December 22, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

Beyond Genealogy

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Matthew 1:18–25

This week’s sermon is about what happens when life doesn’t work out the way you planned. I’m going to begin with the most boring sermon illustration ever. I’m going to read you some of the first seventeen verses of Matthew chapter 1, the part we skipped in order to get to what we know as the Christmas story.

It occurred to me this week how strange it is that we so often skip over the lengthy accounts of genealogy that appear so frequently in the Bible. Sure, to just read it like that sounds pretty boring. But genealogy has always been interesting to us, and it still is. People have always been interested in tracing family histories. In recent years, web resources about tracing your lineage have exploded; the Henry Louis Gates Jr. series on “Finding Your Roots” has been a huge hit.

Most of us, at some point, start asking questions about where we came from. We also want to know where our bloodline is going. We care about who our children marry and what kind of young people they parent and raise to carry on the family name. Just in case that idea seems archaic or old-fashioned to you, consider the following illustration, which happens to come from the TV show Parenthood but is common enough to find a number of places.

Julia is a young, successful lawyer. She’s married to a wonderful, supportive stay-at-home dad named Joel, and they have a sweet, gifted little girl. Julia comes to a place many of us face at one time or another: she considers her age, the choices she’s made, and what she wants out of life, and she decides that she wants to work less, spend more time at home, and have another child. The couple talks; they make the decision to have another child. At first, they’re both excited, and the trying-to-get-pregnant part is fun, but then it takes longer than they expected. They watch what they eat; they spend money on fertility doctors . . . nothing. At the same time, her sister-in-law, who isn’t even trying, gets pregnant with a third child, and the girl who delivers coffee at Julie’s office gets pregnant and is going to give the baby up for adoption. Why is everybody else getting pregnant? The happy couple starts to feel miserable; nothing is going according to plan.

Progressively, you become sympathetic to the couple as they go through a discernment process so many couples have to face. They make peace with the fact that they will not give birth to another child. They warm up to, and eventually fall in love with, the idea of adoption. But after unsuccessfully going down the road of naming all of their adoption priorities, they still don’t get matched with a baby. So they agree to adopt a child out of the foster system—and they get an older boy, of a different race, whose biological mother is serving a prison sentence. Over the long term, it’s a story that progressively begins to include small miracles, but along the way it is not what they had in mind.

The power of this story, for me, comes not from the particular characters involved or the polish of the television lens through which it is portrayed. The power comes from how common and transferable the story is. Who among us doesn’t know a couple who has struggled to get pregnant or parents who have chosen to adopt? The story isn’t just about adoption or parenthood; it’s really about when things don’t go according to plan, and beyond struggles with fertility or adoption, that theme has countless applications. Yes, plans change when you can’t have another child. Plans also change when a pregnancy comes unexpectedly. Plans change when a spouse or a child gets sick or dies. Plans change when an accident strikes or health diminishes with age. Plans change when a marriage or relationship ends or when a job is lost. In all of these cases and so many others, life presents us with situations we did not expect and circumstances we never imagined would be part of our story. These surprises in life involve such a range of emotions: fear, shame, guilt, anger—all legitimate responses when life doesn’t go the way you planned.

Sometimes within the unexpected parts of our stories we find occasions for joy and for redemption. Often when that is the case it is because we have been able to make a decision to love again: to love another person, to love the life we have, to love ourselves—not as we thought we would be, but as we are.

I told you the whole story about Julia and my take on it because I couldn’t help thinking about it when I opened my Bible and read about Joseph this week. We’re not told much about Joseph, outside of this story in which Mary becomes pregnant and Joseph has a decision to make. We commonly speculate on how he might have dealt with the possibility that Mary was unfaithful, but there’s something else going on here too. The child Joseph will raise is not his, and in case you didn’t know that lineage was important to Joseph, the first seventeen verses of the Gospel according to Matthew are devoted to establishing the importance of that fact.

We read forty-two generations worth of ancestors of Joseph, going back to Abraham, including King David, establishing Joseph as the most blue-blooded, distinguished biblical character you can imagine. Then finally, after forty-two generations, as if it’s some kind of cruel punch line for Joseph, we read that Joseph was the husband of Mary . . . and she was the mother of Jesus—not by Joseph. Joseph’s plans have been changed.

The story of Christmas seems at first like an unusual story: biblical genealogy, miraculous pregnancy, an angel appearing to Joseph in a dream. What if we frame it differently? What if it’s a story of a proud family, an unexpected addition to that family, and a choice to love a child? This seems to be what is going on with Joseph. He has a plan, and it’s a good one, but his life takes a turn he does not expect, and the plan changes. And he makes a decision to love the child and the wife and the life he has been given.

This story is experienced by Joseph and Mary, but it’s created by God. This story of plans that have changed is the way God chooses for Jesus Christ to come into the world, and the message is simple: God seems to be saying to anyone who ever had their plans change, “I know life is not what you expected, but it’s going to be OK.”

There’s an old story, I’ve told it before, and some of you may know it, but I couldn’t think of a better one to make the point.

(Starting to light candles and hear the music of “Silent Night”)

Ministers make lots of plans each Christmas: we know that you all come to church with great expectations, and even though we probably shouldn’t, at times we try very hard to meet them. It was in Austria, on Christmas Eve in 1818, that a pastor named Joseph Mohr was in the midst of planning an incredible Christmas music festival, when suddenly the church organ broke. You can imagine the running from place to place, the voices raised in disbelief, the chaos and anger as the reality set in that Christmas would not come according to plan.

Joseph Mohr, once he had made peace with the day he had been given, sat down to write a Christmas poem. He wrote the lyrics, four verses, and when he had completed it, he set off to find his musician friend, Franz Gruber. Gruber wrote the melody to the poem and set it to guitar accompaniment, and that night at the festival, “Silent Night,” the most beloved of all Christmas carols, was born. If Joseph Mohr’s Christmas music festival had gone according to plan that year, it’s safe to assume that it would have been forgotten long ago. But we know the story still because “Silent Night” is a song whose origins remind us of the meaning of Christmas. God comes into the world in the unexpected gift of a child, as if to say to us, “I know this is not what you expected, but it’s going to be OK.” Amen.