Liar, Liar

Here we are again, Happy Advent. We have made it to the magical time of year where despite the chaos of the world around us, here at First Church of Fort Pierce and churches around the world we take some time to pause and reflect on the coming of Jesus into the world. Specifically we reflect on our deep need for Jesus to come and rearrange our hearts and our world once again.

Listen, I don’t need to tell you that our entire Cultural obsession with consumerism at this time of year (and every time of the year) could use some rearranging. It’s not that hard to see. But that’s only one symptom of a bigger problem. I think that the stress of cooking the perfect dinner, of throwing the best holiday party, of finding and buying the best gifts all stems from one thing. Fear. Fear of not living up to the expectations of our families or our friends. Fear of living out the happiest time of the year feeling as if we don’t belong because we haven’t done Christmas the right way. Fear of feeling as if we don’t belong because, well we aren’t good enough. Feeling like we’re bad company.

One of the beautiful things about this time of year is that we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the savior of the world, God come to us in human form. And one of the coolest things about Jesus is the family that he chose to be born into. He chose the legacy that would come from. And it’s filled with a lot of people who, like you and me, were considered Bad Company. Not reputable. Not worthy of being remembered — let alone celebrated.

If you open your Bible to the New Testament, the first thing that you will read is this list of Jesus’s ancestors. It’s what we call a genealogy, and it essentially traces Jesus’s roots back through Israelite history. Some things that are really important to understand is that ancient genealogies like this are generally concerned with a) only males and b) are more concerned with proving a point than with being exhaustive. This means that this is not like ancestory.com, giving a detailed family tree where everyone is included. Rather, the point of them is to prove, especially in Jesus’s case, who someone is descended from. For Jesus this is Abraham and King David.

But embedded in this list is the curious insertion of a few female names. Names that don’t belong. Not only because they are female, but also because almost none of them were Israelites by birth. They don’t belong there --- Twice! So this means that their very presence here is incredibly important. What we are going to find is that all of these women has a past, shrouded in questionable or down right sinful sexual practices that should have excluded them from mention in the history books, especially from the lineage of Jesus Christ, and yet here they are. So let’s just check this out, we won’t read the whole list of names but we’ll get to where we are going for today.

Matthew 1:1–3 (NRSV)

An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,

and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar

So here’s our first woman, and she shows up pretty early. We have Abraham - The man who God called and told that he would make the father of many nations - Then Isaac and his son Jacob. And then one of Jacob’s 12 sons Judah who has some children with a woman named Tamar. This Judah is an important character. He is the guy who sold his brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt, and he’s also the guy that the tribe of Judah — The line of Kings — would be named after. He’s a big deal, but he’s no saint. So this is where we are at.

Judah, after selling Joseph into slavery moves away from his family and has three sons. He finds a Canaanite wife for his oldest son, and her name is Tamar. Well it turns out this son is a pretty evil guy and he dies. So a thing happens next that is strange to us, but was a commonly accepted practice.

Because this is a patriarchal society, everything revolves around the oldest living male of the family. Everything belongs to him, and then also his oldest living heir. Women had no status outside of their affiliation to this oldest living male. Essentially what this means for Tamar is that she is property of Judah. So when her husband dies, it is Judah’s responsibility to care for her, by doing something that is really weird to us.

He’s to give her in marriage to his next oldest son. And any male children that they have will be legally heirs of the oldest brother and retain the right as the family patriarch when Judah dies. Well brother number two is not interested in having a child that will take his newly found inheritance away, so he practices a form of birth control to prevent Tamar from having a child. And then he dies just like his brother before him.

Now Judah is obligated to give Tamar in marriage to his third son, who is a bit young for marriage, at least so he says. But really Judah is concerned that Tamar is somehow wicked and cursed and that if his only remaining son marries her, he too will die. So he tells her to go home to her own family and wait for him to call on her once his son is old enough. But he doesn’t plan to call.

An important thing to remember here is that — with no husband — Tamar is condemned to a life of abject poverty. She has no rights to any property or wealth and is only able to maintain her own life at the grace of her own birth family (a family that is no longer obligated to her because she is technically now a member of Judah’s family). In sending her away, Judah has committed a grave injustice by scheming to rid his family of Tamar at her own expense. And so that’s the set up of a story that is about to get even weirder and more rated R than it already has been up to this point. So here we go, hold on to your hats.

Genesis 38:12–16 NRSV

In course of time the wife of Judah, Shua’s daughter, died; when Judah’s time of mourning was over, he went up to Timnah to his sheepshearers, he and his friend Hirah the Adullamite. When Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is going up to Timnah to shear his sheep,” she put off her widow’s garments, put on a veil, wrapped herself up, and sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. She saw that Shelah was grown up, yet she had not been given to him in marriage. When Judah saw her, he thought her to be a prostitute, for she had covered her face. He went over to her at the roadside, and said, “Come, let me come in to you,” for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law. She said, “What will you give me, that you may come in to me?”

Man, I love the Bible. Like did you know this was in here? Ok a disclaimer about this story — Just because it’s in the Bible doesn’t mean that it’s morally acceptable ok. But look at what’s happened. Tamar, comes to the full realization of Judah’s deception. Any hope she was clinging to that her life would be redeemed is smashed when she sees Judah and his youngest son whom she was meant to marry coming to town.

So what happens next is Judah says, well I’ll send you a young goat from my flock. And she say’s “I need collateral” Give me your signet ring, your cord, and your staff.” And Judah can’t help himself, so he agrees. And well, they do what they planned on doing. And Judah departs, Tamar goes and puts back on her widows clothing. Later, Judah sends a friend to pay this woman he slept with and recover his goods, but she’s nowhere to be found. And he returns, tells Judah, and he decides not to drag his reputation through the mud by pursuing her. Remember that he doesn’t know that this was Tamar. He just thinks it was a prostitute. So we’ll pick this thing up at what happens next.

Genesis 38:24 NRSV

About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar has played the whore; moreover she is pregnant as a result of whoredom.” And Judah said, “Bring her out, and let her be burned.”

Cool man. So you can see the irony here. Judah = a hypocrite

Genesis 38:25 NRSV

As she was being brought out, she sent word to her father-in-law, “It was the owner of these who made me pregnant.” And she said, “Take note, please, whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff.”

Awkward.

Genesis 38:26 NRSV

Then Judah acknowledged them and said, “She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not lie with her again.

Well, that’s an unexpected ending to be honest. This is where we can follow by Judah’s example. Maybe he saw the error of his ways, or maybe he was backed into a corner, because Tamar’s possession of Judah’s signet ring was an undeniable piece of evidence that something had gone on between them. I think he has had a genuine change of heart because of the words that he says.

He says, “she is more right than I” some translations say “she is more righteous than me.” The Hebrew sentence is constructed using the verb tsadach, which is derived from the same word that the Hebrew language uses for “righteous.” But in this verbal form the word conveys an idea that someone is to be considered as just or innocent.

Which is curious in this case, because Tamar did something that seems by our modern sensibilities to be wrong. She paid back deception with deception. She commited an act of sexual sin. And then leveraged it over Judah.

And yet in this case, Judah sees himself as having been the source of injustice, and takes personal responsibility, declaring her as “Just, innocent.”

This is an incredibly important point, because in doing this he legitimizes Tamar as a member of his family once again. She goes on to have twin sons, and by carrying heirs to Judah’s lineage her future is secured.

This act of redemption, this admission by Judah that Tamar does in fact belong here, that she’s not “Bad Company” foreshadows the actions of his descendants. 2000 years later a young man by the name of Joseph would be faced with a similar decision. His fiance was found to be pregnant, and his first inclination was to send her away quietly. But that’s a story for another day.

You see, regardless of the questionable morality found in this story, both by Judah and Tamar, we find a resolution to the chaos in the reconciliation found at the end. Judah did everything he could to tell Tamar, “You’re bad company.” He spun a web of deception out of self preservation that caused great harm to Tamar. Healing only came when he finally opened the door for her restoration to the family, a door that was later kicked down by the arrival of Jesus on the scene, who eternally redeemed her name by placing this outsider smack in the middle of his family tree. Jesus said “Canaanite roots, widowed status, deception, prostitution?” You belong here with me.

We have a natural propensity to disqualify people or even ourselves from our communities, from the church — maybe based on the things that have been done or the things that we currently do — and the result is much like what we see happened to Tamar. She was sent away under false pretenses that Judah justified by claiming to protect his son. Then he sentenced her to death.

And isn’t this too much the way that we operate. We label people as those who are bad company, and we shut them out, contributing to their spiritual death. We’ve all done this. We all have a list of people who, really, we owe an admission of “you are more right than me” to. And this is a good time to get working on that list.

But we also have got to work on not adding to that list in the future. And we do that by rearranging the way we see other people.

I had a friend named Leslie, who unfortunately went on to be with God several years ago, but Leslie was by far the most unifying, community building person I have ever met in my life.

He was an Alabama native who stood at about 6 foot 70, and the truest example of a gentle yet jolly giant. Leslie, well Leslie had a way of being that just drew people into his life. And that way of being was made up of 50% charisma, and 50% his unwillingness to watch anyone experience alienation.

His most famous words were “I’m so glad you’re here.” It didn’t matter if it was your first time where ever you were or the 10,000th. And here’s the funny thing about that. Leslie was a hospice nurse by profession and an avid member of a 12 step recovery program. So there was about a 99% chance that when you met Leslie, your life was not going how you planned. You weren’t in a good spot. You probably weren’t glad you were there. You probably thought that you weren’t very good company. But Leslie thought different. And he didn’t just say “I’m so glad you’re here,” he lived it.

He brought people into his life at such an incredible pace that we would fill his house on holidays, we would take up an insane amount of tables at restaurants, and his funeral was standing room only. This was a man who made sure that you KNEW that you belonged long before you decided that you wanted to.

This is the type of life that Jesus lived, starting way back in his ancestry — through his life of eating with prostitutes and tax collectors — and into the life of the church that He made open to people of all nations, races, genders, etc.

The fact is this, we can do better. Jesus, Leslie — these people lived to make sure that others knew that they belonged. They lived in a way that rewrote the story of people whose lives were lived in the dark, who believed that they were bad company. They said “you’re good enough company for me.”

Jesus doesn’t look at the mess of our lives and say “you don’t belong here, go get right and come back.” Jesus says “I’m so glad you’re here.” That’s the message of Advent. That’s the message of Christ. So won’t you make that message the one that defines who you are and how you extend the arm of community to everyone from this moment forward?