There’s Room for Every Story
Welcome to the season of Advent – the beginning of the church year. In Advent we prepare for the coming of Jesus. Sometimes we’d like to rush right through the waiting (and the work). But Advent is intended to have some slowness, some quiet, some building expectation to it.
Our theme in this season is “From Generation to Generation. We will be reminded in coming weeks of how our lives, our histories, our actions and our stories are interconnected and woven together. And we will be reminded that our stories are part of God’s big story. We’re not following the lectionary exactly this season, so you might find us talking about different scriptures than perhaps you’ve come to expect. But let’s see where the story leads.
Today, Bruce braved the genealogy of Jesus as it is found in Matthew’s gospel. Reading through the names and the generations, we remember that Jesus was born to a woman, flesh and blood, and as a human being, and therefore he had a genealogy and lineage, and one that tells part of the story.
How many of you have worked on your genealogy, or have someone in your family doing that work and sharing it with you?
My paternal grandfather, the Methodist minister, spent his retirement years recording a detailed genealogy of the Manny family. He documented generations back to their arrival from England to Hingham, MA.
I know that my fifth great grandfather was General Benjamin Lincoln, the revolutionary political pawn sent to accept Cornwallis’ sword of surrender at Yorktown on Washington’s behalf. He’s featured at the center of a John Trumbull painting in the capital rotunda.
I also know that my grandfather’s uncles were street preachers in Chicago’s immigrant neighborhoods during the charismatic holiness movement of the late 19th century. My grandfather, not wanting his own history to be lost, wrote a detailed account of his own life so that his grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren would know a lot about him.
I will note that what is sorely missing in his work is the stories of the women in my family. I have piles of papers in my house that are waiting for my retirement so that I can write my grandmother’s biography, because hers is an important story as well. But I digress, sort of.
The stories of where we came from can also be stories of who we are and who we might be. These stories connect us to other peoples’ stories that branch off and double back and intersect.
In the ancient world, these stories of family connections from generation to generation mattered a LOT. A genealogy established lines of inheritance – material, social, political and spiritual inheritance. It determined a person’s power, status, perhaps even their livelihood.
Let’s unpack some of the connections in this genealogy we’ve heard this morning – three sets of 14 generations each are named. There is rhythm and symmetry and a purpose – three sets of fourteen was easier to memorize and remember. Recall that these accounts were recorded from oral traditions. People spoke these lists long before they were written down.
The first set of fourteen generations connects Jesus to Abraham (you know, Father Abraham and his many sons) – and therefore to the chosen people of God. And as part of that heritage, it goes on to connect Jesus to King David, and therefore to the prophecies about the Messiah being in the line of David, a shoot from the root of Jesse as the prophet Isaiah said.
That same first set includes the names of three women – a thing that would have been unusual in the recounting of family lines. Tamar, Rahab and Ruth were each remarkable and vital parts of the unfolding story of God. They are here because their stories matter…their lives move God’s big story forward in specific ways.
Tamar was widowed by two of Judah’s sons without conceiving an heir. She tricked Judah into a tryst that resulted in the birth of twins – keeping the family line marching forward.
Rehab lived on the margins of society in Jericho, possibly a prostitute, literally living at the city walls, a location that would enable her to help Joshua’s soldiers to enter, gather intelligence and leave safely. In return, they committed to her family having a safe place to land in Israel, preserving her place in the big family of God.
And Ruth, who chose to stay with her mother-in-law after being widowed, strategically seduced Boaz to secure a place in society for herself and her mother in law Naomi.
Each set of fourteen generations includes so many imperfect folks – Abraham had doubted and deceived even as he tried to do as God was asking him to. David seduced Bathsheba and then killed her husband to cover his disgrace. Poor Bathsheba doesn’t even get named but she is there as “the wife of Uriah” – she is named by her shame so to speak.
Certainly there are people named who are less “compromised” or about whom we know far less in this genealogy (But really, do we pay the same attention to those folks in most of history? Do we actually know or recall the stories that aren’t quite so sordid?)
This lineage is chocked full of human condition – of betrayal and sin and disobedience. And it is chocked full of God keeping God’s promises to the people God chose. And as part of the human family, we are connected to the full range of lineage. We all have skeletons in our family closet, right? We all have those relatives that seem squeaky clean on paper and we have family that seems wracked by wrongdoing, and in most generations there is a rich mixture of both, side by side and moment by moment in the same person!
This lineage is a starting point in the story of Jesus.
It is a story that belongs to us as followers of Jesus, and we belong to this story. At Faith, we name that we are a place to belong – that is a claim about all of us right here connected to this church – but it is also a claim about how we belong to the big family of God that is so much bigger than church.
Our stories are rooted in our bloodline and they are beyond our bloodline – they are our experiences, our relationships, our hometowns, our work. Our stories connect us to one another and to Jesus and David and Ruth and Tamar and Abraham. Through baptism, we have been adopted into these stories of faith beyond our bloodline (much like Joseph adopting Jesus as his own).
I wonder how we might pay attention to our connectedness during this season?
I wonder how we might think about the ancient story of Jesus and about how our stories today matter to God’s Kin-dom.
In our Advent newsletter, The Good News, there was a piece about the “We Are” poetry project, a societal movement to share our wild diversity through poetry. When we share our stories, we can be amazed to find how our stories might touch other’s stories. We learn about experiences that we share with others and we learn about how others have been formed by life differently than us.
While the prompt in the newsletter is to reflect on our church family and who we are as the people of Faith, I hope you will also craft your story – your “I am” or “I come from” poem. (There is a link to the larger individual poetry project in the newsletter. Let the office or a worship host know if you need the newsletter or help finding it online!). And then I hope you will take interest in others’ source story as well.
It is a fun little movement of the Spirit that Janice Harmon shared her “I come from” poem as part of her interview process with our SPRC. She brought that framework with her to girls camp two summers ago, and we all drafted and shared our I come from or our I am poems as a way to get to know one another at the beginning of the week. Last week, Michael Wu shared so beautifully from his own source story. It is a great gift to me as your pastor when you show up in my office and share a bit of your story with me. And I’ve heard from many of you that you appreciate the way I share stories of my experience and background.
So in the spirit of getting our hearts and minds working on this, here is my poem:
I come from
cradle Methodists who were
street preachers and teetotalers.
I come from a large family
that laughs and argues and
loves out loud.
I come from
Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, Zoom
and phonics.
I come from three networks and
Peter Jennings' voice
detailing the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the end
of the Cold War.
I come from a story and a half
cape cod on Hart Street
where the fire siren blew
each Saturday at noon.
I come from the generation
labeled X, stuck between
the swell of Boomers and Millennials.
I come from a yard that
grows tomatoes and grapes
and rhubarb.
I come from
second chances and
grace upon grace.
I come from love
and light.
I hope you will share yours as well. Because connecting our lives makes a difference. We are created connected to God. We are created connected to Jesus. We are created to be connected to one another.
Our Hebrew scripture reading today was from the book of Isaiah – and it casts the vision of what will happen as God works to bring people from very different places together –
He shall judge between the nations
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war any more.
O house of Jacob,
come, let us walk
in the light of the Lord!
May we connect and know the power of peace and love. May we connect so that we understand God’s love for us. May we connect and see how we all belong to the big story of God.
May it be so.
Amen.
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