is a frequent topic of weepy appeals—"My daughter is getting married next month and I'm looking for a song from an old Kodak commercial that begins, 'Where are you going...?' Does anyone know where I can find it?"

You don't need to be a parent yourself to know that babies don't stay babies for very long, or to feel wistful at the passage of time. "Where are you going, my little one, little one?" is a question we often ask while gazing at old snapshots of ourselves. It is a question we ask in astonishment, with nostalgia, maybe with regret, always with a lump in our throats. Who is that sweet child? Where was I going? Where have I gone? Turn around, turn around ... As someone said, "Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened."

Only three days ago it was Christmas, and the Babe in the Manger hadn't even opened his eyes yet, let alone said "Ma-Ma." He's not old enough for strained peas, yet in the appointed gospel for today, the First Sunday of Christmas, we've fast forwarded to his adolescence. How did we get to this point so quickly? In our liturgical calendar, the Magi haven't even visited him yet. How can he be up and walking with his family all those miles from Nazareth to Jerusalem? "Turn around and he's twelve, turn around and he's grown..."

Grown, and a prodigy, wowing the teachers in the Temple with precocious questions. He's a willful boy too, worrying his parents to death. In fact, the word Luke uses to describe his mother's anguish in this episode is the same word Luke uses to describe the torment of the rich man who ends up in hell in the story of the beggar, Lazarus. It's a feeling of exquisite pain well known to countless parents the world over!

Anne Minton says that the moral of this story is that you can disobey your parents all you want as long as you say that God told you to do it. And she's not far wrong. It is a story about an important kind of disobedience. However, if an internet check of past sermonic offerings on this text is any indication, today a lot of preachers will "focus on the family" instead. They will reassure us that Mary and Joseph were not negligent parents for misplacing their kid. They'll tone down the fact that Mary seems to have forgotten that Jesus is supposed to be somebody special and yelled at him as if he were just a run of the mill, ratty pre-teen. They will spin Jesus' response to his mother's angry anguish, trying to turn what was intended as a rebuke into a kinder, gentler puzzlement. And they will play up the fact that in the end Jesus respects his parents' authority and "went down with them and was subject to them." Some may even say that this filial subjection was the source of his reported growth "in wisdom and favor, human and divine."

But it's important not to get all mucked up in a kind of Kodak sentimentality. This is not a story about a model Holy Family, even though in many churches that's what this Sunday is called. It's a story about a model dysfunctional one, and a story about how and why one must disobey. It is about the way an authentic vocation relativizes human absolutes, including the pull of blood kinship.

The point of this story turns on the use of the word "father" in the exchange between Jesus and Mary. Mary asks, "Why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been searching..." Jesus responds, "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?" Here Jesus shifts his filial allegiance from Joseph ("your father," as Mary calls him) to God ("my Father," as Jesus pointedly says).

The boy Jesus is becoming a man, and part of his growing up is being confronted with competing loyalties, feeling the acute tension between the ordinary duties and expectations of a child on the small stage of a biological family and great aspirations on the larger stage of the ministry to which he is beginning to know himself called. Growing up. Asking amazing questions. Ordering his priorities. Making choices. And accepting the obligation and pain that comes with a call: I must be about the business of God.

Of course Jesus finally does return home with his parents for the time being, and Luke says he does so "obediently." He was, after all, only twelve, not yet a fully-responsible man in the eyes of the Law. Except to assure us that he grew in wisdom and favor, human and divine, the gospels are then silent about him for the next 18 years. But the die was cast at twelve. Luke, who of all the gospel writers lavished the most imaginative detail on the traditions about the infancy of Jesus, has told us in this story, and in no uncertain terms, that Jesus was born for one purpose only—to grow up. To grow up into an adulthood shaped exclusively around the priorities of God's house and God's business.

For the grown-up Jesus, these priorities will eventually come to demand a wrenching re-ordering of values. We know how that goes: the mighty are to be cast down, the rich to be sent away empty, the meek to inherit the earth, the last to be first, reckless hospitality and mercy to trump everything else. His commitment to his Father's business will also demand a new kind of kinship that will unflinchingly and persistently condemn our ordinary idolatry of clan and nuclear families. His first and final allegiance to God's house over all other allegiances, personal, religious and national, will mark him for a state execution, and his own blood family will continue to be embarrassed, confused and disheartened by the things he says and the company he keeps.

But all this is in the future. It will come soon enough. In a split second of Marian distraction, he will be fully-grown. In another blink of an eye, he will be dying on a cross. But now he is a boy, learning the Law and beginning to walk in the pathway that will be his life.

III

I know that a lot of good, smart and faithful Christian folk struggle at Christmas with intellectual doubts about the veracity of the New Testament's infancy narratives. They find it hard to credit the flamboyantly supernatural dimensions of these stories—angelic announcements, the virgin birth, dreams and portents.

I struggle with these things too, but I struggle less with them than I do with what happens after the Christmas angels have retired to heaven and the great cosmic celebration dies down. My faith is far more challenged by the precocious, willful, disobedient boy in the temple than by the sweet sleeping babe in the hay. It is harder for me to believe the miracle of a life unreservedly shaped around the priority of God than it is for me to imagine that a virgin could bear a son without human agency. And I am most willing to embrace the possibility that God came as a human baby as long as God stays a baby and does not grow up to make demands on me.

UCC General Minister and President, John Thomas, tells this story:

"Bethlehem, Pa., was named by its Moravian founders after their first communion service was held on Christmas Eve. Today "the Christmas city" offers a delightful array of Moravian Christmas traditions [to the public]... Each year, a nativity scene is erected on the plaza between the library and city hall, dominated by a huge lighted star on the mountain overlooking the Lehigh River to the south. Once during my time as pastor in nearby Easton, the newspaper reported that the figure of Jesus had been stolen. Jesus was eventually located nearby, where the vandals had left him and, to avoid a recurrence, the city mothers and fathers bolted him to the manger after they returned him to the plaza."

Most of us, John comments, are "happy to keep Jesus bolted to his manger." Who wants him grown up and walking around, "meddling in the greed that denies children health care, or a decent home or a safe school? Who wants him challenging our easy resort to violence as the only way to global security? Who wants him asking us awkward questions about why we treat the creation as little more than a convenience store filled with raw materials to satisfy our endless desire? Who wants him holding up a mirror to the deceits and betrayals of our personal lives? Better to keep him bolted [to] that manger."²

Yes, indeed. We do hate to see the Infant Jesus grow up so fast. He's such a pretty little baby and we want to savor the Kodak moment forever. But it's not just because he's so pretty that we hate to see him leave his crib. It's also because we know that when that infant becomes a boy, and that boy becomes a man, we will be asked to grow up too.

1. "Turn Around," by Harry, Alan Greene and Malvina Reynolds.

2. "That baby in the manger? He grew up," UC News, December, 2003.