New Love

Pastor Robarge’s Sermon
Advent Service, December 7, 2011

The Scripture reading for the basis of the sermon comes from Matthew 1 starting with Verse 1. You will recognize it by the many names that you probably won’t recognize, and it comes from the genealogy of Jesus Christ which will be the focus. So listen as we hear from the record of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.

“Abraham was the father of Isaac, 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, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, Salmon 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’s wife, Solomon the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asa, Asa the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram, Jehoram the father of Uzziah, Uzziah the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amon, Amon the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon.”

“After the exile to Babylon: Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, Abiud the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor, Azor the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Akim, Akim the father of Eliud, Eliud the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.”

“Thus, there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.”

Yeah, it’s a mouthful, right? Did you catch it all? Do you have all the fathers from father to son? I’m going to quiz you afterwards. It’ll be up on the screen. If you don’t pass, you have to sit through the sermon again. So I suggest you go back if you didn’t listen. No. [Laughing.]

If you could see the genealogy of Jesus Christ, I don’t know how many of you have ever approached it, but there are two of them. There’s one in Matthew and there’s one in Luke. The one from Matthew is the one that’s always going to be looked at and be categorized a little bit by Joseph’s descendants, Joseph’s side of the family. Now some people ask, well, Jesus wasn’t full blood from Joseph. Joseph was kind of his step dad a little bit, so why would they take that one? But then we look at the other side, Luke’s genealogy, as what we would look at as Mary’s side of the family.

So why do we need that? Why do we want it? As we look at it, well, for one, it’s hard to read. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to read it, but you kind of guess at names. You kind of figure out, “Well, I don’t know how to say that. We’ll just move on to the next story, Jesus’ birth. There we go. That’s good.”

When we think about genealogy, we think about our own. We think what is a genealogy? It’s family history. What’s in your family history? Is it important? Sometimes there are moments when we try to skip over our own family history. Maybe we’ve never tried to look at it. Maybe we’ve never tried to pay any attention to it. But sometimes we look at it and there are all kinds of different ways in which we can do it. Ancestory.com has all these ways in which you can look at your family history way back as far as it’ll go.

But what’s the point of it? Why do we need to know? Why is it even important? Why do people care about family history? Because there are things in there that are important. We look at our family and we look at some areas in our families where we say, “Well, our family history is probably not very perfect, right?”

I have people in my family history who I’d probably like to leave in the history. Maybe you have some family where you’re like, “Well, you know I have this branch of the family and I’m really proud of this branch over here, but don’t look on that side. Got some weird ones over there.” And if you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, I don’t know if I have any weird ones, it might be you.” I’m just saying. It’s probably me.

So these family histories, when we look at them, we try to say, “So what’s the purpose of all of this?” We have these pieces of our family history that we may try to ignore, we may try to put off to the side because we might be embarrassed by it. But it’s still important. It’s still important for us to be able to say, “So what is in my family history? Who is it who’s in my family history?” And we’d say, “There’s importance for it.”

Now when we look at the reason the Jews found it important, it’s a little bit different from us. The Jews themselves said, “Family history is very important.” That’s why the gospel of Matthew starts off with Chapter 1, Verse 1, the genealogy of Jesus Christ because, for them, it was important to know what line you came from, what tribe you were in, what people you were from. Why? Because you need to know that in Jewish history, to ignore that would be bad. To ignore it would be saying, “I don’t know if I’m inside the people of God or if I’m outside the people of God.” That’s how important it was for these people to know their family history.

Outside the Jews, there was also another people who were very concerned about family history, about their family tree and those are the people in the royal ancestry. In order to figure out if you are of royalty, your genes, your line, your family tree has to be traced and looked at to make sure that you are from the right family. There are people who make money off of this kind of thing, off of being able to locate and find the right family tree, the right family history.

There’s a movie, I think, called King Ralph and I don’t know if it was based upon a true story or not but I think John Goodman was in it. There was this royal family who were there and they were taking a photograph of the entire family. It had aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and cousins. They were all gathered there. As it turned out, they were all electrocuted when the picture was taken. For some reason, the current flowed and they all died. So the story becomes how is it that they’re going to find the heir who’s going to take the crown. So there was somebody who looked after generation after generation and found an heir. Without the family line, without the family history, there can be no king.

So when we come across the genealogy of Jesus Christ and we kind of yawn and we find the names are hard to pronounce and we look at them and we say, “Ah, just forget it. What’s the point?” We’d say the point is this: Jesus Himself establishes who He is. Jesus Himself establishes who He is in the genealogy in Matthew. He establishes that not only is He from the line of David but that He is rightful for the throne.

We also see in the extent of this to what lengths God will go to show His love for His people. If you look at the family history, even if you look at your own, you see all the pieces that had to come together in order to make you standing here right now. Your parents had to come together. Your grandparents then had to be together and so on and so forth as we look back and we continue to look at that family tree. All the pieces had to be right in order for you to be standing where you are.

And it’s the same thing with Jesus when we look at the lineage, when we look at His family line. All of these pieces started to come together and it was by no coincidence because God doesn’t do coincidence. It was all part of the plan, that Jesus was there, that Jesus was born, because He says, “This is how much I love you.”

As we’ve looked at last week, if you weren’t here, just recap, we were looking at the Advent wreath. The Advent wreath is something old. It’s a tradition and it was based in Germanic tribes in Germany. So these German tribes would come together and they said, “We’re going to celebrate Christmas. We want to make sure each candle, candle represents life and Jesus coming into the world, but each candle is going to represent something.” Every year, they would light this wreath up and this candle would represent something about Jesus each week.

Last week, we looked at the candle of hope and the candle of hope said, “We hope in Jesus Christ.” The hope is not defined by the way the world defines hope. The hope is defined as a secure knowledge of Jesus Christ. There’s nothing that can take away from that.

So we move on to the second candle. The second candle has a little bit of controversy that surrounds it. Now some people would say, “Who’s following this controversy about Advent wreath candles?” It’s just me. I’m just out there looking. So the candle itself, the second candle, there are two things that it’s always been represented by. One is it’s been called a candle of preparation, the preparation as we prepare our hearts, we prepare our rooms, our houses, our cities for the birth of Christ. So the second candle’s been looked at as a preparation candle, but it’s also been looked at as the candle of love, the candle of love knowing that God Himself not only sent Jesus Christ into this world but that Jesus Himself will soon return showing His love for all people. And when we light the second candle this week, we see that. We see that very love that God Himself stepped into space and time and He said, “This is how much I love you. I’m sending my one and only Son into the world to redeem you, to buy you back from sin, death and the devil.”

That’s what it means when we look at Emmanuel, our God is with us. He stepped beyond the realm of space and time and He stepped right into this human mess because He loved you so much. It was a moment of love, and this genealogy just shows how much He loves you. Why? Because we see people in there who are a little bit embarrassing. We find people in the family history who aren’t exactly ones who we would want to be model citizens.

We look at even just people we know. We look at Abraham. Abraham wasn’t always the model citizen that we find the Father Abraham to be. We find Jacob and Isaac. We know of their flaws. We know of the times that they didn’t hold up to the contract they made with God. We go through and we see Tamar and we see women who are listed in Jesus’ line but then we see a woman named Rahab, which we know in the Scripture she was a prostitute.

You would think if Matthew was really trying to shine up this family history of Jesus, he would have left out some of the shady characters, but that’s what it was to know that God loved you so much that He worked through individuals who were broken, individuals who were flawed because He still said, “My love goes beyond brokenness. My love goes beyond the imperfections of this family line.” And we can see it as it breaks through that. It breaks through all the realms of what we’d say were the imperfections.

God, in His love and His extent, as He showed it, He continued time and time again, through this line, to show how much He loves you. As you can see, the love doesn’t end there. It’s not like we just light the candle and we say, “Okay, God loves us. Let’s go.” There’s a love for a purpose. We think about John 3:16 and we say, “God so loved the world that He sent His only Son.” That’s great but what does it mean? How is it that we take that love? Because 1 John then also goes on, as John continues to explain what he meant when he says, “God so loved the world that He sent His only Son,” and then in 1 John what he says is, “I have loved you so that you might go and love others. Love your brothers and sisters.” Well, that’s pretty easy, right?

God loves us. I can go and love somebody. I can love my spouse. That’s pretty easy. I can love my mom and dad, maybe my brother and sister sometimes. That’s kind of the easy part but who it is that God’s calling us to love is not always the easiest and most comfortable place we want to go. Why? Because God says not only do I want you to love the people who love you in return, He says, “I want you to love the unlovable.” He says, “I want you to go and love the people who talk behind your back.” “I want you to go and love the people who have tried to destroy your character.” “I want you to love the people who everyone would find unlovable.” How is that for a challenge? How is that to be able to say, “This love of God isn’t just for me to be able to say, ‘Yes, God loves me. That’s grand.’” We all know that. It’s the truth. But then He says, “Take that love and go out and love in return.”

Why do we try to love the unlovable? Because God Himself loves you when you were completely unlovable. Humankind, mankind itself rebelled against God, the Creator of heaven and earth. God said, “This is the plan that I have for you,” and what did we do in return? We said, “No, God, you can keep you plan. I have my own. I’m going in another direction.” And we do that every time. We don’t keep His Word.

We do that every time when we say, “Instead of loving, I choose to hate.” We do that every time when God says, “Here’s my Son, Jesus Christ, who died for you and you’re forgiven,” and when we say, “I can’t believe in forgiveness.” God’s love was for the unlovable. God’s love was for you when you didn’t deserve it. And now He says to you, “Go and love the unlovable.” Go and love those people because maybe this Christmas, those people themselves are still looking for some kind of love. They’re looking for something out there that’s going to love them.

But maybe it comes by the rough exterior. It comes by them saying, “I don’t like you,” but love says, “I’m going to go beyond that. I’m going to love because God’s called me to love. I’m going to love because it’s a new kind of love.” God Himself when He stepped into space and time, He said, “I have shown you a new kind of love because I myself didn’t just stand far off from you but I came into Creation for you, lived the life that you couldn’t live and died the death so you wouldn’t have to.” That’s a new kind of love that the world doesn’t know, and it’s a new kind of love that He’s called us out to do ourselves.

So in this Christmas, as we find that new kind of love, I pray we start to look at those relationships that are around us. Who is it that God is calling me to love as I know that He has first loved me? Then start to search those out and find that this Christmas is a season for new love. Amen.