"From Generation to Generation...There is Room for Every Story" a sermon on Matthew 1:1-17

Matthew 1:1-17
“From Generation to Generation…There is Room for Every Story”
Preached Sunday, November 27, 2022

I have shared before that part of the story I use to define myself is that I come from a line of strong Methodist women.

Working backwards we have my mother, Judy. She raised her children in The United Methodist Church. She is a lay leader in her church, a certified lay speaker, and, generally, a woman who is seemingly unafraid to step out in her faith to help others.

And then we have her mother, Alice. Alice was also an example of faith to me: she raised her children in The Methodist Church and when I was a child, attended church with her grandchildren every Sunday. I loved watching her when she sang in the choir. Admittedly, I loved it more when she sat with us in the pews and I got to hear her sing. Still to this day, I get a shiver when I sing some hymns, because I am hearing her voice in my head.

Then we have her mother, Marjorie, a Methodist woman and a force to be reckoned with. I’m told she had a heart for social justice and was a woman before her time, working toward racial integration, founding the Youngstown chapter of the United Nations Association, holding a position in the national PTA, and driving around the country to help get her alcoholic brother in rehab. I only knew her the first handful of years of my life, but it meant so much to me when my grandmother and my mother told me they saw her in me.

And for the first time this week I learned that her mother, Norma, was heavily involved in one of the precursor organizations that would become what we know as United Methodist Women - and what in just the last year has changed its name to United Women in Faith.

I’d love to learn more about these women and the generations that preceded them and perhaps some day I will be gifted with that opportunity. And for today, when I reference the 4 generations of Methodist women who came before me, I am shaping my own story too. That I am who I am because of the generations that came before me.

Do you see where I am going with this? When Matthew takes the first 17 verses of his chapter to trace Jesus’s genealogy, he is not just laying out the facts, it is not a simple classroom assignment of Jesus’s family tree. Just as I am shaping a narrative about myself through the 4 generations of Methodist women, Matthew is defining who Jesus is through the generations before him. And genealogy was a well-known genre of the time. Readers would know the references and the narrative that Matthew was shaping about Jesus through his genealogy - but for us, we’re not quite as familiar. So let’s take a little bit of a closer look this morning.

First, the key figures laid out in the first verse:
“An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

By saying that Jesus is a son of Abraham, Matthew is linking Jesus to the Israelites and to God’s people. Abraham is the father of the Israelites and it was through Abraham that God adopted the Israelites as God’s people, God’s children. And it was through Abraham’s lineage that God promised to bless all humanity. Matthew is telling his readers that Jesus is that long awaited son of Abraham through which they all would be blessed.

Now, “son of David” is a line that Matthew likes a lot - in verse 1 it’s the first of 10 times he uses it in his Gospel. He is trying to establish here that Jesus is royalty - a king. And it was from David’s line that the Messiah was to come. That’s why Jesus’s lineage is traced not only through David to Solomon but all the way to Jechoniah who was the last surviving Israelite king at the time of the Babylonian exile.

So right of that bat, Matthew is saying that Jesus is the Messiah, the one who God promised through the father of all the Israelites, Abraham, to bless all of humanity and he is the rightful heir to the King of the Israelites, descended down through the generations from David to Solomon to Jechoniah to the day of Jesus's birth.

Tying Abraham and David to Jesus are pretty obvious in their meaning and intent but there are somethings hidden here that only a really astute reader would notice. And here’s where things get a little crazy. Have you all seen this meme online? It conveys when someone is trying to explain a really complex thing that makes people think they’re crazy? Well, I am going to try and simplify as much as I can because Matthew isn’t holding anything back.

We need to note that there are 14 generations listed in the line of David. Which means he left out 3. He didn’t leave out three because they were scandalous black sheep - and we’ll get to some scandal in the genealogy in a minute - but he left them out - because the number 14, in Hebrew, signifies David. Each letter in Hebrew has a numerical value and when you add the letters in David’s name together…you get fourteen! So it’s another nod to the reader that Jesus is in the line of David, a king who would come and save the Israelites. Moreover, Matthew actually intentionally misspells a couple names in the line of David on purpose. Asa became Asaph - a poet featured in the Psalms and Amon became Amos - the famous prophet. Now, some translations into English, like I believe the one I read today, aren't in on the wordplay so they’ve taken them as misspellings and changed them back to their “intended” names but you’ll see a little footnote in the Bible saying as such. But to his initial readers, they would have noticed the play on words with the names subtly changed - so when they are reading the genealogy of Jesus, they are not just thinking about the Son of Abraham who would bless all humanity, and the Son of David through which a king would fulfill all their hopes, they were also thinking of the a Messiah who would fulfill all the hopes of the Psalms and the Prophets. And this person, centered in our history, in our worship, in our prophecy, in all our hopes and dreams - this person, is Jesus…and that is the story Matthew is crafting in listing the genealogy of Jesus. It’s quite a theological statement and it sets up the expectation of Jesus and who he would be.

…But believe it or not, Matthew is not done making important points in this list of names.

There are four other names that would have popped out to his initial readers: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. It would not have been normal to list four women in a patriarchal genealogy so that in of itself is unusual but it’s not necessarily that they are women that makes them of note. If that were the case, perhaps Matthew would have chosen some…well…more respectable women. Like the matriarchs of the Israelites, like Sarah, Rebecca, or Rachel…but no, he goes Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. I’d love to spend time breaking down each of their stories for you if you don’t know them - but each of their stories is a new sermon in and of itself. But a couple common threads hold them together: All of these women are non-Israelites or connected to non-Israelite families. Caananites and a Moabite…and even beyond that, all of these women are associated with sex scandals. A woman who had to force her in-laws to do right by her after being widow, pretending to be a prostitute so they would sleep with her to give her a son. A woman who was a prostitute A woman who laid at the feet of a man to trap him into marriage - that’s most likely a euphemism. And Bathsheba…a woman who was raped by King David and then David had her husband killed.

In listing these women, Matthew is implying several things about Jesus and who he will be: He will expand God’s blessing beyond the Israelites, to the Canaanites, the Moabites, the Gentiles…He is also saying that God works through all kinds of people - through foreigners, and scandals and women…And of course, Matthew’s genealogy ends with Mary - a woman herself who would have been associated with a scandal - an unwed pregnant mother.

So Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus moves not just vertically, down through the ages, generation to generation - it also moves out, horizontally, ever expanding, widening the circle of the understanding of who the Messiah was for.

You know, lately I’ve seen a lot of talk online about encouraging teachers to not assign family trees but instead to have students make a circle of care. The reasoning behind this is that family trees are a privilege that not everyone has. Some may not know their family tree through reasons like adoption. Others may be cut off through their family trees through trauma of some sort. And then, especially for many Black students, their family trees reflect the horror of slavery that isn’t addressed when the project is assigned at a young grade. So, instead of family trees - circles of care are encouraged to take their place. Now what is a circle of care? A circle of care starts with an individual in the middle and then it radiates out from there to include all who have loved and cared for them, blood or otherwise, and it continues to radiate out, showing a net of love and care that has formed that person into who they are today.

And while Matthew’s genealogy is certainly a vertical approach, through the generations, to explain who Jesus is, it’s also a horizontal one…but it’s Jesus in the center and then all those who HE cares for radiating out. And in that first circle, they may have assumed that the Messiah was only going to come for a certain type of people or one type of person or just the Israelites…but in Jesus’s lifetime, those in his circle of care included lowly fishermen, hated tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, outcasts, widows, children and the least of these…his circle of care didn’t look like what people expected it to look like. In our baptismal vows we confess that Jesus has opened up his church to all people of all ages and all nations and all races - every gender, every orientation, every type of person out there. Jesus’s circle of care encompasses each and every person in this world. Jesus’s circle of care NEVER stops, it includes every person ever born.

And ever since Jesus, we have seen followers of Jesus working to spread the Gospel message that Jesus loves you, yes, even YOU, to more and more people, helping our circles of who we care about look a lot more like the all encompassing circle of Jesus’s love and care.

Jesus loved those whom they didn’t expect him to. And then Paul went to the Gentiles. Who went to, who went to, who went to…The church SHOULD ever be growing more inclusive and more diverse and when we are more inclusive and more diverse we are that much closer to loving all those that Jesus loves - and that’s everybody: drag queens and immigrants and sex workers and the disabled and chronically ill and any person who is on the “edge” of our society - we are called to expand out our circles of care to them…because Jesus loves them and we are too.

And yes, that all comes back down to Jesus, the Messiah, Son of David and Son of Abraham - who would bless all of humanity, who is the rightful king of the Israelites, who is the fulfillment of the law and prophecy, who was sung about in the Psalms - who is the one in which we find hope - hope that God is never done with us, and hope that generation to generation, God’s love would every continue to expand through us.

This Advent and Christmas season, may we expand our circles of care and love, sharing the love of Jesus with all.

Amen.