Wandering Brings Us Home

Text: Matthew 1:1-25

We humans are built for wandering. It is no wonder that Moses wandered around in the desert for 40 years. I imagine that when Adam and Eve were ejected out of the garden of Eden, they said “wow! look at all that open space; we can go wandering about in it.” The good news about wandering is that you cover a lot of territory pretty thoroughly. It is good for finding new things and having new experiences. The bad news is that life of wandering can seem a little aimless. The question is, are we getting anywhere?

This is the question of Advent. The season seems at first to be a transition between the past and the future. It is a time of equal parts reflection and anticipation. Where do we come from? Where are we going? We review the past, with its regrets and sorrows, and also its accomplishments and pleasures. And we are pulled forward, hoping for guidance and fulfillment, delight and contentment. In our theological life, Advent lies between Pentecost and Christmas, between the daily and the divine.

Yet in that way, more than in any other season of the church, Advent is a season of the immediate present. It sits looking equally at the past and at the beyond, which is where most of the time most of us sit. Our brains tell us constantly of the stories we have just lived and just as constantly writing new ones, in which we are the hero, or the villain.

That’s where the passage from Matthew sits, too, as long as you remember that the Gospel begins with the “begats.” That’s the word that the old King James version used to tie together the generations: “Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob, …” and so forth. “Begat” is the old word. Our pew Bibles say “Abraham was the father of Issac” and a modern popular Bible says “Abraham had Issac.” But the word in the Bible means more like “Is the origin of” or “Is the bringing forth of.” It is the same root as the words generation, genealogy, and—more significantly—the word genesis, the book of creation.

These men and women that Matthew lists are not just like beads on a string. Each gives rise to the next. The whole process is organic, to say the least. For Matthew, this long rope of generations is a path of constant unfolding and revelation. They are connected by their divine origin. Abraham is miraculously the father of all Israel. And connected by their divine purpose. Jesus is miraculously the point of all this childbearing.

Matthew looks backward, and what he sees is an inevitability. A direct and designed path from the past to now. Abraham to Joseph and then Jesus. Yet even Matthew must have noticed that his list is not just Hebrew father to son, father to son, like a Jacob’s ladder, step by step. There are some side steps through gentile women, and some pieces are missing and names that don’t appear elsewhere in the Bible. But Matthew saw it a perfect. And so did Martin Luther, our denominational namesake. They both see the present giving meaning to the events of the past and linking them together in purpose.

This is, we can no doubt safely say, not how it appeared to those who lived these lives each so concisely encapsulated into a single “begat.” It is difficult to judge the present by its future outcome, almost impossible in even our own lives and never spanning forty-two generations and nine hundred years. There is no way that the meaning that Matthew and Luther gave to these men and women was visible to them.

They, like us, looked back a little and forward a little less. If anything, I suspect they looked back to their immediate forbears with admiration, anger, and grief, just as we do. They looked forward with uncertainly, just as we do.

The mountains of Colorado descend abruptly to the plains of the midwest. The foothills aren’t much to talk about. The mountains are tall, and in a minute they are nothing at all. You travel in the mountains in narrow valleys and over passes. There are just not that many places to go. You are hemmed in by circumstance. But when you come down from the mountain, you are spit out onto vast possibility. You can go anywhere. It can be scary.

More of our lives is lived, it seems to me, on the plains than in the mountains. The plains are made for wandering, and that’s what mostly we do. Not necessarily vaguely or lost, like the wandering Israelites, but without a clear destination. Gradually our purpose—our destination—becomes clearer. But that is only because the time of our lives ahead of us is less and the possible routes become more limited. Until we find ourselves where we find ourselves. How did I get here? I can trace back the path. But how the heck did I get here? How did Pastor Seitz get to Boston, he asked in his sermon a couple of weeks ago. He never thought he’d live here. I once declared that I’d settle anywhere but in Massachusetts. I’ve been here forty years now. So much for declaiming. People’s stories are strange.

There are three histories in the Bible. One is the personal history of each character. People’s stories. Each of those people in Matthew’s genealogy. And by extension, our stories, each of us. Stories that get revealed by our living them. Pointing nowhere, though going somewhere. And the second is the history of creation, starting with Genesis, ending in our Bible with Revelation and in our theology with the end of time. And the third is what people call salvation history. The story of God’s involvement with people, starting with the covenant with Abraham and extending to Jesus and beyond. This is the history that Matthew presents. The story of Mary and Joseph and the coming child is part of all three histories.

For Christians, in fact, the histories are combined in Jesus. The meaning of the three histories are merged. We say that the meaning of the life of Jesus comes out of creation and salvation history, and the point of those histories in turn comes from Jesus. So Paul can write that we are in God and God is in us. And that by living in Jesus we are transformed. And that the death of Jesus changes ours.

We see in short times. We see back more clearly than forward. But God sees differently. God sees the whole of which we see only a part. The sense that Matthew makes of the chain of ancestors, God makes with all of us. It is not that God knows the unknowable, not that God knows the future—I can’t speak to that—but that God sees the whole story as a story producing life and holiness. The whole story, past and future, is to God, I think, ever blooming, blossoming, ever generating life. Whether or not we see how it could be, we are a part of that.

We can see that way—God’s way—too. The God in us, the God in whose image we are said to be made, lets us see that way, too. In days such as Advent, in the rites and meditations and reflections and songs, in the contemplation of the past and in the hopes for Jesus, we are taught how to see that way and we are reminded that we can see that way.

Our paths combine with and become part of the story of God in the world. We are not alone. Immanuel, God with us. We are able to see a little as God must see. To see the intensity of life even in the face of death, to see the combination of the secular and the divine, to know the presence of God among us.

We wander, but not aimlessly, even if our aim is unclear to us. We are in God’s story. God is in ours.

Grace to you and peace from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ.