Sermon Tone Analysis

Announce change in benediction.

Announce Aletheia Sunday 14th at 6:30 starting with Apostles Creed

 

Pray for rain – repent for squandering water, repent for our way of life which is causing climate change.

Repent for destroying the earth.

Matthew 1: 1 – 11

 

Romans 11: 17 – 24

 

 

!! Sermon

 

A friend of mine recently joined a Bible study group recently which had started from scratch, and nobody who joined the group had any prior relationship to the other people in the group.

I suspect most of us have been in a similar situation a few times in our lives when we are thrown into a group of people we don’t know.

In a Bible study or a similar setting, the leader will usually ask, “Please introduce yourself to the group, and tell us a little about yourself.”

When you have to do that, what is the first thing which usually jumps to your mind?

Does it sound something like, “Hi, I am Carol, and I am a school teacher”?

Or “Hi, I am Danie; I am married with three children”

or I am a widower, or I am divorced?

Sometimes it’s, “Hello, I am Andrew, Avril’s son.”

Usually in a group like that, someone says, “Hi I am Mike and I haven’t been a Christian for very long.”

When we first introduce ourselves, we usually want to tell people the most important piece of information they may need to know in order to understand us.

When I was a child, the death of my father defined everything about my life.

We struggled financially, and when I was placed in a situation of introducing myself to strangers, I would look around at the other kids clothes, and my introduction would usually be, “Hi, I am Michael, my dad passed away when I was 8”.

That event defined who I was.

When we first introduce ourselves, we try to create the kind of impression which *will help us the most in our dealings* with the people we are meeting.

Our first introduction creates the lens we want other people to see us through.

So when we read Matthew, Matthew’s opening line to us is that Jesus is the son of David, the Son of Abraham.

Imagine the impact that statement had on Matthew’s readers.

Matthew says Jesus is the son of Abraham.

In Genesis 12 God said to Abraham, “/To your offspring I will give this land/.”

Usually we think that is all the descendents of Abraham, But in Galatians 3 Paul corrects our thinking when he says, /“The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed.

The Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ./

The word offspring is singular, so Matthew is saying in his first line that Jesus and Jesus alone is the rightful heir to Abraham.

Let me just make that clearer.

The New Testament does not see Isaac as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, God’s promise is fulfilled in Jesus.

In 2 Samuel, God spoke to David through the prophet Nathan, and said, “12 /When your days are over and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring (SINGULAR) to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom.

13 He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

14 I will be his father, and he will be my son.”/

Matthew is arguing that Jesus, not Solomon, is that promised son of David whose throne will be established forever.

In Matthew’s opening line, I think he is saying, “Jesus is the whole reason why Israel has existed.”

I think Matthew is saying, “*Israel isn’t the centre of God’s purposes, Jesus is”.

*

 

Mathew uses the next 16 verses to back up his opening statement.

But when we read the Bible, from verse 2 to verse 17, most of us go to sleep.

This genealogy doesn’t mean too much to us, maybe because we don’t know a lot of the people Matthew is speaking about, or we don’t know their stories.

But if Matthew puts it right up front in his introduction of Jesus, it’s because Matthew wants to create an image in our minds of just who Jesus is, and it must have meant something to the people he was introducing Jesus to.

!! Transition to Haiti

On the 12th of January 2010, Haiti, which is already the poorest country in the Northern Hemisphere, suffered a devastating earthquake which marked 7 on the Richter scale.

Estimates are that over 200 000 Haitians lost their lives in the last month because of the earthquake.

A friend of mine from school is on the South African rescue team and he was saying that this is by far the worst natural disaster he has ever seen.

Apart from the buildings that have been destroyed, in all the confusion, families have been torn apart too.

Many children have been orphaned and charity organizations are setting up makeshift orphanages for these children.

The president of Haiti has placed a moratorium on children leaving the country, because these children are incredibly vulnerable to child trafficking.

It seems in Haiti that because of the poverty, many parents give their children away in the hope that they will find a better life.

Most of these children will never see their parents again.

Some parents told reporters that they had to choose which child to send away.

Some parents sent 3 or 4 children to be adopted, in the hope that they would have a better life in America.

Nine days ago, 10 Americans from Idaho were arrested for trying to take 33 children between the age of 2 and 12 out of Haiti without any papers.

They did not even have passports for the children.

Many of these children were not orphans.

They had actually met with the parents of some of these children and negotiated taking them away from their homes.

On the bus, one girl had been crying, begging to be returned to her mother.

Imagine if these children had actually been removed from Haiti without any record of who they are, who their parents are, which family they belong to.

How would they introduce themselves to a crowd?

Would their opening line be, “*I don’t know who I am”?*

If we play that forward by seventy years, and imagine either these children, or their children or grandchildren coming back to Haiti.

Maybe they would want to lay claim to some property which belonged to their family, but they couldn’t because they have no papers.

!! Transition to Babylon Exile

If we can grasp those children’s predicament, maybe we can understand what it must have been like for the Jews to be carried off to Babylon for the Exile.

Six hundred years before Jesus was born, the Babylonians demolished Jerusalem, and took thousands of Jews to Babylon.

They were separated from family and the world they knew.

Seventy years later, when they were allowed to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple, they had to try to prove that their ancestors had lived there.

Receiving your family land back was dependant on being able to prove your genealogy.

They didn’t have passports, so they had to tell the officials who their parents and their grandparents were, and they would try to trace them through any records they could find.

But for Israel it was even more important, because in Israel your ancestry decided which official role you could play in the life of the new Jerusalem.

In Ezra chapter two we read of thousands of people who were given positions as priests, Levites, and singers, and temple servants, because of they could prove their ancestry.

But we also read in verse 59

59 /The following came up from the towns of Tel Melah, Tel Harsha, Kerub, Addon and Immer, but they could not show that their families were descended from Israel: /

/60// The descendants of Delaiah, Tobiah and Nekoda                                             652 /

/61// And from among the priests: The descendants of Hobaiah, Hakkoz and Barzillai (a man who had married a daughter of Barzillai the Gileadite and was called by that name).

/

/62 //These searched for their family records, but they could not find them and so were excluded from the priesthood as unclean./

In Israel, children were groomed from birth to fulfil their calling.

Being a priest wasn’t something decided one day.

Children grew up in an environment which prepared them to serve God.

Matthew is making a claim, that Jesus is the rightful heir to the throne of Israel, but that claim needs to be substantiated, and so he backs it up with a genealogy.

Matthew has to prove that Jesus is a son of the line of kings.

!! Transition to Mary

In the last line of the genealogy Matthew breaks the pattern, and rather than saying, “And Joseph was the father of Jesus”, he says, “/and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ//.”/

So why would Matthew give us this whole ancestry of Joseph, just to tell us that Jesus wasn’t Joseph’s son?

 

Matthew tells us Joseph’s ancestry, because even though Jesus is not Joseph’s biological son, He is still Jesus’ legal son.

And as Joseph’s legal son, Jesus was under the care and discipline of Joseph, and had all the rights to inherit from Joseph, even inheriting the throne of Israel.

Jesus is who his opening line says He is, the son of David and Abraham.

But as Matthew closes up holes, new problems emerge.

If Joseph is the husband of Mary, but not the biological father of Jesus, *how should we see Mary*?

Is Jesus not the product of some sexual indiscretion which would disqualify Him from being Israel’s messiah?

I think for that reason, Matthew mentions 4 other women, and they are all women with peculiar stories.

What fascinated me is none *of these women were naturally in line to be an ancestor of Jesus*, but along the way they were grafted into Jesus’ family tree, and they brought new life.

The first woman Matthew mentions is Tamar, the daughter-in-law stroke wife of Judah.

Do you remember the story?

Judah had 3 sons, and Tamar was married to the oldest one, Er, but he died at an early age.

So Judah followed Jewish law and arranged for his second son Onan to marry Tamar.

But Onan acted wickedly and so he too died at an early age.

Judah should have arranged for the marriage of his third son, Shelah, but he was afraid and so he made excuses why they couldn’t marry.

Judah put Tamar’s life on hold.

One day Tamar heard that Judah was planning a trip.