Sermon Notes — December 28, 2025
December 28, 2025
Sweet Little Jesus Boy
Luke 2:21-24, 39-40 (CEB)
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
Up until yesterday afternoon my house still looked like Christmas exploded. Fortunately I did have some time yesterday afternoon to work on getting things back to “normal,” and, well, we’re getting there. The presents have all been opened and mostly put away. The Christmas tree is still up, and will stay up until at least Epiphany, if not longer. We’ve had all the Christmas meals but the refrigerator is still stacked with leftovers. That’s my reality. Yours might be different. But for me after the busyness of the last few weeks – the shopping, the eating, the visiting, the wrapping, the unwrapping, the putting away – I am looking forward to a little bit of normal.
This is the last Sunday of the Advent and Christmas season. Next week is Epiphany, so we’ll leave Luke’s gospel and flip over to Matthew to hear the story about the strangers from the East who follow a bright star to Bethlehem and bring gifts to King Jesus. But during this season our worship has been almost exclusively shaped by the first two chapters of Luke. They are long chapters and they are packed full. We start with Zechariah in the temple and jump to Mary hanging out at home, and then Mary and Elizabeth together, and back to Mary and Joseph and then there are some shepherds in the field and prophets in the temple again, and we end with a story about twelve-year-old Jesus sending Mary and Joseph into total panic.
As I have been getting ready for today’s sermon I’ve been reading these stories again, stories that lead up to the birth of Sweet Little Jesus Boy, stories about Sweet Little Jesus Boy, and at least one story about when Mary and Joseph might not have thought their little Jesus boy was so sweet.
And what I want to offer you this morning is the sanctity – the sacredness – of normal.
Will you pray with me and for me?
All throughout the first two chapters of Luke we have been reading stories about normal people doing normal things. They’re not things that are normal for us, but they are quite normal for men and women living in the time and place of Jesus.
We start with Zechariah. We meet Zechariah in chapter 1 of Luke. Zechariah is a priest, and one of his duties as a priest is to enter into the innermost part of the temple in Jerusalem and bring offerings to God on behalf of the people. Not normal for me or for you, but quite normal for Zechariah. He’s just doing his job, minding his own business, when he looks up and – bam – there’s an angel standing there. He is terrified but he does manage a conversation with the angel in which the angel tells Zechariah that his wife will have a son and that they are to name the son John. This is John who we will come to know as John the Baptist. Zechariah, normal in every way, doing his normal things, receives a message from God.
Then there’s Mary. Now this is a subject of some debate in theological circles. Did God choose Mary because she was more special than other young women? Was she exemplary in any way? Had she done something that made God notice her? I am in the camp that says that Mary was no different than any other young woman. She was normal in every way. God doesn’t choose her because she’s special. She becomes special because God chooses her. She hears the angel’s proposal that she become the mother of the Son of the Most High and she consents. Mary, normal in every way, doing her normal things, becomes the mother of God.
Shepherds? Definitely normal. Doing their job, minding their own business, are also suddenly visited by an angel, and then a whole army of angels, with a message that their savior has been born, and that they can actually go see him if they’d like. They will know it’s him because he will be the baby wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a feeding trough.
Then we get to today’s text.
Normal for Mary and Joseph and the whole Jewish community was circumcision for baby boys eight days after they were born and publicly announcing the baby’s name. Normal for Mary and Joseph and the whole Jewish community was a mother bringing a sacrifice to the Temple forty days after she gave birth to a son. These things were normal because they were written in the Law of Moses – the law that God gave to the people when they fled from Egypt through the wilderness to the Promised Land.
The rituals in today’s text may sound like a lot to us, but for Mary and Joseph and Jesus they were normal. These were the rhythms of normal life.
There is a subtle shift between the normal that leads up to Jesus’ birth and the normal after Jesus is born. After Jesus is born Luke is very, very careful to emphasize just how faithful to these rhythms of life that Mary and Joseph were. Now I’m going to get off the subject a little bit and I hope you’ll bear with me, but I think this is really important for us to understand. Later in Luke’s gospel – and this is true in all the gospels – but later in Luke’s gospel Jesus is going to get sideways with the Jewish religious leaders. He is going to challenge them and they are going to challenge him, and people watching these interactions are going to get really uncomfortable and some of them will start to take sides.
So right here at the beginning of his gospel, Luke emphasizes that Jesus was raised in a family that was scrupulous in their observance of the Law. Mary and Joseph raise Jesus squarely in the middle of faithful Jewish tradition. They observe the Law because they love the Law and they raise Jesus to observe and love the Law, too.
Later in his life Jesus will challenge the religious leaders, but he will do so as a faithful Jewish man, not as an outsider. And that’s because his momma and daddy raised him right.
The part of the text that we skipped over here is the portion that Terry preached on last week, the presentation of Jesus in the temple.
And then, Luke tells us,
they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him. (Luke 2: 39-40).
But before we leave Jesus alone to grow up in peace, we get one more story situated within the faithful rhythms of normal life, and I’m skipping ahead here, but the story will probably sound familiar to you. Mary and Joseph and Jesus do what all devout Jewish families did three times each year – they travel to the Temple in Jerusalem to make offerings. In this particular story they travel to Jerusalem for the Feast of Passover, but there are two other Festivals that required a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They are the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Tabernacles. In this story Jesus is twelve years old, Luke tells us. Mary and Joseph and everyone else they were traveling with had made the required sacrifices in the temple and they were on the way home. An entire day into the trip back to Nazareth, Mary and Joseph realize that Jesus is not with them, and they make the whole day’s journey back to Jerusalem where they find Jesus sitting in the temple hanging out with the rabbis, listening to them talk to each other, and asking them questions. Mary, bless Mary, can you imagine? Relieved and angry all at the same time. So glad to have found him but wanting an explanation for why he had stayed behind when he knew good and well that everyone else had left Jerusalem.
The whole story – the first two chapters of Luke – are all about God who shows up within the rhythms of everyday life. Zechariah fulfilling his duty in the temple, Mary hanging out at home, shepherds doing their jobs, the Holy Family taking their child to the temple in Jerusalem twice – once eight days after his birth and later to celebrate the Festival of Passover when he is twelve.
But Jesus and his family didn’t only go to the temple on these two occasions. Luke says in verse 41 that they did this every year, just as the law commanded.
And the whole of the rest of Jesus’s very normal childhood is summed up in these two statements.
The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him. (Luke 2:40)
And
And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor. (Luke 2:52)
He played outside, he ate what his momma put in front of him, he learned from his mother and his father and his synagogue, he followed the religious rhythms of life, and God was working all along.
Here’s what I hope you will take with you into the new year, perhaps ponder it in your heart as Mary so often does in Luke’s gospel.
There will be some days when you will unmistakably recognize the work of God in the middle of the everyday stuff. And there will probably be even more days when you don’t recognize the work of God in the middle of the everyday stuff, in the middle of normal. But the promise of the first two chapters of Luke is that whether we recognize it or not, whether we notice it or not, God is always at work.
God is always at work to redeem the world. Sometimes the work is quiet. Sometimes it is big and bold. But God’s intention from the very beginning of all things has been to save us – to bring us back to God – to reconcile us to God and to each other – and to make things on earth as they are in heaven.
And Jesus is the sign. Jesus is the sign that God continues to work whether we can see it or not. God is working in each of us to make us more like Jesus. God is working in our church to make us the body of Christ. And God is working in our world to transform it into the Kingdom of Heaven.
And perhaps the greatest miracle of all is that God invites us into the work. Just as God invited Zechariah, invited Mary, invited the shepherds. God doesn’t task us with saving the world; we are not the answer. God simply beckons us to come and be part of it, to see what God is doing and join in.
Sweet Little Jesus Boy, we pray, keep coming to us in the middle of our normal, keep disrupting our lives with your salvation, keep inviting us into the world with you.
Amen.