Meg Peery McLaughlin
Mind Your Business
November 10, 2024
Luke 2: 41-52
I chose our scripture for this Sunday earlier this Fall.
Looking at the church calendar only,
I chose the story of Jesus coming into his adulthood in Luke chapter 2
with Presbyterian Campus Ministry in mind.
Because this weekend more than 100 PCM Alums,
including 3 who are your current pastors,
gathered here at UPC to celebrate how during their years at Carolina,
they had sacred space to call home,
they had pastor dedicated to their care and spiritual health
they had friends with whom to break bread.
(and access to a bathroom near Franklin street).
PCM is a coming of age place.
We call it a place to belong, a place to believe, a place to become.
To become. I’m a sucker for coming of age stories.
Catcher in the Rye
Inside Out 2
To Kill a Mockingbird
Are you there God? It’s me Margaret
It’s hard, holy work, coming into your own,
listening for who God is calling you to be,
trusting your baptism, knowing who you are in this world.
I picked this story of Jesus coming of age, as our text to explore together,
intending to thank you for your commitment
to these students—past, present and future. It matters.
But as this Fall unfolded and November drew near,
it dawned on me that November 10,
was not only going to be the Twenty Fifth Sunday after Pentecost,
and PCM Homecoming,
but would also be the Sunday after the Election.
What to do? Change the scripture? But to what? The preacher mind raced.
But here’s the thing: Presbyterians don’t proof text, it’s not our style.
Scripture reveals the heart of God, not our own opinions.
And so we stick to the Word, we stick by the Word,
and see what God might have to say to us today.
As we approach this word, let us pray:
Almighty God,
Silence our agendas; confound our expectations-
penetrate the corners of our hearts with your life giving Word.
Speak. We are listening. Amen
Now every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover.
And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival.
When the festival was ended and they started to return,
the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem,
but his parents were unaware of this.
44 Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey.
Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends.
When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him.
After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers,
listening to them and asking them questions.
And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.
When his parents saw him they were astonished, and his mother said to him,
“Child, why have you treated us like this?
Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you.”
He said to them, “Why were you searching for me?
Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
But they did not understand what he said to them.
Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them,
and his mother treasured all these things in her heart.
And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
This story starts with people who love Jesus making an assumption about Jesus.
Mary and Joseph assume Jesus is with them.
They assume he’s in their group, in their company the text says.
They assume that he is lockstep with them,
falling in line with their every expectation.
It’s an easy thing to do, isn’t it?
Easy to assume that Jesus is with us, in our company;
to presume he’s marching to the beat of the same drum we are beating.
I will only speak for myself, and not proudly
but I confess I’ve made that assumption, and it’s made this week even harder to bear.
I think it’s probably no surprise to you that I voted blue.
I believe it is a faithful thing—whether red or blue—
for Jesus’ teachings to shape my political values,
for my faith informs my partisan choices.
But if I take that too far,
And assume that Jesus is lock step with my way,
and then it doesn’t go my way,
not only am I disappointed, but I feel distant from God.
–
This story starts with people who love Jesus being really anxious.
When Mary and Joseph realize that Jesus is not with them, they panic.
Luke tells us that when they cannot find Jesus,
they ask their relatives, their friends. It’s a frantic scene.
No doubt their minds had gone to the worst-case scenario.
For three days, it must have felt like the sky was falling.
I’ve heard from many you this week—you are in despair, disoriented, deeply troubled.
I know that we are not all like-minded politically, that there is a range in this room.
And indeed, I give God thanks for a church where red and blue, left and right,
can live in communion with Christ and one another.
But I see you- on edge. Tearful. Anxious. It’s okay to say that here. You are not alone.
–
This story ends with people who love Jesus learning something important about him.
Mary and Joseph dump all their busted assumptions,
all their anxiety, anger, angst at Jesus’ feet.
And he simply, calmly, responds:
Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?
His Father’s House is the Temple
— where Jesus is reading the scriptures, discussing the Torah with the rabbis.
The Temple, what Jews believed was the very dwelling place of God.
It’s where they’d all just gathered
as the Passover lamb was sacrificed to celebrate the Exodus,
where they’d worshipped God who has always been in the habit of setting people free.
Of course Jesus would be in the temple.
Other translations say
Did you not know I’d be about my Father’s business?
This is a whole word, church.
When we are panicking that he’s lost because he’s not where we expect him,
Jesus is in his Father’s house.
When we are walking around assuming that Jesus is in our company,
anxious, our minds scattered in fear,
Jesus is minding his Father’s business.
And what is that business other than:
healing the sick, feeding the hungry,
welcoming the stranger, binding up the broken hearted,
executing justice for the orphan and widow,
blessing, blessing, blessing all of creation.
As the body of Christ the church, we know that Christ’s business is our own,
if we claim to follow in his way.
So I suppose what want to say today
on this 10th day of November that we ought to keep minding our business.
Thursday we are putting on a Trivia Night for UPC Session and Board of Deacons, asking questions about what it is to be the church, to be about God’s work.
It’ll be the venue for Officer Examination for our new
Elders (those who govern us)
and Deacons (those who care for us).
Last week we had Officer Training to get them ready and give the
newbies a solid edge on the competition.
During the training, Jarrett had a slide up on the screen
that listed the 13 statements of faith that make up our
Presbyterian Book of Confessions.
When you ask a Presbyterian what they believe, they won’t give you a tidy checklist, they’ll give a whole book of statements of belief,
written at different times in history, sometimes with slightly conflicting doctrines. Fun, right?
So Gary Crunkleton is a Deacon Elect and seeing this list he raised his hand and said,
“I want to know about the Theological Declaration of Barmen,” he said,
“because I’m a barman!” (I love you, Gary).
To help us understand that confession, we first backed up to an older one.
The Scots Confession, written during the Reformation, says this:
The church professes that empires, kingdoms, dominions, and cities are appointed and ordained by God; the powers and authorities in them, emperors in empires, kings in their realms, dukes and princes in their dominions, and magistrates in cities, are ordained by God’s holy ordinance for the manifestation of his own glory and for the good and well being of all men.
It goes on to say that such leaders of the state should be loved and
held in the highest respect, because they are “lieutenants of God.”
Fast forward to 1934 in Germany where Christians were living with the Nazi party in power. Their State had started meddling in the church,
pushing it to de-Judaize Christianity by telling the church to remove the Old Testament and present Jesus not as a brown skinned Jew,
but as one of the Aryan race.
So in a place called Barmen, a town just east of Dusseldorf,
some Reformed churches came together to articulate
that Jesus Christ is the only lieutenant of God–
the one Living Word of God who we are to trust and obey in life and in death.
The Barmen Declaration says: We reject the false doctrine,
as though the church were permitted to abandon its message because of the
to changes in prevailing political convictions.
So, Gary, my barman friend,
turns out you pointed to an important teaching in the wake of an election:
That’s that no matter what,
the church of Jesus Christ is to keep on minding our business,
refusing to abandon our message.
And our message is one of free grace to all people .
And our business is following the one who said:
Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.
Pray for your enemies.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.
Look out for false prophets.
Forgive as you have been forgiven.
Do not lay up treasures on earth.
Be wise as serpents; gentle as doves.
Judge not.
Let your light shine.
So mind your business, church.
Now I know the common phrase is Mind your OWN Business.
I’m just minding my own business, we say as we stay in our lane, do our thing.
But I tell you what, when we are about God’s business,
it’s not a quiet private matter, it veers in all the lanes
and it’s never just about ourselves.
It’s connected—deeply interconnected– to people and planet,
it messes with our schedules and sense of security.
Jesus business is risky business.
Will Willimon, who used to be Dean of the Chapel at Duke,
and who is also our own Lynn Blanchard’s cousin, I learned this year,
Will tells a story of when he was a pastor, it’s a story about a member of his church who owned a hardware store, but always took Sunday off to be in worship.
Will writes,
Someone had warned me about him when I moved there.
“He’s usually quiet,” they said “but be careful”
People in that church still recalled the Sunday in 1970 when,
in the middle of a sermon that referenced Nixon and the Vietnam War,
he stood up, shook his head, and walked right out.
So I always preached with one eye on my notes and the other on him.
He hadn’t walked out on a sermon in more than ten years.
Still a preacher can never be too safe.
You can imagine my fear when one Sunday,
having waited until everyone had shaken my hand and left the narthex,
he approached me, gritted his teeth and muttered
“I just don’t see things your way, preacher.”
I moved into my best mode of non-defensive defensiveness,
assuring him that my sermon was just one way of looking at things,
at that perhaps he may have misinterpreted what I said,
and even if he had not, I could very well be wrong, er, uh. . .
“Don’t you back off with me,” he snapped.
“I just said that your sermon shook me up. I didn’t ask you to take it back.
Stick by the Word—if you’re a real preacher. Don’t you dare take it back .
We are Presbyterians. We stick by the Word.
So let’s mind our business.
of truth-telling, peace-making, justice-doing.
Let’s mind our business and don’t dare back down.
In the name of the Father and Son of Holy Spirit.