Surprising People
Genealogies are fascinating and meaningful things. Maybe you have done this work for your own family. There is a bit of a treasure hunt quality to it.
In my genealogy, there is my great great great great great grandfather, Benjamin Lincoln, the little-known general who accepted Cornwallis’ sword of surrender at Yorktown in the little battle of passive aggression between Washington and Cornwallis. That’s kind of cool. He’s featured prominently in the John Trumbull painting of that moment that hangs in the capitol rotunda.
There is also my grandfather, the Methodist minister who followed in a line of generations of Methodist preachers beginning with the earliest Methodists movement in the United States. But he didn’t launch that career until after he’d ridden his motorcycle across the country and fled one night’s camp under the cover of darkness because he’d overheard other traveler’s plans which seemed unsavory.
And there is my grandmother, who was born into an abusive household, shuttled off to another abusive foster-family type situation where she essentially lived as an indentured servant until she met my grandfather who to his death talked about marrying her as something of a mercy mission. She lost several babies, was hospitalized for a severe depression and raised four children on a shoestring in parsonages across Northern Illinois.
Our genealogies reveal vitally important things – some things we want to know, others we would rather not remember at times.
In scripture, genealogies help to set the stage and remind the reader / hearer of the backdrop of someone’s life or the whole story’s frame.
Genealogies appear in several places in the Hebrew scripture, most notably in Genesis – where the lineage sets up an understanding of the various tribal nations, relationships among them, and the ancient geography of the Middle East.
And in the gospels, there is a genealogy in both Luke and Matthew. In Luke, the genealogy is not told as part of the birth narrative, but is instead part of how we learn of Jesus’ ministry being launched. That version in Luke, unlike the version from Matthew that you heard today, ties Jesus back through the ages all the way to Adam, the first “son of God.” In doing so, the author of Luke’s gospel sets up Jesus as something of a “new Adam,” and thereby suggests a “new creation.” The genealogy is there to shape “the rest of the story” in Luke.
In the genealogy Clyde shared today from Matthew, Jesus’ family line is tracked back to Abraham. For hearers of this story early on, this would tie Jesus’ birth to the well known promise that God made to Abraham – the promise that through him, “all families of the earth shall be blessed.” Immediately following the genealogy, the writer of Matthew tells of the divine source of Jesus’ birth – with Mary engaged to Joseph but being found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. In 19 verses, the author establishes that Jesus is both of Human and of God. Once again, the genealogy is an important frame for how the rest of the story will be told and received.
In a very early chapter of the book we’ve been studying this year, We Make the Road by Walking, author Brian McLaren begins to point to the way patterns matter throughout creation and then in the world around us – we can sometimes overlook the patterns and only recognize chaos, but if we look hard, we are apt to find patterns that point us to something bigger going on, some organizing structure, some truth. Throughout the journey we are on together, we will name patterns that show up in our Holy Scriptures. Today, we’re focusing in on a pattern because it matters to how we see the big picture of Jesus’ birth and ministry, and eventually his death and resurrection.
In Matthew’s gospel, the family tree of Jesus is divided into three parts – the first moving from Abraham to King David, the second moving from King David to “the time of deportation to Babylon,” the season of exile for the Jewish people, and finally from the exile to the birth of Jesus. Each division includes 14 generations. Remember that what we know as “books of the Bible” began as stories passed down orally within a community – a pattern like this might have helped the teller to remember all the details – because the details mattered. This is why we still have those details today!
Further in the details of this family tree, there are remarkably five women mentioned. They are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba (although she is not “named,” exactly), and Mary.
Tamar had posed as a prostitute in order to trick her father-in-law into a tryst so that she might bear a son and seal her financial and social security.
Rahab was an inn keeper or perhaps ran a brothel – and helped Joshua’s spies as the assessed the military might of Jericho before crossing into the Promised Land. In return she found a place among the Israelites for her family and her future generations.
Rahab’s son Boaz is seduced on a barn floor by Ruth, a widowed Moabite who committed herself so firmly to her also widowed mother-in-law Naomi that she sought a politically savvy union that would preserve the whole family.
Perhaps best known is the “wife of Uriah,” the woman named Bathsheba whose union with David while her husband still lived resulted in the birth of Solomon, who is responsible for building the Temple in Jerusalem. (Real time edits. I realized as I listened to myself today online that this does not read correctly - Solomon was not conceived when David and Bathsheba first came together because of that root top sighting - that child died. But Solomon was born of their union.)
And finally there is Mary – who is engaged but not married and now found to be pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The common thread among these women? As my study bible carefully names it, all five had “irregular sexual unions” but were considered important enough to name as part of God’s plan.
As McLaren points out, these aren’t the kind of women who would typically be named in great histories of the time.
And really, that is the point of their inclusion.
These women and their various unions represent some of the messy realities of life. They aren’t glossed over or forgotten, they are actually named and claimed. Their lives are real, complicated, and vital.
Jesus, from the moment of birth is entering a world of messiness and is ultimately PART of the messiness. There is something of his story and his family line that even suggests that messiness is not only a reality, but it somehow belongs. Somehow by God’s grace, all the crazy circumstances yield a big picture that is fuller and brighter and more inclusive and grace-filled than our humanity can sometimes fathom.
But what if we never actually see it that way? I think we miss the gospel good news when we gloss over the messiness of it all.
In 2013 I visited India as a part of my seminary studies. We worked over two weeks with a number of Dalit theologians and political activists. In the ancient caste system that still shapes social norms in India today, Dalits are the lowest caste – they are the untouchables, understood to be unclean and stuck doing the work that others will not – things like scavenging through trash, handling the carcasses of dead animals, digging graves or tanning hides.
As you drive through cities and villages across India, there is inevitably something of a squatter camp on the outskirts of each one – a complicated assortment of shelters stacked together, bright swatches of torn tarp or rescued fabric, a mix of cardboard and salvaged plywood, black smoke of cooking fires and warming fires interspersed. Nearby you are apt to find the community dump, where those occupying these squatter villages are combing through the trash to find anything that might be consumed, used for clothing or shelter, or repaired and sold elsewhere.
We didn’t just drive by these enclaves of poverty. We spent time in them, talking to the people, finding the leaders, learning about how they prioritized issues to seek help and support and more connection to the rest of the world around them.
These weren’t poor and hopeless and helpless people. They were clever, creative, resourceful. They were grateful for what they had and they were called to help one another. There lives were not simple. I do not intend to glamorize their hardship, only to recognize the fullness of their humanity.
In my imagination, these are the people Jesus would seek out today. Here is where Jesus would bring good news – the world is hard and your life is messy and God loves you so. You are not forgotten. In fact, you belong and are a critical part of the story.
But how can they be part of my story if I do not pay attention?
I am aware that sometimes when we dwell in the hard parts of some people’s stories, we can feel guilty – like we get overtaken by some sort of survivor guilt and we have to turn away, or worse yet, we start seeking out reasons a poor person must be poor – bad life choices, a broken family, a lack of legal status.
It is as if our rational brains cannot face the gaping difference of our circumstances.
Jesus time and again sat with the least of these.
He was himself from the least of these.
I suspect we are all from some “least of these” people too, if we look hard enough. I revisit gingerly the story of my grandmother, her experiences of neglect and poverty, her struggle to maintain mental health. These are not sources of shame, they are part of the big picture. They are part of her contribution to the world around her…
And I wonder if we can understand the least of these in our own experience whether we might be better able to, like Jesus, be fully with the least of these – in understanding, in shared vision, in service to the wholeness of the Kin-dom of God.
And so as we continue to make this road by walking, I pray that we will sit with the fullness of the story of Jesus, of the way that as a human, he was from the messy realities of life. So that we might be able to acknowledge the messiness that is always with us, not to reject it or judge it or be shamed by it, but to understand that messiness is part of who we are, part of how we are equipped to move in the world, and how we are also called to be with other’s messiness in the world.
May it be so.
Amen.
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