Christmas Eve, Sunday, December 24, 2017 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Christmas at Matthew’s House

Advent Sermon Series: A Tour of Gospel Homes

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 11:1–10
Matthew 1:1–6, 17–25

We are a people grown weary of waiting.
We dwell in the midst of cynical people, and we
have settled for what we can control. We do know that
you hold initiative for our lives, that your love planned our
salvation before we saw the light of day. And so we wait for your coming in your vulnerable baby in whom all things are made new.

Walter Brueggemann, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth.

Well here we are—the morning of Christmas Eve or, more accurately, the Fourth Sunday of Advent. We have five more hours to go until we make the total move to Christmas. During this season of Advent, we have been making our way on a Christmas tour of Gospel homes. We have visited Mark’s rather austere home, the one without any decorations unless you count the crown of thorns hanging on the front door in place of a Christmas wreath. On the Second Sunday of Advent we stopped by John’s house, a home enveloped in thick darkness that radiated light and warmth and welcome, where we heard about Jesus as God’s eternal speech. Last Sunday, since we were halfway through the tour, we took a break for some refreshment of joy, lit the pink Advent candle, and celebrated this season with the gift of music—the Christmas cantata, which our musicians offered with beauty and heart.

So today, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, we are heading to Matthew’s house before moving on to Luke’s tonight. You might not remember the way we talked about Matthew’s house in the very beginning of our series, but this is the house that is absolutely overrun with people. As a matter of fact, whereas John’s house was difficult to reach due to the darkness, Matthew’s house is hard to reach because the street is just about blocked off by all of the cars parked every which way. We see license plates from all over—the Hebron Hills and Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Babylon, Galilee and Nazareth. As we walk up to the home, we hear all of the people before we actually see them. There are so many people present that they are spilling out into the front lawn. Lots of conversations going on. Lots of laughter. It is a huge family reunion, after all.

That focus on family is one of the things we notice as we step into Matthew’s entryway. Similar to how one might have children’s pictures displayed up and down the walls of the hallway at home, Matthew’s entryway is awash in family photos. They are all crowded together; a few hang crookedly, covering the walls from floor to ceiling. Generations of relatives—“great-great-great-great-grandfathers, distant cousins,” people we’ve never even heard of, as well as several women whose lives, as another minister has stated, “might have inspired the saying ‘well-behaved women rarely make history’” (Katelyn Gordon, First Presbyterian Church, Charlotte, North Carolina). Picture after picture, all displayed in a particular order, fourteen generations at a time, telling a particular kind of story about a particular family.

As you noticed with the first part of our reading, Matthew starts telling his story of Jesus’ birth by writing a long genealogy, one that goes all the way back to the beginning of Israel’s story with Father Abraham and then forward all the way up to Joseph. He shows us a huge verbal picture gallery of generation after generation. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and on and on Matthew goes, pointing to each picture as he says the name, section after section, wall after wall, so many faces to see and names to hear. But finally Matthew pauses when he comes to the last couple of pictures.

As he takes a breath, we see Jacob the father of Joseph, and Joseph, the husband of Mary (her picture is up there too, a bit of a surprise), of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah. We don’t see a picture of Jesus just yet. It is an empty frame, waiting until the end of chapter 1 to be filled, as you heard. But here in the beginning Matthew describes picture after picture, all carefully arranged, the whole family reunion exhibit clearly designed to tell us a story—a story about God in Jesus and, therefore, a story about us.

Matthew’s focus on setting up Jesus’ birth by connecting him to his family tree of the past reminds me of a recent event I attended and a lecture I heard Eboo Patel offer. He spoke to a congregation primarily made up of Jews, with a few scattered Christians and Muslims mixed in. We were all gathered at Temple Shalom for their annual Interfaith Shabbat service. It is a special year for those at Temple Shalom, for it is their 150th anniversary. Because of this august occasion, they have a special display out in their gathering area.

It is an exhibit that resembles Matthew’s picture gallery—a timeline with pictures and stories that illuminate major events in their history as a congregation. You see everything from an image of their first temple to a photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in 1964 preaching from their lectern on the bimah. Picture after picture, displayed and interpreted to tell the story of that community of faith’s beginning, to tell the story of who they are now, and to hint at who they might be becoming.

Dr. Patel, a Muslim himself and the founder and leader of the Interfaith Youth Core, also told a story that night. It was a story about our nation and how the cultural term “Judeo-Christian” came into being. According to the research Dr. Patel has done, the phrase Judeo-Christian was not really invented until the 1930s when, in the face of rising anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism in this country, the leaders of the National Conference of Christians and Jews decided it was time to speak up. They felt called to help expand the American vision of just who belongs here. America is not meant to be Christian-only, they argued. Rather, the leaders of that interfaith movement desired to help the American people learn to tell the truer story of our nation as a pluralistic land, one nurtured at that time by three ennobling traditions: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism.

It was a risky move, because in the 1930s using the term “Judeo-Christian” signaled an overt desire to open the promise of our nation to more and more people. It was meant to be a term of inclusion. It signaled a commitment to purposefully seek a plurality of voices to shape our nation’s story, to help us understand who we have been, who we are, and who we are becoming. Yet these days, Dr. Patel pointed out, Judeo-Christian is no longer experienced as an inclusive term. It is no longer used as a phrase to signal a radical opening to a plurality of people. Therefore, Dr. Patel asserted, it is time to craft a new story for our nation, one that honors and celebrates the reality that we are now the most religiously diverse country in the world. But who will tell that truer new story? he asked us. In the face of rising anti-Semitism and anti-Islamic sentiment in our day and time, whose voices are needed to shape our nation’s story today?

Our country’s growing diversity is signaling to us another historical opportunity to tell a beautiful and broad new story about who we are, a story that again opens the doors of power and influence to more and more people, that helps all kinds of people know they belong here too. Are we going to help tell that new story? Eboo asked us. Are we, religious people committed to the value of a diverse nation, going to do what we can to make sure the new story of America’s possibility starts to find its shape and voice again?

Dr. Patel wanted us to think about the ways we are arranging our pictures on our national wall, who goes where and what that signals. What events and people are we highlighting? Whom are we ignoring? The story we tell ourselves, the things we highlight, the moments we ignore—that story shapes us. As Eboo said, the way we tell our story, the way we imagine our world, determines who we know ourselves to be and what we think we can do. The story has power.

I connect that Shabbat service with our scripture today for a few reasons. First of all, as we stand in Matthew’s entryway, looking at all of those pictures, we quickly come to understand that Matthew, like Dr. Patel, like those leaders of the early National Conference of Christians and Jews, knew the power of the story. He knew the power that came with highlighting particular people and particular events. Matthew knew that the way he arranged the pictures on his wall, the way he arranged the genealogy that led up to Jesus’ birth, would be a huge signal to all of those who heard his Gospel as to who Jesus is, as to who God is, and, therefore, who we are to be in response.

But second, with this particular genealogy, Matthew was revealing to us that the story of our God, somewhat similar to the national one Dr. Patel was prodding us to imagine, is also more beautifully broad and more generously inclusive than we know. While we did not have time this morning to go through each picture, just know that the people Matthew highlights in Jesus’ genealogy are quite diverse in their own life experiences, in their measure of faithfulness, some even in their own religious tradition.

Plus, as you heard, Matthew lists four women, not including Mary. Not only is it rare to find women’s names listed in historical genealogies of that time, these particular women Matthew highlights challenged many of their societal norms. Only two of them were Israelites—Bathsheba, who married a Gentile named Uriah until King David had him killed so he could marry Bathsheba himself; and Tamar. The other two women listed, Rahab and Ruth, are Gentiles, people outside the Jewish lineage. All of these women did whatever it took to survive. But there they are—their pictures all hanging in Matthew’s entryway. Folks whom you would have assumed were outside of the family tree, outside of the story of God’s work, all brought in and listed, just like all the others.

We wonder if Matthew was trying to help his own congregation, one that scholars think was primarily made up of Jewish Christians, begin to open up their own hearts to the promise that God’s family is made up of many more kinds of people than they ever could have imagined. The family that Matthew claims leads directly to Jesus, God-with-Us, is a family composed of both God’s chosen people Israel as well as some Gentiles grafted on to the tree, an expansiveness of God not yet fully articulated in that day and time but one that Paul would also lift up in his letters and that the book of Acts would point to throughout its story of the movement of the Spirit.

Like Dr. Patel knows today regarding our national conversation, Matthew knew back then regarding our religious identity conversation: the story we tell has power. Matthew knew that the way our story gets told often determines who we know ourselves to be and what we think we can do. It is why he painstakingly points out this diverse variety of photos hanging in his entryway. Matthew desires for us to understand more deeply God’s very expansive and always expanding family, for God’s arms are long enough to reach around the world. Yet what Matthew hints at and what Dr. Patel said outright is that so much of our religious history and even our current religious climate reveals that God’s people continually keep trying to pull God’s arms back only for themselves, to shorten God’s embrace so that there is only enough room for them, to determine whom God can love and in whom God can work.

But here, in the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, as we stand in the his entryway looking around—both at the pictures on the walls and at all of the people filling each and every room, spilling out into the front lawn, telling their loud and sometimes inappropriate stories—we begin to get this very real sense that trying to pull God’s arms back or shorten God’s embrace is futile and unfaithful. Matthew helps us to remember that God is working in this world through some very unlikely, unexpected people—people rarely seen by our world as the primary storytellers or story-shapers; people often overlooked; people like Rahab or even Mary; people who move through the world with their own drama and brokenness, who keep falling down and getting back up; people like Jacob and Tamar; people who have a difficult time trusting that they are, indeed, important parts of God’s family, that they are, indeed, also called to be God’s servants in this world, God’s lights of compassion and justice; people like Ruth and Joseph and Bathsheeba and you.

Here at Matthew’s house I think he hopes all new visitors get stuck here in his entryway for a while, marveling at all the variety of people with whom, through whom, in whom, God chooses to work out God’s goodness in this world. People that are somehow all connected in God as family—many of whom we might never imagine would be the storytellers or the story-shapers of the most significant story of all—how God decided to enter into this crazy genealogy as flesh-and-blood; how God decided to become a person whose picture could be hung on a wall; how God in Jesus came as a constant reminder of just how far our God would go to show us who God is and, therefore, who we are invited to become as God’s children.

As we get ready to walk into the rest of the house, to go and see if Joseph is feeling ready for fatherhood, if Mary’s butterflies have calmed down, if we can see the bright star through the windows, Matthew’s question to us, similar to Dr. Patel’s question to his congregation, is if we are ready to tell our story to our world. If we are ready to talk about our story of a God more expansive and inclusive than most of us can even understand, our story of a God willing to do whatever it took to show us love, our story of a God whose long arms embrace the whole world and for whom diversity and pluralism and a whole cacophony of voices are things to celebrate and not fear. After all, just look at all the pictures of all the people on Matthew’s wall, as well as all the faces of those in these pews—people whom God has chosen to use to tell God’s story of salvation and healing for the whole world, a story that continues to expand. May we be up for that task.

Amen.