Sermon from December 23, 2007
Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord – Luke 2:11.
Human language has clever ways of softening personal names. For example, in German, Hans is a common boy’s name. In some parts of German-speaking Europe, Hans becomes Hansel, as in Hansel and Gretel. The Ukrainian girl’s name Vita becomes Vitenka. Those changes not only soften the name but introduce affection.
Boys’ names in my school days underwent a similar softening. Robert not only became Bob but Bobby. There were so many of those names that ended in the letter “y”: Danny, Billy, Jackie, Sonny, Jimmy, Harry, Joey, Tommy, Micky, Dicky, Ricky.
Maybe that explains what happened to James. Maybe if we had called him Jimmy, he wouldn’t have done what he did. He lived one street over and one block north. I often walked behind him to school in grades 1-12 and noticed his long, loping stride. I didn’t know him well. He seemed pleasant enough. He graduated from high school a year or so behind me. I didn’t hear anything about him for 25-30 years. So, on a visit with my mom, it surprised me to read in the newspaper that he had been arrested for espionage during the Cold War.
How did that happen? The James I knew didn’t seem like a spy for the Soviets. But, then, what did I really know about him? I wanted to know if anything in his past anticipated what he had done. The article said little, and I left town again, and the years went by, and I didn’t know how to find out more, and no one to my knowledge wrote a story about James.
Sammy was different. There’s that letter “y” again, softening Samuel down into something fit for the wear and tear of daily life. I knew Sammy Kyzar much better than I knew James. Sammy and I played baseball together, prayed together, and graduated together. But you could have knocked me over with a feather at our class’s tenth reunion, when Sammy told us he was in the pipeline to become an astronaut.
If that happened, we couldn’t call him Sammy any more. It would have to be Sam or maybe Commander Kyzar. How did the guy, who played shortstop, turn into an astronaut? But, then, what did I really know about him? I wanted to know if anything in his past anticipated his transformation into an aspiring astronaut.
I think everyone is a hero in search of a biographer; but unless a person becomes famous or notorious, no one cares enough to write it. Knowing someone on a daily basis, especially when the person is young, almost guarantees that we will miss the signs of future greatness or of future evil.
Did you know that happened to Jesus Christ? He had just begun to make a name for Himself, and He came home to Nazareth to preach before the hometown folks. Here’s how they responded: Many who heard him were amazed. “Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles! Isn't this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary's son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” – Mark 6:2-3.
Do you hear the underlying logic of what they’re saying? “He can’t be anything special, because we know him.” That’s like my saying, “Sammy Kyzar can’t be an astronaut, because he played shortstop on my baseball team.” Or: “James couldn’t be a spy, because he lived one street over and one block north.”
The people who told the stories about Jesus and the men who wrote them down were all reeling under a staggering fact: Jesus of Nazareth had defeated death. They had killed him and buried Him, and He came back to life with a new and indestructible body. It made the early Christians want to revisit everything they could learn about Him – what He had done, what He had said, even the events of His early years – to see what anticipated what came later.
The Family Tree
Actually, not everyone was interested in Jesus’ early years, when He arrived in our world. The Gospels of Mark and John said nothing about the Christmas story that we use freely at this time of year. Fortunately, Matthew and Luke did. We should pay closer attention first to Matthew’s and Luke’s foray into Jesus’ family tree. Turn with me to Matthew 1:1-17.
Are you related to anyone great? Do you ever hear people talk about their connection to people on the Mayflower or George Washington or English royalty? Nearly all those connections are not good for much except bragging rights.
It’s possible to view the opening 17 verses of Matthew’s Gospel that way. Matthew himself or the genealogists he consulted did a good job of making a well-organized, simple family tree of Jesus’ ancestry. And you talk about bragging rights! Verse six starts off this way: And Jesse the father of King David. Including King David, the next fifteen names in this family tree are the names of kings.
Now, if your little boy grew up with Jesus in Nazareth, I doubt that he and his friends were going around saying, “Boy, Jesus descended from the kings of Israel and Judah.” First of all, your little boy wouldn’t know it. You wouldn’t know it. Second, if anyone knew it, they wouldn’t care, because several hundred other little Jewish children could say the same thing. It didn’t mean any more than if one of us in this room descended in a direct line from George and Martha Washington.
But Matthew thought it was a big deal, big enough to open his Gospel with Jesus’ family tree. In fact, he called attention to Jesus’ connection with royalty in the opening line of the Gospel: A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David. Why did he do that?
The quotation from Luke 2:11 that started the sermon offers us the key to the way that Matthew opened his Gospel. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. The angels called him Christ. The opening line of Matthew’s Gospel calls him Christ. To us Christ is a proper name, like Jesus or Joseph.
But to Jewish ears Christ was not a proper name; it was the name of an office, the office of Messiah – the Messiah. “The hopes and fears of all the years” came together in the long-anticipated Messiah. We know from our own Christian writings the nature of Jewish hopes. The father of John the Baptist gave expression to those hopes like this:
“Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel,
because he has come and has redeemed his people.
He has raised up a horn of salvation for us
in the house of his servant David
(as he said through his holy prophets long ago),
salvation from our enemies
and from all who hate us” – Luke 1:68-71.
Matthew did not begin his Gospel with Jesus’ family tree to establish bragging rights; he began that way to establish the legal basis for the claim that Jesus was the Messiah. Jews hoped against hope for another king like David of old. Matthew said, “Here He is; we even can trace his biological ancestry right back to King David himself.”
Repercussions
Two people took this possibility very seriously. When wise men from the east came to Jerusalem asking, “Where is the one who is born king of the Jews?” no one was more disturbed than King Herod. He was so disturbed that another king might usurp his power and that of his subsequent dynasty, he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under (Matthew 2:16).
Reasons of state being what they are, I wonder if very many people understood what lay behind the carnage; and I doubt that anyone at the time associated it with Jesus. Matthew’s Gospel made the king’s purpose common knowledge, and making it public hurled a direct challenge to the power of the petty kings of Palestine that followed. Matthew exposed the “smoking gun” behind the slaughter of the innocents.
The other person who took seriously Jesus’ claims to royalty did so much later. Again, we go back to the angels’ cry to the shepherds: Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. As with the word Christ, the word Lord hides from us something that Roman citizens would feel the first time they heard it.
The Greek word that we translate Lord is kurios. In Acts 25:26 a letter from a Roman provincial governor refers to Caesar as kurios. It is well attested from other early Christian writings that people referred to the Caesar as kurios kaisar. During times of persecution, Christians could be asked to put a pinch of incense on Caesar’s altar and say, “Kurios Kaisar!” Many refused and said, “Kurios Iesous!” and paid with their lives.
We get a sense of the growing challenge of Christ to Caesar in the city of Thessalonica, when opponents said this about the Apostle Paul and his traveling companions: “These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here, and Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar's decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus” Matthew and his family tree of Jesus and Luke’s record of the angelic chorus took pains to show that the royal authority of Jesus was there from the night of His arrival. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Messiah the Kurios.
His royal authority, which converted the Roman Empire, impinges on our experience almost daily. When we see Gov. Mike Huckabee’s advertisement in which he wishes Americans a Merry Christmas while standing in front of an unmistakably Biblical scene; and when Gov. Mitt Romney goes out of his way in a political statement to talk about Jesus Christ as the Savior of mankind; and when most of the people pursuing the presidency are eager to declare themselves to be people of faith without mentioning Jesus Christ – when we see and hear all this, we are feeling the royal authority of Jesus Christ impinging at street level on the presidential politics of America.
How does it impinge on your experience? Well, you are here. You say, “I came, because I like the music.” But the authority and beauty of Christ inspired the music and the musicians. You say, “I came to hear the sermon.” But the authority and beauty of Christ inspired the sermon and the preacher. Would you allow the authority of Christ to impinge more than ever on your experience? Here is another reason to do that. – Acts 17:6-7.
The Bad Boys (and Girls) of Jesus’ Genealogy
Something else stands out in Matthew’s genealogy, if you look at it long enough. You discover the bad boys (and girls) of Jesus’ genealogy. In our day we are accustomed to royalty behaving badly. Prince Charles made the tabloids because of his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. Prince Andrew, Duke of York, divorced his wife Sarah in 1996. Royal families of all nations have skeletons in many closets.
To dangle the skeletons in the genealogy of Jesus publicly seems a bit much. Matthew didn’t have to do it. He seems to have been deliberate about it. For example, in verse 5 he mentions Ruth. She was a model of virtue, but she was a Gentile. Verse six mentions Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife. The story of how Uriah’s wife became King David’s wife is sordid and violent. Verse seven mentions Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, who confused political power with wisdom and brought about the secession of ten tribes from the state of Israel. Verse 10 mentions Manasseh, who reigned for 55 years in which the Bible says he led his people astray, so that they did more evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before the Israelites – 2 Kings 21:9.
Why include these names, when Matthew could have been more selective? I think the answer comes down in verse 21: “She (Mary) will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
People who didn’t like Jesus called him a friend of tax collectors and “sinners”9:13.
Does this part of His story resonate with you? Do you ever feel like you just don’t measure up? Do you carry with you secrets you don’t want anyone ever to know about you? This figure of authority and beauty is also a figure of tenderness and mercy. Christians have an elaborate and beautiful explanation of how His tenderness and mercy wash away our guilt. At the heart of that explanation is the way my Jewish friend in Syracuse put it to me one time: “One plus one plus one equals one, and the one in the middle died for me.” – Matthew 11:19. I think He took that as high praise. He said this about the purpose of Christmas: “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” – Matthew
The Pastoral Center of Gravity
If you ever visit the British Museum in London, I hope you’ll go to the new branch near King’s Cross Station. It houses ancient documents. Among them are the Lindisfarne Gospels and a 1700 year-old copy of the Greek New Testament. They belong in a museum.
But when you opened with me earlier to Matthew 1:1-17, you were holding in your hand a living thing. If you had your hand on the shoulder of a tiger, it would be a more living thing than the Word of God in your hand. It doesn’t belong in a museum. It belongs right down in the jungle of life.
It offers us access to Jesus Christ, as do Communion, prayer, and life together in a community of faith. In the year ahead, would you commit yourself to using these means of access and knowing more deeply the Jesus Christ, our Savior, in His authority, beauty, tenderness and mercy?
Finally, have you ever decided, as a matter of personal choice, to become a follower of Jesus Christ? Why not here? Now? You could pray: “Jesus, I believe in you. Forgive me sins, and show me your way of life.” Then, come live with us in this congregation, and let’s discover that way of life together.
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