Geneology

Geneology

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

December 23, 2019

We had a wonderful Bible Study this week at the Baptist Church.  Pastor Scott Foster is, like my other clergy colleagues in Holliston, a truly remarkable person.  He is knowledgeable, kind and a pillar of faith.  The series we were using for our Ecumenical Bible Study this Advent was the Nativity accounts in John, Luke and Matthew.  Unfortunately, John’s Prologue was snowed out.  So, this week Scott led us through Matthew’s birth narrative. I was expecting the usual study on Joseph being an upstanding man and marrying Mary despite the pregnancy, you know, what we heard this morning for our Gospel lesson.

Well, no.  He covered Matthew 1.1-17.  You know what is there?  A whole bunch of names.  I am going to invite you to turn to Matthew chapter 1 (it’s on page 1035 for quick reference).  Scott asked us to identify a few unusual traits – things we would not expect in Jesus’ genealogy.  So, the first thing he talked about are the five women he named.  Each one remarkable in different ways – Tamar who is childless and uses deceit and cunning to gain justice and eventually to bear a child. Rahab the prostitute, who saves the lives of Israelite Spies.  Ruth the Moabitess, also not a Jew, who through her faithfulness to her mother-in-law after her husband dies, and her cunning, gets Boaz to marry her, and so she marries and carries on the family and becomes the grandmother of King David.  Then Bathsheba, who is not named, but is called the widow of Uriah the Hittite (because David had Uriah killed), and David forces himself upon her, and she bears Solomon.  And then Mary, a young unwed girl, who is chosen to be the mother of Jesus.

And the point Scott made was that Matthew places these five women in the genealogy – which is unexpected, and then three women who were not even Israelites – and they led unconventional lives – but are part of the lineage of David.

Scott went on to say that the good news of this genealogy is that it demonstrates that through our faith, we, like these women, are grafted into the heritage of being children of the God of the Most High.  We are, as these women, on equal footing with all those faithful, albeit flawed, followers of God just like those that are listed in the pages of I and II Kings, I and II Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah in the Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament.  We are a part of that lineage – we are God’s children, and it is through our witness to the power of our own faith to those who need the light of Christ, we pass on this Godly inheritance.

And this is what Paul is writing about in the lection this morning from Romans.

Romans 1:1-7

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,

To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

To be a saint, it does not take special skills of healing, or knowledge, or witnessing.  It only takes the willingness to the let the light of Christ shine through you into the world in whatever way God wants to make it manifested in you.

As it says a few chapters later in Matthew’s Gospel:

¹⁶ Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 5:16)