Advent 3: Family Life Series

Riffing off of Fred Craddock “When the roll is called down here”

A List

Matthew 1:1–17

Summary: The genealogy in Matthew 1:1–17 showcases the lineage of Jesus, connecting Him to both the promises of the Old Testament and the fulfillment of God's plan for salvation.

Application: This passage reminds us that, just like the individuals in Jesus' genealogy, we all have a place in God's family through faith in Christ. It also encourages us to embrace our own imperfections and weaknesses, knowing that God had plan for us in Jesus.

Teaching: We learn from this passage that God's work of salvation is not limited by human failings or societal norms. He uses flawed individuals to accomplish His perfect will and bring about redemption for all who believe.

How this passage could point to Christ: The genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1 ties Him to the promises of the Old Testament, emphasizing His role as the long-awaited Messiah )Genesis 3) and Savior of the world. Jesus fulfills the promises made to Adam and Eve, Abraham and David, demonstrating God's faithfulness throughout history.

Big Idea: Through Jesus, we are connected to the family of God, regardless of our past or present circumstances.

Riffed Manuscript:

I hope you will not feel guilty if your heart was not all aflutter during the reading of the text. It's not very interesting. It's a list of strange names. I always show my students in preaching class a sermon by Fred Craddock called “When the roll is called down here.” It’s a great sermon on the list of names from Romans 16 that he gave at the university Chapel in 2011. Today my sermon is literally going to be riffing off of that sermon the way Rev used to riff his sermon on the Trinity off of Green Eggs and Ham (remember that).

As a rule of thumb when you're preaching from the biblical text, avoid the lists. They're deadly. Here it seems that our Gospel lesson for today is the most notorious list… but lets actually think of it as calling the roll, which I suppose is a strange thing in itself. I have never worshipped in a church in which someone got up and called roll. Have you?

Sometimes, calling the roll is not all that bad. Fred Craddock remembers a time in December when he was summoned to Superior Court, DeKalb County, Georgia, to serve on the jury. On Monday morning at nine o'clock, 240 of us formed a pool out of which the jurors for civil and criminal cases would be chosen.

The deputy clerk of the superior court stood and called all 240 names. She did not have them in alphabetical order, so you had to really listen.

There were two Bill Johnsons. Both couldn’t be more opposite then each other, but they were both Bill Johnson.

There was a man named Clark who answered when the clerk read, "Mrs. Clark."

He said, "Here."

She looked up and said, "Mrs. Clark."

"Here."

"Mrs. Clark."

Then he stood up and said, "Well, I thought the letter was for me, and I opened it."

The clerk said, "We summoned Mrs. Clark."

"Well," he said, "I'm here. Can I do it? She doesn't have any interest in this sort of thing."

The clerk said, "Mr. Clark, how do you know? She doesn't even know she's been summoned."

This roll call was pretty good. There was a man whose name I wrote down phonetically because I couldn't spell it. His name was Zurfell Lichenstein. I remember it because they went over it five or six times, mispronouncing it each time. He insisted it be pronounced correctly and finally stood in a huff and said, "I see no reason why I should serve on a jury in a court that can't pronounce my name."

The woman next to me said, "Lichenstein. I wonder if he's a Jew."

I said, "Well, I don't know. Could be. Does it matter?"

"I am German. My name is Zeller."

"Well, it doesn't matter. That was forty years ago."

"He and I could be seated next to each other in a jury."

"Well, you were probably just a child when all of that happened years ago."

"I was ten years old. I visited Grandmother, who lived about four miles from Buchenwald. I smelled the odor."

A person could get interested in Matthew's roll call, if only to say, I wonder how Matthew knew all those people since he had never been to a family gathering with Jesus. I wonder if you could buy ancestry.com back then?

I could get interested in the roll call because it gives a sociological profile of the membership of Christ’s family. I don't expect you to remember this, but in the list there is a husband and wife, Boaz and Ruth. There's a man named Solomon and his mother Bathsheba with a painful addendum “Uriah’s wife” no need to explain that story. There is a pair of brothers, Perez, and Zerah, by Tamar. Another interesting story. Hey maybe lists are interesting in the Bible. There are brothers of Jeconiah the father of Josiah. There is a lady of the night in this family tree… Rahab… you thought you had some weird relatives. There is an old man, Abraham. Isn't that an interesting family line for Jesus? There's a unwed woman, Mary. There's a single man, Joseph. Not a lot of nuclear family there at all except as Christ has called them together. It's an interesting list—sort of. No, not very. We all know those stories.

One of the most discouraging things about Fred Craddock’s original sermon is that for all of it’s wit and pleasing rhetoric it has absolutely NO gospel. Zero zlich… nada… minime. I show the sermon though to demonstrate for my students that a really great sermon is not great because of it’s rhetoric and effect. A sermon is really great because it proclaims the Great Gospel of God. That’s what separates a sermon from any other form of public speaking. Because preaching is authoritative public discourse, based off of a text of scripture, centered in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the benefit of the hearers faith or life. Now you might think… every text of the Bible EXCEPT FOR A LIST. Because I don’t see the Gospel in the lists in the Bible. Well you do in this list from Matthew 1. You see they started keeping track of lists in the Bible all the way back in Genesis 11. That was because they needed to track one person… the Messiah through all of human history. God had to pick one family (Abraham’s) out of all of the people on earth to try and track the promised one… the savior of the world. So all the lists in the Bible leading up to Matthew 1 are asking this question… is he here yet… and they are all leaning on the answer. The whole bible is leaning on this promise wondering is he here yet and the answer is nope… not yet… in fact the Hebrew Bible ends with the biggest list of them all. Chronicles… 2 huge lists… and they are following David’s line… asking… is the Davidic Messiah here yet… and the Hebrew Bible ends with that question and there answer is nope not yet. Which is why Matthew starts with a list! Because its Gospel… The answer to the question that every family in scripture from our first parents to Abraham through David has been asked has now been answered.... YES HE is here… the Messiah has come and his name is Jesus! Follow that Messiah all the way down the line to the cross and empty tomb and you will see that HE IS the one we have been waiting for. He is the Long awaited Messiah and Savior of the World. So for Matthew it’s not a list.

He's packing his things in someone’s home in Egypt, who hosts the church there, and who is currently hosting Matthew after he came from sharing the Gospel in Ethiopia. Matthew is getting ready to go Syria and Macedonia. He's about to move to a new place far away. I don’t know how old he is at that time about fifty-nine or sixty years old, and he feels he has one more ministry in him.

He doesn't have much to pack—his coat, his books, and a few other things. While he is throwing things away to trim down the load for packing and moving, Matthew comes across some notes and correspondence. He sits down among the boxes and begins to remember the people in the notes. Especially that list that started it all. You know the one.

You've done it yourself. On our last Sunday of service at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Coeur d’Alene Idaho, the church gave my wife and me a gift. It was a box that a lot of people from the church had put cards into, and they wrote by hand these letters and signed their names, the names of all the church members. Every time we'd move, we'd come across that Box. I would spread those letters out in from of us, and we'd start remembering.

We remembered something about Ralph, who persuaded the elders to vote against my raise. We remembered Pat Bailey, that saint who loved to pray, who would cook us a weeks worth of meals. Chad was very quiet and never said anything until you were at lunch. Then there was his wife Heather. There is this marvelous woman who lived with that man until the day that the cancer finally took him, and yet she was always faithful and pleasant. He was dying with cancer when we left. He would have been the last funeral we would have done there if we stayed not too much longer.

This is the way we go through that box full of letters.

What Matthew wrote in our reading, then, wasn't a list. He was remembering people who were special to the story of his Jesus:

Abraham and Sarah, stepped out in faith. Boaz and Ruth, took the risk to fall in love past their cultural divide. They're great Christians. There's Mary. Mary worked hard. She was there when everybody else quit. Right there at the feet of Jesus when he died. She's the one who always said, "There’s my boy. I remember when he got lost at the temple. I'll clean up the baskets after the feeding of the 5,000, pick up all rags from the lepers, and straighten the mess the disciples would make. You go on home. You're tired."

"Well, Mary, you're tired too."

"Yes, Matthew, but you've got to ride a donkey across Asia tomorrow. You go on. I'll pick up here." Mary worked hard.

Who knows who the first person was who converted under his preaching, I expect he didn't sleep a wink that night. He probably spent the whole night saying, "Thank God, finally somebody heard." What a marvelous day that was.

He worked with Thomas who was called twin. Because in Aramaic te-oma means that. If you know Aramaic you can hear it, couldn't you, in the name To’ma Te’oma? He always sat on the right, and always wore blue every Sunday.

Tell John "hello." Tell his mother "hello" because she's my mother, too.

Mary was the woman who earned from the apostle Matthew the title "mother." Remember Jesus made that so at the cross when he said to John, “Behold your mother” and to Mary he said of John “behold your son.” He stayed in her home taking care of things from then on out. She became all other their mother that day. She was the kind of woman who could say to them, "Sit down and eat your breakfast. I don't care if you are an apostle. You've got to eat."

When I think of a list of names I remember when they brought the famous list to Prescott Arizona, the town I was raised in. The workers set it up in a public place—block after block—to form a long wall of names: Vietnam names.

Some of us looked at it like it was a list of names. Others walked slowly down the column. There was the woman who went up and put her finger on a name, and she held a child up and put the child's hand on a name. There was a woman there who kissed the wall at a name. There were flowers lying beneath the wall. I still remember my Dad Charlie… looking.... hunting for a name. I knew when he found it. It broke my heart.

Don't call that a list. It's not a list.

In fact, these names in Matthew are extremely special to the church, because even though we say "hello" to them once a year in the form of a reading at church, what were really saying is "goodbye." We don’t want the list until next year. We got other texts to read. But before we get to Christmas and those long lists of names of people we have to buy for. Before we engage the nest of hostility called last minute gift buying where our Christmas gift list become a hit list for the stores. Let’s take time at Matthew Chapter 1, to remember these people: Say a prayer to God in thanksgiving for these people. Remember that without this list we wouldn’t even be having Christmas, these motley and sometimes respectable saints, are the beginning of the story of our salvation.

These are not just names.

Before Fred Craddock got married, he moved down to a little village on Watts Barr Lake between Chattanooga and Knoxville. It was the custom in that church at Easter to have a baptismal service, and it was held in Watts Barr Lake at sundown on Easter evening. Out on a sand bar, He stood with the candidates for baptism. After they were baptized, the candidates moved out of the water, changed clothes in little booths constructed of hanging blankets, then went to the fire in the center. Last of all, He went over, changed clothes, and went to the fire where the little congregation was gathered, singing and cooking supper.

Once they were all around the fire, Glen Hickey—always Glen—introduced the new people. He gave their names, where they lived and worked. Then the rest of them formed a circle around them while they stayed warm at the fire.

The next part of the ritual was that each person around the circle gave her or his name and said,

"My name is____, and if you ever need somebody to do washing and ironing, call on me."

"My name is____, and if you ever need anybody to chop wood, call on me."

"My name is____, and if you ever need anybody to baby-sit, call on me."

"My name is____, and if you ever need anybody to repair your house, call on me."

"My name is____, and if you ever need anybody to sit with the sick, call on me."

"My name is____, and if you ever need a car to go to town, call on me."

And around they circle went. Then they ate and had a square dance. Finally at the appointed time, Percy Miller, with thumbs in his bibbed overalls, would stand up and say, "It's time to go." Everybody would leave. After his first experience of that, Percy saw Fred standing there, still. He looked at him and said, "Craddock, folks don't ever get any closer than this."

In that community, their name for that kind of ritual is "church."

That reminds me of our community here at Faith. Its a place were people are connected by that one name on the list from today. The name of Jesus. That connects every other name on that list to every name of everybody here. And that’s what we call church. There’s been this whole long list since Easter of people who have been leaning towards this Question: Is He here yet… When is Jesus going to get here. Well even though he hasn’t returned yet… every name on that long list of people waiting still matters.

Write these words: "I thank my God for all my remembrance of you. (Philemon 4)" Now write a name. Well go on… find something to write on… you can use your phone. Write another name, and another name, and another. Keep the list, because to you, it's not a list. In fact, the next time you move, hold on to that list. Even if you have to leave your car, and your library, and your furniture, and your computer, and everything else, take that list with you. In fact, when your life has ended and you leave the earth, take it with you.

When Jesus was on the cross he had a list too and your name was on it. He was dying for you so that you can meet up with all your loved one’s and he rose again so that he could be there with us too.

I know, I know. When you get to the gate, St. Peter's going to say: Now, look: you went into the world with nothing. You're going to come out of it with nothing. What do you have there?

"Well, it's just some names."

"Well, let me see it."

"It's just a list of names of people I worked with and people who helped me to know Jesus."

"Well, let me see it."

"It's just a group of people that, if it weren't for them, I'd have never made it."

"I want to see it."

Finally, you give it to him, and he smiles. He says, "I know all of them. In fact, on my way here to the gate I passed them. They are already here… if you hurry you can see them holding a sign, right next to Jesus that says, 'Welcome home.'"