Rumours of Grace: The God who picks up rags

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Take this holiday season to familiarize yourself with the story that started it all, the story of Jesus Christ.

Give yourself a bizarre experience this Christmas: read the two stories – both almost 2,000 years old – of the birth of Christ, of Jesus. They are both contained in the Christian Bible. One is by Matthew, who was at one time a tax collector collaborating with the forces who occupied his Jewish homeland. He became a follower, a disciple of Jesus.

By virtue of the fact that his book appears in the Bible, he is now a bestselling author worldwide. Not bad for someone once hated by his fellow Jews. The other account is by Luke. We’ll leave his alone today.

For now, take a moment and read just the first three bits of Matthew’s book. The easiest way for you to do this is to stay seated and go to biblegateway.com. In the search field type in Matthew 1:1-2:12 (those are chapters and verses).

Have you read passage? If so, stay with me. You read: 1) a list of Jesus’ ancestors; 2) a story of his foster father reluctantly agreeing to marry Jesus’ mother; 3) the story of some traveler-astrologers who are on the search for a new-born leader.

Here’s what I want to say about these three sections of Matthew’s story: taken all together, they look pretty rickety.

Regarding the list of ancestors, there are some “greats” from the history of the Jewish people. For example, Jesus and Matthew were both Jewish, as well as Abraham and David, the greatest king in Jewish memory.

However, if you want a list of noble ancestors as support for the greatness of Jesus, Matthew disappoints you. There are number of pretty scandalous characters in the list. Check out the story of Judah and Tamar in the pre-Jesus part of the Bible, the Old Testament. This story is wilder than any soap opera storyline out there; there’s even some incest. That’s right. Incest.

It’s the story of a family with its share of sketchy characters. Not the greatest start to the story of Jesus.

In the second segment we find Joseph, the fiancé of Mary, Jesus’ mother. He thinks that Mary has cheated on him. He didn’t believe that Mary’s birth was a sign, a wonder from God that didn’t involve him or another lover.

But Joseph’s mind is eventually changed after he has a dream. There one night, gone in the morning. Flimsy, one might say.

Now the third segment. Star gazers following their charts and a particular star in the hope of finding an infant destined to be a great leader. I realize that we have astrological advice in every newspaper in the country. But I also don’t think many take such columns all that seriously. Very few of us would base any travel plans on a reading of the stars. The astrologers in Matthew 2 though, base their trip on their reading of the stars.

Again, this is not a terribly strong beginning, is it, to the story of Jesus Christ who, supposedly is the Son of God?

But what if it turns out that God has a penchant for working with the threadbare, the flimsy, and not-so-impressive people of our world?

This is precisely one of the key aspects of the character of God that is found in the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Bible. God takes the Hebrews, a population of subjected slaves in Egypt, and shapes them into a small but real tribal nation (as told in the book of Exodus). Moses, a man guilty of manslaughter, becomes their leader. David, who at one time successfully pulled off a conspiracy to commit murder, is used by God (and punished by him too) and leaves behind the most famous collection of prayers on the planet (the book of Psalms).

Women, who by the time Jesus shows up were regarded as second-class persons by just about everyone, appear in the list of Jesus’ ancestors. Matthew, a collaborating tax-collecting thief, ends up sacrificing his life as he follows Jesus Christ, and leaves behind a powerful spiritual legacy with the writing of his book. This pattern happens a thousand times in the Bible.

God turns our world upside down. The glamourous, wealthy and powerful have their own rewards. But he is making use of the poor, the people whose bones are rattling with uncertainty and fear, the figures who, to the powerful, seem like wind-blown rags, hardly worth paying attention to.

Under the nose of barbaric Roman governor Herod (the one in Matthew 2), two peasants, Mary and Joseph, become parents of the Son of God. Their first family trip led to them fleeing as refugees, escaping from the governor’s paranoid wrath.

Superstitious astrologers, vaporous dreams, sketchy ancestors, peasant lovers, God cobbles it all together and sets before us, what? Glory. The Son of God.

It happens in our own lives too. When we look to God for help, we find that he is able to take our own weather-worn, creased, falling-apart-at-the-seams lives in which we find much to regret and plenty of which to be ashamed; he takes it all and through the cracks there begins to shine the same thing: Glory. Have a great Christmas.

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