“Matthew 1
1 A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham: 2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, 3 Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar…
Genesis 38
1 At that time, Judah left his brothers and went down to stay with a man of Adullam named Hirah. 2 There Judah met the daughter of a Canaanite man named Shua. He married her and lay with her; 3 she became pregnant and gave birth to a son, who was named Er. 4 She conceived again and gave birth to a son and named him Onan. 5 She gave birth to still another son and named him Shelah. It was at Kezib that she gave birth to him. 6 Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. 7 But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death.
8 Then Judah said to Onan, ‘Lie with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to produce offspring for your brother.’ 9 But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so whenever he lay with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother. 10 What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so He put him to death also.
11 Judah then said to his daughter-in-law Tamar, ‘Live as a widow in your father’s house until my son Shelah grows up.’ For he thought, ‘He may die too, just like his brothers.’ So Tamar went to live in her father’s house.
12 After a long time Judah’s wife, the daughter of Shua, died. When Judah had recovered from his grief, he went up to Timnah, to the men who were shearing his sheep, and his friend Hirah the Adullamite went with him.
13 When Tamar was told, ‘Your father-in-law is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep,’ 14 she took off her widow’s clothes, covered herself with a veil to disguise herself, and then sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that, though Shelah had now grown up, she had not been given to him as his wife.
15 When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face. 16 Not realizing that she was his daughter-in-law, he went over to her by the roadside and said, ‘Come now, let me sleep with you.’ ‘And what will you give me to sleep with you?’ she asked.
17 ‘I’ll send you a young goat from my flock,’ he said. ‘Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it?’ she asked.
18 He said, ‘What pledge should I give you?’ ‘Your seal and its cord, and the staff in your hand,’ she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she became pregnant by him. 19 After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow’s clothes again.
20 Meanwhile Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Adullamite in order to get his pledge back from the woman, but he did not find her. 21 He asked the men who lived there, ‘Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?’ ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here,’ they said.
22 So he went back to Judah and said, ‘I didn’t find her. Besides, the men who lived there said, ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here.’’
23 Then Judah said, ‘Let her keep what she has, or we will become a laughingstock. After all, I did send her this young goat, but you didn’t find her.’
24 About three months later Judah was told, ‘Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.’ Judah said, ‘Bring her out and have her burned to death!’
25 As she was being brought out, she sent a message to her father-in-law. ‘I am pregnant by the man who owns these,’ she said. And she added, ‘See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are.’
26 Judah recognized them and said, ‘She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.’ And he did not sleep with her again.
27 When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb. 28 As she was giving birth, one of them put out his hand; so the midwife took a scarlet thread and tied it on his wrist and said, ‘This one came out first.’ 29 But when he drew back his hand, his brother came out, and she said, ‘So this is how you have broken out!’ And he was named Perez. 30 Then his brother, who had the scarlet thread on his wrist, came out and he was given the name Zerah.”
On Thursday, October 5, 2017, The New York Times broke a story detailing decades of sexual harassment allegations by movie producer Harvey Weinstein. It seems his behavior was something of an open secret in Hollywood. Three days later Weinstein was fired from his own company. Weinstein was only the first domino to fall. Others followed. The stories about the behavior of actor Kevin Spacey and comedian Louis CK are particularly disturbing. The list of the disgraced grew almost daily for months. The LA Timesran a story that captured the mood: Who’s Next? High Anxiety in Hollywood. The accusations were sordid and graphic. As the LA Timesput it, “the curtain has been pulled back, and, oh, is it messy.”
That was over a year ago now. Is it still messy? A few sexual harassment seminars haven’t changed the human heart. A few high-profile firings may have put fear into people, but it isn’t the fear of God. The boards who fired these men are largely still the same boards who knew about this behavior beforehand but did nothing until it was public.
The situation is still a mess. There have been some false accusations and that produces its own mess. The mess was there before it went public. “The curtain has been pulled back, and, oh, is it messy.”
Is there hope in such a sordid mess? Christmas says, ‘yes.’
This Christmas season we will study Jesus’ genealogy. The genealogy of Jesus is a sordid mess. It’s as messy as anything you will read about in the paper. Jesus was born to bring grace into our sometimes sordid, sometimes sleazy stories. The grace of God is enough for any mess. That is the claim of this first sermon of Advent: the grace of God is enough for any mess
We will see this in two points. First: A mess. Second: an unexpected grace. We see the mess in verses 1-25 and the unexpected grace in verses 26-30.
First, let’s pull back the curtain on Judah and Tamar. It will be messy. That’s our first point: a mess.
Genesis 38 is part of the story of Jacob’s family. Jacob was the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham. Jacob was a son of promise. God had promised that the whole world would be blessed through Jacob’s family. Jacob’s family was a mess.
This is good news for you if you love the church. We are God’s family and we are often a mess, but God works in what we might consider to be a complete mess.
When we open our Scripture, Jacob’s sons had just sold their brother Joseph into slavery. They then lied to their father, telling him that Joseph was killed by wild animals. Jacob was crushed. When he heard his boy was dead, he said, “I will continue to mourn until I join my son in the grave,” and when we meet him years later, he still seems to be a broken-down man.
Imagine you have three teenage boys and two of them come running into the house crying. They tell you that your youngest son was just kidnapped. You call the police and they put out an Amber alert. Months go by and your son is not found. Years later you find out that your two boys sold their brother to a man at the gas station who was involved with human trafficking. That’s Jacob’s family. That’s the family of God at this point in history.
Now Jacob himself had some very rough edges. He played favorites with his children. He had multiple women in his life. When he was younger, he had to run away from home because he had so sinned against his brother that he feared for his life. Jacob had lied grievously to his own father. He had an unhealthy relationship with his mother. Jacob was a deceiver and there was some sick poetic justice to the fact that he was just deceived by his own boys.
Without God’s restraining grace that is the way life goes. If you’ve grown up in a family with sordid secrets and you have chosen a different path, praise God for His grace because that’s what enabled you to choose a different path. If you want God’s ways rather than the way of sin, praise God because He put that desire in you and He continues to put that desire in you. “By grace you have been saved.” What we see in Jacob’s sons is sad, but it is what we should expect in a world like ours. Sin is not unexpected. Grace is unexpected.
Now, as we open our chapter, Jacob’s family seems to be going from bad to worse. Not only was Joseph gone, but now Jacob’s son Judah has left and married a pagan wife. This was and is always a sign of trouble in the book of Genesis. Abraham was adamant that his son not marry a pagan wife. For all her many faults, Rebekah was adamant that her son Jacob not marry a pagan wife. Judah married a pagan wife.
It got worse. Judah had a son with this unbelieving woman and his name was Er. Er was so wicked that God put him to death. We’ve only seen this sort of wrath twice to this point in Genesis –the flood and Sodom and Gomorrah –and those were groups of people. This was the first individual who was so wicked that God intervened in history to rid the world of him and his sin.
God still intervenes to rid the world of the wicked and their sin. He does it in many ways. Paul told us that one of these ways is through the powers that be. “If you do wrong,” wrote Paul, “be afraid, for the magistrate does not bear the sword in vain. He is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
There are people like Er running around this world today. Be aware of them, but don’t live in terror of them. The one you call Father is far more powerful than they are, and they will face Him just as Er faced Him. An omnipotent God has ways of dealing with the wicked.
Now, Er was married to Tamar and he died without an heir. In that culture, this called for what was known as a Levirate marriage. A Levirate marriage was designed to protect and care for the widow. The dead man’s brother was required to marry the widow so she would have a home and descendants to inherit their dead father’s land and to care for their mother.
This was their form of life of insurance. Er’s brother, Onan, would marry Tamar. Their first child together would carry on Er’s family name and inherit Er’s property. That might sound strange to us but in that culture this arrangement cared for the widow and assured that she and her first son would always have property and a family. That was important to that culture. Life insurance is important in our culture too.
Onan didn’t care for Tamar. Onan had no intention of establishing a home with Tamar. He used her as an object of physical gratification and nothing more. That’s what’s behind the graphic language of verse 9.
In that culture Tamar had no legal recourse. It is hard for many of us who are far more privileged than we realize to put ourselves in the shoes of people like Tamar. I don’t know what it is like to be an abused wife who is deathly afraid to reach out for help. I don’t know what it is like to be in a seemingly hopeless situation without any recourse or power. The few times I’ve experienced anything approaching that were terrifying. Who can help? Verse 10 tells us who can help. “What [Onan] did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so, He put him to death also.”
God is the help of the helpless. Psalm 68 calls Him, “a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows.” God was Tamar’s help and we don’t even know if she called on Him for help. I don’t know the condition of Tamar’s heart. I do know she was a woman in trouble and God helped her. God does that. I don’t know how He will do it in every situation. I don’t know why He often waits to do it. I just know that He likes to step in and defend the defenseless.
This is good news because we live in a world in which those with power often abuse those without power. Jesus made that clear saying, “the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them.” Jesus wasn’t just saying that the Gentile rulers were prideful. He was saying they used their power to abuse others.
The same is true today. Is anyone here this morning actually surprised by the sexual harassment and abuse in Hollywood? ‘Who would have ever guessed that a rich, powerful producer might take advantage of young, beautiful girls who want to be famous?’ Is anyone surprised this is sadly what it seems to take to make it in Hollywood?
The powerful often abuse their power and abuse other people, but that’s not the last word. Verse 10 is. “What Onan did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so, God put him to death also.”
There is judgment for the wicked. ‘Leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.’ God tells you not to take vengeance because that is His job.
God put Onan to death. Once He did, Tamar was still in financial limbo. She needed an heir to have a right to Er’s property. Judah, Er’s father, now put her in an impossible situation. Judah promised Tamar that she would marry his young son Shelah and receive the property, but Judah had no intention of keeping that promise. She had already buried two of his sons. He wouldn’t give her a chance to bury the third.
Tamar now had no husband, and no legal right to her first husband or second husband’s property. She had no income. Now, thanks to Judah, she had no chance of finding a husband because she was perpetually engaged to a man who would never marry her. Anyone in the Ancient Near East reading this would be say, ‘that poor girl.’
This doesn’t excuse Tamar’s plan, but it should help you understand it. Tamar waited until Judah’s wife died because Judah was the only man, other than her perpetual fiancé Shelah, who could give her the property, family line, and home to which she was entitled. If she had a child with Judah, she would have her heir and the property she needed to live.
Tamar waited until sheep shearing time. Sheep shearing was always a party in those days and the alcohol flowed. The men had money to spend and many spent it on debauchery. Tamar dressed herself as a prostitute and Judah, who was very likely drunk, propositioned his daughter-in-law.
Tamar deceived the deceiver. She asked for a deposit from Judah, his seal, cord, and staff. In that culture, the seal of a wealthy man like Judah was his legal identity. He affixed his seal to documents. As one Old Testament scholar put it, these items, “would have been a kind of ancient Near Eastern equivalent of all of a person’s credit cards.”
Tamar became pregnant with Judah’s child. She now had her legal right to the property she was promised, but she also had a problem. She was technically engaged to Judah’s son, Shelah. When Judah heard that Tamar was pregnant, he was furious. His response was extreme, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!”
Notice the irony here. Judah had no intention of every marrying his son off to Tamar, but he was furious enough that she didn’t respect the fake engagement that that he demanded she be burned alive for refusing to respect it.
Tamar laid down her cards. She pulled out Judah’s credit cards –his seal, cord, and staff –and said, in verse 25, “I am pregnant by the man who owns these. See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are.’”
Judah knew the child was his. Judah knew that the honorable thing was to marry his daughter-in-law. That’s might be the assumption behind verse 26, “he did not sleep with her again.” Judah gave her the marriage that he was legally required to give, and he gave her the properties that he was legally required to give.
This is a sordid story. When you get to know another couple, one of the questions you doubtlessly ask is, ‘so, tell us about how you met.’ Imagine sitting down with Judah and Tamar and saying, ‘so, tell us how you met.’ This story is a mess. This story is sordid. I even used euphemisms to read Scripture this morning. Why are we studying it?
We are studying it because God gives grace even in unimaginable messes. Maybe you think your family is a mess. There are sordid things in our family trees. The details of yours are probably different from what we see with Judah and Tamar, but there are tawdry, crude, and rather embarrassing details among us. What good can come out of these messes?
Maybe you think the church in America is a mess. The people of God’s grace so easily becomes a consumer driven, human centered, sideshow to anything that matters. When the church gives up on God, on His word, on His ways, what hope is there? What good can come out of this mess?
I don’t know. I have no idea what good can come out of these messes. I’m not a prophet. What I do know is what good came out of this one mess with Judah and Tamar. I don’t know exactly what God will do today, but I do know the sort of thing He does. That’s our second point: an unexpected grace.
The first grace we see takes place in the life of Judah. When he realized that he was the father of Tamar’s child he said, “She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.”
Judah recognized that he was wrong to not give his daughter-in-law what was rightfully hers. Realizing that you are wrong and fixing what you have done is rare. Repentance is rare. This moment seems to be something of a turning point in the life of Judah. In the previous chapter, Judah was the brother who suggested selling Joseph into slavery. The story then began to follow Joseph down to Egypt. This story of Judah and Tamar interrupts the Joseph story, in part, because Moses wanted to show us how Judah has changed from the man who sold his brother into slavery into the man we meet when he sees Joseph again.
When Judah and his brothers came to Egypt, they met Joseph, but they didn’t realize it was him. Joseph arranged a situation that demanded Benjamin, his full biological brother, be arrested. Now we see the transformed Judah. Judah approached Joseph saying, “my father said to us, ‘You know that my wife bore me two sons. One of them went away from me, and I said, “He has surely been torn to pieces.’ And I have not seen him since. If you take this one from me too and harm comes to him, you will bring my gray head down to the grave in misery.’ So now, if the boy is not with us when I go back to my father, and if my father, whose life is closely bound up with the boy’s life, sees that the boy isn’t there, he will die. Your servants will bring the gray head of our father down to the grave in sorrow. Your servant guaranteed the boy’s safety to my father. I said, ‘If I do not bring him back to you, I will bear the blame before you, my father, all my life!’ Now then, please let your servant remain here as my lord’s slave in place of the boy, and let the boy return with his brothers. How can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? No! Do not let me see the misery that would come on my father.”
This was the same Judah who had sold his father’s son into slavery and lied about it to his father. Now he was willing to be a slave to do what was. How did he change? Chapter 38, this account of Judah and Tamar, is here, in part, to show us how Judah changed. “She is more righteous than I.”
People can change. People in messes can change. People who make messes can change. God can change them. God can change you even if you have created some sordid situations.
The second grace we see takes place in the life of Tamar. Look at verse 27, “When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb.” Twins are twice as nice. God provided for Tamar in abundance. The Levirate marriage was designed for one son, but God gave her two. This was undeserved kindness.
God’s kindness doesn’t mean that He approved of everything Tamar did. Don’t take God’s mercy in the face of sin as a sign that He excuses sin. Don’t say what Paul’s opponents said when they saw God’s grace in spite of sin, “let’s sin so that grace may increase.”
God is often abundantly kind despite sin. A daughter born outside of marriage is rightfully a joy to her Christian mother and a child of the covenant. A fool of a man somehow marries a godly, patient wife who makes his life better in a thousand ways even though he still acts like a fool. We can rejoice in such kindnesses.
We do rejoice in these kindnesses. I hope none of us longs for perpetual misery for people who make sinful decisions. If a Christian man marries a non-Christian woman, we don’t want that marriage to be horrible. We know good things can come out of ungodly decisions but that doesn’t make ungodly decisions right. The Father can still give good gifts, but these good gifts don’t excuse the sin; they are rather a reason to repent. Why would you want to sin against such a generous God who was kind to you despite your disobedience? We see God’s grace to Tamar in working in her life despite her sin.
We see the third grace in the genealogy at the end of the chapter. Moses didn’t tell this story because it was sordid. There are always plenty of messy stories to tell. Moses didn’t even tell this story because there was grace in the midst of the mess. Moses told us about the birth of Judah’s sons because God made clear that Judah’s line was the line of the coming Christ.
If you know the book of Genesis, this choice of Judah should amaze you. Genesis 37-50 focus on Jacob’s family and all but one of those fourteen chapters centers on Joseph. At 13 chapters, Joseph’s life story is one of the longest in the Bible. He suffered evil and repaid it with good. His obedience saved the world from famine. He forgave his brothers. He was godly. Moses wrote one chapter about Judah and it was this sordid tale. Moses wrote thirteen chapters about Joseph’s godliness and one chapter about Judah’s godlessness. Which man would you expect God to choose to head the family that would bless the entire world? Would you rather your salvation come out of Joseph or out of Judah?
Here we see the grace of God’s choice. “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.” That’s good news for us because we often act more like Judah than Joseph.
Matthew starts his gospel, his good news of Jesus, with a genealogy of his own. “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah 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.”
The Son of God didn’t choose to join us at our best. He chose to join us at our worst. He chose to come from the sordid tale we heard this morning. “You see, at just the right time, when we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” wrote the apostle Paul. You could also say, ‘you see, at just the right time, when we were still stuck in sordidness, Christ joined us, Christ became one of us to pull us out.’
The Son of God joined this family tree; a family tree like some of ours. That’s part of the beauty of Christmas. Jesus became one of us. He took our sin upon Himself. He did it on the cross and he did it in his genealogy. “He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely, he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
Grace is offered in the midst of sordidness. The grace of repentance is offered in the midst of sordidness. The grace of a generous Father is offered in the midst of sordidness. The grace of the baby born of the line of Judah and Tamar is offered in the midst of sordidness. That is the grace of our Lord Jesus.
That’s what’s needed in Hollywood. That’s what’s needed in our families. That’s what’s needed in this church. That’s what’s needed in Inwood. That’s what’s needed this Christmas season. That’s why the Son of God came. Amen.