“How Newness Enters the World”
Rev. Dr. Steven Jungkeit
Texts: Ezra 9: 1-4, Nehemiah 13: 1-3, Matthew 1: 1-16
It’s always a good idea to read the fine print. That applies to the mortgage on your house, it applies to the list of side-effects on the medication your physician has prescribed, and it applies to the Bible. There’s often information buried in the fine print that is useful to know. And sometimes, there are buried treasures that we wouldn’t otherwise discover.
That’s why it’s worth reading the long genealogy that begins Matthew’s Gospel, a kind of wind up to the Christmas story. No one reads this part of the Bible. In fact, I’d be surprised if, across the 360 years of our existence as a church, it has ever been read, even by the severest Puritan Divines who have inhabited this place. Many of you are at home this morning, and probably chose to refill your coffee mugs as the passage was read. I’ll do my best to explain why that list of names matters, and why it’s worth reading now.
Before doing that, however, I’d like to return us to a relatively recent episode in the history of the United States, one that has come to have a startling and uncomfortable relevance to the world we now inhabit. It was in the year 1967 when two individuals, one white, the other black, finally had their relationship legalized in the United States. A handful of states, including Connecticut and the rest of New England, allowed interracial marriage, but all of the Southern states, many of the mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states, and almost all of the Western states prohibited a man and a woman from different racial backgrounds from marrying. That all changed when Richard and Mildred Loving took their case to the Supreme Court, and won.
You may know the story – a film was released about the Lovings ten years ago. Richard was a white man and Mildred was a woman of color. They fell in love, but the laws of the state of Virginia prevented them from being married. In 1958, they traveled to Washington, D.C., where they could be married, and then returned to their home in Virginia. A few weeks later, the police showed up in the early morning hours and arrested them. They were sentenced to a year in prison for their love, but were told by the county judge that they could avoid prison if they left the state of Virginia and never returned.
(Allow me to say parenthetically that I have heard expressed – not so long ago – the view that things were better in the 50’s, coupled with the wish that we could get back to the communal values people had back then. Whenever we hear such sentiments, we ought to wonder if these are the sorts of restrictions that made life “better.”)
The Lovings did leave Virginia, taking up residence in Washington. But they were unable to visit their families, who continued to reside in Virginia. Like dissidents from the Soviet Union, returning home would have meant prison. Isolated and alone, they sued the state of Virginia in 1963, and appealed their case all the way up to the Supreme Court, which, four years later, ruled unanimously that miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. It took until the year 2000 for Alabama to remove its version of the law from its state constitution.
The Loving decision continues to have widespread significance. It was one of the cases cited as precedent in Obergefell vs. Hodges, which made same sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Knowing how fragile court decisions can be, it was only in 2022 – just to underscore the obvious, 3 years ago – that Congress enacted the Respect for Marriage Act, to enshrine all of this in legislation. Court decisions, as we know, can be overturned. This is recent history, in other words, suggesting how precarious these freedom to love who you love actually is.
But now couple that history with some other related features of our contemporary life: armed men snatching immigrants off the streets of our cities; purging people of color from top government posts; gutting DEI initiatives; belief among some in the so called Great Replacement Theory; and talk of rolling back Obergefell itself. There is, in our culture, a persistent and, I would add, a paranoid, impulse toward notions of purity – racial purity, cultural purity, economic purity, and gender and sexual purity. It is an impulse at odds with the ways that humans love, and dream, and hope, and find satisfaction. It is an impulse at odds with the way culture tends to work at its best. And it’s an impulse at odds with the Gospel itself, as we shall shortly see.
It’s cold comfort to note that this isn’t a new phenomenon. It is an unfortunate truth that prohibitions against intermarriage, and prohibitions about the mixing of neighboring cultures, can be found throughout the Hebrew Bible. I’ve selected several of them to be read this morning, from Ezra and Nehemiah. I might have shared others as well – you can find similar passages in Exodus, in Deuteronomy, or in the books of Chronicles, to name a few, where mixing with peoples from neighboring territories is forbidden. Ezra and Nehemiah give it to us in its most naked formulations. Speaking of the surrounding tribes, the Ezra puts it thus: “For they (the Israelites) have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons. Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, and in this faithlessness the officials and leaders have led the way.” I especially appreciate the added detail that this revelation causes poor Ezra to tear his clothes and hair, and to sit appalled. Those same purification codes are at play in Nehemiah, causing the Israelites to separate all those of foreign descent from their number, naming in particular the Ammonites and the Moabites. It’s an early blueprint for later applications of racial and cultural apartheid.
As near as we can tell, this was a tendency that became pronounced in the years following the Babylonian exile, when the canon of the Hebrew Bible was in formation, along with the formation of a strong cultural identity, designed to withstand future cultural incursions. The material in Exodus and Deuteronomy admonishing cultural and ethnic purity likely dates from this era as well. It was edited into the story of Moses and the wandering Israelites to suggest a religious continuity that simply wasn’t true historically. These are not pronouncements issued by God from Sinai, in other words. They are the very human and very flawed voices of a few religious men, writing during a time of high cultural anxiety, who cleverly disguised their own voices so as to seem like God.
But the Bible never speaks in one voice. It is composed of multiple voices, some of which are in open conflict with one another. Some of those voices, in fact, seem to wish to correct the misshapen perspectives of others. Here, I wish to bring us back to all that fine print, that list of names that begins Matthew’s Gospel, announcing the birth of Jesus. What does all that fine print, all that tedious detail, reveal to us?
It all has to do with the women that are included in the genealogy. Other than Mary, only three women are named: Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth. Each of them represents a moment of rebellion from the ideology of purity that we’ve been tracking – moments when individuals, not unlike Richard and Mildred Loving, challenged the prevailing ethos. Tamar and Rahab were Canaanites, a people that, in particular passages, the ancient Israelites were told to shun, and sometimes to exterminate outright. But then there is Ruth, the pivot around which this entire sequence turns. She is given a whole book within the Hebrew Bible, and it is from her that the line of King David was born. So too, it is from Ruth that the writer of Matthew traces the lineage of Jesus.
Ruth, you might recall, was a Moabite. She originated from the territory east of the Jordan, the territory which Nehemiah warned against, a group hated and feared, whose ethics, whose religion, whose very being was thought to pollute the purity of Israel. For emphasis, listen once again to the words of Nehemiah: “On that day they read from the book of Moses in the hearing of the people, and in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God.” In nearly every one of the passages prohibiting intercultural marriage or exchange, the Moabites are somewhere at the top of the list.
To make this contemporary, encountering Moab in much of the Hebrew Bible is akin to the way Haiti has functioned in official discourse of late, and really for the whole of its existence. It is akin to the way Mexico has often been framed in the public imagination of the United States, or the way Somalis have been characterized recently by our President. As with each of those locations and ethnicities in our present world, in the Hebrew Bible Moab was the site from which degradation, disorder, and social disintegration could be pinned. And so there were efforts to practice a kind of cultural apartheid between the Hebrews and the Moabites.
And yet in Ruth, we discover something marvelous. The line of David, and of Jesus too, descends from Moab, this hated and feared other. I love how subversive those rabbis must have been who inserted the book of Ruth into this ethnocentric system of control. I love how sly, and how subtle it all is. They don’t seek to refute or cancel the voices of Ezra or Nehemiah. They simply demolish all that cultural chauvinism with what I think of as a gentle ruthlessness, demonstrating how the very glory of ancient Israel emerged from a coupling of individuals not unlike the Lovings, demonstrating how an entire culture was changed for the better by a simple act of love.
So too, I love how the birth of Jesus is tied to that pivotal moment in Ruth, and to Tamar and Rahab as well. Though the text doesn’t say so explicitly, by making Mary the fourth woman to be named in the genealogy, it strongly suggests that she too may have had ancestry outside the ethnic and religious boundaries of ancient Judaism. Then, as now, the genealogy of Jesus functions as a repudiation of all forms of cultural, racial, and body apartheid. Then, as now, the genealogy – all that tedious, fine print – suggests that whenever a loving union of individuals and of peoples from across such differences takes place, a blessing emerges, stagnation is overcome, and something genuinely new and lifegiving emerges. It is the very genealogy of Jesus that allows me to say as a minister that I am against purity in all of its forms – racial, cultural, ideological, biological, moral, all of it. It is the very genealogy of Jesus that allows us all to claim the life and ministry of that same Jesus back from all of those who wish to enforce various purity codes upon our lives today. Matthew 1 serves notice: Jesus comes to break apart all purity codes, in the name of a love that refuses to be constrained by such narrow limitations. It is one of the hidden treasures embedded within the Christmas story.
So how does this pertain to your life, and to mine? Let me briefly outline three implications. First, not that we need it, but all this fine print is license and encouragement to all of us to love openly who and what we actually do love. In fact, the text suggests that the good of the world depends upon our finding ways to love what has been kept from us, whether by accident or design. Sometimes that goodness takes the form of erotic love, as it did in the Scriptures – it is eros that’s being chronicled in this list, after all – and as it did in the case of Richard and Mildred Loving. But often it takes place on the level of friendship, and of cultural exchange. In this time of our history, we in North America do well to find ways to love the language and the food and the music, and yes, the people of Central and South America. We who are white do well to fall in love with the richness of Black lives and cultures. We who call ourselves Christian do well to celebrate the beauty and insights of other traditions, some adjacent to our own, and some quite distant. We who are male, or straight, do well to take delight in queer lives and queer stories. We who are citizens do well to respect, to protect, and yes, to love those living among us who do not enjoy those same protections. The birth of Jesus ought to stir such longings and desires within our hearts, to widen our capacities for love.
Next, the insights of the genealogy move me to consider the Middle East and Palestine, where a small handful of members and friends of FCCOL will shortly travel. It is where this vision of bodily and cultural apartheid has been enacted most ruthlessly. Surely, there is a vital lesson to be learned from the story of Ruth the Moabite giving birth to the Davidic line, a line that goes on to include Jesus of Nazareth. Surely the story gives us license to imagine the goodness that might emerge if these two cultures were allowed to mingle freely with one another. Surely this genealogy gives us hope that a time will come when an entirely new constitution is drafted, when an entirely new country will emerge, giving equal rights to both Jews and Palestinians. Surely the books of Ruth and Matthew alike demonstrate the promise that springs from allowing such cross-cultural loves to thrive.
Then this: the genealogy of Jesus invites us to understand that Christmas itself is not something to be defended or policed, so as to keep its cultural significance intact against outsiders that will diminish its significance. Like Jesus, Christmas is born of mixed parentage. It is superimposed upon ancient Roman and Indigenous traditions related to the solstice, to nature, to darkness and to light. It borrows from Egyptian, which is to say, from African sensibilities in the particulars of the story, and in its timing. Saint Nicholas, from whom we get Santa Claus, was a Turkish saint from the 4th century. The decorated trees we put in our homes come from pre-Christian fertility rituals. Some of the most well known songs we sing at Christmas were written by Jews – Winter Wonderland, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, White Christmas, and I’ll Be Home for Christmas, to name just a handful of them. Like all of our best traditions, Christmas is already born of multiple loves that cross cultural barriers to be together.
Newness enters the world, the blessing happens, because certain individuals have dared to love what they were told they ought not love, or didn’t know it was possible to love. Sometimes it is a person of a forbidden tribe, or race, or class, or body type. Sometimes it’s an unfamiliar cultural tradition. Sometimes it is whole groups of people who find ways to love one another across their differences. When such things happen, a kind of grace descends upon the world, and the Christ child is born all over again.
And so let us read the fine print. In the spirit of Christmas itself, let us make our stand against purity, that love might be born into the world ever and again. Amen.