1 Samuel 2:18-26; Psalm 119:9-16; Luke 2:41-52; Acts 16:1-5
You'll have noticed, I hope, a theme running through the service so far: youth, and how we perceive young people. I started thinking about this because of this morning's Gospel reading about Jesus as a twelve-year-old. If we'd heard that story as an anonymous news headline, I wonder what you'd have thought of the boy concerned. Was he indisciplined, ungrateful for his parents' care? Was he arrogant, a know-it-all who cared nothing for the wisdom of tradition but only wanted to proclaim his own point of view? Should we blame the parents, for not keeping closer watch on him? Was it an example of the breakdown of community responsibility that no one else noticed when he wandered away from the group? If, because this is Jesus we're talking about, we're not inclined to make such harsh judgments on the young man involved, should that attitude of love and respect also carry over to young people today, trying to work out who they are in a society and an age much more complex than first-century Palestine?
But before we get to the youth of today, let's consider some of the other snapshots of young people given in our readings this morning. In our reading from 1 Samuel we get two stereotypes: Samuel, the blue-eyed boy - well, probably not literally, considering he was Jewish, but the one who could do no wrong; and Eli's sons Hophni and Phineas: the yobs, the young tearaways who forced their attentions on women and - as we hear in another passage -grabbed for themselves the choicest cuts of meat brought for sacrifice to God.
Samuel gets a good biblical press: the youngster dedicated to God in response to his mother Hannah's answered prayer for fertility. Brought up from a baby in God's house, he can hear God's voice calling him in the night, but is too inexperienced to recognise God's tones, and must be tutored by old Eli in the right responses. Samuel is evidently going to be a prophet, to play a great role in Israel's destiny, and he is already showing the signs of his vocation. Eli must have set his hopes on the lad, especially considering his own sons were turning out bad, trading on their positions as heirs of his priesthood to get what they wanted. I wonder, though, if it's possible that Eli's sons turned out bad partly because of Samuel.
Who could compete with that miracle child, the apple of their father's eye? Better, they may have thought, to turn bad and leave Samuel and their father to follow the path of righteousness together, than to be crushed under the reproach of never being as good as him.
Sometimes we project a lot onto the coming generations. They will follow in our footsteps; they will succeed where we have failed, because we are there to guide and to warn them; they will adopt our values and priorities, gained over a lifetime, and turn out so well we can boast of them to others. Or that's the theory. I am the living proof that it doesn't always work out that way; my parents, good agnostics that they are, are still, I think, bemused that I ended up in a pulpit. Thankfully, they have supported me on my path. But it cannot have been easy for them holding the balance between wanting to transmit their behaviour and values and supporting me as I turned out differently. As it is, my father and I are only now cautiously beginning to talk together about what is important to us and why, and I recommend that process to you too; it's a delicate business, when you don't want to hurt feelings, but it has brought us closer together as a family.
So rather than sticking with saintly Samuel and the sinning sons of Eli, let's look at a more realistic example of youth in the Bible: Timothy, son of Eunice, grandson of Lois, and one of Paul's main companions, presented to us in our reading from Acts this morning at the very beginning of his missionary career. You may wonder why we know the names of Timothy's mother and grandmother- actually, the information comes from the letter called 1 Timothy rather than from the book of Acts - yet not his father's name. Remember that genealogy of Jesus beginning Matthew's Gospel which we studied in a Vision4Life service last year - all those begots from father to son? Knowing the name of someone's mother is unusual in the Bible. But there are two reasons why we may know about the women but not the men in Timothy's family. Firstly, it may be because Lois and Eunice played an important role in their church, so their names are remembered. But secondly, you may have picked up something else about Timothy in that brief reading: he was mixed-race. While his mother and grandmother were Jewish, his anonymous father was Greek. And Timothy's name was Greek, meaning ‘Fear God' - though ‘Timothy' was also the name of one of the heroic Jewish freedom fighters of a previous age, the Maccabees. Being mixed-race, Timothy was in danger of falling between two cultures: Greeks didn't see why he wanted to follow a Jewish teacher like Paul, and Jews didn't understand why he hadn't been circumcised, like every other male Jew, at a very young age.
Whether Timothy's father had died, whether his parents' marriage had broken up, whether he was the child of a brief relationship with an absent father, or whether his father just didn't want to be involved, Paul seems to have stepped into the role of surrogate father to the boy. After Timothy's circumcision, avoiding offence to Jewish Christians, Paul took him under his wing and gave him experience of the life of a travelling missionary. Later on, he sent Timothy as his envoy to churches at Corinth and at Philippi. Writing from prison, Paul calls Timothy his son in the Gospel. We don't have Timothy's account of the relationship between them, but here is a fruitful partnership between generations. Tradition says that Timothy became Bishop of Ephesus and was killed while protesting against a procession of pagan idols there - you may remember Paul had trouble in Ephesus too with worshippers of the goddess Diana and the silversmiths who supplied their temple.
Like good King Wenceslaus and his pageboy, Timothy and Paul needed each other's knowledge, strength and support to get the job done. And today too, young people, those related to us and those who turn up in the headlines, aren't heroes like Samuel or villains like Phineas and Hophni, but real people like everyone else. Sometimes, like Timothy, they have difficulties in their background to overcome. But again like Timothy they are well able, working with older people and independently, to pass on to their peers and others what they know of God. It may not be how their parents would phrase it; their texts, Facebook posts and twitters may well be beyond our technological competence! But unless we take young people seriously on their own terms, as the elders in the Temple took the teenage Jesus, even before his baptism gave meaning to our own, we run the risk of missing out on some very good questions, and some even more interesting answers.