Waiting and Anticipating

How good are you at waiting?

I find it hard to wait. This summer, we went to Canada’s wonderland a few times and the line ups for rides were excruciating. Often, there is an hour or two hour wait for a 1.5 minute ride. Recently, I was waiting for someone in the waiting room at the hospital ER. After a couple of minutes, I found myself bored, distracted, and uncomfortable. I think it’s the inactivity that gets to me when I am waiting.

Christmas is coming and so now the waiting gets more intense, doesn’t it? Today marks the first week of advent and so now we start counting down to Christmas with our advent calendars and each day that draws us nearer, the waiting can get harder. You might be anticipating the reunion with family, or the goodness of that Christmas feast. Or you might be excited about the presents, both what you get but also what you are giving. You anticipate the wonder and appreciation that you will receive from those you get to bless. But the waiting for all of it is hard because it can feel like you aren’t doing anything, like it’s an in-between time. It’s too late to do one thing and too early to start another. And so we get bored and antsy during times when we have to wait.

In an article for Christianity today, Ashely Hales writes “Generally speaking, we are bad at waiting. Our tech usage is one way we recognize our growing inability to wait for anything, but as believers looking at the historical arc of God’s story, we can only deduce that waiting has meaning. The time spent waiting for a message or event can be just as meaningful as the message or event itself. “Waiting ultimately reorients our stories: We are not the primary actor on a stage of our own making or choosing. Rather, God is the hero of the story. Will we be content to wait on his work? In these in-between times, what character will be formed in us as individuals and as a culture? Technologies give us the illusion of god-like power and control: summoning up any piece of information with one simple click, purchasing anything with a quick swipe, and expecting others to operate around our own schedules. But they can’t overcome the limits of our creatureliness—nor should we want them to. The created order—with its boundaries of time, space, and body—is not an imposition on our freedom but the life-giving water in which we swim. Limits are part of what makes us human. They show us more of who we are—creatures, not the Creator”

Advent is all about waiting and anticipating. We spend the four weeks before Christmas in anticipation of celebrating the birth of Jesus, believing that on that day, everything changed for us. Hope and light were born into despair and darkness and with Jesus came the dawn of redeeming grace.

Today, we are going to start our advent with a different passage. We are going to start with Jesus’ genealogy in the book of Matthew. This is a family tree of sorts for Jesus, through Joseph, his adopted, earthly father. Through this genealogy we see a sense of God waiting for the right time to come, allowing the river of history to continue to flow until it was the right time and then he jumped in. My hope through this series is to help us be better at waiting and to see how there is something for us in the anticipation of the birth of Jesus.

So let’s read our passage together.

Matthew 1:1–17 (NLT)

This is a record of the ancestors of Jesus the Messiah, a descendant of David and of Abraham: Abraham was the father of Isaac. Isaac was the father of Jacob. Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers. Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah (whose mother was Tamar). Perez was the father of Hezron. Hezron was the father of Ram. Ram was the father of Amminadab. Amminadab was the father of Nahshon. Nahshon was the father of Salmon. Salmon was the father of Boaz (whose mother was Rahab). Boaz was the father of Obed (whose mother was Ruth). Obed was the father of Jesse. Jesse was the father of King David. David was the father of Solomon (whose mother was Bathsheba, the widow of Uriah). Solomon was the father of Rehoboam. Rehoboam was the father of Abijah. Abijah was the father of Asa. Asa was the father of Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat was the father of Jehoram. Jehoram was the father of Uzziah. Uzziah was the father of Jotham. Jotham was the father of Ahaz. Ahaz was the father of Hezekiah. Hezekiah was the father of Manasseh. Manasseh was the father of Amon. Amon was the father of Josiah. Josiah was the father of Jehoiachin and his brothers (born at the time of the exile to Babylon). After the Babylonian exile: Jehoiachin was the father of Shealtiel. Shealtiel was the father of Zerubbabel. Zerubbabel was the father of Abiud. Abiud was the father of Eliakim. Eliakim was the father of Azor. Azor was the father of Zadok. Zadok was the father of Akim. Akim was the father of Eliud. Eliud was the father of Eleazar. Eleazar was the father of Matthan. Matthan was the father of Jacob. Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Mary gave birth to Jesus, who is called the Messiah. All those listed above include fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the Babylonian exile, and fourteen from the Babylonian exile to the Messiah.

Pray.

I think it’s safe to say that most of us, if we were going to write a book outlining the life of Jesus, we would start it differently that with a genealogy. In fact, how many of us, when we read the book of Matthew, tend to skip over these first 17 verses, or at least burn through them quickly in order to get to the good stuff after?

I get it. A list of names is boring and at a firs glance, it doesn’t seem serve the narrative at all. And some of that interpretation can be attributed to our western, 21st Century perspective that interprets these ancient writings in light of today’s sense of entertainment. But for Matthew’s original audience, this is a key section in building up to Matthew’s main point.

Matthew wrote his gospel in a distinctly Jewish manner in order to effectively reach 1st century Jews. That’s why his gospel has more OT references than the other gospels. Mark has 34, John has 40, Luke has 58 but Matthew has 96.

And to the 1 century jewish person, lineage was important. Who was in your family tree directly affected how people saw you. The better the lineage, the more respect you gave someone. So how does this genealogy affect how people understood Jesus? This genealogy proves to Matthew’s original jewish readers that Jesus, the itinerant preacher from small town Nazareth, was actually the Messiah. By tracing Jesus’ family tree back to King David and to Abraham, Matthew makes the case that Jesus is the prophesied Messiah. Look at what the OT prophet Jeremiah says about the Messiah:

Jeremiah 23:5–6 NLT

“For the time is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will raise up a righteous descendant from King David’s line. He will be a King who rules with wisdom. He will do what is just and right throughout the land. And this will be his name: ‘The Lord Is Our Righteousness.’ In that day Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety.

The people of first century Israel were waiting for the day when God would send the messiah. For the last 500 years, they were conquered by the Babylonians, the Persians, the Selucids, the Ptolemies and now the Romans. These oppressed people were anticipating of the day when God would send the Messiah to free Israel from her enemies and give her peace. And Matthew’s main point with the genealogy is to establish Jesus as that Jewish messiah, even though he fulfilled the role differently than their expectations. They wanted a Messiah to free them from Rome, but Jesus the Messiah came for something deeper. He came to save them from sin and death.

Again, Matthew is using the genealogy to establish Jesus’ credentials as the Messiah, according to the OT prophecies. But I think that there is more that we can learn from this passage. In fact, as we begin the season of Advent, a season of preparation, let me suggest two things that this genealogy has to teach us this morning.

1. Jesus is the centre of history

With Christmas approaching, many of you will be playing more board games with others. Our family loves playing games together. One game we used to play often was scattergories. The reason I loved this game so much was because whenever this timer went off, it would scare the snot out of Rebekah. Even if she is done and is watching the timer, she jumps when it goes off. But before we had these types of timers, many games used to use these ones (hold up hourglass). It’s amazing the amount of stress and pressure that these tiny bits of falling sand can cause us, isn’t it?

I think the hourglass is a great picture of the role of Jesus in history. (Draw on Whiteboard) This genealogy reminds us that history has a flow to it, a movement and at the the center of this movement is Jesus. He is the one whom all things flow towards and then flow out of. Starting with the patriarch of the Jewish faith, Abraham, and tracking his family tree, we move through history and end up at Jesus. But the gospel of Matthew was written approximately 1,956 years ago, and so we also see that history has continued to flow out of this event. It’s why for centuries our calendar has been divided into two parts, correlating with the birth of Jesus. Whether you use the old terms of BC (before Christ) and AD (anno domini - the year of our Lord) or you use the modern terms of BCE (before the common era) and CE (common era), both are set around Jesus as the centre.

So too, our lives can be illustrated this way as well. We can divide up our lives into three parts as well - before Jesus, meeting Jesus, and after Jesus. Some of you, your hourglass looks like this, because you met Jesus early in your life. Some of you, you met Jesus later so your hourglass looks like this. And I wonder if some of you might be approaching this line for the first time today. That today is the day where you meet Jesus. What do I mean by that? I mean that maybe for some of you, as you reflect on how life has led you to being here with us in person or online, are ready to acknowledge that maybe God has been trying to get your attention and bring you to this place so that you could experience the love, the grace and the power of Jesus in your life. Jesus is God incarnate - the one who left heaven to come to earth, to lead people out of darkness and towards the light of his love. He is the one who, though was innocent, was sacrificed on a cross so that you may experience God’s forgiveness and the full and abundant spiritual life that he promised. And how do we experience this abundant spiritual life? We put our faith in him. We believe in what Jesus says, what he did and who he is. We do as Paul says in Romans 10:9-10 “If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God, and it is by openly declaring your faith that you are saved.”

And if you are those of us who can look back on this line, who know that they have met Jesus and have been transformed by him, then as we celebrate Advent in waiting and in anticipation, I encourage you to do two things:

Be grateful that God showed up in your life, and that he continues to show up.

Be in prayer, anticipating God showing up in the lives of the people God has surrounded you with.

But for all of us, I would ask a question: Is Jesus the centre of your life? Are your thoughts funnelled through him? Do you work as if you work for him? Do you love others the way Jesus loves them? Are you generous the Jesus is generous? In other words, is Jesus at the heart of everything you say and do? The ongoing faith journey that we are all on is a journey of chiselling away all the stuff in our lives that isn’t of God until Jesus is left. He must increase and we must decrease. Since he is the centre of history, he should also be the centre of our hearts desire as well.

2. Jesus is the redemption of all

Every family has some misfits, some ne’er do wells, some black sheep, don’t they? And if you aren’t sure who it is in your family, it might well be you. Go ask your grandma, she’ll tell you, and then she’ll give you a cookie.

Jesus had some black sheep in his family. Abraham lied and allowed his wife to marry someone else because he was afraid. Twice. Judah slept his daughter in law, thinking she was a prostitute. Boaz married Ruth, who wasn’t Jewish. The story of David and Bathsheba is a whole soap-opera drama where David knocks up another man’s wife and then has him killed. Jesus’ family history is filled with black sheep. And considering that they skipped a few generations in the family tree when they made the list so that it would be easy to memorize, it’s interesting to note who is mentioned.

I think that the list shown is deliberate to show us the kind of people that Jesus has come to save. Let me draw your attention to three groups in Jesus genealogy:

Women - Matthew mentions Rahab, Tamar, Bathsheba, Ruth and even Mary in this genealogy. This is significant because culturally at the time, women weren’t really considered people - they were property of the fathers and husbands to whom they belonged. They had no legal rights and their testimonies were not valid in court. Most genealogies of that time do not include women. But when Matthew writes Jesus’ genealogy under the influence of the Holy Spirit, he includes women because God sees women far differently than culture has for thousands and thousands of years. Women are spiritually equal to men. Women have value to add to every faith conversation. Women are loved by God and Jesus has come to redeem and lift women up.

Men of influence and power - Abraham, Isaac and Jabob are the founding patriarchs of Israel and had amassed great fortune and land. David is still honored as Israel’s greatest king. Zerubbabel is famously mentioned in the book of Ezra, Haggai and Zechariah as one of the chief leaders responsible for rebuilding the temple. These are heroes of the faith, who although they struggled with their own sins and temptations, are looked up in history as good people. But good people still need Jesus and their inclusion, beyond establishing Jesus’ credentials as the Jewish Messiah, remind us that God loves and redeems those who, despite some flaws, still walk with God.

Ordinary people - Do you know what Ram is known for in the Bible? Just for being the father of Amminadab. And do you know what Amminadab is known for? Just for being the father of Nahshon. Some people in the Bible aren’t famous for being good or bad, faithful or faithless. Some people just lived a quiet, obscure life that didn’t really impact history. They are included because those people, who are invisible to the world are visible to God. He knows them and he loves them and he sent his Son for them - to purchase their salvation and to pour his love into their hearts. Jesus came for the ordinary people, as well as the extraordinary.

Despicable men - King Rehoboam, son of Solomon, oppressed the people so brutally, he caused a civil war that split Israel into two nations, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Manasseh was one of the worst kings in Israel’s history. He built pagan shrines and encouraged worship of false gods and idols. He murdered so many innocent people, it was said Jerusalem was filled with one side to the other with the blood of innocents. He even sacrificed his son to a false god by throwing him alive into a fire. His son Amon, who succeeded him was just as bad as he was. Their inclusion in Jesus’ genealogy shows us that there is no one who cannot be redeemed. There is no one so bad, that God cannot forgive them. All of us, no matter how deep our sin, can experience the love and grace of God that comes through Jesus Christ. There is no sin so great that it makes you unredeemable.

Romans 5:6–8 NLT

When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. Now, most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, though someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good. But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.

So what do we do with this? First, we should again be thankful. Seeing this list shows us that no matter what we have done, or who our family is and what they have done, we realize that Jesus has come for all of us. There is no one outside of his grace - no one who is so good that they don’t need Jesus and no one so bad that they can’t be redeemed.

Second, this truth should influence the way that we see others. The way that we see those who disagree with us about politics or vaccination. Those of different faiths. Those of different sexual orientation. Those in the church and those outside the church. Even how we see those people who strut about wearing crocs like they are real shoes. If no one is excluded from the love and grace of God, then we, as his people, need to view everyone like Jesus does.

Conclusion

Advent is a season of preparation and of waiting. We prepare our hearts to worship our King and celebrate his birth through the reading of God’s word, and through prayer, just as we prepare for the holidays through gift giving and meal preparation. We wait for the day we get to celebrate his birth in a spirit of anticipation, just like the people of Israel were anticipating the coming of the messiah. And in our waiting we remember that Jesus is the centre of our lives and that no one is good enough that they don’t need Jesus and no one is bad enough that they can’t be redeemed.

Revelation 22:17 “The Spirit and the bride (which is the church) say, “Come.” Let anyone who hears this say, “Come.” Let anyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who desires drink freely from the water of life.”