A Living Lineage (Matt. 1:18-25)

images L-R: "Tamar Belle-Fille De Juda, 1960” (Marc Chagall) | “Rahab” (artist unknown) | "Ruth Takes Away the Barley" (James J. Tissot) | “Bathsheba" (Marc Chagall: 1962–1963)

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on December 21, 2025. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here. (The sermon begins at the 41:49) 
​Scripture texts: Isaiah 7:10-16 • Romans 1:1-7  • Matthew 1:(1-17) 18-25

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Good morning, beloved of Christ! 

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about ancestry. About how little I actually know about my own apart from each of my sets of grandparents, and the fact that I was named for my great-grandmother Amy. In fact, just this past summer I was talking to my parents about her over dinner, revisiting this old story they told about how her real name was Amelia Josephenie. But since my parents didn’t know that until I was 7 or 8 years old, they named me Amy Jo, as she was called, and I escaped being called such an old-timey name. I went on to share that over time, as I’ve grown older and wiser and, I like to think, more sophisticated, I lament my parents’ faulty knowledge. Because now, at 44, I would love such a beautiful and timeless name to be mine!

Well, as I was retelling this, my mom was looking at me funnier and funnier, and by the time I was done, she said, “that’s not true. We never told you that! We always knew her name was Amelia, though they always called her Amy, and we picked Jo for your middle name because it was easy.” 

When I tell you, friends, how aghast I was! I swear I did not make that story up, and none of us know where the tale originated or how it became part of my personal lore. I suspect it was another one of my sisters’ tall tales, like when they all got together to convince me I was adopted. That was terrible. 

In any case, I have since learned through some digging that her full name was actually Amelia Henrietta Terry Craig, which is also beautiful, and makes me want to learn more about where she came from -- where I come from. But for today’s purposes, it just made me really interested in the part of Matthew chapter 1 that we skip over to begin at verse 18 in today’s gospel. 

So I’m going to take us back into it for a bit, not just because it lays the firm and vital foundation that Matthew’s entire gospel is built upon, though it does. What interests me is how much it tells us about who God is, and how God wanted to be known when God was born: 

Because Immanuel wasn’t born as some pristine out-of-nowhere starchild. He came as One who chose to make certain histories his own when he took on flesh and blood, and dwelt among us.

I say chose for good reason: According to the ancient prophets, the Promised Messiah whom God would send to deliver God’s people, would descend from the Kingly tribe of Judah. And Matthew, more than any other gospel writer, underscores this point at length and in great detail, as he testifies to all the ways Jesus was the fulfillment of each those promises. All the way down to the details, like his descendancy from King David. 

The thing is, though, David’s lineage would not be his genetically, by birth of and to Mary -- her ancestry is undisclosed, and wouldn’t have mattered anyway because Hebrew lineages were recorded through fathers and sons, not mothers and daughters. Instead, Jesus would have to be adopted into that lineage, and this through the line of Joseph. He is whose particular line God chose for Their advent among us. And his lineage, as recounted by Matthew, is chock full of people whose stories we know well, from Judah to Boaz to Solomon and Hezekiah, and so on. 

But. Among the 28 generations named, only four of them are especially remarkable because they shouldn’t even be there. They are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Four women who each survived by the skin of her teeth. Four women whose lives and legacies are reduced to the scandals they endured, until they’re named as the four great-grand-mothers of God’s own self. So let’s meet them:

Tamar’s story begins in Genesis 38 when she marries Judah’s oldest son Er, a wicked man who dies before she bears any children. As was custom, she then married his brother Oman who was also wicked and died without any heirs. At this point her father-in-law Judah, who is now responsible for her progeny and future, condemns her to chaste, childless widowhood. But after years of waiting for justice, she takes matters into her own hands, subverting Judah’s abandonment and condemnation, and compelling him to fulfill his sacred obligations to honor and protect her legacy, ultimately giving birth to Judah’s twin sons. This is important, because it is through one of them, Perez, that Tamar becomes the great- great-great-great-great grandmother of Boaz.

Boaz was also the son of Rahab, the second woman named in Joseph’s lineage who also, you might recall, used scandalous means to secure her and her entire family’s survival and futures. 

And thank God she did, because her son Boaz would famously marry Ruth, the third ancestress Matthew’s gospel names. Just like both Tamar and Rahab, she used her own feminine wiles to “uncover Boaz’s feet” -- a biblical euphemism for you-know-what — and so persuade him to fulfill his obligations as her and Naomi’s kinsman redeemer. A love story for the ages.

And just two generations later, Ruth and Boaz’s grandson, Rahab’s great-grandson, would be King David. The king who sent for and took Bathsheba — known to Matthew’s readers only as “The Wife of Uriah,” whom David had killed in order to keep Bathsheba for his own. 

And from that great tragedy, Bathsheba would give birth to Solomon, the 24th Great-grandfather of Jesus. The God-child adopted by his father Joseph, into a lineage of some great and terrible men; And some of the most cunning, strategic, and scandalously subversive women in God’s ancient story. 

All these extraordinary women deserve more than a sermon — indeed a deep study into their lives, their survival, all they overcame to become the matriarchs of Christ’s family — the mothers God chose as God’s own. But for today it is enough to see why Joseph’s particular lineage matters.

Within a religious and social structure that meticulously recorded men’s ancestry all the way back to Abraham, these women, especially, matter. 
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Their stories were legendary among Jews, having been recorded in a narrative written and dominated by men. But more than that, their revolutionary inheritance was alive in Joseph as much as, if not more than all those great and terrible men. This we know because we can see it beating like a heart in today’s short gospel, from the very beginning when Joseph found out his betrothed was pregnant by another: "He was a righteous man, faithful to the law, and yet was unwilling to expose her to public disgrace. So he resolved to divorce her quietly."

Joseph’s ancestor Judah sought the death of Tamar when he heard what she’d done; and Kind David killed Bathsheba’s husband when his own sins found him out —  just two of too many shameless men who projected their own lawlessness onto the women they “owned,” without regard for their honor or disgrace. Men who today would feature prominently in certain files.

And yet here is Joseph, publicly humiliated by his unfaithful bride’s pregnancy, still choosing her good. This is not a man descended from ruthless forefathers, but one persuaded by his radical foremothers, which manifests brilliantly as the rest of his short story unfolds: 

For here, in verses 20-25 we meet a man who is not halted by fear of disgrace, but is moved to act boldly in ways that will guarantee it. A quality he will pass on to his adopted son. 

Here is a man who knows how to dream and, more importantly, knows how to take dreams seriously enough to cede his life and all his ambitions to the conviction that God’s own self has chosen him for the highest calling of being brought low, so that Salvation and Liberation may come to all people -- even those who will regard him for as long as he lives as a harlot’s cuckold of a husband. 

Here is a man who awakens from that dream and offers no words, is given no voice, either to process or discuss or clarify or rationalize his way out of the wholly irrational vision. Instead, he trusts what the living Word tells him, as nakedly absurd as it is, that this son will be the very presence and essence of God in skin. 

He acts immediately and decisively, taking Mary as his wife, knowing how dearly it will cost his reputation. And he honors her for the duration of her pregnancy, declining to take her body which is rightly his by marriage. Choosing what is​ right over his own “rights."

And, when the time comes, he fulfills his ancestral obligation as a father by naming Jesus his firstborn son and heir of his messianic lineage. 

None of this, Beloved, and I mean none of it, was a reasonable ask of Joseph. Indeed, as the beginning of today’s Word underscores, a righteous man like Joseph was not just allowed but legally obliged to divorce Mary, given how utterly she dishonored him. And among all his ancestors, indeed all of Abraham’s descendants, there are precious few men who chose to love and care for scandalized and whore-ified women without first being duly compelled. 

But Joseph did. 

With all disrespect to cultural norms, which defined women exclusively in relation to the men who owned them, and in radical rebellion against his own patriarchal privileges and rights by which he could have had Mary publicly shamed or even killed, he chose instead to be recorded and remembered by Matthew and his readers as “Joseph, Husband of Mary, the Mother of God.” 

Beyond this vignette, Beloved, little is said about Joseph throughout the rest of the gospels, save the few times he is referred to as Jesus’s father or “father.” But what a profound witness these seven short verses are to a man who descended from great kings but claimed the inheritance of discarded and disgraced women instead. 

Most of us, I bet, descend from ancestors as storied as Joseph’s. We’ve borne the weight of our ancestors' transgressions even as we've labor to heal them in obedience to God’s sometimes absurd and unreasonable callings on our lives, right? We all literally contain multitudes.

My own lineage, for what it’s worth, is full of brave and beautiful people who fought in the American Revolution and stayed to build this country, sometimes with stolen labor from enslaved persons. Some who crossed oceans with pennies in their pockets to make a life in a new land, albeit land stolen from displaced Indigenous tribes. They were people who loved God deeply and passed down to me a myriad of redemptive and repulsive beliefs, revolting secrets and hidden truths, moments of pure selflessness and devastating acts of weakness. 

I am, as far as I can tell, the first in the family from both sides, across many generations, to come out as bisexual. Mine is a family that exclusively affirms a strict cis-hetero-normative binary, and finds nothing about my identity to be as public or proud of as I am. And I am the first woman pastor in a huge tree of pastors, who to this day do not acknowledge my pastoral calling because women are to be obedient wives, mothers, and homemakers. Because I have chosen to be honest and open about all, I’ve also been cut off from many relatives. Generational curses abound.

Which is just to say that in some small measure, I think I understand what it cost Joseph to listen to God, to choose Mary and Jesus and all the risk of disgrace attendant to it. Perhaps you do too. 

But I am also convinced that while I do not yet know their names, I am not -- because I cannot possibly be! — the first queer preacher in my family’s lineage. And so I lean on my unnamed ancestors to cover and sustain me in this increasingly dangerous and tyrannical time; To keep me radical, subversive, and wise as I listen for God and say Yes to bold risks and acting immediately to do justice especially when it’s costly. To do like Joseph and break ancient patterns and carve new family lines for our own and future generations to be their full resplendent selves, bearing God to this world in majestic and mundane and all manner of ways, for the salvation and liberation and restoration of all and all and all God’s creation. 

This is the legacy we get to choose, with Joseph and all his great grandmothers, all praise be to Christ, his beloved son, whose birth we still and always await.

Amen and amen, and all the people said: Amen!

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