"With"
- FirstPres Abq
- Dec 21
- 6 min read
Rev. Matthew Miller
One of the drawbacks to the way we read scripture in worship
is that we generally only read a few verses. If you want to get fancy, scholars will refer to this as a pericope. It’s a Greek word that literally means “cut around.” It’s getting to be grapefruit season. We have that special knife with the bent serrated blade that allows you to cut around and section a grapefruit. That’s what a pericope is. It’s a section of the greater whole. And saying it may give people the impression that you know more than you do. So, you’re welcome. The drawback, though, is that while this section may give us a taste of the whole, it is not in fact the whole thing. Take our reading this morning.
It’s your standard reading for the Sunday before Christmas. This is Matthew’s account of the events leading up to Jesus’ birth, so it leans decidedly in the male direction of the story. Rather than Luke’s active mother of God, we get Mary first as the object of Joseph’s engagement, then his charity, and finally as the fulfillment of a prophet’s words about an entirely different circumstance. But we don’t actually hear her voice in any of it. Not even whatever conversation was had informing Joseph of Mary’s unexpected pregnancy. “She was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit,” Matthew tells us, but doesn’t really elaborate on who, or how she was found to be pregnant. Did Mary have that conversation with Joseph, or did another member of the family? Presumably, she knew that much for herself. As for the Holy Spirit’s role. Well, that part isn’t explained until Joseph hears about it from an angel in a dream. But at first, it isn’t difficult to imagine how he thought this unexplained pregnancy might have come to be. It happened the way every other pregnancy in the history of mammalian reproduction happens. He just wasn’t involved. And here’s my point. All of this would be- well, not fine because it is too often the pattern in a world in which women are not given agency
or voice in their own stories. But it is understandable because, sadly, we are used to stories in which women are not even the subject of their own stories, they’re simply a set of worn-out assumptions. It would be understandable if we skipped over what comes before this pericope, this section of the story. Because if you know what comes before, you just might spot the brilliant irony of this first chapter as a whole. What comes before is a genealogy. What comes before is what the preacher Fred Craddock describes as Matthew’s stroll through the family cemetery while waiting for the baby to be born.
The first church I was called to serve in Tennessee came with a manse. For those unfamiliar with the term, a manse is a house that the church owns that they let the pastor and their family (if they have one) live in as part of their compensation. I’ve seen a few manses over the years, and many of them are located right next to the church, or on the same block. I was so grateful that our manse was not that close to the church. Everyone needs the chance to put a little distance between work and home, even if your home is owned by the people you work for. It’s been a while since we lived there so I looked it up on Google maps and the house was a good mile away from the church. If I rode my bike, I could cut through the cemetery to get to and from work. That cemetery was old. Some of the stones went back to the 19th century and were unreadable, some were heartbreaking, listing names with dates that began and ended too close together. But there were also familiar names. Names we came to know over the years that we lived there. These were their people. We were just passing through. In towns like that you can’t really say you’re from there unless you’ve got folks in the cemetery. Matthew’s stroll through the cemetery is a sermon in itself. It lists the generations from Abraham to David and from David to… Joseph. Maybe that’s why people tend to skip over the genealogy. It’s just a bunch of names, afterall. But tucked into that list of predominantly male names are the names of four women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheeba. Not just women, but foreign women immigrants, aliens- who played a pivotal role in the story of Israel’s people. But wait a minute, you might be saying, weren’t we just talking about how Mary was found to be pregnant by the Holy Spirit? In one breath Matthew claims to present the genealogy of Jesus that ends with Joseph, and with the next breath he is telling us that Joseph, the husband of Mary, who bore Jesus who is called the Messiah isn’t even Jesus’ biological father. What gives? Does Matthew need a copy editor to keep his story straight, or is something more interesting going on here? The clue, or course, in a genealogy and a story and a world dominated by men, is the women. These women, strictly speaking, do not belong. They do not belong to the people of God’s covenant. But they’re on the list. They played a critical role that no one would have expected them to play. And Jesus, strictly speaking, does not belong on this list. Joseph isn’t his father. But from the outset,
Matthew claims this to be the genealogy of Jesus. A few years back, a dear friend in this congregation convinced me to get a DNA test. He had become very interested in DNA an genealogies. He even took me to lunch when I got the results to walk me through some of what it meant. Matthew offers us a genealogy that spans 28 generations, but with the internet I was shown the migration pattern of my particular DNA Halpogroup over tens of millennia. I was excited to show it to our son, Yared, who was born in Ethiopia because, according to the data, my ancestral DNA originated in Africa and passed through Ethiopia on its way up the Middle East into what is now Ukraine before coming across Europe to Scandanavia and the British Isles. “Look,” I told him, “it turns out that we are related after all!” Is Jesus really the son of Abraham, the son of David as Matthew claims. Well, no. And…yes. Because neither the DNA, nor who’s in the family graveyard
really determines who our people are. At least not with the coming of Christ.
What’s coming in Christ, what comes to us in Jesus is God with us. That’s what the angel tells Joseph. God is with us. Back in that small town in Tennessee,
where you weren’t considered to be from there if you didn’t have people in the cemetery,
I once heard someone utter the phrase, “we’ve got to take care of our own first.” I think I knew that this was how some people thought, but it was a little shocking to hear it said out loud by a member of the church. Since then, and especially lately
it seems like that sentiment has become increasingly easy to express out loud. In some cases, it’s been very loud. The drawback, of course, is determining who that is. Who are our own that we need to take care of first? The ones who share the same DNA, family name, or ethnicity? The ones who belong to this church, our creed? The ones born in a certain place to the right kind of people, our kind of people? Just who are “our own”? Are they the folks who share our opinions, or our skin color, or our voting preferences? The ones who march in the parade with us, or protest the parade with us? The ones who share our interests and our podcast playlist? The irony of this story and the genealogy that precedes it is that it makes clear that by some of those standards Jesus isn’t one of our own, or at least not as far as Joseph and David and Abraham go. But then neither were Tamar and Rahab and Ruth and Bathsheeba. So then, what? Well, here’s my takeaway. It would be easy to read this story and make Joseph out to be some kind of hero. He’s just a poor sap engaged to girl who says she’s pregnant and he knows he can’t be the father. He’s not a bad guy. He doesn’t want to make her life harder than it’s already going to be, but he doesn’t want to be a part of that either. Until the angel sets him straight and gives him his marching orders from God. He really doesn’t have a choice.
He does what God commands. Well done, Joseph. Except I don’t think that’s what this story is about at all. It’s about the fact that before Joseph can claim and raise Jesus as his own, even though he clearly isn’t his own, God has been moving through Joseph’s family for generations to claim both him and the rest of us as God’s own from eternity. Friends,this story is about so much more than one man’s righteousness and a conversation with an angel. It’s about how even a genealogy that runs from Father Abraham to King David to the humble carpenter, Joseph of Nazareth, contains all kinds of outliers and misfits who do not belong according to the lists this world likes to keep, but who very much belong to God in the Kinship that is established with the coming of Jesus into the world. The coming of God to be with us. In it with us. Together with us. As one of our own, because we are one of God’s own. It has far less to do with our claim upon Jesus and far more to do with God’s claim upon us through one more unconventional family that bears little resemblance to what the world considers to be traditional. The good news is that the people who often don’t belong on the list are the very ones who belong to God, who has come to take care of God’s own.
