Scripture: Matthew 1:18-25
As I was saying last week, it’s my intention during the four Sundays of Advent this year to take a different one of the four gospels each week and reflect on the Christmas story as it appears in that gospel. I began last week with the gospel of Mark, which in a literal sense doesn’t have a story about the birth of Jesus in it, though I managed to find some things to say about it anyway.
Today I come to the gospel of Matthew, which very definitely does have a Christmas story, quite an extensive Christmas story actually, if you include, as I think we should, not just those verses we heard earlier but the portions that lead in to that and follow after that. When you take the whole story together, it offers actually a whole bunch of things to reflect on, more than I could possibly attend to in one sermon, though I want to at least touch on several of them. If you’ll bear with me for a few minutes, I want to just outline the larger story for you, the larger story of Christ’s birth as it appears in Matthew, suggesting as I go through the story some of the themes that on another day I might build an entire sermon around, but that today will receive just some quick comments.
Our reading today began at chapter 1, verse 18, but the story really begins at the beginning, at chapter 1, verse 1, which says: “An account of the birth of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Then it goes into some detail about Jesus being a son of Abraham and a son of David. “Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Aram, and Aram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.” If you think I actually know how to pronounce all those names, you’d be wrong. The correct technique is just to keep going.
But I won’t go on…although there is more, and I am just getting to the good part where Rehaboam was the father of Abijah and Jehoshaphat was the father…oh well, never mind. I’ve said enough to give you the flavor of the first seventeen verses. Lots of fathering. Lots of unpronounceable names—a passage I wouldn’t give anyone to read five minutes before the service. You can see why people usually start with verse 18. You can see why television specials do not feature someone reading these verses with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir softly singing Silent Night in the background. You can see why this is not a beloved part of the story. But beloved or not, it is part of the story, and it is not without some things worth commenting on. For instance…
Probably what Matthew was getting at here was the idea that Jesus was the culmination of Jewish history which began with Abraham and extended on down to Jesus. Also, genealogies like this served, as they have and still do for many people, they served to establish a person’s identity as part a certain tribe, or clan, or family. If you were a member of the tribe of Levi, for instance, you were eligible to be a priest. And scriptures had always said that when the messiah came he would be a descendant of King David, so when Matthew establishes Jesus’ lineage as going back to David, he is essentially trying to show that Jesus is eligible to be the Messiah.
In any case genealogies might be important to people for many reasons and a listing of ancestors such as Matthew provides for Jesus was, so I read, not uncommon. What was uncommon was for the list to include five women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and of course Mary. And not just five people who were women but five people who also didn’t fit in the list for other reasons: either because they were foreigners and/or because they had been involved in some presumed sexual impropriety, including of course Mary, the unwed teenage mother. In the inclusion of these five women we can hear, maybe, a faint murmur of the structures of power beginning to crumble, an anticipation, a herald of a more inclusive and a more loving community that would come into being with the coming of Jesus. To be sure, the list of Jesus’ ancestors is still composed mostly of kings, or of powerful men in any case, but there are these hints of a new kind of kingdom coming through these women surprisingly included in Jesus’ lineage. As the saying goes, that would preach at Sojourners, but will not be the sermon today, except for the little bit I just said.
Then comes the story of the birth itself, which we heard, and which I’m going to skip over for now because I’m going to come back to it in a few minutes. After that, we come to the kings or the magi, the mysterious visitors from the east who come bearing gifts which they intend to offer to Jesus, guided through long travels by a holy star, encountering the fearful and murderous King Herod but not being fooled by him and eventually returning to their homes to live their lives inspired by their encounter with a true king. You know that story, the basics of it. There’s lots of preaching material there, all sorts of symbols and story lines to play with, and plenty that fits at Sojourners. Just the notion of journeying for instance. I think we are pretty clear at Sojourners that faith is a journey, not a destination, not a possession. The image of the magi finding their way to Jesus and then back home again is a good image for people who understand faith to be an unsettled and at times unsettling journey. That too would preach at Sojourners…more fully on some other occasion.
Then there is the story immediately after that, usually referred to as “the slaughter of the innocents”, where Herod, realizing that he has been tricked or perhaps ignored, neither of which is a good thing to do to a tyrant, realizing in any case that he is not going to find this dangerous baby so he can have him taken care of directly, decides that he’s just going to have to kill all the male children under two. Presumably this messiah, whoever he is, would be among them. And so it is that this story of extraordinary cruelty and violence is placed alongside the story of Jesus’ birth, as our faith always exists alongside of and in the midst of a world where cruelty and violence seem to have their way, a world where innocent children and women and men do die, often at the hands of other human beings, where all the gifts and good will we can muster does not stop the bloodshed. Again, lots to reflect on and lots of ways to do it, and appropriate for Sojourners where I think I can safely say that our approach to faith is not to use it to sugarcoat reality, not to let it turn our eyes from the injustices and sorrows of the world, not to smooth over the world’s harshness with pretty phrases of faith.
And of course Jesus does escape Herod’s killing fields by fleeing to Egypt—Egypt the historic place of captivity for the Hebrew people, as though to say that God is not just someone who captives can turn to, can appeal to for help, but that God is someone who will dwell among the captives. The name of Christ is not only as the hymn We Three Kings says, “king and God and sacrifice” reflecting the gifts the kings brought with them (gold for a king, incense for the worship of a god, myrrh a perfume to anoint the dead), but Christ’s name will also be “captive” and “liberator”. He comes not just to the world in general but especially to places of captivity and to be among those seeking liberation. Still again a theme that I know would find a sympathetic audience at Sojourners.
But now finally let me come back to the eight verses that Allison did read. As I’ve tried to indicate, I could have chosen any of these themes I’ve referred to that are part of Matthew’s story and that I relate to easily and built this whole sermon around that theme, any one of them. And in fact even within these eight verses there is the reference to the fact that the messiah will be called Emmanuel, which means “God with us”, and that is a common theme to be preached on from this passage and again one that would come naturally for me. I have often had the thought that that is the very core of the gospel, God with us, and that we don’t really need and can’t really ask for any more than that. So I might have turned my attention there.
But in fact the verse that kept asking for my attention, almost like a student in a classroom with a hand raised and shouting “me, me, me”, the verse that seemed to be printed in bold type telling me not to ignore it—that verse was the one that I actually designated as a sermon text and asked Millie to print in the bulletin. “…you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” I think I might have asked Millie to put that in the bulletin so I would be less likely to change my mind and just take the easy way and ignore that verse. I’m told that sentence makes more sense in Aramaic or Hebrew because the name Joshua sounds like the word for save. In any case, it was that sentence, that verse, that I found myself being drawn to. It was not a verse that I particularly resonated with or related to easily. In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that it wasn’t exactly that I was drawn to it, more that as I read the first chapters of Matthew over several times that I kept stumbling over this verse.
“He will save his people from their sins.” Reminds me of the billboards that used to say—maybe there are still some—the billboards that said Jesus Saves. Reminds me of the people I have encountered occasionally who have wanted to know whether I am saved, being pretty sure apparently that they were and suggesting that if I wasn’t, I could be if I would say just the right words about Jesus. Reminds me of what I almost always feel is the unspoken assumption that goes along with the idea that Jesus saves, the assumption that only Jesus saves, that no one or nothing else can, and that therefore those who have not confessed their faith in Jesus and thrown themselves on the mercy of Jesus are condemned to eternal punishment. Reminds me of the whole idea that having faith in Jesus is somehow all about saving yourself from punishment, an idea which I have always found to be quite far from anything I understand about the spirit of Jesus. Reminds me of the whole theology that I think so often goes along with the idea that Jesus saves, the theology that says that Jesus does this by enduring the pain and punishment we deserve because of our sin and that Jesus takes this on himself so God’s need to see justice done and for punishment to take place is satisfied and human beings can be forgiven.
Needless to say, none of those reminders are pleasant or positive. And whether or not they are entirely fair or rational, they are there, and they make it not such an easy thing for me to relate to this verse: “…you are to name him Jesus for he will save his people from their sins.” Much easier for me to talk about inclusive communities. Much easier to talk about journeys of faith. Much easier to talk about Jesus as the one who comes to set at liberty those who are oppressed. Much easier to talk about God with us. Not so easy, frankly, for me, to see Jesus as one who will save his people from their sins. Not so easy, frankly, for me, to say Jesus saves.
Yet…he does. Jesus saves. I say that not as some pulpit pounding truth that everyone ought to believe. I say it as a testimony. I mean that after I have reflected a bit and come to the point where I can put aside all those negative associations I talked about a minute ago, after I have calmed down and focused more on what I think and what I believe than on the ways I dissent from what others may think or believe, I do in the end believe Jesus saves.
Jesus saves me from being overwhelmed by the griefs of the world, many of which are the result not of my sin or of your sin but that are a result of our sin, the sins of our collective humanity, sins that have produced a world that is so harsh for so many people and that we are all complicit in. Jesus points me to a different reality, present in the middle of that one. Jesus saves. Maybe some of you remember the line from the hymn, God of Grace and God of Glory. One verse of that begins: “Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore.” Jesus saves me from that weak resignation. He calls me, nudges me, troubles me, unsettles me, refuses to let me make my peace with the world as it is. Jesus saves. Jesus saves me from thinking that the only kind of power there is is the power of the Herods of this world. Jesus saves. Jesus saves me from any temptation to think of this world, to think of my life in this world or your life in this world as God-forsaken. Jesus saves.
Is it possible to be saved from all these things without Jesus? It is. I am not saying Jesus is the only road to salvation, no matter what you or I may mean by the notion of salvation. You know I would not say that. You know I don’t believe that. Nevertheless, at the risk of being misunderstood, at the risk of having any of a number of negative associations come up for you as they have often come up for me, I still want to say this morning as a personal testimony: Jesus saves. And however far astray the Christmas season may go in all sorts of directions, I am glad to celebrate in whatever small but well-intended way I can think of, his coming. I am grateful—it is such a terribly inadequate word—but I am grateful for the gift of Jesus of Nazareth, who is called the Christ, savior. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 9, 2007