Origin Story

Date: March 1, 2020
Scripture: Matthew 1:1-7
Preacher: Rev. Beth Neel

Sermon

A few years ago my first cousin once removed on my father’s mother’s side self-published a family history entitled “Yonder Will Be Better.” It’s the story of the Clark family moving around the United States beginning in the early 1800s, from Kentucky to Mississippi to Arkansas to Missouri to California to Utah and back to California. Reading through it, I learned of great, great Aunt Zerilda, whose Cherokee mother died on the Trail of Tears; I learned who fought on which side of the Civil War, who left her husband, which children survived infancy.

And while these are my family’s stories, the names are just names. They are people with whom I share genetic material. They are people who experienced dire poverty at times and grief. They were adventurous, loving, imperfect.

Some of us have more curiosity than others about our family trees, but whether we go to city halls and look up records or send out our spit in an envelope to 23andMe, knowing where we come from helps us understand something about who we are.

In olden days, as in the days of Jesus, family trees and genealogies served a different sort of purpose. Where you came from and who your people were established your status – were you from impressive, powerful, important people? Or were your forebears scoundrels, wags, and generally disreputable sorts of people? Because one’s genealogy gave or took away status, people sometimes manipulated their ancestry, tweaked things a bit so that they might look better than they really were in societal terms.

So at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel, we get a version of Jesus’ genealogy. It’s pretty neat and tidy, in three sets of fourteen (thought the last set is missing one), but in order to get that Matthew has to leave a few generations out.

It starts out well enough, going all the way back to Abraham, which cements Jesus’ identity as being one in a long line of true Israelites. King David is in there, too, connecting Jesus to his royal lineage. We get the patriarchs Isaac and Jacob, the wise king Solomon, the great reformer Hezekiah. There are some terrific people in this genealogy.

But when we take a closer look at this list of somewhat hard-to-pronounce names, things get a bit tricky. Matthew includes Gentiles in the ancestry of the Jewish messiah. And he includes women, of all people, which simply was not the done thing.

Tamar is in there – Tamar who had a child by her father-in-law. Rahab the prostitute is in there – a Gentile, a Canaanite woman who helped the Israelite spies scout things out before they left the desert and entered the promised land. Ruth is there – a Moabite, another Gentile, she who showed such faithfulness to her mother-in-law Naomi; Ruth, who became the grandmother of King David through her second husband, Boaz.

Bathsheba is in there, though she is not named. She, of course, was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and through that marriage was herself considered a Hittite, a foreigner. Her story is a bit shady, through no fault of her own. The king lusted after her, had her husband killed, and took her as his wife. So that’s in Jesus’ family history. And then there’s Mary, Jesus’ mother, who bore the brunt of shame for having a child not fathered by her husband.

Now why do you suppose that Matthew, a writer in the first century when genealogies were used to make a person look good, would include so many questionable characters in this list?

How scholars love that question!

Michael Joseph Brown, writing in the African-American commentary True to Our Native Land, says about the women included in the genealogy, “Jesus descends not only from a distinguished bloodline full of kings and queens but also from outsiders and persons of questionable character and practice…. Matthew challenges our … idea that we are who we are because we come from the right kind of people, with the idea that even the Messiah descended from a flawed family line.” (p. 87)

Womanist scholar Wil Gafney adds another layer of interpretation to this family. She writes, “I maintain that one of the reasons Jesus was so committed to justice for God’s daughters … was because of his own family history. Jesus had some scandals in his family tree … Jesus was not ashamed of his mama or any of his folk or the secrets and skeletons in their closets. That’s good news right there. Some of you are scandalous and some of you are scandalized and Jesus is not ashamed of any of us.” (https://www.wilgafney.com/2014/10/19/who-are-you-calling-a-whore/)

Writing from a sociopolitical point of view, Warren Carter notes that “The genealogy sets Jesus’ origin, and that of his followers, at the center of God’s purposes. Every name evokes larger stories of encounters with Israel’s God…. The genealogy does not testify to Rome’s control of human destiny or to the emperor’s oversight of human affairs…. It depicts God’s sovereign will and guiding promises.” (Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, 2000)

Matthew intentionally included people considered socially unsavory and unworthy as a way of showing the wideness in God’s mercy and the depth of God’s bench, as it were. God partners with really ordinary human beings in order to carry out the divine will. And that should give us hope.

You may have heard it said that someone won’t come to church because they think they aren’t good enough, but I say to you that God does not expect anything like perfection from us. That might be hard for the perfectionists among us to hear, that after getting everything just right there is not a prize that awaits us. And it might be hard for the elder-brothers-of-the-prodigal-sons to hear, that God loves and values and partners with the shady characters as much as the righteous ones.

But isn’t there also some relief in that? Is there maybe a little part of you that let out a silent sigh, knowing that your mistakes, your bad choices, will not condemn you forever?

 You may have heard it said that God values some people more than others, but I say to you that that is simply not true. The world in which Jesus lived, and the world of his ancestors, didn’t think that women amounted to much beyond their ability to bear sons, and maybe their ability to work the fields and feed the family and weave cloth and satisfy their husbands. And sadly, that thought has prevailed in the church world for many centuries. We’re getting beyond that, finally, but vestiges of that sexism are still present. I’ve been called a lady pastor, a girl pastor, a pastorette, cupcake, sweetheart, and sunshine, and not in good ways.

Women of color have it worse, as do LGBTQ folks, as does anyone who doesn’t fit what we think is the Biblical norm. All means all, and all are welcome in church, at the table, in the pulpit, and in leadership.

You may have heard it said that you can’t escape your past, but I say to you that none of us is bound by what happened to us or what happened before us. Some of the women we met in Guatemala are living examples of that.

Dora and Clemencia are sisters who work in the weaving co-op we visited, Corazon de Mujer. Like the other women in the co-op, their family was devastated by the 30+ years’ armed conflict. Their parents both died from stress-related illnesses that they endured because of the poverty and violence they lived with. The family of six children scraped by as they could, though the military stole their food and though they were displaced from their village.

But through the kindness of a woman named Justina, a new future opened up for them. Justina formed the co-op and invited a disparate group of women to come together and support one another and make beautiful things. They are so honest about their story, their suffering and their hardship, about the prejudice they still endure as people of Mayan descent. And they work so hard not only for themselves but even more so that their children will know a better life. Their past was horrific but they are not bound by it.

Where we come from does not necessarily show where we are or where we are going.

I have a friend, Cliff, who was adopted, and this year he decided to do 23andMe, the genetic testing service. His was a closed adoption, so he knows nothing about his birth parents. In a Facebook post, he wrote this.

“So….in case some of you don’t know. I’m adopted. I have always known this. It was no secret. But due to being adopted things like my biological heritage and my medical history have been a mystery to me. Also the possibility of biological connections out there has rolled around in my head more than once. So I did 23 and Me a few weeks ago to answer some of these questions and I’m waiting until [my wife and kids] and I are together after dinner to read the findings.

“Let me say, I know who my REAL family is. They are the ones I’ve always known and loved and have made me who I am.”

It is a good thing, a blessing, when we know not only who we are but whose we are. Maybe you know about your ancestors; maybe you don’t. Maybe you are hiding secrets or ashamed about something in your identity, and maybe there is much about your history that is still a mystery to you. No matter the circumstance, you belong to God. You are a son of Adam, a daughter of Eve, to use C.S. Lewis’s phrase. How you live out your identity as God’s beloved child is a lifetime’s quest.

At the Ash Wednesday service last week, we offered questions for contemplation this Lent. These questions emerged from the Sunday preaching texts, and so in closing, I offer you this question:

What is the blessing and what is the burden of all that history that adds up to you? 

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