In our day, and maybe, they say, since the good old days of Victorian England, the Christmas season has been all about being home. You know the imagery: with the fire ablaze in the living room, children gathered around, and everybody home for the holidays, right where they should be. But it’s striking sometimes to look at how different that image of family is from the stories we’ve heard over the past five weeks of Advent and Christmas about Jesus’s family, his parents, his cousin John the Baptist, all the people in Luke’s wonderful narrative of Christ’s birth and childhood.
One of those differences that we can pay some attention to is that the whole season of Advent may be about family, but in fact, almost no one that we’ve seen is comfortably at home. John the Baptist has gone to live in the desert, and that’s where we meet him; Joseph and Mary are in the midst of traveling when Jesus is born, and he’s visited at his birth by shepherds, working and sleeping in the fields, and by mysterious wise men who, wherever they were from, were very far from there. A scene made up entirely of travelers. Even today, on the feast of the Holy Family, the traveling never stops, once again Joseph and Mary are on the move, once again fulfilling an obligation to their faith related to Jesus’s coming of age, and they experience the traveling parent’s worst nightmare, as Jesus disappears from their sight for three days, just as he will disappear for three days on Good Friday, to great anxiety and sadness, only to return to tell them that he was doing what he needed to do, whether they understand it or not. And clearly, as it says here, they don’t understand how it is that his role is to leave them.
As so often in the New Testament, as Jesus begins his ministry and begins to call disciples and bring healing, there are more stories here about people leaving home, leaving their family, than there are stories about people settling down and building families. Perhaps most radical of all is the first reading today from the Old Testament, from the Book of Samuel, where we hear about Hannah giving her just-born son Samuel to the temple so that he can stay there forever and be raised there and consecrated in service. Now once again, I have to make it clear that despite the occasional request, St. David’s does not offer a program like this if you are interested in it for your children, so don’t call, but just think for a moment of this image: How strange it is on the feast of the Holy Family that what we hear about is families divided, children leaving, parents sometimes filled with faith, but also sometimes confused about what God was doing to their family.
If we do nothing else today, it’s a good day to remember that this is the feast of the Holy Family, not the Perfect Family. And that holiness in a family doesn’t have to do with how stable we all are, or how much we are together, or whether you have children who have fulfilled your expectations, or even whether everyone gets along. What we’re striving for as we build and support our families is not perfection, but responsiveness, a willingness for each person in the family to put God’s call first, a willingness to listen and to change and to move and to adapt and sometimes to accept something that seems terribly hard. What we all need as families isn’t perfection; in a way, it is the opposite of what we sometimes picture as perfection — as a family sometimes we can be so directed and so self-contained that when God’s call comes, we find a way to tune it out, maybe even using our family responsibilities and priorities as a reason we can’t move, or change, or be of help to others. That may be the difference between a Holy Family, and other kinds of families: Holy Families aren’t ends in themselves, they are places that enable us to be on the road to someplace else, to be ready when we get our message from the angel.
Here at the end of this gospel reading it says that after scaring his parents this way, Jesus went home and was obedient to them. But this reading isn’t about obedience to parents, or about parents being completely devoted to children Both of those are good things, but only if they don’t replace genuine searching and readiness for the work and the call that may take us way outside the expectations we have for our family or any other family we know. That willingness to travel someplace new, maybe alone or maybe together, is what makes families holy.