I like looking at old family pictures: the serious black-and-white expressions; the strange fashions; the outlandish hairstyles. But usually I have to call my mother over and ask her, Who on earth is that? A few years ago we had a mammoth family pictures session and wrote the names of all the people we could identify on the back of the photos - but even when I know the names, sometimes I'm not a great deal wiser about how they fit into the family story.
My mother's cousin tells me that unearthing family history can become a full-time activity - going to record offices, writing to archives, looking up links on the Internet. But the results can be fascinating - just look at the TV programmes which have been broadcast in the series ‘Who do you think you are?' People have found to their surprise that their ancestors came from far-off places, showed undreamed of courage or ingenuity - or, sometimes, have found skeletons clattering out of the family closet. But either way, for me, stories and pictures of where we come from are always fascinating. And I find that holds good for our ancestors in the faith.
Two of the four Gospels begin by looking back in Jesus' family tree, trying to understand something of who he was by seeing where his family came from. Matthew takes the story back as far as Abraham, called by God as the father of the Jewish people. Luke, who's not so interested in Jews, goes one step further back, starting off with Adam.
Name upon name, man upon man piles up in these genealogies; some famous, some unknown. These lists can seem dry and irrelevant, like the blurry old pictures of strangers at the beginning of family albums. How can the stories of those who lived so long ago help us in the twenty-first century, living in a vastly more complex society? To start with, where are the women?
You might conclude that, apart from his mother, there weren't any women in Jesus' family at all - if it weren't for four names in Matthew's genealogy: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. Four skeletons in Jesus' cupboard: a woman who hangs around the red-light district and bears her father-in-law's child; the local good-time girl who lets the Israelites into Jericho; a Moabite asylum seeker, and someone else's wife who goes in for strategic sunbathing and whose husband goes missing under suspicious circumstances. Not the sort of ancestors God's leader would choose, you might think - but very much the sort of ancestors, I suspect, that all our families have, if we look back far enough. If we look at our biblical ancestors, in other words, just like our biological ones, they don't naturally wear halos. They are people like us, trying to make sense of their messy lives and God's call to them within those lives.
So through this Advent, as we prepare again for the coming of Jesus, we will be looking at some symbolic snapshots of biblical characters whose lives may speak to our own. Sunday by Sunday, we will be displaying them on our Jesse tree - named after Jesse, David's father - to remind ourselves about the family we have in common. And week by week, I will be inviting you to pray using those stories, those characters, as a springboard for thought and meditation. In the busyness of Christmas preparations, why not put aside a few minutes daily to look at our family pictures, to remind ourselves where we come from as Christians, and whose arrival it is we're preparing for?