What Really Matters: Connection
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – 11/27/22
What Really Matters: Who Your People Are – Matt. 1: 1-17
Now that the leaves have left the trees it’s easier to see the sunset out of the western facing windows of my home. And on morning walks through the neighborhood, I am noticing all manner of things that must have been there all summer but until now were obscured by the leaves. Now I can see the homes of squirrels, the nests of birds, forgotten kites, and a big hive of hornets not far from my favorite picnic spot.
It’s not just the coming winter that can reveal things otherwise hidden. Many of us have experienced a number of major life stressors that have thrown into stark relief the gifts and challenges before us that we may have otherwise been able to ignore. I know that those early lockdown days of the pandemic did that for many of us. When our schedules stopped and so many of our normal supports were taken away. What was it that was revealed to us then? Were there uncomfortable truths we were forced to face? Were there precious gifts we realized we had taken for granted? What did we notice about what really matters to us?
To the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, what really seems to matter is who your people are. This scripture text doesn’t always get read in church. It doesn’t have a lot of juicy narrative for preachers to sermonize on or church-goers to relate to. But Matthew includes it–even starts the Gospel with it. So, the writer must have deemed this list of Jesus’ ancestors to be of imminent importance.
According to Matthew scholar and Highland Avenue member Rick Gardner in his new Covenant Bible Study we have the privilege of sharing together this season in Sunday School, “the author of the first Gospel…inhabited a culture in which genealogies were important. …Among their various functions genealogies could serve to establish the extent of kinship, an important source of identity in a tribal society. They could also indicate whether someone had the lineage required to hold a particular office, such as king or priest.” For the writer of Matthew, there was no other way to reveal who this Jesus really was.
Although I haven’t engaged in it very deeply myself, I’ve noticed an interest in genealogies to be trending these days. Indeed, ancestry interest seems to be big business with a well-advertised research service you can subscribe to for an annual fee and a field of popular television shows about genealogy, including Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—a show that thrives on introducing famous people to surprising news about their ancestors. Viewers are often treated to a few moments of introspection from the celebrities in focus as they seek to assimilate any new information about their heritage into their own stories about what and who makes them who they are.
In the Gospel of Matthew, the genealogy of Jesus has some surprising characters in it, too. There’s some expected and impressive male ancestors listed there like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesse, David, and Solomon. But there are also some women who make the list–women who were the victims of violence or who engaged in scandalous activities but who nonetheless became heroines in the story of Judaism. Come to think of it, some of the male ancestors on that list had their own well-known scandals, suffering, and shortcomings. But while the men are of unquestionable Jewish heritage, the women are all outsiders.
For a Gospel that ends with an admonition from Jesus to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” I think it’s safe to assume that these outsider women are not slipped into Jesus’ genealogy accidentally. Rather, they show up on this list of ancestors by design.
The genealogy of Jesus also doesn’t seem to shy away from scandal, listing Bathsheba as simply the wife of Uriah and in doing so, underlining the cruel abuses of power by King David. There’s no purity being sought in this lineage. There’s no preoccupation with insider blood or blameless conduct. For better or worse, this is the earthly ancestry to which Jesus will be born. Or, it’s the line of Joseph at least, the man who will adopt him, despite the scandalous circumstances of Mary’s pregnancy.
There’s a story I love that goes around the internet every year at this time. It’s the story of an unrelated white woman and black man who have had Thanksgiving dinner together every year for the past seven years. They met by accident. Wanda Dench was trying to text her grandson an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. Unbeknownst to her, he had a new number. And a stranger received the text meant for her grandson.
Jamal Hinton texted back, “You’re not my grandma. Can I still get a plate though?”
She answered: “Of course. Grandmas feed everyone!” That was 2016 and the two previous strangers have knit their families together every year since. They’ve adopted each other in a way that gives me and so many others hope for our connection to each other.[1]
The good news of God’s love for the world as known in Jesus is not just good news to a particular group or to people who behave a certain way. It’s good news for all of us. Because that means we, too, are adopted into the people of God. In Jesus, we are all connected to God, and we are all connected to each other. We are God’s people. We are each other’s people, too.
In that unbreakable connection we can find hope. In that unbreakable connection we can live by the star of what really matters: the never ending love of God.
There’s one more little detail in today’s scripture passage. A few odd verses about the number of generations. Matthew tells us: “So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.”
This might not mean a lot to you or me. But for the writer of Matthew and his original audience, the number fourteen meant completion. It meant Jesus had been born in the fullness of time. The time was just right for him to be born.
The time is just right for us, too.
The time is just right for us to welcome the birth of Christ once again into our hearts, our homes, our families, our world, and the family of humanity, so that we will learn from all that has been revealed to us and find the holy hope, peace, joy, and love of being the family of God unbreakably connected to each other and to all that really matters.
May it be so. Amen.
1] https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2022/11/23/black-man-white-grandma-plan-to-share-7th-thanksgiving-dinner/
