At this joy-filled gathering we recall how God did not wait until the human family
had it all together to come among us.
God’s Son is born into a world of far from perfect people.
The Son of God came into our darkness with the light of his saving love.
The 2nd person of the Divine Trinity took on our sinful flesh and transformed it
by tasting the entire gamut of the human experience, from birth to death
and all the joys and sorrows in-between. He is Emmanuel, God-with-us.
If we struggle to believe that God is with us because of our brokenness and imperfections and sinfulness, we need look no farther than Jesus’ family tree to know
that’s exactly the kind of people Jesus came from and did not run away from.
Even as an adult, Jesus would hang out with broken people to heal them;
with imperfect people to redeem them; with sinful people to save them.
For Emmanuel takes the crooked lines of our lives & makes them straight
by his saving mercy.
God even uses sinful humans to carry out His plan of salvation
as evidenced by Jesus’ genealogy.
When people listen to the long list of names in Jesus’ family tree
as laid out in Matthew’s Gospel, their eyes often glaze over.
When this Gospel is proclaimed with all the strange names of Jesus’ ancestors,
those listening often find their minds wandering and wonder—will this never end?
That’s too bad, because there is a roomful of fascinating characters in Jesus’ lineage, enough to make a blockbuster miniseries on Netflix.
There was Tamar who tricks her father-in-law, Judah, into lying down with her,
so she might be able to bear children connected to his family line.
There was Rahab, a Gentile prostitute in Jericho, who saves the Hebrew spies
and then marries into the family tree.
There was Ruth, a Moabite woman who became the great-grandmother of King David.
Though Ruth is a despised outside because the people of Moab were enemies of Israel,
she still wriggles her way into the story as one of Jesus’ ancestors.
There was a woman whose name is not even mentioned,
only the fact that she was the wife of Uriah and mother to Solomon.
It’s as if the evangelist Matthew cannot bear to say her name,
because to do so would bring up dark secrets staining the golden throne of King David.
David commits adultery with the wife of Uriah, who is one of David’s soldiers.
Then when David fails to cover up this deadly sin, he has Uriah murdered,
so David can then take the wife of Uriah as his own wife.
Remember--one of the titles for Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel is the “Son of David”--Wow!
By the way, the woman’s name is Bathsheba, the mother of King Solomon.
But then Solomon sells his soul to the foreign gods of his many wives.
Then there is King Ahaz, who we met last Sunday, who refuses to ask God for advice
but instead trusts only in himself. And the list of scoundrels goes on….
The reason the evangelist Matthew includes Jesus’ family tree in his Gospel
before detailing the birth of Jesus is he wants us to remember that in Jesus,
God took upon himself our sinful humanity to transform it.
Each of the ancestors of Jesus possesses the human flaws and failings
which Jesus is born to redeem.
Why? We have to ask the question: Why?
Why not start Creation all over & hope for a more “perfect” people to welcome His Son?
Why? One word---LOVE!
Even though we may reject the God of Love by closing our hearts to Him,
God is still with us---Emmanuel.
Even though we may turn away from God in our sin, God is still with us, Emmanuel.
Like a father or mother delighting in their child, watching with eyes aglow
as their little one dances & frolics in their presence, so the Lord God delights in us,
his adopted children in Christ.
God not only delights in us because he made us, but also because his Only Son
has become forever part of the human race.
God not only delights in us because he has held us in his heart from before
the beginning of the world, but God also delights in us because he has saved us.
Lest we forget, we come here today to remember that the Son of God
was born to save us from our sins, which blind us to God’s delight in us.
Lest we forget, Jesus, whose name means “God saves,” comes as Savior of the World to heal us from all that blinds us to the light of God shining forth from others.
Because the sins we commit against others—those hateful words and hurtful deeds--
result from us not seeing the presence of God in others.
This blindness prevents us from delighting in others as God delights in them.
God delights in the human race, rejoices over you and me.
God expresses this delight by discarding all divine privileges to become one like us,
to taste the entire spectrum of the human experience.
The Son of God takes joy in being part of the human family.
The Son of God is not protected from anything during his time on this earth,
but he is sustained in everything by His Heavenly Father’s love.
The Son of God is exposed to the vulnerability of human existence:
born away from home in tough conditions, dependent on Joseph and Mary to protect him
from the power of evil forces marshalled by murderous King Herod,
becoming a refugee in Egypt, and later as an adult tortured and killed by those in power.
God delights in every human being and expresses that delight by becoming flesh of
our flesh and bone of our bone, by taking a human heart which can be broken by love.
The celebration of the Eucharist is one of the most powerful ways
we encounter God-with-us, Emmanuel.
At this table of God’s word, we remember all that God has done for us.
At this altar, we remember the greatest sign of God’s love for us,
that the Son of God’s body was broken and blood poured out to save us
from everlasting death.
Here we remember how He commanded us to love one another in a similar way,
to pour out our lives in love of others.
Here we do what he told us to do in his memory
that we might have the strength to love as he loves.
As bread and wine are taken and blessed, we hear his words once again:
This is my body, take and eat. This is my blood poured out for you, take and drink.
As we enter into Communion with the Risen Lord Jesus,
God-is-with-us in the most solid and real way possible.
Today, the Son of God becomes flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone,
so that we will never forget we are His Body in the world.