Advent 4 Year A 2025: Matthew 1:18-25

My great grandfather’s name was Burdette Gunn. I love old timey names, and Burdette is about as old timey Midwest as they get. The way the family story goes is that Burdette died at age 39 in 1948 after being hit by a train. My mother never met her grandfather, but remembers many kind stories about him. It is a tradition in my family to visit all the local graves of our loved ones around Memorial Day and to tell stories about their pasts. For some reason, this year I decided to Google Burdette to see if I could find anything about the train collision that killed him. That’s where I found the obituary and the wrongful death lawsuit stating that he died in a head-on collision, most certainly not hit by a train. A car crash. He wasn’t doing anything he shouldn’t have been doing, the other driver simply crossed the center line and hit him head-on. My mom and I don’t know when or why the story changed. And now, everyone who would know is dead, so we’ll never know. My mother reeled for a while when this new information came to light. It shook her to the core but eventually led her to a level of acceptance - with questions ready when she reaches the other side!

Family stories have power. The way we choose to tell, or not to tell, or to hide from, our histories shape us for generations. One of my favorite poems speaks to this. It reads:

You should dance with the skeletons in your closet.
Learn their names,
so you can ask them to leave.
Have coffee with your demons.
Ask them important questions like, “What keeps you here?”
Learn what doors they keep finding open,
and kick them out. (From Sparking Her Own Flame by Pierre Alex Jeanty)

The way we choose to remember our stories says as much about us as it does about the stories themselves. The way in which each of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, tell their readers about the good news of Jesus tells us about their communities, their theologies, and what it is they found particularly compelling about Jesus. There are two times of the year when the way in which we remember their stories tend to mush together until we have trouble differentiating between the four. The first time is Holy Week and Easter, when the four accounts, sometimes with the help of Andrew Lloyd Webber, fit together nicely in our minds.

The second time is Christmas, when we tend to forget there are only two birth narratives in our four gospels - and that those two narratives are very different. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus appears as a grown man nine verses in, to be baptized by John and then immediately goes out into the wilderness to be tempted. The gospel of John also lacks a birth narrative per se, but contains the beautiful text that we read on both Christmas Day and the First Sunday After Christmas: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” But to call that a birth narrative, especially after reading Matthew and Luke’s accounts, would be a stretch.

Both Matthew and Luke have genealogies, although Luke’s takes place in chapter 3, following Jesus’ baptism by John. Luke has a lot going on in his first few chapters - chapter 1 alone contains the annunciation, Mary’s magnificat, Zechariah’s benedictus, and the birth of John the Baptist. Luke’s birth narrative has all the shepherds and angels and animals and the babe, lying in a manger. No wise men - that’s only in Matthew. The angel visits Mary and Zechariah, not Joseph, in Luke and only Joseph, not Mary, in Matthew. Luke’s genealogy, while it does contain David, it focuses on tracing Jesus all the way back to Adam, emphasizing Jesus’ importance for all humankind.

Matthew, on the other hand, contains almost none of this backstory. Matthew 1:1 reads, “an account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” There are three divisions of the genealogy, each containing 14 generations which is the numerical value of David’s name in Hebrew. Matthew also includes four women, in addition to Mary the mother of Jesus, in his genealogy of Jesus: Rahab, Ruth, Tamar, and Bathsheba. Four women in a male line of descent is extraordinary on its own. But the inclusion of those four particular women is even more remarkable because of what they say about the way in which Matthew is setting up his story to be told - remember, we’re in chapter one and Jesus is not yet born. Three of the women (and perhaps the fourth, Bathsheba) are certainly Gentiles. Three (and perhaps the fourth, Ruth) had improper sexual relations - with varying degrees of consent - but are admired in Israel’s history and considered important for God’s plan. Their inclusion may answer opponents’ accusations about Mary’s unusual pregnancy or foreshadow the disciples’ commission to “all nations,” including Gentiles. It also cautions us today about who we condemn and who we look to for our inspiration, particularly as Matthew makes his way into the second part of his story where Mary takes center stage.

Matthew presents Jesus’ twofold origin - that he is fully human, having the legitimate prerequisites to be Israel’s Messiah, and fully divine, born of a virgin by the Holy Spirit. It is in Matthew’s gospel that Joseph plays a more active role. In Luke, he’s mostly “husband of Mary”. But in Matthew, we hear how Joseph, finding his betrothed to be pregnant, planned to quietly end the engagement. Marriage at the time was not based on romantic love. That is a very recent sociological change. Marriage was a contract between families in which family status and economics played a role. To be with child before marriage dishonored the families, especially the men, somehow, and was grounds for Joseph’s dismissing her which, no matter how quietly, would have ruined her. Society has always been less forgiving towards women for anything that has to do with sexuality, even when they are without agency or power, or are victims.

We’re so concerned about Mary’s sexuality that some doctrine keeps her chaste even longer than Matthew does, which is just the length of her pregnancy. The doctrine of perpetual virginity suggests what it says - that Mary remained always a virgin, but this is not supported by scripture.

While there is no such thing as an illegitimate child, as legitimacy is a creation of the patriarchy, Jesus came into our imperfect world. Matthew does not say that Mary named the baby Jesus, but that he named the baby Jesus. He, Joseph, named the baby. This was no accident on Matthew’s part, nor was it heavy-handedness by Joseph. It was an act of claiming. By Joseph naming the baby Jesus, Joseph accepted the child as his own. Throughout scripture people’s names matter a great deal, with God constantly renaming them after an encounter with the divine, so it is only fitting that as God claims and names us, Joseph claimed and named Jesus. This awareness of the cultural context raises the importance of Joseph’s decisions throughout the text. As we dig deeper, the story becomes more meaningful, and also more human.

What do we learn when we dig deeper into our stories - not just our sacred stories, but our family legends? What are we afraid of? What don’t we talk about? What are the names of our demons? How are we allowing the skeletons in our closet to continue to hurt us instead of inviting them to leave? When we learn the names of our skeletons, they can still hurt us, but we can at least see them coming and have the tools for the injury to only be a flesh wound. We can even bandage and heal those old injuries. But if we pretend they aren’t there, no true healing takes place. But by pretending they aren’t there, we can miss the parts of our stories that are truly beautiful. The Bible is an overarching story of God’s people - a very flawed people, whom God loves dearly, just as we are. When we honestly look into our past, we will see the ways in which God is claiming and transforming and healing the broken parts of our histories to take us forward into our futures. The ways in which nothing is irredeemable to God and how God is constantly meeting us where we are and leading us to be better than who we were when He found us. Amen.