Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to comm.church for more information.

Well, welcome today, and welcome to the season of Advent. If we haven't met and had a chance yet, my name is Jeremy. And whether you are joining us online today, whether you are here in the room with us, welcome. We are so thankful that you have joined us particularly as we make our movement together towards Christmas. And that's what Advent is all about, this waiting and anticipation.

That's also why I'm wearing this purple stole today to remind us of the season that we're in. Now at Commons, we don't wear liturgical vestments all year, but during these holy seasons, these times of heightened focus and longing, we find it a helpful reminder. You'll see Christmas decorations around the room and probably in your home as well. By the way, every year, people argue about when exactly you're allowed to put up your Christmas decorations. Is it after Halloween or December 1?

Our American friends have this weird Thanksgiving stuck somewhere in the middle there. Maybe it's after that. I don't know. But, of course, the official answer is you put up your decorations at the beginning of Advent. So here we go today.

Of course, do whatever helps you experience Christmas. I'm all for that. You have my full support. Regardless, we have all of these markers of the season around us, ugly Christmas sweaters and all that. And if you want, you can simply think of a clerical stole in the same way.

It is simply just one more visual marker to remind us of what we're all waiting for together. And that of course is the arrival of the Christ. However, this is Advent and we will be jumping into a new series in a moment here, but first a couple things. We just finished the book of James together, and I'm not gonna do a recap today. But that series is available on our podcast and our YouTube channel.

I think James focus on the way that Jesus inspires us, not just to think different, but to live differently in the world, to use our voice and our wealth in practical, generous ways to try to change the world. I think that's an important reminder any time of year, but particularly as we head into this Christmas season together. So check that series out. If you missed any of it, it's available in the archives for you. And the second thing is that along with Advent comes our annual Advent campaign.

Every year, we try to take some of the generosity inspired by Christmas and point it at our neighbors. All year together though, we are privileged to do some amazing work. Already this year in 2021, 13% of our expenses have been directed away from Krammens to serve others, and that's even before we try to hit this goal of raising another $50,000 this Advent. I've already talked about the campaign today. All of the information is available at commons.church/advent.

Please head over there and read about all of our Christmas priorities and consider how you might be able to participate before the end of the year. Now, all that out of the way, we can talk now about Advent angles. And by the way, if you may have quickly glanced at this artwork in the journal this year and read Advent angels yourself. That's fine. That would be fair.

The imagery is decidedly angelic and there are a number of angels in the Christmas story, so fair play. However, the title this year is actually Advent Angles. And the reason for that is because this year, we want to try to look at the Christmas story through some different lenses, in particular, different literary lenses. The Christmas story is after all a story. And in some ways, it's a tragedy.

In some ways, it's a comedy or a fairy tale, a mystery. But in all of that, the profound encounter with God that we call incarnation. It's interesting because we actually talked about the significance of story in the first week of this new season way back in September. We started the fall with a series called The World As It Could Be, and that was a series looking at Jesus' parables of the kingdom, but we started that series with a sermon called Why Stories. Mean, if Jesus has this new imagination for the world shaped in the likeness of God on earth as it is in heaven, he will say at one point, then why is it that stories are the primary way he chooses to teach us about this?

And I think this is a really fascinating question. One that I think is bound up in the Christian imagination of the divine. Our God is not primarily about ideas. God is not a presupposition. And therefore, our God is not as interested as we sometimes imagine in what we think about things.

That was the whole message of James after all. Our God is interested in how we live, how we are shaped and formed in the world, and as human beings, we are primarily shaped by the stories that we tell. I mean, if you really think about it, rarely do we think about our choices as much as we feel them. Yuval Noah Harari has a book out there called Sapiens. And depending on your interests, it's either an incredibly fascinating recounting of the story of human evolution or it's a very long and dry book about anthropology.

You can make that choice for yourself. I happen to be in the first category. One of the moments that has stuck with me since I first read it is just how important the emergence of storytelling was in the human experience. See humans, homo sapien, were not particularly brighter than other hominids were. Neanderthal and Cro Magnon had roughly the same sized brains that we do.

So in terms of pure raw horsepower up here, we really didn't have any advantage. What it seems we did have was a propensity to imitate each other well. And imitation is really powerful. Once you can imitate, you can teach all kinds of things to each other. Our daughter has been working with a physiotherapist as she learns to walk, catching up after a harrowing first few months of her life.

But this is what you do, you demonstrate and your child imitates. Truth is though, you can imitate all kinds of things. You can grunt and point at a stone, and once your counterpoint does that, you can agree that that particular grunt means stone. Imitation is behind not just walking and talking, but the invention of language itself. What's interesting about that is inherently built into the concept of language is story.

Any agreement you and I make that the sound stone represents a physical block of igneous materials in the world, that is a story. It's a metaphor. And in his book, Harari makes the argument that opposable thumbs are great, but really what sets humanity apart is this invention of language and metaphor and story. Through story, one human can rally 10 to an idea, and 10 can become 100, and a 100 can take down a woolly mammoth and defend themselves against saber tooth tigers, and we can build cities and nations. We can agree on fictional concepts like money and countries and, at least from his perspective, gods.

From my perspective, though, I wonder if this propensity to imitate and share and tell stories and create isn't exactly what the Hebrew imagination calls the image of God. Now, we'll come back to this idea in the spring. We're gonna do a series called the forgotten God, and we're gonna talk about the Holy Spirit and Trinity and what we mean when we talk about God as spirit in the world. But for now, I don't think it's an oversight that the Bible is full of open ended stories about God. Hints and glimpses of the divine, I don't think it's a mistake that when Jesus chooses to teach, he does it through story instead of trying to explain God to us.

Because I think that itself, the idea of story, is a reflection of a deeper reality. As Howard Wass and Willeman write, two of my favorite theologians by the way, Our contention is that it does not just happen that God's people tell stories. Certainly the penchant for storytelling has nothing to do with Matthew, Mark, and Luke or the Hebrew prophets I might add, being primitive, pre rational people who told simple stories, whereas we are sophisticated people who do not. Story is the fundamental means of talking about and listening to God. The only human means available to us that is complex and engaging enough to make comprehensible what it means to be with God.

And so, when it comes to perhaps the most baffling idea in Christian theology, the incarnation, the idea that the divine would come and walk among us, I'm not surprised that such a profoundly mind bending idea would come to us through a story. Advent is not theology after all. It is an adventure. And like any good adventure, there are a lot of different ways to read it. In fact, I think it's in listening closely between the lines to hear the different tellings that that story comes alive and becomes true.

So, over the next four weeks of Advent, we are going to read Christmas as a tragedy, as a comedy, as a fairy tale, as a mystery. And through that, we hope to do more than just understand the story. We want to actually be shaped by it. Now, that also means today is tragedy. Sorry.

So, we need to talk about tragedies and genealogies and four particular women and this very human story we enter into. First of all, let's pray and ask for guidance as we begin this Advent adventure. God of Advent, you reassure us that the night is far spent and the day is almost at hand. Keep us awake and alert in this season of waiting, watching for your kingdom to come, looking for ways to bring, to be your light in the world. Make us strong in faith unafraid of the dark and yet vulnerable enough to feel deeply so that we might join others in the healing of their hurts.

God of glorious, simple, unexpected gifts, Help us to set aside the trappings of this season to be present to your story today so that we might bring that same surprising gift of love to everyone we encounter this season. And as we wait for you, I must to wait well with hope and anticipation and an active investment in the world that we know you have planted right beneath our feet. Child of Bethlehem, make your presence known to us this day in the strong name of the Christ we await, we pray. Amen. Okay.

Today's tragedy. And that's a tough pill to swallow when we're entering into Christmas. Right? And we're all pulling out our decorations, and we've got our fancy scarves on, and we're getting our shopping going. Who wants to talk about tragedy now?

And yet, that is part of Christmas too, isn't it? I once got a pair of socks on Christmas morning. This is tragedy. Now, we have an eight year old in our house right now, and so far Christmas has been amazing. He is excited and grateful on Christmas morning every year.

It's awesome. Thanks, buddy. However, the possibility of a Christmas morning letdown looms ever larger every Christmas as those requests get increasingly specific each year. Still, not what I'm talking about today, obviously. Last year, we had just adopted a new beautiful little girl, but health restrictions meant we couldn't introduce her to our family.

We couldn't even spend Christmas day with her birth mother who also lives here in the city. Of course, we knew that this was just the beginning of that particular story. There would be more opportunities and more Christmases to share with everyone, but maybe you still remember what you gave up for the greater good a year ago, and maybe that still stings a bit. Then, of course, there's more permanent loss. Christmas can be incredibly hard for those of us who have lost family and loved ones or who are estranged from family, those who by necessity have to maintain boundaries through the holidays.

We live with that grief all year, but at Christmas, it can feel like that gets flaunted in front of us unremittingly. So while a lot of us are looking forward to Christmas and we can't wait to pull out the lights and tinsel and all of our fancy scarves, there are those of us beside us for whom Advent already feels a bit like a tragedy. And so before we go anywhere today, I need you to know that if Christmas hurts, that's not because you're broken or malfunctioning. Sometimes that's a sign, that pain is there because you're the only one who's really in touch with the truth of the story. In the play King Lear, everything's going bad.

The villains are about to triumph and the kingdom looks lost, but then all of a sudden things look like they're gonna turn around. And and the forces of evil are exposed, and it looks like we're going to get a happy ending after all except, well, this is Shakespeare. So in the final act five in typical form, everyone dies either by suicide or poison or violence. Like, everything falls apart and it's left to basically the only surviving character left, Edgar, to assume the throne and speak for the audience. He says this, the weight of this sad time we must obey.

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. And that idea of being true to speak the weight of it all, even in the moment of his coronation, even when he should be happy, he got what he wanted, acknowledging that moment. I think that kind of feels appropriate for when we're sad at Christmas. In the end, Tintle is always not as good as honesty. However, what I do find both eye opening and a little bit comforting is that the Christmas story itself actually seems to embrace all of this.

I mean, how can we read the conflict going on in Joseph, his struggle to balance trusting his wife against his own good sins, His willingness to enter into her story and everything that will come with it at the cost of his own respectable family dreams. His readiness to leave his hometown, not just to go to Bethlehem, but to heed the warning of wise travelers and to leave for Egypt, to set up his family in a new circumstance without supports or friends or clients or stability to choose the life of a refugee if it means the safety of this child that he's adopted, Pretending that he won't disappear from the story a little later. That Jesus will lose a good father. And Jesus will struggle through sibling rivalries without a dad. That Jesus will have to worry about his mother even as he is about to die?

That's tragic. And then what about his mom? Mary writes the Magnificat, one of the most powerful songs of protest ever written, an enduring testament to the ferocity of a mother, a woman believes with all her soul that the world can be absolutely transformed. And yet, of course, she will watch her son die, Die at the hands of the powerful she believed would be overthrown. Die at the hands of the wealthy she trusted would be sent away.

She will sit at the foot of the cross watching injustice take her son from her. Because tragedy is baked into this story. And it's okay not to get stuck there. We we should celebrate at Christmas. In fact, it's important we don't get stuck there.

But if that's where you are today, if that's where you find yourself in a year from now, somewhere in the middle, then that space is sacred too. And I think the Gospel writers know this. Let me read you the start of the story. It's in Matthew. And stick with me on this one.

I know this isn't the most exciting passage, but this is 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. Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. Judah, the father of Perez and Zerah whose mother was Tamar. Perez, the father of Hezron, and Hezron was the father of Ram.

Ram, the father of Aminabab, and Minadab the father of Nashlon, and Nashlon the father of Salmon. Salmon was the father of Boaz whose mother was Rahab. Boaz the father of Obed whose mother was Ruth. Obed the father of Jesse. And Jesse the father of King David.

David was the father of Solomon whose mother had been Uriah. Now he goes on for another 10 verses here listing names, but he ends with this. Thus there were 14 generations in all from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the exile in Babylon, and 14 from the exile to the Messiah. Now, part of what's happening here is that Matthew wants to connect Jesus to David. King David was considered the high point of the Jewish monarchy.

And a lot of what came to be understood as messianic prophecies and language came from that Davidic period. And David is spelled d v d or dalet vav dalet in Hebrew, and that has the numeric value of 14. Dalet is the fourth letter. Vav is the sixth letter. If you add that all up, you're gonna get 14.

Now this isn't some weird conspiracy theory. In Hebrew, that's actually how you count. They didn't have unique symbols for numbers. So they simply reused the symbols for their letters. So, or assigning a numeric value to a word, often happened with names, was very common.

Now Matthew is stretching things a little bit to make this work though. There are a lot of points in the genealogy that he just leaves out to make sure that each list equals 14. But again, that has precedent as well. In Hebrew genealogies, you generally don't list everyone. You list the important everyone's.

And the art comes then in who you decide is important enough to list. So what we have to understand here is that Matthew is working to link Jesus to the high point in Hebrew history. He does that by using this 14 motif taken from the spelling of David, and he makes choices about what characters to include. The characters he thinks are most important are the ones that say something significant about Jesus to make sure each of his lists equals 14. And none of that is really surprising.

What is surprising is who he chooses for this list. Now, you may have noticed as I read, we get a lot of this. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was the father of Jacob, and Jacob was the father of Judah. But then we read that Judah, the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar. In fact, we get four of these women.

Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba. So the obvious question is, well, what do these women have in common that makes them stand out in the story? A lot of ink has been spilled by a lot of men writing about the sexual histories of these women. Tamar dresses as a prostitute and tricks Judah into sleeping with her. Rahab was a prostitute who helped the Israelites conquer Jericho.

Ruth sneaks into where Boaz is sleeping and uncovers his feet, which by the way is the height of naughty Hebrew literature. Feet are not feet here. Bathsheba is the one who has a quote unquote affair with King David. Now hold on to that. We're gonna have to come back to it and the warning here, when we do, we're going to need to talk about sexual violence.

The commentary has often leaned into this idea that these women are here to show Jesus' relationship to us as sinners. I mean, sure, he has some great men in his backstory, but look at all these nasty women. And first, that's a pretty gross way to read this. But second, it's also profoundly ahistorical. Truth is, most of our preoccupation with sexuality in Christianity, certainly this purity culture we sometimes have is an entirely modern invention that is completely foreign to Judaism.

In Judaism, Tamar was the heroine who put the patriarch Judah back on the path God had for Israel. Rahab was the hero who overcame an entire city state. Ruth was the model of faithful love who came alongside her mother-in-law and found a way to make sure that both of them were cared for after the death of her husband. So this idea that Matthew is listing these women as a point of shame, that's a misreading. These women were heroes of the Hebrew story.

They are here not in spite of their sexual histories, but they are heroes largely because of it. So that brings us to Uriah's wife Bathsheba. Bathsheba is the mother of Solomon, probably the second greatest king of Israel. So she too is very much a hero of the Hebrew story, but she is also the victim of King David. And look, this idea that Bathsheba was some kind of adulteress, that really doesn't take hold until the time of Augustine.

In the Hebrew story, in the Jewish imagination of Matthew, she is the hero who overcomes the tragedy of her circumstance. A quote from Ilda Gaffney here, in her book Womanist Midrash. She writes, when David sends for Bathsheba, she does not have the option to refuse his invitation nor do his men have the option to refuse to bring her. The absolute power of a near ancient eastern monarch combined with the absence of her husband greatly reduces Bathsheba to consent to anything. That she quote came to him conjoined with the quote sent messengers to take her from second Samuel eleven fourteen is there to suggest that she walks along with the soldiers holding onto a shred of dignity rather than be stuffed into a sack and dragged back to the king.

This is still Gaffney here. The power dynamic is clear. David uses the power and the authority of his office to wield the threat of lethal violence to keep her. He sees her. He sends for her.

He has sex with her. He rapes her. And in the subsequent narrative, Nathan and God treat David as such by condemning him but never imputing any sin to Bath Bathsheba as a complicit consenting person. Their treatment of her is consistent with the treatment of women who have been raped in Torah. Point is, Bathsheba isn't the tragedy in the story.

David is. And by the way, the fact that David has been called a man after God's heart, that does not mean that David was a good person all the time. That's an ancient Semitic title that was used to indicate someone was the chosen representative of a particular god on the earth. Nebuchadnezzar is a has the same title given to him by the god Marduk in the inscription of the Nebuchadnezzar column 5 lines twenty one and twenty two. This is basically just another way of saying that you're the king.

So the question then is, well, why are these women listed here? Well, they're listed because they're heroes just like all the men, but why are they specifically singled out in such a patriarchal list? Well, think the reason that they're featured here is because these are all non Hebrew heroes who have contributed to the story of Jesus. Tamar and Rahab were Canaanites. Ruth was a Moabite.

Bathsheba was a Hittite. And for Matthew, this means that the story of the Messiah is more than just a Hebrew tale full of tragedy like King David. It's also a human story full of hope. I mean, if Tamar can overcome the tragedy of being ignored and forgotten, and if Rahab can overcome the tragedy of war, if Ruth can overcome the tragedy of losing a spouse, and if Bathsheba can rise above what was done to her, all of these stories, if they can be bound up in the advent of the divine, then perhaps there is also a bigger story for all of us. With a real tragedy of our tribalness, and the tragedy of our sexism, and the tragedies of our racism and violence where all of our tragedies in our lives can be named and overcome as well.

See, sometimes I think we all wish that evil were sore, were blatantly obvious to us. That all of our problems could be readily identifiable persons that we could easily cut out of our lives. We wish that God would send angels to us to solve our obstacles, that our struggles would vanish as soon as Christ arrives. We wish to be rescued not someday, somewhere, but here and now before our next mortgage payment or before our next Facebook fight or before the present we can't afford to buy. Except sometimes the story that we're actually in isn't like that.

It's it's one where the heroes we want to cheer end up being the villains. And the ones that we want left on the outside pushed away, they're actually the ones that will lead us back home again. And for that kind of story, the kind of story that all of us are in right now, for that kind of story to end well, sometimes we have to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. And so Matthew just says it all for us. He drags it all out in the light because the beauty of the Christmas story is not the tinsel and the trees and the fancy religious scarves, it's that God is not afraid of that mess.

Or of telling the truth or of whether your tragedy that you are experiencing now or you've gone through in the past is still holding on to you in some way. Because the advent of the Christ is not about tidying things up. It is about bringing everything out into the light that heals and sanctifies and makes right what has been stolen. And that grace requires the space to name all of our tragedies openly. As Mary, the mother of Jesus once wrote, God's mercy extends to those who fear from generation to generation.

God has performed mighty deeds with God's arm. God has scattered those who are proud in their innermost thoughts. God has brought down rulers from their thrones. God has lifted up the humble. God has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty.

God has helped God's servant remembering to be merciful. To Abraham and his descendants forever just as God promised. Amen. Let's pray. God of Advent, as we enter this season, knowing that things are still dark and cold for some of us, but trusting that there is now a light flickering off in the distance, and that light and warmth are penetrating the world, making their way to us, might we understand that the renewal of your story, the healing of our stories begins when we bring our full selves to the light.

Not pushing those emotions aside or away, not putting on a brave face, but bringing it all out into the open before you. Trusting that you are not interested in tidying things up, but you are interested in healing us. And so, God, in the midst of our pain and frustration, in the midst of broken relationships, in the midst of all the things we fear this Christmas, would your Spirit be present to us, reminding us that we are welcomed, we are embraced, and the light is now here in the world slowly spreading, making its way toward us this year. In the strong name, the one we await this Advent, pray. Amen.