Preparing for Worship: Boy in the Temple

A "First-Footing" Prayer for a New Year

Resolutions for Worship in 2025

Happy New Year! Did your New Year involve making resolutions?

Productivity expert Oliver Burkeman shared the following in regards to New Year’s resolutions: “Ten minutes spent very badly jogging is just infinitely more valuable than all the most amazing plans to do it perfectly.”

Simply put, doing something, even if it is not with the grace or skill or duration as one might have hoped, matters and is worthy of celebration.

As we begin 2025, I invite you to resolve to enter into worship; and to prepare for worship, in some way that is a bit more than you did in 2024.

• Maybe, for example, you didn’t go to worship, let alone prepare for it. Maybe start with attending worship once a month. 
• Maybe you worship regularly or semi-regularly, but show up on Sunday in haste and think more about your grocery list or what needs done after church than the liturgy, or music, or sermon. Maybe pray the prayer of preparation each week and ask God to help you focus on worship, even for part of the service. 
• Maybe you’ve had a difficult time in the past with the church. I get it. Churches and church members at times serve themselves and not God and it causes hurt. Take one step to restore connection with God – even if it is outside of church. A prayer, a scripture, a time of fellowship. Something renewing and restoring that shares the good news intended for you.

Whatever you choose to do, plan for it. Write it in your calendar or put a reminder on your phone so that the time is scheduled. Strive for it. Aim for consistency, even if it is just a few minutes a week.

And know, that anything you do, like the ten minutes of “badly jogging” that Burkeman mentions, whether it is consistent or not, as long as it is done, is far better than any attempt to be perfect in preparing for worship or worshipping. 

That’s one of the best things about worship. We come as we are. Many of us with our attention in 1,000 places, mindful of the ache in our backside from the wood of the pew, and frankly, at times bored. We still come. And somewhere in that imperfect preparation and imperfect worship, God speaks a word we needed to hear, offers a comfort that we longed for, or challenges us in a way that we needed to be challenged. And then, we are glad we were in worship.

So, prepare. Come. Worship. Imperfections and inconsistencies welcome. In 2025, come!

Preparing for Worship: The Boy Jesus in the Temple

Sunday Scriptures:

Psalm 2:7-8

Luke 2:41-52

This Sunday in the Narrative Lectionary we step away from baby Jesus and enter into the lone story in the canon of Scripture about Jesus as a child. Here, he’s a young Junior High age kid who has taken a familiar, annually made trip with his parents. And at the center of that trip, and of this passage is the Temple.

No other New Testament writer sets Jesus in the context of Judaism and the church like Luke does. Luke’s Gospel begins and ends in the Temple in Jerusalem. Here, we see the Temple as both the liturgical center and the center of the people’s hopes and affections. In the Temple, Zechariah receives word about John. And in the Temple, Simeon and Anna receive the baby Jesus. In our passage for this week, Jesus seeks the Temple out, eager to learn. Later he will weep over Jerusalem, later he will turn his face toward to Jerusalem, later he will turn over tables in the Temple marketplace, later he will enter into Jerusalem on a donkey for his last Passover meal. And there, just a bit away from the Temple, he will be crucified and he will die.

The Temple’s importance continued in the life of the early church. We remember the Apostles' keeping the Temple’s prayer hours, and the importance of being in synagogues for the Apostle Paul. There is continuity in the Gospel of Luke, in the long history of the People of God who descended from Abraham right through the church in Acts and to today. 

And yet, the Temple seems disconnected often times, particularly for us as modern readers. We sometimes think that Jesus rejected the Temple. But preacher Fred Craddock, in his commentary on Luke, reminds us that “neither Jesus nor the church rejects the temple...according to Luke, God has not rejected the Temple. Whatever distance is created between Jesus and the Temple, whatever discontinuity develops, it will have to be due to the priests of the Temple and their rejection of Jesus” (Craddock, 38).

That’s important. God didn’t opt out. People did.

For those who feel we might not be good enough to approach God, Craddock reminds us that the separation between God and Temple, God and Church, God and human kind, and God and us is not because of God’s rejection. It is because of the rejection of the Temple priests whose ways and understandings were getting ruffled up by Jesus. It is because of religious organizations and other entities who presumptuously assume God’s sovereignty for themselves. Its because people choose autonomy, independence, self-guidance. God is secondary.

Or sometimes, not on the list at all.

In our reading for this Sunday, Luke makes it clear that Mary and Joseph have taken raising Jesus as a faithful Jew very seriously. In the verses just prior to our passage for this week, we read that Mary and Joseph “finished everything required by the law of the Lord” (2:39, NRSV). Every year they have journeyed to Jerusalem for Passover. The Law of Moses required pilgrimages for Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles (see Exodus 23:14), but for those at a distance only Passover is required. These gatherings and annual commitments reflect the importance of both worship and community for God’s people. The Temple, worship, and coming together are all immensely important (just as worshipping together is today for us!).

This family must have had some routine to how they made this trip. One day into their trip home, Mary and Joseph realize that Jesus is not with their traveling group. And so, they return to Jerusalem to look for him. They spend three days in uncertainty and worry, searching the city for this boy, a foreshadowing of the three days he will be in the tomb following his death – another time of uncertainty and worry. And then they find him – in the Temple! He’s sitting right among the teachers, learning, asking questions, and sharing his own wisdom which amazed people. Mary has a very understandable motherly reaction to all of this, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety” (Luke 2:48b).

Jesus seems surprised that they were searching. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49b).

Jesus’s developing sense of identity and vocation, his awareness of an increasingly larger world, and a sense of duty is developing. It is a moment of change and difficulty for all of them as who he is continues to unfold. He leaves with them, they head home, and there, Luke tells us, Jesus “was obedient to them” (Luke 2:51b). And Mary, “treasured all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51b). As Craddock says, “...family love and loyalty have their place and flourish under the higher love and loyalty to God” (Craddock, 43).

Closing: Epiphany Thoughts

In addition to our scripture reading, we see an awareness of the higher love and loyalty to God this Sunday also in the celebration of Epiphany. Epiphany (officially Monday, January 6th this year) marks the coming of the wise men to see baby Jesus (see Matthew 2 for the story).

When Jesus was a baby (he would have been a toddler when the visit from the wise men occurred), King Herod was the ruler (marked by his thirst for personal power and control and also his loyalty to occupying Rome). The wise men hear of the birth of a new King and go to Jerusalem asking where to find him. Not wanting to lose his power, Herod sends the wise men on a quest to find Jesus and tells them to bring his location back to him. They find Jesus and Mary and Joseph, and are warned in a dream not to return to Herod. At risk of their own peril, they do not return to him but return home another way. Mary and Joseph then are warned to flee, and leave for Egypt, becoming refugees. Herod “killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under” in what is often called “the slaughter of the innocents” (Matthew 2:16b).

Herod chose himself. Herod chose to opt for power, position and wealth. Herod did not choose God.

What is the good news? There is always more than one piece of good news in each scripture text, but here is one from our reading this week. While this passage builds on a great deal of Old Testament scripture and the history of God’s people, “at no time does the truth or authority of his [Jesus’s] message depend on prior stories” (Craddock, 43). That is good news for us, particularly on this first Sunday of the New Year. Our lives and history are important. But the grace of God, the salvation found in Christ, the good news that we are loved – none of it depends on our prior stories. Regardless of where we’ve been, what we’ve done, how many times our minds have wandered in church, or whatever we are carrying, the good news of Jesus is still the same. And it is available to us – always. 

Blessings on your preparation for worship! If you're interested in joining us in person for worship, find out details here.

To join us virtually, use this YouTube link.

All are welcome!

Works Cited:

Fred Craddock. Luke. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990.

Lori Leibovich. “How to future-proof your happiness in the new year.”January 2, 2025. https://dnyuz.com/2025/01/03/how-to-future-proof-your-happiness-in-the-new-year/

The Northumbria Community Trust. Celtic Daily Prayer. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

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