God Starts with a Mess

Have you ever tried to draw a family tree? Maybe for a class project, or because you got curious about where your people come from. You start tracing the lines, and before long, you realize how tangled it can get. There may be branches you skip over, or names you leave off. And sometimes—if you dig deep enough—you discover that your spouse is actually related to you way down the tree line! Family trees can be… well, complicated. Jesus’ family tree is like that, too. It’s full of twists and turns, surprising connections, and people you might not expect to find. Jesus' family tree is like that—complicated, human, and holy anyway.

This week, we start a new worship series:  The Messy Christmas Story. Throughout the Advent season, we will explore Jesus’ family lineage. Often, we focus on Jesus as the Lamb of God, the one perfect human in the midst of our imperfect world. I recall being told that there has only been one perfect person to walk the earth: Jesus. In the first chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, we find Jesus’ ancestral lineage. I encourage you to read Matthew 1:1-17 each week on our journey together. 

If we are honest about these people, we can’t lift them up as perfect examples. Over these next few weeks, we’ll hear from women and men who lied, struggled, fought, survived, and even schemed their way through life—and somehow, God still called them part of the story. As we embark on this Advent journey together, as we work to prepare our hearts and homes for the coming of this perfect King, we must repent of trying to have it all together. We have to let go of trying to depict the story as a perfect, holy moment. Instead, we must accept that Advent is about recognizing how God enters into real human situations and works God’s plans through our messiness. 

Even in this first example, we see that Abraham and Sarah didn’t have it all together. They doubted, took shortcuts, and hurt others. Despite this, God stayed faithful. As we dive deeper into the story, may we be reminded that the Christmas story doesn’t come from a perfect past. It comes from a messy one where God’s grace is at work despite our human shortcomings. 

The season of Advent has always been a season of waiting and preparation. We prepare for more than a day on the calendar. We prepare our hearts and our lives for the coming of Christ, not just in a babe lying in the manger, but also for the return of Christ. In Advent, we also prepare and wait for Christ to show up in the world today. We look and pay attention as we watch and wait for Christ to bring healing, justice, and peace. Sometimes, the wait can seem long and hard. Often, waiting is a difficult space to be in. We never want to slow down in the wait. We want results now. We want answers quickly. We want Jesus to show up right now and change our lives. Yet waiting takes time.

In our Bible story this week, Abram and Sarai are waiting a long time. For the longest time, their deepest desire was to have a child. Yet, over the years, Abram and Sarai waited and waited and waited. Despite their desire and waiting, they did not have a child. Some of you know what it’s like to wait—for a diagnosis, for a loved one to change, for grief to loosen its grip. Waiting can feel like watching the horizon and never seeing the sun rise. That’s where Abraham and Sarah are.

One day, God promised Abram that God would give them a child even though they were old. In fact, God said to Abram, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be” (Genesis 15:5, NRSVue). Abram believed they could be patient, but after 10 years and no child, Sarai began to doubt. She couldn’t believe that God would really give her a child. So, Sarai told Abram to have a baby with her servant, Hagar. 

Now, Sarai believed that they could adopt Hagar and the baby into the family. Despite her beliefs, jealousy takes hold, and Sarai is displeased that Hagar has become pregnant. Sarai abuses Hagar. This isn’t even all the waiting that Abram and Sarai will do. But it is messy. This is not a Hallmark Christmas Movie with a nice, clean ending. It is a period of waiting where Sarai is so desperate that she thinks she has to take matters into her own hands. She thinks her plans can be done quickly and more efficiently than God. 

Sarai’s plan wasn’t just impulsive. It was desperate. And desperation makes us believe we have to force God’s hand. We stop trusting the slow, steady work of grace and start building our own shortcuts. Even when we try to write our own endings, God doesn’t abandon the story. God continues to work through the mess.God writes grace into even the parts we’d rather skip. God is not afraid of our doubt, our mistakes, or our pain. Instead, God works through them and, at times, despite them to fulfill God’s plans and purposes for our lives.

It’s not just Abram and Sarai in this story. There’s another person caught in the middle:  Hagar. Eventually, Hagar flees into the desert. She thinks that she will have to find a new way and may very well die in the desert. Hagar is the outsider. She’s mistreated. And truthfully, she’s abandoned by Abram and Sarai. Even as an outcast, even in the wilderness, God shows up. God meets Hagar where she is and promises to take care of her. God was faithful. Hagar names God El Roi—the God who sees me. She is the first person in Scripture to give God a name. Think about that. An enslaved, foreign, abused woman—the one everyone else forgets—is the one who sees God clearly. Often, the messy stories in Jesus’ lineage feature individuals who are left out, overlooked, or hurt. Every time God finds them. God shows up to those on the margins and those who have been hurt. God works around our messiness and through our missteps, even to those we or others have hurt. Who in our world today feels like Hagar—used, dismissed, and told to disappear? And are we more like Abram and Sarai than we’d like to admit?

After all of this, Abram was still disappointed. Things had not worked out as he had planned. He and Sarai still didn’t have a child. When Abram was ninety-nine years old, God appeared to him and made a covenant with him. He was renamed Abraham, and Sarai was renamed Sarah. Was Abraham grateful? Did he fall on his knees and worship God? Did he proclaim deep thankfulness for all that God had done and all that God was doing? No—he laughed. Sarah laughed too. And God didn’t punish their laughter. God turned it into the name of their child: Isaac, which means laughter. That’s grace. That’s the kind of God we follow: the one who turns doubt into joy. 

You see, despite everything, God is still at work. Despite Abraham and Sarah trying to take matters into their own hands, despite the harm inflicted on Hagar, despite the doubt and uncertainty, God is faithful. God keeps God’s promises. This isn’t because Abraham and Sarah are the most faithful. It is because God is faithful. God is still faithful. God’s grace doesn’t wait for us to get everything right. God’s grace goes before us, meets us as we are, and works within us to continue to make us into who God intends us to be. God’s promises to us are greater than we ever will be. We remind ourselves of this in our communion liturgy when we proclaim, “When we turned away, and our love failed, your love remained steadfast.” God’s faithfulness surpasses anything we can ever imagine. 

As we begin this Advent journey together, I invite us to look at our own mess. What part of our messiness do we think that God can’t work through? What part of our messiness are we still waiting for an answer to? When do we take matters into our own hands? Is your mess emotional? Financial? Spiritual? Is it your marriage, your memory, your mistakes? Are you exhausted by the wait—waiting for healing, or clarity, or something to change? Or maybe your mess is that you’ve stopped expecting anything to change at all.

Advent doesn’t demand that we clean up our lives before Christ comes. It says the opposite: Christ comes because we can’t clean it up ourselves. We serve a God who loves us enough to send his Son into the world because we can’t clean up our messiness ourselves. Abraham & Sarah couldn’t do it. And neither can we. In this season of waiting, I invite you to sit with that. Sit in the messiness, sit in the ordinary, sit in the less than. Don’t run from it. Don’t edit it. Just wait. Wait for God. Wait for God to come. Wait to God for work. We don’t know when God will answer us. We don’t know when God will move, but we know that God works through our story. God always has, and always will. You don’t have to be perfect to be part of the promise. Just open your heart to the One who has come before—and will come again. Because the story of salvation has always been a messy one, and that’s exactly where Jesus chooses to be.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.