Sermon Cloud

Matthew 1:1-16    

End of vs. 1  Josh, I hate to interrupt you, man, but I think if everyone is going to understand the importance of this genealogy, they’ve gotta understand the significance of those three titles for Jesus.
            “Messiah”  The person people had been waiting centuries for.  The Messiah was God’s anointed one, the Christ.  The King of Kings.  “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”  The Messiah is finally here!

            “Son of David”  David was the greatest King in history.  For Americans, this would be like saying Jesus was “Washingtonian, Lincolnesque and Truman-like” and in one. 

            “Son of Abraham.”  This basically means Jesus was Jewish.  Now, this doesn’t mean a lot to us, I don’t know if many of us are Jewish but most of the people who first read this book were Jewish.  They would’ve know that Abraham was the guy to whom God had made an incredible promise of a child in his old age.  At 100 and his wife at 90, Abraham had a miracle baby.  But it wasn’t just for his own sake.  Abraham was “blessed to be a blessing.”  The Jewish people were to be that blessing, they were the people who were to share God’s love with the world.  This is why Jesus was Jewish, he’s the epitome of God sharing his love with the world. 

            But sometimes the Jewish people took it too far.  A lot of them had a sinful pride about their heritage, being proud of upright, Jewish men, while looking down on the “godless Gentile outsiders” and even Jewish women.  So this geneology ought to be a picture of all these wonderful, Jewish men.  If Jesus is the Messiah, Son of David, Son of Abraham, then you’d expect a straight and narrow family tree. 

            Okay, Josh, you can keep going.  Sorry about that.

Abraham was the father of Isaac  That’s exactly what I’m talking about.  You can’t start your family tree better than having Abraham and Isaac.  Hebrews chapter 11 is called the faith hall of fame and guess who has the largest bio – Abraham.  He was the one who followed God to a new country.  Who trusted God to give him a child even when he was 100 and his wife was 90. 

            Whose mother was Tamar  Wait, read that line again.  Whose mother was Tamar  That’s in my bible, is that really in yours, too?  Why would they put a woman in there?  Jewish people never put women in their geneologies.  Women were 2^nd class citizens.  Finding a woman’s name in the geneology would be like opening up a Chief’s roster and seeing that the starting linebacker was a woman.  It just didn’t happen. 

            And of all the women to pick, why would they put Tamar in there?  Josh, do you know the story of Tamar?  Congregation, you’d better sit down  She had a rough life, made some shady decisions, too.  Her father-in-law was Judah, he was one of the founding fathers of Israel, one of the 12 tribes.  Judah arranged for her to marry his first son, Er.  But then Er died.  The law of that day required that Tamar marry Judah’s other son, so she could have a son to continue Er’s family tree.  But this 2^nd son, Onan, didn’t want to father a child for his brother, so he used the birth control method of “pull and pray” and it worked.  Tamar never got pregnant.  And Onan died.

            Judah noticed a pattern here, my son married this woman and then they die.  So he didn’t want to let his third son marry Tamar.  But he kept promising her, but he wouldn’t come through.

            One day, Judah was going up to another city for his annual sheep-shearing expedition (big deal, I guess) and Tamar heard about it and developed a plan.  She changes out of her widow’s clothes and puts on the clothes of a prostitute and sits along the road waiting for Judah.  Judah sees her but because of the veil he doesn’t recognize her and he propositions her for sex. 
            “How much will you pay me to have sex with you?”

            “I’ll send you a goat from my flock.  And to guarantee it, you can keep my walking stick.”  Which I guess was like a credit card.  So, she got it on with her father-in-law.  Not the best picture.  See why she should not be in this list?

            A couple months later, Judah finds out his unmarried daughter-in-law is pregnant.  He demands that she be burned to death but when they took her to him, she presented his walking stick.  Busted! 

            Judah didn’t follow the law so she took matters into his own hands.  Pretty twisted story.  A part of Jesus’ family tree.  Okay, keep reading. 

            Whose mother was Rahab  Wait, another woman?  And this woman wasn’t even Jewish.  You know the song we sang as little kids, “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho”?  Well, before the “walls came a tumbling down”, Joshua sent spies into the city to scope it out. 

            The spies found Rahab and she snuck them into her house.  She was freaked out, “we’ve heard of you and your God.  We know your enemies get wiped out, we heard about the parting of the Red Sea, we know your God is the Supreme God.” 

            She gave them some inside info and then they crawled out her window with a scarlet rope.  And when the walls came a tumbling down, the house with the scarlet rope was fine. 

            But wouldn’t it be obvious that guys were sneaking in and out of Rahab’s window?  Wouldn’t nosy neighbors notice?

            You’d think so, except for the fact that Rahab’s home based business drew a lot of male clientele, she was a prostitute.  Female/ Non-Jewish/ Prostitute.  Jesus’ family tree.  Keep reading.

            Whose mother was Ruth  Really, Ruth?  Ruth was a woman.  This family tree isn’t as “pure” as I thought it would be.  Ruth was non Jewish.  Ruth was a Moabite.  Moabites did not worship God.  Moabites practiced human sacrifice.  The lifestyle of Moabites was so detestable, God told the people of Israel not to mix with the Moabites. 

            The first Moabite was Moab.  Before Moab was born, his Grandpa had a nervous breakdown and moved the entire family into a cave.  You can’t really blame him for the nervous breakdown, Lot had just seen Sodom and Gomorrah nuked fire from heaven and his wife turned into a pillar of salt.  I’d probably go crazy, too.

            But his daughter’s didn’t like being holed up in a cave, their biological clocks were ticking.  The only way to live into old age was to have kids and they were saying, “how are we going to have kids if we’re locked up in this cave.”

            So, one night, the oldest girl got her dad totally drunk, then she had sex with him.  Moab’s Grandpa was also his dad.  To a culture that prided themselves on purity, Moabites were outcasts. 

            The widow of Uriah  Okay, I promise, this is the last interruption.  You know why Bathsheba was widowed?  Her husband was murdered.  Killed by a guy who really should’ve known better.

            It was King David.  The greatest King in Israel’s history.  King’s had a HUGE role in those days.  They were like High Priest and Commander-in-Chief rolled into one.  One spring, David decided to skip his kingly duties of going to war and stayed in the palace.  He was out walking on the roof of the palace when he saw Bathsheba taking a bath on her rooftop. 

            Was she showing off or did she think no one would see her?  We don’t know.  But we do know David liked what he saw, so he invited her to the palace and had some unholy “bouw-chicka-bow-bouw.” 

            A couple months later, she’s pregnant.  David’s busted.  Because while he was getting it on with Uriah’s wife, Uriah was doing his duty on the battlefield.  So it couldn’t be Uriah’s kid.  So David had his top general make a bad military maneuver that got Uriah killed.

            Adultery and murder in Jesus’ family tree. 

            The baby from their affair died.  Their second baby was Solomon, King Solomon.  And the line of Jesus continues.  Go head, Josh.  I promise, I’m done.

            Finish the passage – to verse 16

            You’d think the family tree of Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of David, would be clean and pure.  But it’s not. 

            If we told all these stories, we’ be here all day.  The reality is that Jesus’ family tree is one jacked-up family tree.  Sure, there are some heroes like Abraham.  But even Abraham made his mistakes.  King Ahaz, terrible things.  Killed people for worshipping God.

             You’ve got screw-ups.  Women – who were 2^nd class citizens in those days.  You’ve got non-Jews; outsiders.  Ruth was a Moabite woman, outcast of outcasts.

            But God worked through all these people to bring Jesus into the world.  The Jesus whose teachings/ whose death and Resurrection turned this world upside down. 

            Just like Jesus’ family tree, our lives are jacked up.  I don’t know who you relate to here.  Maybe it’s Judah or King David.  People who should’ve had it all together.  Maybe you grew up in church and it looks like you’ve got it all together, but you’ve made choices you hope no one finds out about. 

            There is a place in Jesus’ family tree for you.

            Maybe you feel like Ruth or Rahab.  Outsiders, marginalized.  You weren’t taught how to live for God as a kid.  So you made choices.  Because of those choices, “good church people” say we don’t want you around. 

            There is a place in Jesus’ family tree for you.  Even if you aren’t in the family tree now, you know what God does?  In the book of Romans, chapter 9, Paul talks about how God “grafts” us into Jesus’ family tree. 

            And in Ephesians 1:4-5 we read this.  God chose that we’d be adopted into his family.  It’s one thing to be born into a family, it’s another thing to be adopted.  Adoption means you’ve been chosen.  Despite our past, God chose us to be a part of his family.

            But it doesn’t stop there.  God takes our brokenness, our embarrassing past, our biggest weaknesses and he uses it all to create something beautiful.

            Some of the people in the family tree lived in sin their entire lives.  But some turned their lives over to God and God did great things through their lives.

            Rahab left the prostitution business.  Married into the Jewish faith community.  And she’s listed right alongside of Abraham in what we call the “faith hall of fame”, Hebrews 11.  Hebrews 11:30-31  Outsider/ Prostitute/ Hero of the faith.  God uses her life for great things.          

            Ruth, the Moabite.  One of the greatest stories in the bible.  You can read it in the book of Ruth in the Bible, just 4 chapters long, in the first part of the Bible.  Ruth married into a pretty dysfunctional family, a Jewish family that had turned their backs on God.  And then all the men died, leaving her and her mother-in-law to fend for themselves.

            Ruth decided to give her life to God.  It’s an amazing story of how Ruth’s faith helped lead her mother-in-law back to faith in God.  This godly man, Boaz, marries Ruth, they start a new family that’s a part of Jesus’ family tree.     

            That’s what God does.  If we give him our mess, he turns it into something beautiful.  And then he uses our lives to bring about more transformation around us. 

            It doesn’t matter your past.  Doesn’t matter where you came from.  There is room in Jesus’ family tree for you.  The question is do you allow yourself to be adopted into that family?           

            Band