"Desperately Seeking Jesus" - Sermon for 2nd Sunday after Christmas, 1-4-26

Your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.

Jesus was found by his anxious and perplexed parents in temple in Jerusalem, three days after the Passover. Saint Luke tips his hand with this important bit of story-telling in today’s gospel. Some years later, Jesus would return to the temple, and be offered as the Passover Lamb, sacrificed for us on crucifixion’s altar, only to rise on the third day and to present himself to his anxious and perplexed disciples. “Did you not know where I would be?” he said to his parents. “Did I not tell you I would rise?” he said to his disciples.

And we, ever since, have been searching for Jesus with an anxiety and perplexity of our own.

The great mystery of the Incarnation – of God the Son coming among us in flesh-and-blood Jesus, fully human and fully divine, born of Mary, protected by Joseph, crucified, dead, buried, risen, ascended, glorified; seated at the right hand of the Father, while truly present with us in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood – this great mystery is as complex, or as simple, as we want to make it.

It is complex, of course. Like Mary and Joseph, we do not understand – but do we ever want to! We homo-sapiens are a meaning-making species, after all. And thus we write and read and rely upon biblical commentaries and theological tomes, hymn texts and prayers, sermons and seminars, to make this great Mystery all perfectly understandable … or, more likely, as clear as mud. Denominations divide, Christians choose their camps, and some, tired of it all, drop out altogether.

This is not, to be certain, a criticism of religious education, or of the masters and doctors of divinity who populate our pulpits and professorial seats. My work, our work, is important, because we are a meaning-making species, and God uses our gifts the better to help each other comprehend what our pea-brains scarcely can fathom.

And, sometimes, this has the side-effect of causing anxiety and perplexity for the faithful and the seeker. “Am I doing it right?” we ask. “What’s the matter with me, that I don’t believe or behave or belong in the way I had hoped? … Or in the way that I assume the people in the pews next to me do?” “I was lost, and found, and now lost again!” And, panic-stricken, we search and search for Jesus. We read this book, try this practice, give this up, take this on. Like Mary and Joseph, we search for Jesus everywhere but in the temple. The place where he has been all along. I know this is true because I do it myself.

And yes, it is true that Jesus is to be found elsewhere. One of the mysteries of the Incarnation is that, in becoming matter – in becoming stuff – God has divinized stuff in a way that stuff wasn’t before. But stuff is not God; pantheism is a false path. And yet, if we care to look with discerning eyes, we can see signs of Christ, the fingerprints, and brushstrokes of the One through whom all things were made.

But there is something different, fuller, more complete, in coming to the temple to find Jesus. In coming to this sacred space, and churches like this one around the globe, where the Real Presence of Jesus is given from the altar and reserved in the tabernacle; where the faithful and seeker alike, imperfect one and all, gather to pray and worship; to study and contemplate; to forgive and be forgiven; to undergo the sometimes-painful and always life-long process of conversion and transformation and healing.

It is as simple as that. You have come to the temple. Set aside your anxiety. Let go of your perplexity. Jesus wants you to find him. Every time you walk through this door, Jesus is here.

Merry Christmas!

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

2^nd after Christmas Day – January 4, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Desperately Seeking Jesus”