Since it’s the first Sunday of Advent, I want to take a moment and set up what we’ll be doing for the next few weeks. If you’re following along in one of the devotional books, you’ll notice that while the Gospel text matched, the other reading did not. You’ll also notice that there was only one other reading, instead of the normal three. I’m switching it up this year, because I want us to pay attention to something kind of interesting. Advent marks the start of our year in the Gospel of Matthew. And Matthew starts out with a genealogy. We don’t often read this, because, let’s face it, genealogies are kind of boring, just a list of names we’re not familiar with. But this start sets an idea that Matthew will build on throughout the rest of the gospel, the importance of Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophets. By starting it with a genealogy, Matthew demonstrates how Jesus is not a new thing; he is the completion of the prophetic line, one which started way back with God’s promise to Abraham. Pay attention throughout the rest of the year, because you’ll notice this theme of Jesus fulfilling promises made about Abraham, Moses, David, and other great figures in biblical history.
So that’s the role of the genealogy itself. But as we look closer, we notice something unusual. Genealogies usually trace the lineage through the male line, father to son. Read the genealogies in Leviticus and Chronicles, they do the same thing. But, there are five outliers in Matthew’s list, five names that are not like the other. And when something is out of the ordinary in scripture, it’s important to pay attention, because the author probably included it for a reason. In Matthew’s genealogy, five women appear in the list of Jesus’ ancestors. The questions I want us to consider in these weeks leading up to the birth of Jesus are who are these women? Why does Matthew include them? And what about them shaped Jesus as a leader and teacher? How did these women prepare Jesus for his work as savior of the world? We start this morning with the first woman on the list, Tamar, the mother of Judah’s sons.
A little background. Genesis chapter thirty-eight is an interruption in the middle of the story of Joseph. Joseph has his dreams of greatness, is sold by his brothers to some passing travelers, and ends up in Egypt in the house of Potiphar, and then we jump back to Israel, completely out of the story of Joseph, to hear this weird interjection about the line of Judah. Tamar was the wife of Judah’s oldest son, Er. When Er died childless, it fell to Judah’s next son, Onan, to produce an heir for his bother. Which doesn’t make much sense to us now, but was common practice of the time. If a brother died without an heir, it was the role of the next brother to father a son with his brother’s widow. That child would be considered the son and inheritor of the deceased brother’s property. This was important not only for inheritance rights, but also as a protection for the widow. Unfortunately, Onan was not interested in fathering his brother’s heir, and also died childless. Judah had a third son, to whom the responsibility of fathering an heir for Tamar should have fallen. But instead Judah kept this son from Tamar, which left her stuck. Because she still was under the house of Judah, she could not remarry. But without a husband or a son, she had no standing in society, she was a nobody. The funny thing that’s also going on here is by doing this; Judah had really cut off his nose to spite his face. Because as her father-in-law, he was responsible for Tamar’s well-being until she had a husband or heir. So by ignoring her, he was in violation of his legal and ethical responsibility. Also, in a society where one’s value was dependent on one’s descendents, isolating Tamar also left Judah himself without an heir. So fearful was Judah, that he jeopardized his future in order to protect his present.
And on the situation would have gone like this, with both Tamar and Judah paralyzed by Judah’s fear and failure to act. Until Tamar took matters into her own hands. Seeing the paralysis that Judah was stuck in, Tamar, from a position of seeming powerlessness, found a way to move forward, albeit through a bit of trickery. What strikes me about Tamar is how much faith it must have taken to make such a bold move. Faith is often thought of as a concrete thing, I have faith, I believe, in this. It feels very confident and sure. But Martin Luther King, Jr. defined faith as taking the first step even when you cannot see the whole staircase. That is the kind of faith that I think Tamar had. Tamar had faith in her own God-given value as a member of the chosen line of Judah, and her confidence in her own value gave her the courage to move against society’s expectations and demand her place in the family. The quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. feels apt, because when I think of people who took a stand against the accepted value of society out of their own internal sense of their value as children of God, I think of folk involved in the civil rights movement. I think of the students who sat at the Woolsworth lunch counter, the marchers across Edmund Petis bridge, the freedom riders, who said even though the ethic of the culture says I am less than, the ethic of the culture is wrong. In the eyes of God, I am a person worthy of the same rights and privileges of others, and I am going to stand up for those rights.
And as is always the case when we stand up for justice, Tamar’s bold action not only set her free, but it set Judah free as well. Because Judah, by giving in to his own fear, had cut himself off from the promise of descendents and was living against the law of God to provide for and protect the people of his family. Judah called Tamar righteous when he realized what she had done, because he realized that Tamar basically tricked him into doing the right thing. Because of her boldness, the family line of the Lion of Judah, a line that would eventually lead to Jesus, was able to continue.
I think Jesus inherited his boldness and his self-confidence from Tamar. In our Gospel reading for this morning, Jesus told his disciples about a very scary time. Like the passage we heard two weeks ago from Luke, this time that Jesus is foretelling, a time when one would be taken and one would be left, this time has already happened by the time Matthew recorded it. The temple had already fallen, the people of Israel has already seen the destruction of their city and some people being captured, literally “taken up” by the Roman soldiers, while others were left behind. So what Jesus is saying is really, things feel out of control right now, and you maybe feel forgotten by God in the midst of this destruction you cannot control. But you can trust that the Son of Man is coming for you. You can trust in the promise of your God-given value, that you have not been forgotten, that you have not been overlooked. It is a boost of confidence to weary and frightened people to ground them in who they are and help them to continue to step forward in faith.
It is this sort of confidence that Jesus needed, and demonstrated in spades. Throughout his ministry, Jesus always put the good of others above doing what was right by society’s standards. He ate with sinners and outcasts, he healed on the Sabbath, he healed the sick. And in just a few short chapters from this Gospel reading, Jesus will do the most scandalous thing of all. He will hand himself over to be crucified and to die. He will die the death of a sinner and an outcast in the eyes of many, but in fact, the opposite is true. His courageous act of boundary defying self-sacrifice confirmed his identity as the Son of Man and savior of the world.
Everett, today is your baptism. And I hope in your future, that today is a day you can look back on for that same confidence. My prayer for you is that for the rest of your life, when you feel lost, left behind, undervalued, you will be able to look back at this day and trust in your God-claimed identity as a beloved child of God. And that confidence in who you are and whose you are will give you the courage to step forward in faith to work for justice and peace. These are big words for such a little guy, but buddy, I believe God has big things in store for you. And, like all of us, you stand on the shoulders of the spiritual giants who have gone before you, and you have this community behind you, to support you, to pray for you, and to remind you of your God-given value as children of God. May all of us remind each other. Amen.
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