Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz
and this is Ascension Presents.
And Merry Christmas.
I love
the Gospel reading
-- it's one of the Gospel options for Christmas.
It's the genealogy of Jesus—the beginning of Matthew's Gospel.
And sometimes people are like
wait, I hate ... all those names
where you know, it goes like this—it says in the beginning—the book of
genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David
the son of Abraham. And it goes back and says,
Abraham became the father of Isaac,
Isaac became the father of Jacob, Jacob, the father of Judah and his brothers,
Judah became the father of Perez and Sarah—whose mother was Tamar—oh my gosh—
just droning on, and on,
and on.
And just these names of people that we don't know
—all they are to us—
they're just sounds.
But if you know the story—and this is one of the reasons why we have to know the Bible.
We have to know the story. Because, when I got to know the story
and I got to know some of these names,
what it became to me, was rather than this kind of like—OK, here's this prelude that no one care about,
it's just a long bunch of names, it became like a trailer.
I get—whenever I get to proclaim the Gospel,
I get choked up at this whole time
because what it is to me—it's—as these names are going, I picture a trailer—a trailer for a movie.
Here, picture the scene.
It's a blackscreen, right?
And it just has like the name "Abraham", POOF in small letters, and then as his name pops up,
there's like a little drum beat like POOF, and then it goes Abraham, you know,
Isaac POOF,
and Jacob POOF,
and then Perez and Sarah POOF POOF
and as it goes along, it goes to David like BOOM
and it goes to Solomon BAM
and it keeps going down, you know, there's Jacob,
and Joseph, of her is—husband of Mary
—of her was born Jesus, who was called the Christ.
And at this point, like the drums are going brrl brrl kind of a thing
and like BAM! Jesus Christ's name on the whole thing.
And it's phenomenal. And what I think of is—
this whole thing—all these people's names is the teaser trailer.
It's .. these are ... this whole story is the story of how we went from Abraham,
all the way
to Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
And if you were a Jewish person, and you were hearing the Gospel of Matthew read to you, this genealogy,
it wouldn't be like "Oh who?" "What?", "What's going on?"
You'd be like BWAH! You'd be sitting in your seat, like right, at the movie theater like, "Wh- I cannot WAIT!"
"What's happening?" "What's the story?"
Because, you, as a Jewish person,
you've been waiting your entire life and
your whole people have been waiting for thousands of years
for that guy, for Jesus Christ to come on the scene.
That's what we celebrate at Christmas.
That's why I love, I love the genealogy because it gets me so stoked, like every time I'm thinking,
this is how God unfolded this plan, this salvation of the world.
It's worth pausing for a moment and saying "Wait a second."
"Who are some these people?" "What are their names?"
Because we think sometimes that, just because someone's in the Bible,
that that means they're a hero.
Or just because someone did something in the Bible, that means "that was the right thing to do."
Very, very rarely
is someone in this genealogy of Jesus
like always doing the right thing.
In fact, there are four women
who are mentioned in this genealogy.
And it's just like, let's review a couple of these stories.
One is Ruth.
So, it's David's grandmother.
Ruth was not Jewish.
She was not native Jewish, natively Jewish, she was not a native Jew. She was a Moabite.
The greatest king Israel had ever had,
King David,
his grandmother wasn't even Jewish.
And what they're saying is, "OK, so, listen, you have this girl named Mary and there's,
you have maybe questionable circumstances
of the conception of Jesus."
That people who didn't know what really went down,
they wouldn't necessarily have known that she conceived of the Power of the Holy Spirit.
So like, "hmm, very interesting."
But like, no, no, no,
David, the king,
his grandmother wasn't even Jewish, she was Moabite.
David's son, Solomon,
it says, whose mother had been the wife of Uriah.
You're like, wait, what's that story? We all know that story, right?
Bathsheba. That, here's the story of David and Bathsheba,
that at some point, David
basically lusts after this woman,
whether this is mutually entered into,
an adulterous relationship,
or whether this was like, no,
this is absolutely
awful, where David,
the king, used his influence
to essentially
forcibly?
conceive a child with
this woman, Bathsheba, and you're like,
wait a second, that's—
so, even like the greatest king has these awful sins.
Absolutely. And then
he manipulates to have her husband, Uriah,
killed.
Wait, this is in Jesus' family tree?
Absolutely.
Going back even further.
Judah became the father of Perez and Sarah,
whose mother was Tamar.
And you're like "Wait, what's that story?"
Well, here's the crazy story.
Judah had a couple sons.
And so, one of his sons married this woman named Tamar,
but he died before they had kids.
And so Jewish law, his other son,
Judah had to give his next son to Tamar.
But he died before they had kids.
And so Judah's like, "Listen, I know my role,
my job is to give you my next son
so that you can have kids by him
and be taken care of for the rest of your life."
But he wasn't willing to do this.
So, what did Tamar do?
Tamar dressed up like a prostitute because she knew
that Judah was coming by.
And Judah, thinking that,
I mean, this—it goes from worse,
to worse, to worse—
Judah,
seeing this woman,
thinking that she was a prostitute,
not knowing she was actually his daughter-in-law,
goes in and has intercourse with her
and she conceives twins
that are her father-in-law's children.
Like, this is the story,
this is Judah, line from the tribe of Judah.
Like you think, oh, Judah must be awesome.
No, not exactly.
Not only that.
Later on, there is a woman named Rahab.
And Rahab didn't just pretend to be a prostitute,
she actually was a prostitute.
She's, so these women,
so, you have Tamar,
you have Rahab,
you have Ruth.
All, Bathsheba.
These four people who are described ... and these
now these women, oftentimes they were victims of their circumstances.
This is not like the women were the bad culprits in this situation.
All these guys,
Judah, and David, and Solomon and all these guys.
They're the ones who
are not doing well.
Like, if you go through the family tree, you're like,
"Jesus had a crooked family tree."
But it's from
this family
that we were given our
Savior.
It is in this family, that God
was able to save the world.
And I imagine that there's a lot of brokenness in your family,
just like there's brokenness in every family.
I imagine there's a lot of brokenness in your life,
just like there's brokenness in all these people's lives.
But the truth, the powerful truth, is this.
That even in the midst of brokenness,
what does God do? What can God do?
God can use that brokenness to bring out good.
He didn't want the brokenness but
he could use the brokenness to bring out good.
This is the story of Christmas.
This is the reason why we read this genealogy.
Because we realize that Jesus
didn't come into a perfect world,
from a perfect family, into a perfect environment.
Jesus—Jesus, God himself—entered into our
imperfect world,
in a very imperfect environment,
from an incredibly imperfect family.
But even in the midst of this,
he was able to do the most incredible thing
in history.
All of us have broken hearts,
and we have broken lives, we have broken families,
broken relationships.
But if we allow God into them,
if we allow God into
these crooked hearts, and these crooked relationships, and these crooked lives,
and these crooked families,
then we realize that what God did through
this family,
he can do in our family.
Because God can write straight
with crooked lines.
We just have to let him in.
This Christmas, let him in to your
crooked heart, crooked relationships,
crooked life,
and crooked families.
And let him do something amazing.
From all of us here at Ascension Presents, my name's Father Mike.
Merry Christmas and God bless.