Advent 2025: Generational Brokenness and Redemption - Ian Graham - Matthew 1vv1-17

Pastor Ian walks us through Jesus' genealogy and shows how Christ is born into the brokenness he came to heal and save.

Transcript

A Pastor’s Advent Confession

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Morning. Well, I apologize because we had three incredible women do the first three weeks of Advent, and now you have me. So my apologies. This is one of my favorite weeks of the year. Because you know, people ask me, especially where I'm from in Oklahoma, they're like, you know, being a pastor at Christmas time, it's got to be so exhausting. I'm like, not in Princeton. It's the best because the pace actually slows down. And for me, I know that this last week before Christmas, like a lot of people in town are gonna have made their way out, and I'm gonna be looking at a bunch of faces that I know and love. And so it's a joy to stand up here before you this morning and to open God's word. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't know if you've ever had this experience at a family gathering. Specifically, I observed this dynamic. Uh so a couple years ago, my lovely grandmother passed away. I officiated the funeral, and then we were at my aunt's house. She lived a beautiful, long life, a testimony to who Jesus is. It's incredible. But we're we're at the lunch afterward. And my dad and his siblings are talking, and does the real story start coming out at that point? Have you had this experience? I had no idea. So my grandfather was a priest for a large portion of his life. He was uh he was ordained as an episcopal charismatic, uh, and my grandmother was his dutiful wife, and then my dad is talking, and he's like, Yeah, remember when dad almost ran off with that woman to Baltimore? What? I'm like, excuse me? Could I have gotten that information a couple of years ago? And I'm just like, wait, what is happening right now? And I I'm I'm a full-grown adult at this time. I should have some sobriety about the way the world works, but I'm just like, completely, the innocence has been lost, I'm blown away. And I don't know if I'm alone in this. That if you sort of look back in your family history or maybe your family present, there's some some weirdness, some get some skeletons, some stuff you're like, yeah. Okay, like I so then I got really interested. I started tracing our family line. And yeah, I went way, way, way back as far as I could. We stopped at one point. My family was from the clan Graham in Scotland. We warrior poets who were never Presbyterian. Uh so some things are some cycles are just hard to break. Here I am standing before you today. But we just kept going back further. Trace my family tree a long, long way back. Like one of my great-grandmothers, great, like too many greats to name, like a lot of greats. Like her husband died. And so when her husband died, then she married her deceased husband's brother. Okay. But then he died. And then she was gonna marry the next son. But the father was like, yo, this is like a black widow situation. I don't know what's happening here. She cannot marry him. And so this woman in this culture, I don't know what's going on here. She tricks the father into sleeping with her and gets pregnant. Okay, you're like, man, I knew his family, I knew this guy was a little bit weird, but now I'm actually worried. She gets pregnant? The father, you cannot get pregnant out of wedlock in this culture. Again, we're talking a long, long way back. The father finds out that his daughter-in-law, who is at this point unmarried, has become pregnant, and he's like, public shame is coming upon her. But the woman says, Hey, listen, the the father of this child is whoever this stuff belongs to. And she produces the stuff, and the father looks at it and he's like, Oh, that's my stuff. I have another grandmother. Great. Again, like way, way too many greats, like way, way far back. She was a prostitute. Now again. Family skeletons, you guys have them. I think. She lived in a town where there was an army that was coming to invade. Now, again, that sounds terrible. It is. But she just sort of determined that the army that was coming to invade was actually in the right. And so she helped the army by aiding their spies. And as they were exploring the town that they were about to invade, she hid them. And she said, When you guys come with your marauding army, please just, you know, take care of my family. Don't let anything happen to them. And so they kept their word. And they protected her. She lived among the people that conquered her people. No. Some of you guys are picking up on something here. Maybe you're just thinking, this is strange. But maybe you're thinking, I've heard these stories before. I couldn't trace these this family line to a succession of tree branches on my family tree, but because of the blood of Jesus, this is the inheritance, the heritage of the story. This is the family tree of Jesus. The first woman was Tamar from Genesis 38. The second, Rahab from Joshua 2, who's later remarked upon in the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews 11 and James 2, as a paragon of faith. And Matthew, when he begins his gospel, does something really interesting and also really boring. If you were starting a story once upon a time or with a flashback, or telling tall tales about your somewhat imaginary grandmothers, there's a lot of ways to captivate an audience. The Gospel of Matthew starts with the family tree, a list of names. Matthew does not get the memo that the book of Numbers is the book that we all skip in those read the Bible in a year plans. Why would he start the way that he does? I mean, John's Gospel starts with a banger, right? In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Like that's the stuff, right? But Matthew's like, no, I'm going to start with a list of accounts. But what he's doing is subtle as it is beautiful. What if a genealogy, a list of names and successions of generations, could itself be a work of art? What if a genealogy could itself preach the good news? What would that have to say to our family trees? When we peel past the surface layers of what our brains, especially our dopamine adult brains that always read the first sentence in a paragraph on the screen and then skip to the next paragraph, if we would just pay attention for a minute, with a little help from history, maybe some context, we would find something rather beautiful and exquisite tapestry that God has woven together. A genealogy as a genre, kind of boring on its face, if the names are just names in succession. But if those names evoke a world of story, characters, something else happens. We can see the implications of this history for the present and the hope for the future that it paints. Then a genealogy becomes something quite different, something beautiful, something even exciting. As we read the beginning of Matthew's gospel, we find a genealogy. We start out on a strong footing, especially when we're talking about Jesus as the potential Messiah. He is, of course, a descendant of Abraham, as every ethnic Jewish person is. But he's not just a descendant of Abraham, he's also a son of David, a descendant in the royal line, the tribe of Judah. When we trace the steps from the original patriarchs, we find the names that we would expect to find. We got Abraham, we got Isaac, we got Jacob, Jacob's son, Judah, but then something surprising happens in Matthew chapter 1, verse 3. Judah, the father of Perez and Zarah, whose mother was Tamar. Now we've seen the Tamar story could hardly have been wilder. And I actually downplayed some of it. Like it's actually wilder if you read Genesis 38. Now it's important to note that one of the reasons the Tamar story is so inconceivable to us culturally, is that in the ancient Near Eastern culture from which this story comes, when a husband died without having produced a male heir, the husband's family was expected to offer the woman another son in marriage. This was so for a couple of reasons. So that the husband, though deceased, would still have the honor of his family line continuing, but also in a world that was patriarchal in its construction, so that the woman would be taken care of. Now again, we're not endorsing this, but we are just acknowledging this was the way the world was when these scriptures were written. This was a patriarchal culture. A family that had a daughter would marry her off, they would receive a bridal price of some extent, a dowry, and then they would say, She's yours now. She's not coming home, she's not ours, not our problem anymore. Women did not receive any of the share of the inheritance. And so, even if she were to come back home, there's nothing for her. And so this was a measure of care, as weird as it may be to our modern sensibilities, of caring for women who could be left destitute if they didn't have a husband or any sons. And so Tamar expects that she will marry the next son of Judah, who is young at the time. So Judah delays and says, Hey, when he's older, this might be a possibility. But then he doesn't give Tamar his youngest son. And then Tamar, in a genius but kind of underhanded sort of way, gets him to come to the realization that he's not done the right thing, and she has her honor preserved and is presented with twin boys, Perez and Zara. We come next to Rahab. Rahab is the one who helps the Israelite spies scat out Jericho. A story, again, we roughly outlined above. Interesting that both of these stories involve a scarlet thread. Then we come to Matthew 1, verse 5. Salomon, the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse was, of course, the father of David. Here, Matthew says that Rahab was the father of Boaz. This is historically impossible. On a historical timeline, there are some 200 years between Rahab and Boaz. So what's going on here? Is Matthew just wrong or misguided? Are the scriptures in error? No, perhaps. But if we play, pay close attention, we see that Matthew's genealogy fits into a very tight and distinct pattern. A pattern of three sets of family lineages totaling 14 generations. And if we extrapolate these generations in succession, we see that the math doesn't quite add up. It doesn't quite trace the line directly from Abraham to Jesus. There are gaps, there are revisions, there are omissions. And so perhaps Matthew is up to something quite different. And I say this to you all the time because it's so important as we read these words and we encounter them, these are expert artist writers. There are no unnecessary details. And so we have to ask ourselves the question: what is Matthew up to? And what questions is he trying to get us to ask? Again, we look at a couple of the omissions. We would expect that because Jesus is in the kingly line, that we would see all the names of the kings who are sons of David, and the succession, the generations of David. But that's not what we find. We find a couple of kings have been erased, a couple of kings have been replaced, for instance. King Asa, a particularly wicked king, which is saying a lot when you're talking about the Israelite kings, becomes the psalmist and the prophet Asaph, whose psalms are featured prominently in Psalm 73 through 83. I don't know about you, but I love the idea of an artist replacing a wicked politician. King Amos gets replaced with the prophet Amos, who prayed, Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream. Clearly, Matthew is up to something. Matthew is making choices that aren't misguided or in error. He is making choices that preach the good news of King Jesus. A few things. First, the fact that Matthew included women in the line of succession at all is a huge diversion from cultural norms. Genealogies were a common artifact in ancient writings. Because, as genealogies tend to do, they sort of said, This is the reason that I am the right person to do this. But rarely, if ever did they include women in the line of succession. And Matthew, from the very beginning, is like, who is the mother of so-and-so? And he's saying something very distinctly in doing that. Matthew has to trace the line of Jesus through the tribe of Judah. And the fact that Jesus, or that Matthew includes women in this line of succession, would have made the record screech to a halt. Now, then the fact that Matthew includes these women, like Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah, they're all right there for the taking. Why does Matthew seem to delight in the most salacious stories that he can find? I mean, Ruth, you could go either way. Yeah, maybe she was a bit forthright, if you've read the story, but on the up and up. But the rest of them, you're like, whew, that's one of those chapters I don't quite know what to do with all the time, right? Why did Matthew choose these women who are not even main characters in the story? What is Matthew up to? Now I know there's been speculation that Bathsheba's name is not included. If you read the rest of Matthew's genealogy, you see that the woman we know as Bathsheba is referred to as the wife of Uriah the Hittite. And I know it's been speculated that Bathsheba's name is omitted because she committed adultery. Now, if you know anything about the other names on this list, adultery is the least of our concerns. And also David's name is right there. David, at the very least, is an adulterer, and probably far more if we read the story. I think the scriptures in 1 Samuel are trying to get us to see in this sort of pre-Me Too perspective that Bathsheba is far more victim than she is willing participant. The criticism in 2 Samuel is that David's avarice and abdication of duty have led his kingdom to ruin and eventually will split the thing in half. What can Bathsheba do to resist the king's summoning? This is much more assault than it is assent. Bathsheba is named as the wife of Uriah, not to preserve some holy lineage in Matthew's gospel, because we're far from that at this point. But it's because the four women that Matthew chooses are emblematic of the wide sweep of the coming kingdom, that through the line of Abraham, every nation on the earth would be blessed. And Matthew is bearing witness by choosing these four women who are not a part of the covenant people. You have Tamar, who is a Canaanite, Rahab, who is from Jericho, Ruth, a Moabite, one of the historical enemies of the people of God, and then you have Bathsheba, who is by birth a Jewish woman, but because she marries Uriah the Hittite, and again, patriarchal culture, she not only takes on his name, she takes on his heritage, his line, she is effectively a Hittite. And so not only does Matthew include these particular women in his genealogy, none of them are culturally Jewish. But it's saying to us that God is up to something. He is fulfilling his promises to Abraham, that through his descendants all the nations on the earth would be blessed, and that God, in his sovereignly free and patient way, has been guiding the process all along. What a wonder of what God undertakes through the succession of generations, over the course of the wide sweep of time, that through the glacial succession of generations, the goodness of God flowing like a river to us. That in spite of human sinfulness, in spite of judgment and exile and silence, God has never stopped moving towards us, that his throne would be established on earth as it is in heaven, that his son would be born among us into this kind of family, into this kind of world. Dale Brunner says this. He says, Matthew's new Genesis gives us, as it were, four new matriarchs, and all of them preach the gospel of God's deep, forgiven sinners and wide, including Gentiles, mercy. I don't know about you, but I have not had the most meaningful, contemplative, slow-paced advent season. Like I realized this very viscerally yesterday. And just like that, you know, you have those psychosomatic triggers that you're kind of aware of. Like for me, it's like racing heart, and then I get a little like stitch in my shoulder. I'm just like, man. It's not a common experience for me. So I know to pay attention to it, but I'm just like, I am just running a million miles an hour. I don't feel like I've been making room for Jesus. I feel like I've been sitting by the tree reading the scriptures. Like we just got lights on one of the trees yesterday. It's just like, man, it just felt like such a like two-on-the-nose metaphor of what's been going on. Arlest daughter was singing in a lessons in Carol's service for their school, which is exactly what it sounds like. There is a lesson, you sit down, you hear the word of God, and then you stand up and sing a song. And so I showed up to this service. I was late, of course, because that's been the theme. And I'm sitting in the back, and we're singing songs that I've sung a million times, and we're hearing scriptures I've read a lot of times. I'm just kind of going through it. Until we came to the beginning of John. John writes, In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning, though through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that had been made. In him was life, and the life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he did, he gave the right to become children of God. Children born not of natural descent nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God. The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We've seen his glory. The glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace, full of truth. And it's a simple epiphany, Ecclesia. I'm not going to act like this was a revelation that you've never heard before. But truly, it was brought near to my own life and heart. That God doesn't need our best efforts to come to us. God doesn't wait for the table to be set for Him to come and sit down and to dine with us. God doesn't wait for us to clean up the mess of our lives, to get our history and our past straightened out. He just comes. And the thing that we're reminded of every Christmas season is that God is faithful in the face of our faithlessness. He is steadfast and unrelenting and unfailing. That God will not stop because he desires nothing less than to be God with us. Matthew's genealogy reminds us that this son of David, this king, was not only born into humble circumstances to peasant parents, this Jesus was born into this kind of family. And he could have designed it so many other ways. God could have been going back into history, reverse engineering, and just making sure that the people that would be Jesus' great-great-grandmothers and great-great-grandfathers had their stuff together. And he doesn't do that. Jesus comes to a world that is not somewhere far off, some mythical place that is magical and forlorn. Jesus comes to this world. He comes into a family like yours that for many of you you're going to sit around the table with this week. Jesus comes to show us the grace and the mercy of God. And in the face of every bit of human wickedness and brokenness and distortion, Jesus says yes to this world, this world that God so loves that he would give his one and only Son. Perhaps there's brokenness in your past. Perhaps you're looking around guilt and shame and condemnation or scripts from your family of origin. I love what Pete Schizero says. He says, Jesus may live in your heart, but grandpa lives in your bones. Have you ever had this experience? Those of you who are getting a little on in age, you observe things that are coming out of your own life and mouth and actions that look exactly like your parents. I mean, the most interesting human stories are written about the pain and the strife that come from this cycle. My favorite book in the world is a book called East of Eden. And it's a book that essentially asks the question: can you break generational cycles? And the scriptures are saying that right in the midst of a succession of generational brokenness, Jesus the Messiah, comes and is born into a human family. Perhaps you're not just lugging around family of origin stories, you're lugging around something that just you feel like defines you from your life, whether it be in the distant past or the near past. Perhaps you've been long waiting, you have unfulfilled dreams, unanswered prayers, and you can't see God's hand in your life. And if you're honest, you've given up. The scriptures bring us back to the pace of God's provision and his promise. He is mending the world. He is steadfast in his repair and return. He will not leave you abandoned or desolate. He is not slow in keeping his promises, as some understand slowness, but he is patient and he is faithful, wanting all to come to repentance. And in Matthew's genealogy, we see what Jesus is up to from the very beginning. In the most subtle details of the story, we see that Jesus is right siding the world. Women who were cast aside, seen as props or property, who had aspersions cast upon them are vindicated as major characters in the story of redemption. Prophets and poets singing their songs of truth, unremarkable, on the street corner, replace the movers and shakers at the centers of power in the lineage and the true story of the world. The poor are blessed, the hungry are filled with good things. This son of Abraham, this son of David, comes to us and he gives us a family line and a family name. Again, Dale Bruner, I love this. He says, in this past, Jesus' past gives all uprooted Christians a heritage. Wherever we come from, whatever nobility we lack in blood, class, calling, or education, we are all members of the ancient people of God. I'm going to invite the worship team forward. And as they come, I want to read to you a poem by Thomas Merton. Because I think we often need to be astounded anew in both the meticulous care that God undertakes, that his son would be born of a woman when the fullness of time had come, that God had been designing this all along, that he would be God with us. And also the way he just lets history run rampant, lets people make choices, comes into a world that is broken and distorted and dehumanizing. He doesn't try to clean up the house before he comes. He just comes to the house and says yes to all of it and undertakes his great cosmic project of renovation that starts not with the starry heavens or the universe, but starts with our hearts. Thomas Merton writes this into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with the others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are disregarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied status of persons, who are tortured, bombed, and exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in the world. Holy Spirit, we pray that you would come again. God to make your presence manifest among us. For whom we carry the story of a grandpa and grandma and mom and dad around in our bones and the way that we live out of scripts in the world. God, it's such a wonder. Not only that the fact that you became human is stunning on its face, and we could spend the rest of our lives trying to explore those depths. But the fact that you not only became human in a way where you just materialized into the world at some time and place, you became human in the line of succession of a human story. You were born into a family broken like our own. That is a wonder, God. And you could have made it so many other ways, and yet you chose this way. To declare to us, Lord, that in the face of all systemic, generational, repetitive, cyclical spirals, you have placed yourself as the spoke in the wheel. They say that brokenness need not roll endlessly down the cliff of the succession of time, Lord. But you have come in the fullness of time to say that you make all things new. And what that says to each one of us is that we can look at our family's story, our family of origin, to see the blessings as minuscule as they may be, but to say thank you for those, and at one and the same time say, Lord, do something new in me. Help me not to repeat the patterns of brokenness that defined the people that came before me. Not by my own strength or my own discipline or my own motivation, but because you are here. God, because we see that where you renew our past, God, you renew destinies. So for those of us who are parents, God, we desire to give good gifts to our children in the form of faithfulness to you, in the form of healing from that which we have come from. But it's not just about those of us who have kids, Lord. Lord, we see that your kingdom economy. Lord, it's about seeds that are sown, harvest being reaped. And that when you heal things in us, Lord, our friends, our neighbors, those who are in proximity to us are blessed by your presence, Lord. So start with us, Jesus. May we see that we, yes, we have an earthly lineage of which we are a part, God, but you have engrafted us into your story. As tongue in cheek, as I can say that Tamar is my great, too many greats to name grandmother, she is. By your faithfulness, God. So God, help us to see the healing that is testified by you being born into a family such as this. God, for others of us, we need to see the way that you have healed the past by your presence, Lord Jesus. Lord, we think, we have the calculus that says that our sins define us, that the things where we misstep or we step off the road, Lord, those are the things that loom most largely in your sight, and it is a lie. So, God, free us from condemnation that tells us lies and half-truths, God, and tell us the truth, Lord. That in spite of the brokenness in our world, in spite of the brokenness of our lives, Lord, you are here and you will never leave us or forsake us. And this is the message of Christmas, God. Is it all the vulnerability that love requires you have taken on? All the obscurity, all the patience, all the faithfulness, Lord, you have embodied in the giving of your Son, the gift of the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. So, God, tell us the truth here in this place. Tell us the good news that by his blood we are redeemed and engrafted into a new humanity. We worship you, Jesus, and we welcome you here. We pray these things in your name. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen.