Faith Matters: Jesus and Clark Griswold have something in common: Their families need some grace

Every year during Advent at Harbor Community Church, I’ll preach through a special series during this 4 week pre-Christmas period. This year I chose the title Mothers of Jesus: A Series of Fortunate Events. Most of the time genealogies look as boring as boring can get. Names that you can’t pronounce having babies with names you can’t pronounce, who have babies that with names that would never crack today’s top 100. But if you look carefully at Jesus’ bloodline in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew you’ll notice 4 Old Testament women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheeba-though she’s simply mentioned as “Urriah’s wife.”

And if you go back and read the story behind these names, you’d find yourself at a loss for words. Tamar tricked her father-in-law into sleeping with her, so her child had the same father and grandfather. Have fun explaining that one to junior! Rahab served as a prostitute who agreed to lie and hide some Hebrew spies. Ruth comes on the scene as an immigrant outsider, from a group of people deemed unclean and unfit-they weren’t even allowed to assemble with God’s people down to the 10th generation. And if it couldn’t get any weirder, Jesus great, great ... grandfather came from a marriage started by adultery and completed by a murder for hire (though he probably did it for free). You can’t make this stuff up. You could say that Jesus includes women a little on the trashy side, but men even more so!

Just before Tom Hanks starred as Mr. Rogers in his recent movie, he discovered both he and the kind Presbyterian minister shared the same distant 18th century German immigrant patriarch. That’s certainly something I’d want to share.

Yet if Jesus had had a good public relations man, he certainly would have caught these names before it ever came to print. In those days, you could skip a generation if it suited your purpose. Matthew the Gospel writer actually does this in his account in order to make it a nice, neat, orderly set of three separate fourteen generation time periods. If it were me, I would have left these gals out of it completely, though primarily because of their husbands, or in the case of Tamar, her father in law.

I googled awkward Christmas cards last week and used one in my sermon presentation of a non-smiling family comprised of a grown son with a big black eye. I think that’s the kind of Christmas card Jesus’ family would have sent.

It’s a messy family. What kind of religion highlights people from such sketchy and sinful circumstances? It can only be one centered not in religious appearances but in grace, from the beginning of the story to the end. Jesus identifies with sinners and those from sketchy backgrounds. You can’t “out-sin” or “out-sketch” Jesus.

A good PR guy would “grace-wash” His entire family! Jesus’s family tree looks more like the Griswolds than we often realize. We see the outwardly messed up, selfish “Cousin Eddies,” as well as the seemingly put together, self-righteous patriarchs like Clark. Yet they all have one thing in common: they need grace and they realize that in Jesus, they have all the grace they need.

If you don’t feel fit to be part of Jesus’s family, then confess and rest in Him. You’ll actually find you fit right in.

Geoff Henderson is pastor at Harbor Community Church, 2300 43rd St. W., Bradenton. You can reach him at geoff@harborcommunitychurch.org