Sermon - Family Tree

Sermon originally preached on July 25, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC

Matthew 1:1-17 (the genealogy of Jesus)

Do you come from a good family? Do you come from good people?

Do we care about these questions as much as we used to? I don’t think so. It used to be that your family tree defined you. When I finished my sabbatical and went on vacation a couple weeks ago, I was so excited to read something that was just for fun. Don’t get me wrong, I loved all the books I read for my classes, but I really missed a good novel. So now I’m partway through a book called Wolf Hall, which takes place in the court of King Henry the VIII. So there’s Thomas More, and the Boleyn family, and the Duke of Norfolk, who is Anne Boleyn’s uncle, and who you are depends so much on your family tree.

I don’t think we care so much. I know that we are interested in our family trees, but it’s an interest of history and discovery, not because it defines you as a good or bad person. In fact, our society really celebrates people who go from rags to riches, and we celebrate first generation high school or college graduates. We like to hear the inspiring stories of people who overcame adversity in childhood to have success as adults, and our society no longer looks down on children who are born out of wedlock the way these children were once called names, and made to feel ashamed. And thank God for all of this!

Maybe some of you read Thomas Hardy in school, especially Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in which a poor man named John Durbeyfield is told that his family name was once D’Urberville, an old family of nobility and money. And the power that this news has on him sets in motion a very tragic tale in which Tess is ruined in her father’s quest to recover a good family name. Thomas Hardy critiqued the culture of family names and noble standing, showing that each person should be known for his or her own character. It is better to revere a saintly child of scandalous background than to admire a wicked person of good blood.

Or you might read the Harry Potter novels for a more recent critique of a culture based on the purity of noble-blooded ancestry. In Harry’s world, magical children who come from non-magical parents are called “mudbloods,” which is a derogatory slur of the worst order, when it is actually the pure-blooded wizard families who are often the worst people. Family trees.

So, do we still care so much about the family tree of Jesus? Does it matter to us as much as it once did that Jesus is a descendent of Isaac and Jacob, or even King David? We can recognize that all of this may have been very important to the Hebrew people of the first century, but maybe it’s not as important to us. Maybe, for us, the incarnation of God could have been born on Christmas into any family and we would follow that person because of the incredible presence of God, not because we are impressed by the family tree.

And yet, maybe impressing us is not the real point of the family tree in Matthew! We skip over it because we don’t known most of the names and we assume all those names are meant to be admired, but a closer look reveals that this is not an ordinary genealogy. For one thing, it stops being impressive after King David. The kings who follow, between David and the time of exile, were mostly a lousy lot. Only two of fourteen leave a good record in scripture. The rest of them ignored God, practiced all kinds of injustice, and drove the nations of Judah and Israel into the ground. Making a point of that ancestry doesn’t make Jesus look any better, in terms of family credibility. It’s not even impressive before King David! Jacob stole his brother’s birthright, Judah sold his brother Joseph into slavery, and even King David has a dark side in his affair with Bathsheba, of which Matthew 1 makes a point to remind us. That’s kind of strange.

In fact, there is a strange mention of the names of five women. It’s strange because this was written in a patriarchal society, in which family trees were only about the men: father to son, father to son, father to son. Matthew goes out of his way to include five women, and they are not the impressive women in this tree, women like Sarah and Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, the faithful wives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

But he does include Tamar. Now, just briefly, Tamar’s story is in Genesis. She was a Canaanite woman who married one of Judah’s sons, but the son died before they’d had children. By the law of that time, the deceased husband’s brother should have given her a child (children were about all that widows had in those days to support them, you see). But the brother would not, and Judah shunned his foreign daughter-in-law until she had to pose as a prostitute in order to seduce Judah into giving her the child that God’s law at that time required. At the same time, she exposed the injustice with which they had treated her. Does that summary raise more questions than it answers? Then I think the book of Genesis is in your future: not as boring as you thought! Tamar is in this family tree.

And then there is Rahab. Rahab was an actual prostitute at Jericho when Joshua led the Hebrew people into the promised land after the Exodus, and her kindness in sheltering the Hebrew spies helps them to victory at Jericho.

And then there’s Ruth, King David’s great-grandmother, who is a Moabite woman married into a Hebrew family. Her husband and her father-in-law both died, leaving her a widow, and she brought her widowed mother-in-law back to Israel. In Israel, Ruth becomes Jewish, marries Boaz and continues the family tree of Jesus.

And then there is the wife of Uriah, Bathsheba, who was the “victim of [King] David’s lust,” (Raymond E. Brown, A Coming Christ in Advent) and we can only imagine the pressure that a king would bring to bear on her to make this happen. David had Bathsheba’s husband killed and took her as his wife. It is her son Solomon who continues the family tree.

Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba. All of them foreigners. All of them the victim of tragedy, often abuse. Why does Matthew go out of his way to name them? These are not the impressive names of a good family heritage, but more like the skeletons in the family closet. Why does Matthew want to remind people of these scandalous stories, these foreigners in the family tree of Jesus?

At least two reasons, I think. The first is that the last woman named in the family tree is Mary, who has her own scandal when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock. It may be that Matthew wants to prepare his hearers to accept Mary by reminding them that God has long been at work among the outcasts.

The second reason is that Matthew wants us to know that there is room for everyone in the family of Jesus. If it all begins with Jacob (who cheated his twin Esau) and Jacob’s son Judah (who sold off his brother and later shunned Tamar), Rahab and Ruth, and David with Bathsheba, and a bunch of bad kings, then we’ve got a family tree of saints and sinners, a family tree that you might want to hide as much as you’d want to celebrate it. This family tree reminds us, right at the beginning of the gospel, that God works with outcasts and foreigners, with people who are selfish and flawed and broken, just like most of us. And this is why Jesus always invited saints and sinners alike. This is why Jesus ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, and also with Pharisees, Roman centurions, and really everyone else. Everyone was invited to the table of Christ, because his grace was for all people.

And if God’s grace is wide enough for all of them, if God was at work in such a gnarled and twisted family tree, then surely God is at work in our own family trees. Despite the failures, the scandals, the things we don’t want anyone to know about, we have a place in God’s family. The Christ child who was born in this family tree was born for every one of us.

And so the family tree of Jesus continues in his followers. During our bicentennial last year, we celebrated the many wonderful things about our heritage in this congregation. But it hasn’t all been so good. There are also stories of pettiness, exclusion, judgmental attitudes, and fights. Our family tree is still full of both saints and sinners.

This past spring when I traveled to Boston with the confirmation class to learn about the Congregational church, we celebrated their work for religious freedom, for the abolition of slavery, for the equality of women. But we also saw the grave marker, near the grave of John Hancock, of his servant Frank. No last name, probably a slave. And we visited beautiful Boston Common, the park where people gathered for public speeches and sermons, next to the magnificent state house. And I told them that this is also where they used to execute people: witches, and heretics, like those Quakers.

Why should we remember these stories? Because if we are not honest about our past, then we aren’t honest about our present. And if we don’t remember these failings, then we will get the idea that God only works in the lives of perfect people, people who make no mistakes, have no trace of ignorance, and are free from doubt and fear and the prejudices of their day. But if God only works through those kinds of people, then God can’t work through us.

That’s not what the family tree of Jesus proclaims. This family tree proclaims that God works through all of us. This family tree in Matthew is how we get from Abraham to Jesus, but I also imagine the family tree of faith, which shows how we get from Jesus to us. It, too, is full of saints and sinners. It’s got some big names that we recognize, like Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, but it’s got many more names who do not make history.

Here’s an interesting thing about Matthew’s family tree from the time of the exile until Jesus. If you study the Old Testament, you will find only the first two names in that list. The rest have been lost to history, until Joseph and Mary. Unremembered, ordinary people, who never made the history books for their achievements. They were regular people like you and me. I wonder how God is working among us?

Do you come from a good family? Do you come from good people? Well, not good all the time. But we do come from God’s people. We come from God’s family tree.