Sermon - An Interesting Family

Matthew 1:1-17
An Interesting Family
James Sledge                                                                                     November 27, 2022

Tree of Jesse from Capuchin's Bible, c. 1180

 How would you answer if someone asked who you are? What would you tell them? Perhaps you would say what you do for a living. Very often when people meet someone for the first time they ask, “What do you do?”

I grew up in what was then still out in “the country,” on land that had been a family farm a couple of generations earlier. There were lots of other people whose families had been in that area for generations, and if you met someone who didn’t know you, they didn’t typically ask what you did, they asked who you belonged to, who your family was.

No one ever asks me that any longer. We live in mobile society where people often don’t have deep roots in the area where they live. Who you belong to, who your people are, isn’t likely to be very helpful in telling anyone who you are. We’ll have to settle for, “What do you do?” or “Where did you go to school?” or “Where did you come from?”

In some ways, I miss that old connection to place and people. I have fond memories of sitting at the Sunday dinner table with my parents and paternal grandparents, listening to stories about my grandfather as a second grader picking up his teacher on the way to school in a little horse drawn sulky. I felt connected to something, part of something.

I think that people who didn’t grow up like I did still sometimes lament that lack of connection. The popularity of Ancestry.com and DNA tests speaks to a desire to connect with our stories, to discover something of who we are through our heritage.

Another odd thing about my growing up. The Gideons still had permission to come to our elementary school classrooms and hand out their little pocket Bibles. (It was the South in the 1960s.) Those Bibles weren’t much bigger than the palm of your hand, and one of the ways they got them so small was to leave out the Old Testament. They included the Psalms for some reason, but the rest of the stories about Noah and Sarah and Abraham and Moses and Joshua and Rahab and Ruth and David and Solomon and Hezekiah and Josiah and Zerubbabel (one of favorite biblical names) and others, they were all missing.

If you had never seen a Bible and the first one you ever read was a Gideons pocket Bible someone gave you, you could be forgiven if you thought that the Christian story started with Jesus. Jesus just showed up on the scene and started a new religion. But if you didn’t skim over the start of Matthew’s gospel with its long string of so and so begat so and so and so and so begat so and so, you would have had to wonder, who were all these people and what did they have to do with Jesus’ story?

Matthew’s gospel, like the other three gospels, were written for people who had already heard about Jesus and joined the church. Unlike today when the gospels are sometimes seen as tools for introducing Jesus to people, Matthew wrote to members of a Christian community in order to explore the question, “Just who is this Jesus we believe in?” And when Matthew begins to answer that question, he starts by locating Jesus in a bigger story, the story of God’s salvation history through the people of Israel.

I should add that Matthew’s Christian community did have a Bible, a set of scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. For over a century, that was the only scripture the Church knew, and Matthew wants to make certain that we know Jesus belongs to the story of those scriptures. Who is Jesus? Well, who were his people and where did he come from?

Before Matthew can ever talk about Mary and Joseph or a miraculous birth, he has to remind us that Jesus’ story started a long time ago, hundreds and hundreds of years before the first Christmas. Who Jesus is, how Jesus understood himself, is rooted in that ancient story.

If someone had asked a young Jesus who he was, he might well have answered with the covenantal identity from the book of Deuteronomy. A wandering Aramean was my father. He went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Jesus was a Jew, a child of Abraham for whom the Exodus was the epitome of God’s salvation. Jesus was born a Jew, lived, died, and rose again as a Jew, something antisemites would do well to remember.

But according to Matthew, Jesus is not just a son of Abraham, he is also a son of David, of royal lineage. Jesus is to be a Jewish Messiah, and as a royal descendant he can fulfill the covenantal promises made to David all those centuries earlier.

Jesus will be the long-awaited ruler who restores the kingdom of David, but Jesus turns out to be a very different sort of king with a very different kingdom than many people were waiting for, a very different sort of king from what some still imagine him today.

Great Britain aside, kings and kingdoms are something of a historical anachronism. In our day, perhaps we’d be better of speaking of God’s new commonwealth, of God’s new beloved community. But we still can’t escape the fact that this new community is centered on Jesus and his ways. It is in following him that we began to live in the kingdom of God, the commonwealth of God, God’s beloved community.

This commonwealth has no weapons like the typical nation. Its only weapons are peace and love. And unlike the typical commonwealth, the one Jesus brings isn’t much focused on us and them, on citizens and aliens, on insiders and outsiders. It is open to just about anyone.

That may be one of the most startling observations found in the genealogy that opens Matthew’s gospel. The typical Jewish genealogy in Jesus’ day would have been completely patriarchal, and if it were an impressive genealogy, all those men who populated it would be good Jews. But Jesus’ genealogy is not at all what we would expect.

For starters there are women in Jesus’ genealogy. That’s enough of a surprise, but some of these women have rather strange stories. Tamar pretends she’s a prostitute in order to get the father of her deceased husband to sleep with her. Rahab is a prostitute, a Gentile one at that, and she’s not the only Gentile on the list. Ruth is a Gentile foreigner, a Moabite, a people who were enemies of Israel.

Jesus’ genealogy has its share of heroes, but it also has its share of scoundrels and misfits and foreigners and people of questionable morals and backgrounds. The genealogy seems to be more symbolic than historical. It is impossible to line it up with events from the Old Testament and it disagrees with a different genealogy found in Luke’s gospel.

All that suggests that Matthew could have given us a different genealogy, but he chose to give us one with Gentiles and women and scoundrels and foreigners. Matthew is clearly saying something about the sort of people who are welcome in this new kingdom, this new beloved community that Jesus comes to bring.

Sometimes the popular understanding of Christian faith is that you’ve got to be good enough to be a part of it, that it’s an exclusive club with insiders and outsiders. But Matthew’s recitation of Jesus family, of who Jesus belonged to, is about as mixed a bag as you can find, especially for a genealogy of Jesus’ day. It speaks of a community of love where everyone is welcome.

Jesus is happy to embrace you no matter who you are and what your story is. If you get close to Jesus, it will change your life, but there is nothing about you, not a single one of you, that says you don’t belong. And as the story of Jesus’ family continues, it includes gay and straight, trans and non-binary and all the rainbow of possible sexual identities. It includes successes and screwups, wealthy and poor, pillars of the community and ne’er-do-wells. Jesus’ family is as diverse as the human family.

And so as Matthew prepares to tell the story of Jesus’ birth, of the coming of a Messiah, he wants to make sure that whoever you are, you know that this Messiah came for you.