Broadway Christian Church ·Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship ·November 28, 2004

The First Sunday of Advent

Prayer of the Day

We light the first candle of Advent to remind ourselves to watch.  We wait for the coming of Immanuel, God with us.  We watch for something new to be born.  We expect something to be born in us.  We watch, and wait, and pray: show us the way.  Amen.

Scripture
Matthew 1:1-17

The family tree of Jesus Christ,
David’s son, Abraham’s son:

Abraham had Isaac,
         Isaac had Jacob,
         Jacob had Judah and his brothers,
         Judah had Perez and Zerah by Tamar,
         Perez had Herzron,
         Hezron had Aram,
         Aram had Amminadab,
         Amminadab had Nahshon,
         Hahshon had Salmon,
         Salmon had Boaz by Rahab,
         Boaz had Obed by Ruth,
         Obed had Jesse,
         Jesse had David,
              and David became king.

David had Solomon by Uriah’s wife,
         Solomon had Rehoboam,
         Rehoboam had Abijah,
         Abijah had Asa,
         Asa had Jehoshaphat,
         Jehoshaphat had Joram,
         Joram had Uzziah,
         Uzziah had Jotham,
         Jotham had Ahaz,
         Ahaz had Hezekiah,
         Hezekiah had Manasseh,
         Manasseh had Amon,
         Amon had Josiah,
         Josiah had Jehoiachin and his brothers,
              and then the people were taken
              into the Babylonian exile.

When the Babylonian exile ended,
         Jehoiachin had Shealtiel,
         Shealtiel had Abiud,
         Abiud had Eliakim,
         Eliakim had Azor,
         Azor had Zadok,
         Zadock had Achim,
         Achim had Eliud,
         Eliud had Eleazar,
         Eleazar had Matthan,
         Matthan had Jacob,
         Jacob had Joseph, Mary’s husband,
              the Mary who gave birth to Jesus,
              the Jesus who was called Christ.

There were fourteen generations from Abraham to David, another fourteen from David to the Babylonian exile, and yet another fourteen from the Babylonian exile to Christ.

Message
Jesus’ Grandmothers
Kim Ryan

I was remembering this week when my now 17-year-old son was three.  Gage would ask repeatedly and often, “Tell me about when you was little.”  And his father, his grandmother, his grandfather, and I would comply with his persistence as only a three-year-old can be persistent, and we would become storytellers par excellence. 

The stories would unfold.  There was the one about his Dad’s paper route at age ten and the people he met who became life-long friends like Bill and Juanita Powell.  There was the one about his Mom’s turtle that escaped and lived in the walls of her house until some workmen installing a wall heater rescued him, and that turtle lived several more years to tell the tale.  There was one about his Grandpa and his Grandpa’s brother sharing a bicycle and the shenanigans those two would go through to be the rider of the bike for the day.  The one about his Grandmother’s pet raccoon was always a favorite.

We spent a good many years telling these stories and many, many more.  They were stories of the past, memories captured to be passed on to the next generation, sparkled up a bit, embellished as good stories are, but a sharing of one family’s past with a child of the future.

So tell me.  Tell me about “when you was little.”  Think for a moment of a story that you would share.  Every one of us has a story – more than one we could tell.  I like what a Native American storyteller is remembered as having said, “Now, I don’t know if it happened exactly this way or not, but I know it is true.”

Truth is passed on through story – the best truths, the best stories.  So, look again at this list – this long list – of names we just read together and realize along with me that every name on this list represents a story, a family story.

The gospel writer of Matthew begins his masterful, artistic story of Jesus Christ with this list of family names.  Now, we don’t usually begin here in our Advent and Christmas storytelling.  Typically we jump over those first 17 verses of the Gospel of Matthew, and we start the story with verse 18: “Now the birth of Jesus, the Messiah, took place in this way when his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph.”  That one sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

But that’s not where Matthew’s story starts.  Matthew’s story begins with Father Abraham and takes us through 42 generations.  Now the Gospel of Luke will have a genealogy of Jesus as well, but his doesn’t show up until the third chapter, and it begins much earlier.  Luke’s goes all the way back to Adam.  Mark has no family history in that gospel, for Jesus begins his life work as an adult.  For Mark, that story begins with Jesus’ baptism and his adoption as God’s Son.  John has no family history either, because his story begins before time, and Jesus is present before time is acknowledged.

But Matthew begins with Abraham, through King David, through the Babylonian exile.  Why is that?  Why do it that way?  Because the audience, the questioners, the ones asking, “Tell us about Jesus,” were Jewish folks.  Matthew’s stories about Jesus will be told in such a way that his Jewish listeners will be able to understand the profound experience and person of Jesus Christ through their Jewish understandings, through their Jewish history, and through their Jewish hopes.

Matthew will be our gospel teacher starting today and continuing all through this next year until we come to the next first Sunday of Advent.  We’re going to hear many of those stories from Matthew’s perspective.  We’re going to study them.  We’re going to allow them to speak to us in this year ahead.  We will be reminded that Jesus was Jewish – something we Christians sometimes forget.

Today, on this first Sunday of Advent, we begin with Matthew’s story of the 42 Jewish generations.  As I said before, every name listed represents a story, but don’t panic.  I’m not going to tell all those stories.  Some of those stories we can trace, like Abraham, Joseph, and David.  Some of them we can no longer rediscover, like Abiud and Eliakim.  This is the only place in the Bible they are named. 

But interspersed among these names and these family stories are four very unlikely, unexpected names.  Now, you may have already guessed, they are the ones in bold.  You won’t find them that way in the Bible.  I asked Tammy to type out this Scripture for us today.  That’s no small task.  It really sends “Spell Check” over the edge.  I asked her to bold these four names, because they are so easy to miss otherwise, and because they are the names of the four women in Jesus’ genealogy, who are mentioned by name, which is highly unusual, with the incredible unlikelihood that women would be named at all in a biblical genealogy.

Now, the Jewish listeners and readers of Matthew’s story would have immediately sat up and taken notice at the mention of these four names.  They knew these names.  They knew their stories, and it was a bit shocking and more than a bit scandalous for these four women to be named.  These particular women are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and the wife of Uriah (who we may recall as being known as Bathsheba).  These are no queen mothers like the beloved Sarah, Abraham’s wife and the mother of Isaac.  Notice, she’s not mentioned.

No, the stories of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba are “R” rated – for racy.  It’s true. 

However, about halfway through my sermon preparation for this Sunday, I recalled our children were not going to be having Sunday School for those past the third grade.  That’s a dilemma.  You will not find the stories of Tamar, Rahab, and Bathsheba in any book offering children’s stories of the Bible.  Maybe Ruth’s story might make it, but in a fairly diluted version, if it’s there.  These are not children’s stories.  So, that’s my dilemma.  How can I tell these stories in a “PG” format?  Now I know, I know, my children assure me there is nothing on television or nothing in the movies or anywhere else that they haven’t heard on the school bus.  But this is church, for God’s sake.  Well, indeed, for God’s sake.

For the sake of understanding the remarkable person, the child, the man of Jesus Christ, these stories deserve to be told, even to our children.  So, I will offer you the condensed version and encourage you to fill in the gaps and the innuendoes by reading them in their uncensored formats in the Bible, of all places.  I can just see it this afternoon.  “Mom, where’d she say that story was in the Bible?”  “Honey, where is that Bible?”  “We’ll just dust that one off.”

So, here it goes.

Tamar.  The Tamar we find in Genesis 38, not the one in II Samuel.  That’s another story for another day.  But let’s look at the Tamar in the Old Testament book of Genesis 28.

After the death of Tamar’s two husbands, who were brothers, Tamar is still a woman without a child – a terrible situation to be a widow and childless in her time.  She is in the lowest of the lowest of situations for women.  And Judah, her father-in-law, denies her his third son, even though Jewish law required the marriage.

The situation is extremely bleak for Tamar, but she does not surrender herself to the powerlessness others would see her in.  She takes drastic measures.  She disguises herself as a lady of the evening, and she sets herself on the road on which she knows her father-in-law will be passing, and she welcomes his advances.  He does not recognize her.  She is covered by veils.  She welcomes his advances as he travels by, and he promises to send her a goat in appreciation.

She says, “I need something that will assure me you will send me this goat.”  So, he gives her his signet and his staff.  She goes on her way, and he goes on his way.  Shortly thereafter, she finds that she is with child.  She, of course, is delighted.  Her father-in-law is not so delighted.  Not knowing who the father had been for his wayward daughter-in-law, he condemns her to be burned.  That is until she arrives with the signet and the staff revealing who the father of her child is.  But it’s not just one child.  She is having twins.  She is doubly blessed, and Zerah and Perez are born.  Perez is the ancestor of the beloved King David, and the beloved Jesus Christ.  Judah, her father-in-law says of her, “She was more in the right than I.”  That’s Tamar.

Rahab.  Rahab comes later in the biblical story in Joshua 2 and 6.  Now Rahab doesn’t pretend to be a prostitute.  She is one, and a businesswoman at that.  She hides and protects the Israelite Jewish spies when they enter the land of Canaan on a reconnaissance mission.  Anybody thinking “James Bond” here?  It’s got the makings and all the characters.  Because of her daring, her risk taking, her quick decision-making, the spies survived the authorities who are searching for them.  Victory comes to the Israelites, to the Jews, and Rahab and her family alone are rescued from destruction and death.  She will be known as the ancestress of eight prophets, including Jeremiah.  But for our purposes today, mostly she is the mother of Boaz, which brings us to Ruth.

Ruth.  Ruth has her own book in the Bible, in the Old Testament.  She is one of only two women with that honor.  She is best known as the great-great-grandmother of King David, the greatest king of Jewish history.  But before that claim to fame, she was just a lowly foreigner, a widow, a refugee, devoted to her mother-in-law Naomi – also a widow.  In the midst of their shared grief and their shared poverty, Ruth encounters one of her husband’s next-of-kin, Boaz.  With some suggestive tutoring from her mother-in-law, she finds herself in a situation in which she proposes marriage to Boaz.  And with some twists and turns of the plot, he does marry he, and Obed is born to everyone’s delight.

And last, but not least, from II Samuel, is the wife of Uriah.  Her name is Bathsheba.  She is known to have been a beautiful woman, a beautiful pawn in a man’s world, and in a man’s political game.  She is seen bathing by the famous and powerful King David.  Even though she is married to Uriah, and he is off fighting in King David’s war as a soldier, King David wants her.  Because he wants her, he has her.  She is in no position to resist or to turn the king away.  Discovering she is with child, she notifies the king who immediately sends for Uriah to come home from the battle, to take a furlough.  “Come see your wife.  Relax.”

Well, Uriah returns, but he does not go home.  He chooses to sleep outside the palace gate with the king’s servants, because it wouldn’t be fair to his buddies back at the front for him to be home enjoying himself.  David’s plan is foiled, so he does what a king can do.  He sends Uriah back into battle with a personal note for the general.  The general is to place Uriah on the very front line where he will most certainly be killed.  And he is.  This is not King David’s finest hour.

He does marry Bathsheba.  He takes her to be one of his many wives, and has a child, but the baby dies.  Later, another son will be born, a son by the name of Solomon.  Bathsheba, one of the many wives, will be responsible for Solomon – one of the many sons – to be named as David’s successor.  Solomon will be the king to build the beautiful temple at the heart of Jewish worship in Jerusalem, at the heart of those people’s honoring of God.

Now, I’m not making this stuff up.  I promise.  It is right there in the Bible, and more.  Who said Bible study was boring?

Four women, all foreigners.  Not a single one of them Jewish.  Four women, given by society the lowest status of the lowest of the low – widow, deceiver, childless, prostitute, adulteress.  Four women not accepting society’s verdict for them as the final word.  Four women finding their place, making their place in that grand story of God.  Four bold women, indeed.

“Tell us about Jesus.”

Matthew said, “OK.  Here’s where it starts.”

Here is where it starts.  So, what does it mean?  Well, it means that this Jesus you call – we call – the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, may not be the king you were expecting.  It means there are these surprises in his background.  Get ready, because there are more surprises on the way.  It means that right here in this genealogy, in this beginning of beginnings, are the hints, even the warnings.  Get ready for the unexpected.  Get ready for God to break through the acceptable social mores and values and redeem the so-called unredeemable.  Get ready for this Jesus to step outside the usual, and get ready for this Jesus to include and accept and love the unusual.  Get ready for God to work through the unlikeliest of situations and people.

That is the message of Advent.  That is the message of Christmas.  That is the message of following Jesus Christ.  Get ready for God to work through the unlikeliest of situations and people.  Even you.  Even me.

Get ready.

Amen.

Benediction

Creator Christ, help us always to remember who we are and whose we are.  May we ever be inspired by the potential you see in us and humbled by what you can do with the likes of us.  Amen.