Sermon, Year A, Fourth Sunday of Advent, "The Beatitudes remain, Rome has fallen"

 

A Advent 4 AL Paul 2025

Matthew 5:1-11

December 21, 2025

           We live in a pluralistic world where we come into contact with many people of no faith and many people of distinctly different faith.  As a Christian and a faith leader one of my highest callings amidst so many different faith perspectives is to live my faith with humility.  I don’t try to pretend I have all the answers.  Clearly, I do not.  Sometimes my sermons every Sunday are me trying to figure out this thing called faith.

           But a big part of living my faith with humility is recognizing that just because someone else’s faith is different does not mean their faith is any less true, any less beautiful and complex and good.  I was with Native leaders from the Pokagon Band this past week and I can tell . . . they want to know, intuitively, whether I think my Christianity makes me better than them.  Or do I see wisdom and truth in their tradition that offers the possibility of changing me.

In the same way, I have served two different churches where a local rabbi became my best friend.  They are always interested.  Do I think Christianity is the new and improved form of Judaism such that their Jewish faith falls short?  Or am I humble enough to see Judaism as a deep, broad, and diverse path which has a wisdom that is longer than Christianity?  During Advent, that is a critical question.  Because the Scripture verses chosen for Advent make it seem like Jesus is the answer to every Jewish prophetic prediction.  They shall call him Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace . . . gotta be Jesus.  By his stripes we are healed . . . gotta be Jesus.  “My God, my God why have you abandoned me!”  Ah, well, look, that is the Psalmnist in Psalm 22, predicting what Jesus would say on the cross!

I remember in high school being blown away by all the ways the gospels correlated with something from what I used to call the Old Testament and what I now call Hebrew Scripture.  As I studied further though, I learned from scholars like former priest, John Dominic Crossan, that there was another reason Jesus was seen as the fulfillment of so much Hebrew Scripture.  Gospel writers and other New Testament writers actively made “prophecy historicized.”  In other words, New Testament writers would search the Hebrew Scriptures for content that would give authority to the life, teaching, and ministry of Christ. 

They did this so Jews in the First Century would see Jesus as part of a long line teachers and prophets who spoke and acted according to the tradition—not to break with the tradition.  But eventually, Christianity, which began as a cult within Judaism, was either thrown out of the synagogue or broke from the synagogue.  Christianity became distinct from Judaism.

Later on, Christian thinkers and teachers became known for supersessionism or fulfillment theology where Jesus became the answer for every future prediction made in Hebrew Scripture.  At its worst, this suggested that Christians somehow replaced Jews as the chosen people.  Rabbis and Christian pastors I respect state quite bluntly these days, in light of current events, that there are no chosen people. 

           Now while most Christian teachers and scholars in my seminary did not see Jesus as the fulfillment of all Jewish prophecy, they continued to preach from the Revised Common Lectionary for Advent.  And in Advent, we have one after another Jewish prophecy that Jesus seems to fulfill.  But again, what if gospel writers went back into Hebrew Scripture prophecy and used it to give Jesus’s life, teaching, and ministry more heft within their tradition?  That was not done to replace the Jewish faith but to extend it see it continuing to be lived—until Christianity and Judaism went their separate ways far out into the future. 

What many pastors and preachers might not ever tell you is that many of things later attributed to Jesus were not about prophecies far out into the future but many times a statement and reference to things going on presently in their community.  Some of the suffering servant passages which later got attributed to Jesus’s torture and death were actually statements about the untold suffering the whole Jewish people went through during the Babylonian Exile.   

Some of those statements are profoundly dangerous for the Jewish people as the Scripture passages suggest Jews as total innocents in the world who unjustly go through untold amounts of suffering, dislocation, and death.  Or . . . if the Jewish people weren’t innocents, they certainly inherited more suffering and death than they deserved as God’s chosen.

Meanwhile, Jewish prophets before the Babylonian Exile suggest that their suffering is a direct result of the sin of the Jewish political and religious elite who defrauded the poor, made violence an everyday experience for the wider Jewish populace, and set as values their own wealth and gain.  Regardless of sin, no people deserves the desolation, violence, and death brought to the Jewish people from the Exile but stories about innocence or deserved holocaust or genocide do not serve us as we discern paths to peace. 

Christians picked up those narratives of innocence and deserved genocide too easily, and, even worse, those stories have been picked up by Christian Nationalism to do the worst of our nation’s history.  Those narratives have not allowed our nation to be honest about its history and allowed our government to make claims about who we are that are entirely fictional.  We are not innocents in the world and the belief that we are has allowed us to wield the sword in horrific ways believing that the violence we do does not destroy peoples or disfigure who we are.

           So what do preachers and pastors say with this being the reality?  Are they honest?  Do they tell you that gospel writers actively scanned Hebrew Scripture to help Jesus fit within the long line of poetic tradition?  Do they share that many of the prophecies were about what people saw way back then and are not about a Jesus far out into the future?  Or are they a little less honest to say, “Look, Jesus, is being talked about by all these prophets, his actions fulfilling detailed statements about a Promised One who would come to save us?  It is one thing to say that Jesus fulfills a long line of Jewish values encouraging steadfast love, justice, and righteousness.  It is quite another thing to say that Jews several hundred years earlier predicted the arrival of Jesus. 

Jesus does not replace Judaism.  He is not the new and improved version.  Rather, Jesus and Paul made choices within the wide and vast diversity of Judaism to interpret Judaism as powerful and meaningful for the people of their time. 

           Ok, that’s a long explanation to say.  As your pastor, I am trying to live out this humble faith knowing that I don’t have all the answers.  But I want to honor those of different faiths, particularly Jews who have meant so much to my faith through the years.  And I I am trying to do right by you so you see me trying to do my very best to communicate what I see.

So what I chose to do for Advent is select verses from Hebrew Scripture that were not finding their fulfillment in Jesus but were teaching from Jesus’s long tradition as a Jew these ancient values, these deep values, sometimes these countercultural values. 

As I said last week, I often worry that we don’t see some of the powerful parts of our tradition because we romance the Advent and Christmas story.  My most fervent prayer is that before we celebrate the birth of the Christ Child, I help you remember who he was, what is coming into the world, so that you might join hands with this long, ancient tradition.  And that is why this week, when we light the candle of love, I want you to hear from the core of Jesus’s teaching what was meant by that in the Gospel of Matthew.

Because the other strong Scripture which defines Jesus in Matthew, found nowhere else in the other gospels, is when Jesus separates the sheep from the goats.  And Jesus does so by asking, did you extend love to people who have their backs against the wall?  You join Jesus and the Empire of Heaven if you give people who are hungry something to eat, those who are thirsty something to drink.  Do you welcome the stranger?  Visit the ill and those in prison?  Those who do all that . . . they are welcomed into the Empire of Heaven.  That is one of the critical Scripture passages which will eventually define this Christ Child. 

The other is the Scripture passage we have before us today.  It is Jesus’s sermon on the mount, the Beatitudes, a radical statement over and against the Roman imperial gospel which blessed the wealthy, spread the gospel through military conquest (you know you are next when they start calling you “the barbarians”), and silenced all those who disagreed with them through political execution.  The Romans said that they did these things by divine decree.  Jupiter and the pantheon of gods were clearly on their side . . . because, well, look at the state of the world.  Rome and its Caesar ruled. 

This understanding that might makes right and reflects the divine order affirmed the status quo and justified Roman Caesars taking divine titles for themselves like god and son of god.  But this understanding also made the Jews, a conquered and enslaved people born out of liberation by a God who had not chosen the winners to break the waters and give them birth, particularly problematic. 

As we go forward this next week to celebrate Christmas remember the content of the Beatitudes part of the radical, countercultural nature of our tradition.  Jesus is not speaking into a vacuum.  He is remember the God of the Exodus to extend the tradition even further.  Jesus hears the wider Roman wider culture say that god loves the rich.  Jesus says, “Blessed or honored are you destitute, the ones left for dead.”  Jesus hears the wider Roman wider culture say that god accumulates the wealth of nations for us as we slay your fathers and sons of fighting age.  You are given over to us by the gods.  Jesus says, “Blessed are you who mourn.”  Jesus hears Caesar say to prophet after prophet, “You are not to be critical of the crown.  We are the ones who bear the good news of might and power over peoples.  Roman gods encourage us to mete out wrath upon those who question, organize, and offer an alternative to the bread and circuses we drop from on high in coliseums throughout the empire.”  Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.  Blessed are those who are persecuted because of justice, for theirs is the empire of heaven.  And the values of heaven are far different than those of Rome.”

That is the content of the child we will celebrate in less than a week.  He is strongly, intentionally seeking out a way of being that is contrary to Roman empire.  And found in almost every one of the deep faith traditions is a way, a path, that is contrary to the pursuit of material wealth, the justification of violence over and against a people thought to be lesser, and truth-tellers who stand into the wind to say and live contrary to the party line on behalf of God’s good earth, the poor and oppressed, the sick and the dying, those thought to be the sinner and the outcast.  Those truth-tellers very often do so even when they are threatened, beaten, persecuted, and executed.

As we head into Christmas, I say we join those long-line of truth-tellers to reach across the great divides of culture and faith, to live humbly enough to extend our hands and say that we believe that Roman imperial theology is a lie.  Like Jesus, we see a God who is moving and living and breathing to remind us that there is another way, another peace, a more profound Truth.  Magi have been reading the stars, interpreting dreams, and are aware that all of creation is ready to break into a song that is ancient but new.  Angels are at the ready, a veritable army referred to as a host, now showing themselves to those who have been laid low by life, showing themselves to disarm fear and infuse courage.  And a small displaced family seeks shelter from the ravages of the world.  They become hunted by the client king Herod who believes himself to be the King of the Jews and certainly will not stand for any claims contrary to Caesar.

Courage, my dear friends, for the Beatitudes still stand while Rome has fallen.  God has been waiting.  And now we are ready to join hands to piece together the Empire of Heaven, more appropriately known as the Beloved Community.  Let us live into the content of the Beatitudes as Christmas comes.  Amen. 

 

Sermon, Year A, Third Sunday of Advent, "Invitation to a Science Fiction Project" or "What are we willing to walk a long time for?"

 

A Advent 3 AL Col Paul 2025

Matthew 2:1-12

December 21, 2025

 Former Detroit author and activist, Adrienne Maree Brown, has written:

all organizing is science fiction.

we are creating a world we have never seen. we are whispering it to each other cuddled in the dark, and we are screaming it at people who are so scared of it that they dress themselves in war regalia to turn and face us.[1]

In effect, this is what the gospels are.  They are a form of science fiction mystery which call us to an imagining with God, an imagining of a different future--without violence and war, without hunger, poverty, and oppression.  We require imagination, a different way, for as the great Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.  They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”[2] 

The gospels knew this.   Though they used the language of the Roman Empire to critique the Roman Empire, the world the gospels imagined borrowed the language and vision, the science fiction of prophets who spoke from the time after the Exile.  The Exile was one of the nightmares in Jewish history when violence and warfare, oppression and dispossession were everyday realities. 

Remembering a Scripture verse I quoted from last week, God imagines a different future during that Exile.

The Living God shall judge between many peoples,
    and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
    and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
    neither shall they learn war any more;
⁴ but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
    and no one shall make them afraid;[3]

Those science fiction words imagine peace, shalom, and rest—something counter to their whole experience living in Exile 600 to 700 years before the birth of Christ.  The gospel writers believed they were now living in a similar time.  And  as Adrienne Maree Brown writes about such science fiction writing, “it’s neither utopian nor dystopian, it’s more like life.”[4]  

It is the science fiction imagined by those prophets who wrote after the Exile, envisioning a time when people might grow food that they might eat themselves, build homes they might inhabit themselves.  They imagined that science fiction when all that they could remember of the Exile was growing food for others to eat, building homes for others to inhabit.[5]   From these writers, like the prophet Isaiah and his tradition, the gospel writers borrowed heavily to imagine with God, to create their own science fiction. 

That science fiction is necessary because the world they live in is brutal, hard, and scary in the matrix of Roman occupation, oppression, and everyday violence.  Last week I spoke of Rome’s client-king, Herod the Great, who prided himself on being the King of the Jews.  How Herod was so brutal that he killed one of his sons he saw as a threat to his throne, leading the Romans to say, “Better to be Herod’s pig than his son.”

Our passage today begins with Herod.  Spiritual Director Erna Kim Hackett summarizes how the Biblical story reads us.  Again, sometimes we read the Bible so that we might discern meaning.  And sometimes the Bible reads us to discern who we are in the world:  She writes.

I found myself fixated on Herod this year.  I’ll let you figure out why I couldn’t stop thinking about an insecure leader who panders to empire and feigns interest in religion to try and secure his authority.  In the history books, Herod is remembered as a good leader.  He was prolific and visionary when it came to infrastructure.  He remodeled and expanded the Second Temple.  And he maintained a long-lasting relationship with the most powerful empire of his time and its most powerful leaders.  By many metrics, he could be viewed as a very successful leader.  But the Bible does not give a [bleep] about any of that.  If success under empire were the measure of success, Herod would stand at the center of the story as its hero.  Instead, he becomes its warning, a mirror showing what happens to a soul distorted by empire.  Herod reveals how power twists a person, how it turns faith into theater and people into pawns.  So much of America Christianity is desperate to succeed the way Herod succeeded:  political access, proximity to power.  It confuses elections with favor and wealth and blessing.  But Advent confronts us with a different truth.  Empire’s victories are not God’s victories.  The story opens with a tyrant on a throne and [Christ] in the arms of a refugee woman.  Only one of them is worth following.  God shows up on the margins, not in the halls of power.  Advent is an invitation to scrub off every way empire has wooed us, and to quit confusing Herod like ambition with Jesus’s way. ^[6]

 

The passage starts with Herod but the Scripture continues with the Magi playing their traditional role.  The Magi were the ones who read the way the Earth and Sky moved to tell us who were the true kings, the kings blessed by nature’s wisdom.  As a result, the Magi forever posed a threat to ruling powers.[7] 

We have regularly assumed three Magi made the journey because there are three gifts.  But the story does not tell us how many.  Imagine at least 12 Magi, in their traditional role, taking a little side trip to Jerusalem just to stick it in and twist it by innocently asking Herod, “Where will we find the King of the Jews?”  In the movie version of this scene, I imagine Herod, who believes King of the Jews is a title reserved exclusively for him, excusing himself and finding a private room where he punches his royal purple walls for about a half hour before he returns.

The question by the Magi is a form of Biblical humor, sarcasm aimed at the upper-crust and powerful.   In our modern world, it might be a number of radical Muslim clerics arriving in Washington, D.C., asking where they might find “the leader of the free world.”  Making it clear that they don’t think it’s the president, they move on to Haiti to follow the star they have seen.  

The story is told as a snub, a diss, to move from the seat of Rome’s client-king, the seat of local political and religious power in Jerusalem to a place on the margins. 

The Magi come from the East, the place of the Roman Empire’s mortal enemy, the Parthian Empire.  Imagine not only 12 magi arriving in Jerusalem but maybe 50 to 100 of them with all of their royal servants and accoutrements.  For the Biblical passage says that when the Magi tell Herod of the star they have seen Herod and all of Jerusalem are frightened.  The king-makers show up to say they are looking for the King of the Jews.  And, oh by the way, Herod, it isn’t you!  The Magi have been looking for portents, signs in the natural world, which would tell of the passing of an old order in favor of something new.  

As the seat of Roman-controlled Jewish power, everyone in Jerusalem knew that a star sighted by the Magi could only mean that change and transformation were about to occur, a new king was on the rise.  Three times in Matthew, Chapter 2, it says that these “king-makers” prostrate themselves before the infant child, a form of worship and reverence for a ruler or an emperor.  Not once did these same Magi do so for King Herod.[8]  They have made their choice.  The Magi proclaim who is the true king, the king for whom heaven and nature sing.

Long have Christian scholars misinterpreted what the Magi bring to symbolize gifts that reflect the life and death of Christ.  Rather, the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh evoke the words of Psalm 72, the Psalm that was the basis for our responsive reading for today.  That Psalm is considered a coronation Psalm to be spoken as every Israelite ruler takes the throne. 

Psalm 72 says that the king shall practice social justice.  This value is affirmed as nations and kings from all over the known world shall make a pilgrimage to Zion to lay these gifts at the feet of the king.  This king shall be the champion for the economically poor and downtrodden.  The king who shall crush the oppressor.  The Magi bring these gifts to affirm Psalm 72, to affirm the true king’s primary value.

Three times in Chapter 2, Herod’s death is mentioned, as a way of suggesting that when God’s narrative and the narrative of imperial power come into conflict, imperial power is not ultimate.  The imperial system, a system exposed as ruthless and murderous, opposes the presence and power of God.  And at each turn the imperial system is thwarted in trying to kill the new king.  1) The Magi are uncooperative. 2)  Angels and dreams further the will of God and frustrate Herod’s plans..  3) Though the Holy Family must quickly leave for exile in Egypt, they do escape with their lives. 

All to say that the imperial system is not the ultimate.  Rome has its limits.  While Caesar claims the god, Jupiter’s presence, for Rome, throughout the Gospel of Matthew claims are made for Jesus’s presence among the community of the disciples.  Even after the Empire crucifies Jesus and he dies, his presence is still afoot for those weaving together the Empire of Heaven.[9]

The title of king is not taken lightly by the Romans.  Those who claimed the title without ordination by Rome were routinely executed.  The historian Josephus chronicles that others who took the title king did not fare well.  This is an ominous sign of what is in store for Jesus.  Simon was beheaded. Athronges was captured.  Menachem was killed.  And another Simon, who led one of the longest and most successful revolts against the empire, was executed in Rome’s capital city as a dramatic presentation of Rome’s superiority and intolerance for any challenges to its superiority.[10]

Jesus of Nazareth became a symbol of hope and resistance because of the very real and gritty ways of living he offered that helped Galileean communities to be sustainable and resilient at a time when they were fracturing.  Roman imperialism and its Caesar exerted everyday intense stress, pressure, poverty, and violence against their subject peoples. 

Jesus did not counsel people to engage this struggle righteously alone.  We sit in places like this church today because Jesus encouraged people to fortify one another by piecing together community, sharing food with one another, participating in mutual healing, darning back together fractured relationships destroyed by the economic violence, challenging the system which robbed those with those living with their backs against the wall.  And in the way Jesus practiced this movement, he had fun doing it.  I want to remind us again and again that they called Jesus a glutton and a drunkard.    

As I preached last week, these Bible stories are a threat to those who want to romanticize Christmas.  As a preacher and a pastor, I don’t know if I have ever been challenged to make Advent and Christmas more Biblically real.  Again and again, however, I have been challenged to practice the more imperial, sentimental Christmas with the right hymns, the right Christmas Eve words said at the right times, and to preach in a way that makes everyone feel all snug in their beds while visions of sugar plums dance in our heads. 

I hope.  I hope and pray for just a second, however, that like last week we might consider that the Biblical Advent and Christmas are needed in places throughout our world where people are imagining what God is imagining, entering into a science fiction project that speaks to our hearts of a new dawn, a new day where we might all experience the goodness of God.

Because again, for some in the world,  the pain is all too real.  And a sentimental and vanilla Christmas does not rhyme with their family’s tremendous debt, the fear of one more medical bill, violence some face in their everyday life as a spouse or child, people caught struggling with trauma and addiction, and the worry for some that they will be stopped without proper papers. 

 Or, now in our own country, what happens if Herod or Caesar come for my family and my children?  What am I to do?  Do we pack up our family and head for the safety of Egypt?  How do we make sure that the Holy Family escapes the mass slaughter of someone who calls himself the King of the Jews?

The Gospel of Matthew makes it clear that even Jesus’s arrival does not prevent the slaughter of children, poverty and disease, and deep, deep pain in the world.  What Jesus brings is the idea that God wants a decidedly different world, wants us to imagine it, to do our own project work in science fiction, and that God is inviting us in to be collaborators on the project. 

Spiritual guide, Matthew Fox, has written, “Sentimentalism is feelings without care for justice.  Nazi concentration camp hierarchy would torture prisoners during the day and return home at night and weep listening to Beethoven.”[11]

“The tamed piety of the conventional church wants an innocent baby who comes gently into our secure lives and keeps everything benign and friendly.  It may be conventional and it may be tame but it is not biblical and it is not Christian.”[12]   The Biblical story is all too messy and real.  That story is about both hope and hurt; pain and risk, as well as excitement and joy.  All were part of the adventure.

I want to invite us all over again to be Christ’s church, a symbol of hope and resistance over and against Herods and Caesars in each age.  How might we join with, be good allies with,  peoples that seeks liberation from the everyday warfare aimed at its people?  What would that look like to create a space where every person might be able to rest under a vine and fig tree--to offer refuge and sanctuary? 

 In this day, the Magi come looking for the people who walk the path of a new king, people who seek to be collaborators on the imagined project God has set before communities of sustainability and resilience.  Goodness knows Advent hope, peace, and joy begin when we ask what God might be imagining for the world and then begin to weave that together.  We begin where the prophet Isaiah and all the Gospel writers began—at a time when people have trouble even thinking it’s possible.  It’s not born yet.  We can only describe it along the edges.

Coloma/Watervliet or Bainbridge has/have never been the center of the universe, but neither were Bethlehem and Nazareth.  People of good courage, let us begin, with imagination and vision to walk the road to begin the science fiction project God has placed before us.  Like the Magi, what are we willing to walk a long time for?  

Last night and promised tonight the beauty of the Geminid meteor shower tells us that a new world awaits us.  The Herods and the Caesars of the world quake in their boots knowing they could not control or commodify it.  Let us scrub off every way the Domination system has tried to woo us to remember who we are as followers of the refugee child on the move from Bethlehem.  Let us be scrubbed clean to journey with Magi and to imagine with God.  Amen. 

---

[1]Adrienne Maree Brown, “afrofuturism and #blackspring (new school, #afroturismtns),” adrienne maree brown, May 2, 2015

[2] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114. 2007

[3] Micah 4:3-4a

[4] Brown, “afrofuturism.”

[5] Isaiah 65:21

[6] Erna Kim Hackett, “Liberated Together” on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/DR_Qssskdkj/?img_index=1.

[7] Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire:  Initial Explorations (Harrisburg, PA:  Trinity Press International, 2001), pp. 66-67.

[8]  Carter, Matthew and Empire, p. 66.

[9] Ibid, p. 67

[10] Ibid, p. 161.

[11] Matthew Fox, The Pope’s War:  Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved  (New York:  Sterling Ethos, 2011), p. 39.

[12] Ken Sehested quoting Kyle Childress, “Wiseguys and one scared king,” Prayer and politiks, January 1, 2012.  http://www.prayerandpolitiks.org/articles-essays-sermons/2019/01/04/wiseguys-and-one-scared-king.3418910.

Sermon, Year A, Second Sunday of Advent, "We need a story that saves us"

A Advent 2 ColPaul AL 2025

Matthew 1:1-17

December 7, 2025

          I wanted to offer a trigger warning this morning knowing that we are going to talk about rape.  It is spoken about to neither glamorize or trivialize but to recognize it as the violence done to others.  Please be good to your own emotional and mental well-being as I share.  (Prayer)

In 1962, the son of a tribal chieftan, an attorney, member of the African National Congress and founder of the powerful Youth League within the African National Congress was arrested.  South African security police arrested Nelson Mandela for his opposition to the white government and its apartheid ("separateness") policies of racial, political, and economic discrimination against the nonwhite majority. In 1964, the government brought further charges including sabotage, high treason, and conspiracy to overthrow the government. At the opening of his defense in the 1964 trial, Mandela made a statement that would result in him receiving a sentence for 27 years.

He began that speech by speaking about the basis for his authority before the South African court.

In my youth in the Transkei I listened to the elders of my tribe telling stories of the old days. Amongst the tales they related to me were those of wars fought by our ancestors in defence [sic] of the fatherland. The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle. This is what has motivated me in all that I have done in relation to the charges made against me in this case.

Later in that same speech, as he defined who he was and his political position, Mandela said,

 

I have always regarded myself, in the first place, as an African patriot. After all, I was born in Umtata, forty-six years ago. My guardian was my cousin, who was the acting paramount chief of Tembuland, and I am related both to the present paramount chief of Tembuland, Sabata Dalindyebo, and to Kaizer Matanzima, the Chief Minister of the Transkei.

 

We may think genealogies in the Bible the most boring and unimportant information found, other than the number of cubits God gave Noah to construct the ark. But in the ancient world, genealogies communicated important information. Much like Mandela defines himself through his family history, ancient genealogies were about a “claim to authority, to place, to political or civil rights, various social roles, or even the right to speak. Genealogies justified privilege, provided a written pedigree, and a long genealogy was a mark of honor. Genealogies were guides to social interaction” and where one ranked in the world. In keeping with a male-dominated society, genealogies like the one in Matthew were traced through Joseph and established a man’s social status in the world.  

But there is something odd going on in the Gospel of Matthew’s genealogy.

Much like you might know me as from the ancient clan of Mulberrys who were hallowed kings and prolific speakers, known for stirring speeches and calls to virtuous lives.  Revered and praised for his silver-tongued soliloquies and referenced as the first-ever Renaissance man, the Grand Duke of Dansbury, Pip Mulberry, was known as a teller of stories, baron of commerce, and a maker of a great souffle. Isn't that what we're all looking for when we put together those family genealogies?

Yeah, well, the real story is that James Mulberry was caught stealing a silken handkerchief, was brought before the English court, and told that he could either go to Turtle Island as an indentured servant or be hung for his crime. Luckily, my good man, ancestor James, may have been a criminal, but he was not stupid. The Mulberry clan settled in the lands of the Shawnee and Cherokee as indentured servants and moved north through lands of the Osage, Miami, and Peoria. I'm sure Mulberry royalty is somewhere back in the history.   If our family genealogist had only dug a little deeper . . .  Maybe.

One of the things Scripture teaches is that God does not see the world as we might see it.  Too often, we see things as they are and do not recognize what might happen if viewed through the eyes of God, when God arrives.  Isaiah 35 relates that transformation where wilderness and dry land bloom and blossom, the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame leap, and violent predators are nowhere to be found.  Salvation has come.  The land is now a safe place for community life and conduct.  It is almost as if joy cannot be known unless we know the flip side of suffering and struggle.  One has to know how vast and empty the wilderness is to know how bountiful it is when pools appear, springs of water show, and color and blossom break out.  God arrives in the messiness of the wasteland. 

By the same measure, today we have the genealogy of Jesus found in the Gospel of Matthew.  Matthew’s genealogy is different than Luke’s in some significant ways.  For example, Matthew includes four women in his genealogy.  And they are all women who are sexually suspect.  Tamar’s name appears two other times in Scripture.  She disguises herself as a prostitute to have sex with her father-in-law in Genesis.  In another incarnation, in I Samuel, Tamar is the daughter of David who is raped and abducted.  The second female name is Rahab who is a prostitute and a foreigner who helped Israelite spies.  The third female name is Ruth who was a foreigner from Moab and offered herself sexually to Boaz to protect herself and her Israelite mother-in-law, Naomi.    The fourth female name mentioned is the foreigner Bathsheba who was raped by King David only to have the child born as a result of that rape, die.  Finally, Mary of Nazareth is mentioned among all these women who are sexually suspect in a patriarchal world.  Almost all the women are not ethnically Jewish.  What is the author of Matthew trying to say about the unwed, pregnant Mary?  And why wasn’t she stoned for presumably breaking Jewish Law by having sex before marriage?  Maybe some historical background would help. 

Shortly before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, Herod the Great, a much-disliked, paranoid territorial ruler, died. Herod the Great, known as the King of the Jews, was so paranoid he even had one of his sons executed for high treason. He was so ruthless that the Romans would say of him, “It is better to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son.”  Herod’s the Great’s economic, political, and religious policies put a huge strain on Jewish peasant life.  For he was known as a city builder, and building opulent cities mined the resources of Jewish communities to export out and demanded higher taxes of the rural populace.  Herod the Great built these cities for the lifestyles of the rich and famous and named one of those cities after Caesar himself.  In today’s world, caring nothing for the remainder of the populace, we might say that Herod was “politically smart” and knew how to keep his head on his shoulders by serving these wealthy and elite interests.  When Herod the Great died, Jewish rebels and revolutionaries saw a power void and an opportunity.   Jewish rebellion, which had been simmering just below the surface, exploded upon Herod's death.

One of the leaders of that rebellion was Judas the Galileean, his father killed by Herod the Great.  One of the centers of that rebellion was the city of Sepphoris, four miles north of the rural, backwater town of Nazareth. 

Following Herod the Great’s death, Augustus Caesar divided the territory of Herod’s kingdom up among three other sons.  But the military forces of Herod's sons could not quell the Jewish rebellion. As a result, Rome took notice. The military commander Quinctillius Varus had been set up in Syria to provide a boundary to Rome's greatest military threat to the east—the Parthian Empire. You may know the Parthian Empire by the names of their independent, royal spiritual advisors—the Magi.

Just around the year of Christ’s birth, Commander Varus had up to 36,000 soldiers at his disposal and he moved in with all of his Roman legions and burned the cities of Sepphoris and Emmaus to the ground. Two thousand men were crucified. All other able-bodied men were enslaved and/or sent to the galleys where they were kept just barely alive, chained in the dark, living in their own filth, probably surviving less than a year. All of the girls and women in the Roman military path, particularly in defenseless rural communities like Nazareth, would have been raped.

Caesar Augustus appointed Herod the Great's son, Herod Antipas, to govern Galilee. In a display of patronage, and in keeping with the city building tradition of his father, Antipas rebuilt Sepphoris as a thoroughly Roman city with marble palaces, colonnaded streets, a theater, and Roman baths, such that Sepphoris became known in the Roman Empire as the “jewel of Galilee.” While the rural area around Sepphoris remained Jewish, Sepphoris was the city set upon a hill, four miles north of Nazareth, that reminded Galileean Jews of the opulence, oppression, and cruelty of the Roman Empire every day.

That is the context for Matthew’s genealogy.  Every day, the people of Nazareth could look four miles to the north, where they could see the city of Sepphoris and remember the Roman legions as they marched toward them.  Every day, they could look four miles north to see Sepphoris, the city set upon a hill, and know that the city was being re-done in Rome’s image.  The Nazareth farmers who were left, probably only older men, would never pose a threat to a Roman centurion.  Many of those farmers had lost their land due to leveraged debt.  The former farmers would make their way to Sepphoris and make a little money by re-building the city, a city where they had probably lost countless friends and relatives.  Tradespeople, like carpenters, were peasants who had lost their land.  And every day they would walk to Sepphoris to rebuild Sepphoris in Rome’s image.

Every day, Roman imperial presence was in the face of those Jews remaining in Sepphoris or coming to town to ply their trade from rural backwater towns like Nazareth, all who had survived the military massacre wrought by Quinctillius Varus. 

In this wilderness and wasteland, stands Mary of Nazareth.  The Virgin Birth may be important to many of you and your faith understanding.  If that is important, I don’t want to take that away from you.  But in the messiness of our own lives—the imperfection, sometimes the wilderness and wasteland, the places where trauma and pain and the impossible are held, God arrives.  God arrives.  And because we have known suffering, wilderness and wasteland, we might also know joy.  (long pause)

One of the projects I had the most fun doing in my almost 30 years of ordained ministry was using a Senior High Youth Group in central Illinois to retell the Christmas story through video camera.  Mary and Joseph are dating at Olivet Nazarene College in Kankakee, Illinois, when just around the holidays Mary confirms that she does indeed see a plus sign on the home pregnancy test.  Joseph is in disbelief.  Must have been some other guy but it wasn’t me.  Our Mary was great at giving Joseph “side-eye” when he delivered these lines.  Our angel was Mary’s sister, Beth, who convinces Joseph that he does need to go home with Mary for the holidays and face the music.

Mary and Joseph return home to Morton, Illinois, on school break, where they chatter with Mom and Dad about how school is going in stilted sentences, until . . . Mary blurts out, “Mom, Dad, I’m pregnant.”  A TV news director helped us splice together the minivan passing by, screeching to a halt, and then dad throwing luggage and Joseph and Mary out into a nearby cornfield.  Joseph and Mary try to get into one of the nearby hotels but an impending Barry Manilow concert makes it impossible.  Mary and Joseph ask the pastor of our church if they can use his garage.  We just happened to do it on the night of Church Council meeting so the last shot is Joseph and Mary and the babe and the Church Council behind them singing “Silent Night,” all done in the Senior Pastor’s garage.  The kids loved it, and they remarked that they had never thought through how scandalous and messy the Christmas story truly was. 

Some adults hated it.  And they let me know.  How dare I promote pre-marital sex!   I had rubbed the romance off the Christmas story.  But that’s the difference, right?  Many of us want a story that makes the holiday more bright and cheery.   And some of us need a story that saves our lives, that identifies with the pain and suffering, trauma and wasteland that is our lives.  Some of us need a story that reminds us that God arrives into the mess, however painful and scarred, wilderness and wasteland, fragile and vulnerable to create a space for us.  Where in the world does the story have to remain romantic so that transformation never happens?  And where does the story become real so that transformation is possible, because people have been waiting to hear that good news in painful, waste, and suspect places?

Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary of Nazareth magnify the Living and Holy God with an understanding that their stories do not end when all seems lost.  As the author of Matthew observes, this is not one-time thing.  God keeps arriving.  In the midst of the suffering, pain, and trauma of your life, my prayer is that those wildernesses have opened your eyes for joy.  Because God keeps arriving.  God keeps arriving.  During this season, we desperately need a story that does not make things cheery and bright.  We need a story that saves us.  God keeps arriving.  Amen. 

Sources:  Richard L. Rohrbaugh and Bruce J. Malina, Social Science Commentary on the Gospels  Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2002;  Article by Jona Lendering, http://www.livius.org/q/quinctilius/varus.html; Rev Dawn Hutchings, December 17, 2012  http://pastordawn.com/tag/advent-sermon-mary-of-nazareth-raped/; www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/14647-varus-quintilius

Sermon, Year A, Second Sunday of Advent, "The Begats Matter"

 

A Advent 2 Pilg AL 2022

Matthew 1:1-17

December 4, 2022

(Trigger warning:  Within this sermon are allusions to sexual violence.)

           As I hope anybody who has been a part of our Bible 101 and Bible 201 classes can tell you, I don’t get really excited about providing answers when it comes to Bible study.  Certainty and answers are not what the Bible even tries to provide.  What really gets me going, has me super stoked, is when the class starts to realize that many of the questions they have long had, questions many people thought disqualified them from garnering meaning from the Bible, are the real and true questions needed to engage Biblical story, parable, and genealogy.  And that happened in both Bible 101 and Bible 201. 

           Wonderful questions, great questions by people in each class showed folks to be deep and courageous thinkers, willing to challenge the tradition they grew up to sometimes feel isolated our out of place in that tradition.  The two Bible studies described who we are as a United Church of Christ church.  We are a people of good questions rather than certainty and final answers—true of any healthy and deep and whole spirituality.

           In that vein, I would like to read the gospel passage for today, one rarely included in church services.  It is the genealogy of Jesus, according to the writer of Matthew.  I don’t know about you, but when I first began reading the Bible, all of those “begats” added to my boredom with the Bible.  Puhlllllease.  Why?  Why include all these begats? 

The ”begats” are important.  And this one is different and unique.  The Biblical text is usually male-dominated, patriarchal, particularly genealogies.  In other words, Biblical genealogies are exclusively male in tracing our ancestors.  Except this one.  Matthew’s genealogy includes some interesting females from the stories of faith. 

Begore we begin, I’ll need a good question from you to help me move through Matthew’s genealogy, as a way of imagining how that genealogy must have fallen on the ear of the reader or listener in ancient times.

           Six years ago, Dean James Ryan gave the address at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s diploma ceremony.[1]  Ryan told the soon-to-be graduates that life had five essential questions.  The first one was, “Wait.  What?”  as in talking to his kids, the first thing they must hear from him is “Blah, blah, blah, blah,” and then he breaks into their consciousness with “and then clean your room.” 

“Wait.  What?” they respond.  This is a question of clarification to ensure understanding, a question to ask before making decisions or coming to conclusions.  The “wait” is a reminder that we need to slow down to make sure we truly understand.  Dean Ryan goes on to share that the final question is, to which hopes the graduates will all respond, “I did,” is, from a poem by Raven Carver called, “Late fragment.”[2]  In that poem, Carver asks, “Did you get what you wanted out of life, even so.”  Even so, is a wonderfully poetic phrase which reminds us that there will be tragedy, trauma, pain, and suffering in life.  Did you get what you wanted out of life, even so—even with the tragedy, trauma, and pain?  And the answer in the poem is, “I did.  I wanted to call myself beloved, to know myself as seen.”  I am able to say, “I did,” because I faithfully moved through life’s essential questions.

So I am going to read through the genealogy of Jesus responsively.  Responsively, because when I say one of the women included in the genealogy, you all are going to be great United Church of Christ people and ask that great clarification, “Wait, what?”  And then I will help with the clarification.  When you hear the females in the story of faith—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah, Bathsheb—I would like you to respond with, “Wait, what?”

Ready?  Matthew, chapter 1, verses 1 through, well, we’ll go through about the first seven verses.

¹ An account^[of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.  ² Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, ³ and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar,

Wait, what?

Tamar disguised herself as a prostitute and deceived Judah, her father-in-law, in order to have sex with him, become pregnant from that sex, and have a child from him. From this union, Perez was born

 

and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Aram, ⁴ and Aram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, ⁵ and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab,

Wait what?

Rahab wasn’t even a Jew or Israelite.  But was a foreign woman who was a prostitute living in Jericho who hid the messengers Joshua sent to spy in Jericho.

and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth,

 

Wait what?

 

Ruth the Moabite was certainly not a Jew and  did something that must surely have felt “improper”: after Boaz had eaten and drunk… she came softly, uncovered his feet (a euphemism for genitalia in the Hebrew Bible) and lay down.  In other words, Ruth offered to have sex with Boaz to redeem her life and the life of her mother-in-law.

 

and Obed the father of Jesse, ⁶ and Jesse the father of King David.  And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, ⁷ 

Wait what?

Well, the wife of Uriah was Bathsheba, who was married to a Hittite and raped by King David.  She lost this pregnancy but was later taken as David’s wife and gave birth to the child who would become King Solomon.[3] 

           I’m going to end it there, the final woman mentioned in the genealogy being Mary who gave birth to Jesus.  All of these women named by the writer of Matthew, sexually suspect in some way, all of them included in genealogies that are almost always exclusively male.  Could it be that Matthew includes these women to say something about Mary of Nazareth?

Just before the birth of Jesus, the city of Sepphoris was considered a Jewish city of rebellion, strongly anti-Roman, and within view of the rural community of Nazareth.  When King Herod the Great died, Jews saw an opportunity, and revolted.  Rome had had enough.  Quinctilius Varus marched with his legions from Antioch and burned Sepphoris to the ground, wiping the city off of the map and then turning to do that to the city of Emmaus.  Men of fighting age would have been slaughtered or enslaved.  Every implement of rebellion or revolt impounded, taken as treasure, or burned.  All of the women would have been raped.  This was the way the Roman Empire, the Roman legions would have maintained the peace, by crushing any hope of conquered peoples, to traumatize those already living in so much poverty, sickness, and death.

Wait.  What?  What do we think the writer of Matthew is trying to say to include these women in the genealogy of Jesus, to then also include Mary of Nazareth?

I share this genealogy so that all of us might be able to see ourselves in the Biblical story.  Too often we think the story of faith is about pretty, romantic stories that are for the “in crowd,” the ones who live charmed lives, the people who live lives without pain or blemish or suffering or death.  What I want us all to hear is that if our lives have been messy, maybe filled with trauma, or a life that has sometimes felt like everything has been against you, what these stories tell us, is that we can get what we want out of life, even so.  That even so, even when our lives might be marked by pain or torment, we can know that we are beloved by God, seen by God. 

Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary of Nazareth were beloved by God, seen by God.  Into such a scandalous family tree, Jesus is born, to bring a different kind of peace.  So let us continue to be people of questions, remembering that though we may think our lives too scandalous for us to be known as beloved or seen by God, the scandalous has already been written into the story for us. 

Too often, during this time when we tell the Christmas story, we read these stories with so much romanticism and a lack of critical questioning that we wonder how we might be worthy of them—that there must be something we do to believe this season is written on behalf of the scandalous, the suspect, and those who are regularly seen as unworthy. 

Do not believe that anything we have done or that has been done to us has taken us outside God knowing us as beloved and seen.  For we are.  Wait, what?  Yes, that’s right.  Did you get what you wanted out of this life, even so?  We did.  For in this story, that tells us of the ancestors of Jesus, the family of faith, we know we are beloved.  And we are seen.  Amen.

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[1] “Dean James Ryan’s 5 Essential Questions in Life,” Harvard Graduate School of Education, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW0NguMGIbE&ab_channel=HarvardGraduateSchoolofEducation

[2] Raymond Carver, “Late fragment,” A New Path to the Waterfall, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990.

[3] Some extra resources, https://www.wilgafney.com/2014/10/19/who-are-you-calling-a-whore/

https://www.wilgafney.com/2021/11/14/remember-jesus-of-the-line-of-bathsheba/