Continuing To Grow I want to look with you this morning at something the Wise Men and Jesus, in our second lesson today, had in common: They all left home! The account that we have in the Gospel of St. Luke about Jesus as a twelve-year old boy is the one account we have about anything in our Lord’s life, between the time He was born and the time He began his ministry, about thirty years later. There is nothing else in this whole period except this account which is from the physician, St. Luke, about the boyhood of Jesus. And I think this account is in- cluded in the Gospel for a very good reason: I think it tells us something very important about growing up. And what it tells us is that growing up involves leaving home. Jesus’ parents had gone up to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover, and Jesus went along with them, and His parents assumed that he was with them as they returned to Nazareth, and after going a whole days’s journey, they discovered that He was not with them. And they went back to Jerusalem and looked for Him for three days, before they found Him in the Temple. Growing up involves leaving home. And that is not an easy thing to do, even for the Holy Family. There was some dissension here, and Mary had some critical words for her Son: How could you do this to us? It is not that the family was bad; it is simply that in God’s Creation, the immediate family is never enough. God did not create it to be the final answer. Growing up involves leaving home. But notice that when Jesus left home, the place where He went shared all the values and all the traditions of the place He had left. As a matter of fact, for years his family had been sharing in this same tradition of going to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. So really He was continuing with them a tradition they had started, and in the Temple he was with people who shared with Him everything He had known at home. A friend in Richmond, who went to St. Christopher’s Episcopal School, in the 1930s, remarked that it was like the ex- tended family. St. Christopher’s had been started by–I believe it was a Colonel–Chamberlain, of the Confederate Army and was continued by his son. My friend’s family knew all the faculty. They shared the same standards. They shared the same hopes, the same traditions. It was like an extended family. Hopefully, this is what it can be like, when young people leave home, but we have to acknowledge that many times it is not. One of the times when many people leave home for the first time is when they go to college. And, sad to say, in many cases, instead of being an ex- tension of their family and tradition, college for many people today involves a rejection of the very values they have grown up with. “Let us free you from your parents’ prejudices!” I have an idea that is what happened to Hillary, when she went from a very protected family on the Gold Coast in Chicago to a wealthy and very sophisticated eastern girls’ school–the same wealthy and sophisticated eastern girls’ school that invited Oprah Winfrey to be their com-mencement speaker! So many times college involves a rejection of home. But when our Lord went to the Temple, the Temple reaffirmed the values He had grown up with, so that, as Scripture says, He was able to go back home with His parents and be subject unto them. The values and the authority were all the same. I think the last time this kind of thing happened in this country on a significant scale was back in World War II when this country had something like 500,000 men in uniform when we went into the war and, by the time the war was over, between 10 and 12 million people had been trained. And this training produced a generation such was we have not seen since that time–a generation that knew something about authority, and respect, and courage. Growth often involves leaving home. What we hope for is that the standards out in the world will be the same as we have known; but we know that often that is not so, so then we have to hope that people can take the kind of standards with them that will endure in what is often a hostile world. And that is why I am so grateful for our Anglican heritage. You look at so many professions, you look in any area of business and civic life, and over the centuries there have been Anglicans who have been leaders in their fields. Back to the earliest history of the Church! When Charlemagne had his glorious vision of a kingdom in Europe that would protect Christians, he called on Alcuin, the scholar of York, to set up his whole school system, because the quality of learning in the Old English–the Celtic–monasteries was without equal. In every area, whether it is scholarship, whether it is medicine, science, religion, the military-- George Washington was one of us, Robert E. Lee was one of us. Everywhere you look in our history, Anglicans have led in every area! Our heritage is such that, the deeper you get into it, the more you realize you will never outgrow it. You will never even get it all covered. Out of our tradition has come the whole heritage of limited government, of the constitutional mon- archy, of the limit of power. I feel some urgency about this subject today, because every year we see less and less of the division of power and more and more concentration of power in Washington. The Supreme Court at one stroke eliminated the abortion laws of all 50 states, and there wasn’t a rebellion. Clinton has been bombing Iraq for weeks, and I have yet to hear anybody in Washington say, “Isn’t it the prerogative of the Senate to declare war?” By what authority does he do this, other than the authority of a tyrant in a totalitarian state? I feel some great concern for the traditions and values that we treasure, because they can be lost. We must not take them for granted. Somebody brings in from time to time a wonderful publication called The Weekly Telegraph, and one edition recently contained an article that I had not seen in the local press. It had to do with the widow of Alan Paton. Back in the 1940s Alan Paton wrote a book called Cry, the Beloved Country, having to do with the plight of the blacks in South Africa. For a time, it was on the required reading list of most liberal colleges. His was one of the earliest voices for the liberation–so called–of the blacks in South Africa. In December of this year, Paton’s widow announced that she is leaving South Africa, because it is too danger-ous to live there any more. Her car was hijacked, with her in it; but she managed to escape. Once she was mugged. Twice her home was broken into by armed robbers. All this in the last two years. In the last four years, nine of her friends have been murdered. South Africa today is going the same way as Liberia and Rhodesia–now called Zimbabwe. South Africa was the only solvent nation in Africa, under the Dutch; but now it is going straight down hill. President Mandela has said that those who leave are cowards,, and South Africa is better off without them. So far as I have seen, there has been no comment from Archbishop Tutu about the plight of these people at all! The values that we hold dear are under attack at home and abroad. For those who come after us, as well as for ourselves, in the coming months and years, we need to do all we can to learn about and reaffirm the values that have made the Anglican Church so great. A Sermon preached at All Saints, Pensacola, 10 Jan. ‘99, by The Rev. Hugh Hall.