Sixth Sunday in Easter; Vision4Life Bible Year Service
Family trees - how much do you know about yours?
Gospel reading: Matthew 1:1-17
Comment: Skeletons in closets?
I don't know what stories you've been sharing about your family tree. My guess is that not many of your ancestors will have had such unpronounceable names as some of those you've just heard about in Jesus' family. But some of them at least will ring a bell. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob you'll know about. Judah, Joseph's eldest brother who eventually developed a conscience and offered his own life to Joseph, powerful in Egypt, instead of their father's youngest, Benjamin. He's sort of familiar. But Tamar? What's she doing in that masculine list? You'll have noticed that Jesus' ancestors listed by Matthew are all men - or at least, almost all of them. And the five who are women - Tamar, Ruth, Rahab, Bathsheba the wife of Uriah and Mary - have something in common: they're skeletons in the family closet.
When I was at a conference once, the speaker asked people to raise a hand if there were any messy parts of our family story, bits we didn't necessarily like talking about in public. And as she went through a list: divorce, adoption, gay and lesbian family members, children born outside marriage, disabilities, mental illnesses, stepfamilies - every single hand went up. That stuck in my mind. We all have sensitive parts of the family story that aren't easy to tell, though they can involve just as much love as the tidy bits.
But what on earth is Matthew doing, starting his Gospel, his story telling everyone how important Jesus is, by washing his dirty linen in public? By only talking about five women, he's drawing them to our attention, and making us wonder, What is it about these five that's so important?
And they have some tales to tell, Tamar, Ruth, Rahab, Bathsheba and Mary. We don't know much of Rahab's story, other than that she was a Caananite entertainer in Jericho who let in Israelite spies and hid them, in return for safety promised to herself and her family. Very patriotic, Rahab was, from the Israelite point of view, anyway - but going by her chosen calling, no better than she should be.
Tamar was the wife of Judah's eldest son, but he died under a cloud. Under the rules of the time, Judah's second son was made to marry Tamar, and should have given her a son to inherit for his brother - but he didn't want to be bothered with a son that would be treated as his brother's heir, and wouldn't give her children, so she had to go back home and give up hope of her own life unless she did something drastic. Meanwhile, Judah, on a journey, stopped off for rest and recreation with a mysterious veiled stranger by the roadside, who turned out to be - guess who? - Tamar herself, who revealed her identity and her pregnancy at the same time. So in the end Tamar got her family - and Jesus got a maternal ancestor who was prepared to think the unthinkable in order to get what was hers.
Ruth we know about. You may wonder: what's awkward about her? But Ruth was another foreigner, a Moabite, bringing foreign blood into the family tree, and after the Exile, when there had been a lot of people marrying across racial boundaries, some priests went as far as saying it was God's will that all Israelite men should send away their foreign wives. Bathsheba's story we know, too: fancied by the King on a rooftop, her husband Uriah sent into battle to be killed so that her child with David could be born in wedlock. And then there's Mary. Jesus' own mother.
Again, you may wonder: what's the problem with Mary? We may not think about her as much as Catholics do, but as Jesus' mother she has our respect. Yet when Jesus was born, Mary was an unmarried mother, probably a teenager: a tabloid scandal. The stories must have circulated when Jesus grew up. So Matthew decides to make a point of it: God is in all our family life, not just the public bits. And I wonder: does that make you think any differently about any skeletons in your own family closet?
Sharing: Who do we think we are? II
Who else belongs in your family besides blood relations?
New Testament reading: Acts 10:45-48
Comment: Belonging together?
Sometimes people come into your family by marriage or partnership - and there can be problems. They're all very well, but would you let your daughter marry one? She's not really our sort of person. People form relationships across racial lines; in some countries that's been illegal, and it can still get people hot under the collar. Maybe you've talked about people who you'd never have chosen as family - I hope they've ended up fitting in, or if it's you, that your in-laws recognised your sterling qualities. Or maybe you've remembered people who aren't family of any sort, who still end up playing a really important part in our lives, even though you'd never have thought it when you first met.
That snippet of text we get in our second reading this morning comes from the end of a very surprising story to its first hearers, though the shock may have worn off for us. Remember how Peter had a vision of all the things good Jews shouldn't eat, all neatly presented in a tablecloth, with a voice telling him, What God's made clean, you shouldn't turn your nose up at? And as soon as he'd woken from the dream, there was a knock at the door? It was messengers sent by a Roman centurion to ask Peter to visit his house. A Jew visiting Gentiles, in a house that wasn't kosher? Peter would never have done it before his dream. But now he decided to go and find out what was going on.
When he got to Cornelius' house, Peter went in, told Cornelius and the others what had happened to him. Cornelius matched his vision with another: he'd been told to invite Peter in so he could tell everyone what God wanted them to know. So Cornelius was outside his comfort zone too. Imagine a British soldier in Iraq going to the local imam and asking him about God's message, and you'll get an idea about just how unlikely the whole thing was.
But that wasn't the end of the unlikeliness. Peter started to tell everyone about Jesus: inspired by the Spirit, a healer, put to death by crucifixion but raised to life. But while he was still talking, God's Spirit started to inspire the Gentiles in his audience, just as it had happened to Jews in Jerusalem at Pentecost. So firstly, the Gentiles suddenly turned from outsiders to members of the family - and secondly, God did this without so much as a by-your-leave to Peter, the insider, the one who knew what he was about.
Peter could have said, They're Gentiles - even worse, they're Romans! We can't have them in the church. Jesus is Jewish, and if people want to be his followers, they've got to become Jewish too. He could have said, This is all out of order. People can't become Christians in this disorganised way - we'll have to wait and do membership classes and see if they're really serious.
But Peter had more sense than that. He could see God at work, so he decided to join in, to baptise the lot of them, to welcome people from the outside to become insiders. And thank God he did, or we'd none of us know about Jesus today - for we're all Gentiles.
Last Sunday I was really proud of you all when we had twice as many people as normal for Zachary's baptism, and you welcomed them all magnificently. And each time we get new people in church, it's up to us, the insiders, to make the effort to welcome them, to go over and speak to them after church at coffee, to get to know them, to make them feel they belong with us, as Peter did Cornelius. After all, with each new person who comes through our doors, God's already got there before us - we just need to recognise, as Peter did, what God's up to!
As your family, Lord, see us here
Child of Abraham the wand'rer
R&S 623: Eternal Ruler of the ceaseless round
Family is really important to Jewish people - that may be one of the reasons why Matthew began his Gospel with a genealogy. From a child, Jesus would have heard the stories of Joseph's ancestors; from a man, he would know the messier versions, full of sex and violence. I wondered this week what he may have made of them, in that part of his life lost to us, between childhood and when his ministry began. And here is the result of my wonderings.
‘Mum's forever going on about this house of David business. It's really important to her. I suppose it's partly because both sides of the family have David as one of their ancestors, so whichever way you look at it, he's still my however-many-greats grandad. And Mum still gets a bit upset about all the talk there's been about her and me. First time someone at synagogue school called me ‘Mary's son', of course I wanted to know why it wasn't ‘Joseph's son' like all the other lads. That was when I found out for the first time how she wasn't married when she had me. ‘Not that it makes any difference to you,' she added hastily. But it did make me think a bit, wonder if it did make a difference to God, the way everyone else went on about it. And Mum noticed, bless her heart. The next thing, she had it in her head to tell me about my great-great-grandmothers. And seems like several of them had what you might call chequered histories.
I knew about my great-grandfathers, of course. Not just David, though of course he was the king, even though he'd not started off royal, because God had chosen him. When I daydreamed in the workshop, it used to be about becoming a king as great as David. But when Mum told me about Bathsheba, I was shocked. Someone as wise and strong as David, getting one of his army chiefs killed just so he could cover up what he'd done! There and then I decided: no one was ever going to lay down their life so I could have a good time.
He wasn't the only one to lose his head over sex. What did Judah think he was up to, having a quiet lie-down with some unknown femme fatale? He was lucky to get away with a new son-cum-grandson in the family. But Boaz, now, he was a different kettle of fish. He could have ignored poor old Naomi when she came back from Moab with a foreign daughter-in-law in tow, said it was all her fault for going abroad to start with. He was a big landowner - could have said he was far too important to marry a foreign nobody like Ruth; could have made her do a Rahab, selling her body for safety and protection. But no: my ancestor Boaz saw Ruth was beautiful, said Mum, not because of what she looked like, but because of how she treated Naomi. She was young and fit - she could have left her mother-in-law in the lurch, gone off to marry again. But she looked after family no one else would bother about, said Mum. God was pleased with her, and Boaz could see that, even though she was from Moab and not Jewish at all.
‘Take heed, son!' Mum told me. ‘God looks after the people who are down on their luck; and the ones who think they're high and mighty - God's going to bring them down a peg or two.' Then she started singing that song she made ages ago - she used to sing it to me in my cradle - and I didn't get any more stories out of her that day. But the penny dropped. God cares about the people nobody else wants to know. If I want to please God, even if I ended up as great as David, I shouldn't expect everyone to be my slave; I should be the one doing the serving. What's more, if what Mum says is right, two of my own great-grandmothers were foreigners. So I can't be like some of my mates who reckon God only loves the Jews.
The way I see it, God made the whole world, and all the people in it are in God's image. So it's daft that we're going round being each other's enemies, just because of what your great-grandad did to my great-grandad. If we're ever going to sort this mess out, we're going to have to put a full stop to the whole hating thing. We're going to have to start loving our enemies.
So I'm practising on those lads who call me ‘Mary's son'. They think they'll embarrass me. What they've not worked out is, they couldn't make me prouder if they called me ‘David's son'. Because my Mum is someone who's had a lot of trouble in her life, but somehow she's come through it loving, and she's taught me to do the same. Come to think of it, my great-grandmas must have had something to do with that, too. And even my great-grandads - after all, God forgave David his mistakes, so God must think a lot of forgiveness. Mmm - I'd better go on praying about that one.
