The Cherry Log Sermons

Georgia  

Chapter 1

God Is with Us

Matthew 1:18–25

This is the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, and so we have now arrived in Bethlehem. The baby is due anytime, and all we have now to do is wait, which is the hardest part.

It is hard to wait. In a hospital sometimes the most miserable room is the waiting room. You don’t have any information; you stop every nurse. No, sorry, that’s not my patient. The doctor will be out later. Maybe tomorrow. That sort of thing. You’re helpless; you can’t do anything. The time creeps by. No one waits very well.

So I suggest this morning, in order to occupy ourselves until the birth, that we do what Matthew did. Matthew went outside and took a stroll through Jesus’ family graveyard. He starts his Gospel with a genealogy. Some people say, What a horrible way to start a book. It’s just a list of names you can’t pronounce. Dwight Eisenhower said that in his family they had to read the Bible through completely every so often but that he was given permission to skip the genealogies. Well, we’re not going to skip the genealogy; we’re going to join Matthew for a walk through the family graveyard of Jesus.

Some people think going to a cemetery is morbid, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. One summer not long ago our family visited Arlington National Cemetery. Far from being morbid, it was very inspiring to be there. Once when I was in New Haven, Connecticut and my host was showing me around town, we toured the town’s historic cemetery, and suddenly I found myself standing in front of the grave of Nathan Hale, the man who said, I regret I have but one life to give for my country. It was an awesome moment, an inspiring moment. Some of you have been to these places. You just cannot believe all the feelings that churn.

Sometimes, though, it can be embarrassing to visit a cemetery, because you come across the graves of folk you wish you were not kin to. I remember that my sister was once in pursuit of information about an ancestor by the name of Ruby Craddock. The other Craddocks had come to this country from Wales, but not Ruby, so my sister, who was heavily into genealogies, was pursuing Ruby.

Eventually she reported, I found Ruby.

Good, I said. What did you find out about Ruby?

She said, You don’t want to know. It seems that Ruby, instead of coming to America with the rest of the Craddocks, went to London instead and opened a brothel. I assured my sister that this was another branch of the family and not to worry about it.

Going to cemeteries can be a strange, mysterious thing. South of Atlanta—it still haunts me to think about it—there is a cemetery in a small town where the members of a very large family are buried together in this one plot, all, that is, except for one. By the inscription on the marker, this one family member was a son. He is buried fifty yards away, I would say, all by himself. I just hate all the thoughts that come to my mind.

Other graveyards are mysterious in other ways. Last week, Fred Dickey from California wanted to take me up to Hogback Mountain to see the Dickey family graveyard. The Dickey graveyard is an unusual one and very, very old. The Dickeys have become particularly famous through one of their members, James Dickey, who wrote Deliverance and many other works. Mrs. Dickey was a member of President Zachary Taylor’s family. All of this seemed very important, and I told Fred that I’d like to see that graveyard.

So we went out early on a Saturday morning to Hogback Mountain and found the cemetery. It was about forty feet square with a concrete wall, now broken in places. At one end of the cemetery stood two stones marked George Dickey and Hanna Dickey. Twenty-seven other markers were there, but with no names on them—just field stones stuck in the ground at different angles. There were twenty-nine graves in all; two with names, twenty-seven with no names. The twenty-seven were for slaves. The slave owners buried with their slaves? I wish I knew about how that came to be. Cemeteries can be strange places.

So off we go with Matthew to the cemetery that holds the remains of the family of Jesus, and there at the entrance is the patriarch of them all, Abraham. A simple marker stands for Abraham; he was a simple man. He was a man of faith, and on his tombstone it said in small print, He was a pilgrim on the earth seeking a city with foundations whose builder and maker is God. He was buried with his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob.

There is no marker there for Sarah, his wife; no marker for Rebekah, his daughter-in-law; no marker for Rachel, his granddaughter-in-law. I regret that very much, but you know how they felt about women back in those days. They were just sort of also people. You know what the Bible says about the crowd that Jesus fed, that there were five thousand men present, not counting the women and children.

But there are women in this cemetery of Jesus’ family. There is Tamar. You remember Tamar. She is not really a savory character, but she was clever; she chased Judah, but he did not run as fast as she did. Then there is Rahab. Rahab in Jesus’ family was like Ruby in mine. Also, there is Ruth, the Moabite woman who loved her mother-in-law with a love that has been sung about at weddings for hundreds of years: Entreat me not to leave you. There is Bathsheba. She is not even mentioned by name; she is simply called Uriah’s wife, and she was. Uriah was a soldier in the army, and while he was away she had an affair with the king.

I am surprised there are women’s names in Jesus’ family cemetery. Maybe this is prophetic, pointing toward the coming day of the one we remember, pointing toward the one who is the climax of the whole genealogy, Jesus of Nazareth. Maybe including these women is prophetic, promising that someday, someday, under the good gracious eye of Jesus Christ, those distinctions will not be made—certainly not in churches. Maybe someday.

What strikes me about these women is that none of them were Jews. Did you think about that? Tamar was an Arab. Bathsheba a Palestinian. Ruth—today we would say she was Jordanian. None of them were Jews. Maybe this is prophetic too, announcing that the one who comes at the end of that genealogy, Jesus of Nazareth, will bring it to pass that the blessing of God will be showered on all people, Jew and Gentile alike, making no distinction.

Maybe those markers out there in that cemetery are really important. Over there is Judah—there is a big marker for Judah—a very important man. He gave his name to the people, Judeans—the Jews. He gave his name to the land, the land of Judah. He gave his name to the religion, Judaism. He is very important.

And over there, of course, is David. The central marker in the graveyard, the tallest of all the markers, is David’s. The first part of the genealogy leads up to David, and the rest of the genealogy flows away from David. David is the centerpiece of the graveyard, just as he is the centerpiece of Jewish history. David was a remarkable man—a shepherd, a musician, a poet, a soldier, a king—a man of remarkable ambivalence, a man of powerful contradictions. He had an immense capacity to weep over his own sin: O Lord, my sin is always before me; create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me. Restore the bones you have broken; do not take your Holy Spirit away. But then, David could be hard and cold. He is back at the palace, his soldiers are in the field; across the way he sees a woman bathing. He sends for her, has the affair.

Who are you, woman?

I’m the wife of Uriah. He is out fighting in the army.

Uh-oh. So David has Uriah killed, and then he takes in the poor widow, bless his heart. He could be cold as the edge of steel. The way he replaced his predecessor, Saul, was cold and calculating too, and yet, and yet …every night when David sat down to supper, there was a crippled, sickly, club-footed man named Mephibosheth, the grandson of the man he had destroyed. My sin is always in front of me.

Following David comes that line of kings, some of them not even worth mentioning. Uzziah became king when he was sixteen, a teenager. He died a leper. Then there was Manasseh, who ruled longer than anybody else. He ruled for fifty-five years, but I daresay he paid for his own monument. He was no good, and he stayed in power all that time by compromise and total lack of conviction. To him, every kind of religion was the same. Sure, come on in. Read the tea leaves, gaze at the crystal balls, practice the superstition, do the witch dance, trust in God, bring it all in. He did not have a spine, this Manasseh. And there was Josiah, who should have been a preacher, not a king. He was so in love with scripture. He wanted to make the scripture the center of the life of the people. Then comes the last name—Joseph. The last one in the graveyard is Joseph.

Does this mean that Joseph is the father of Jesus? If Jesus is the son of David, then Joseph must have been his father. Was Joseph his father? Well, no … yes … no. This is the way it worked: Joseph was engaged to a woman named Mary. Remember, engagement back then was a legal thing. You did not get engaged at the drive-in some Friday night. Engagement was a serious business, and it could be broken only by going to the courts. In effect, it was the same as marriage and binding in nature. So Joseph was engaged, may have been engaged for years. Engagements lasted a long time. The two families came together, signed the papers, and when the young people became of age, they married.

Joseph is engaged to Mary, but he discovers that she is pregnant. Now what is he going to do? Joseph’s fiancée is pregnant. Joseph is a good man, a righteous man, a man who wants to do the right thing. That’s great, but how do you know the right thing? What is the right thing to do? Here is a carpenter in the community engaged to a woman named Mary, and it is evident she is pregnant. What is Joseph to do?

There are two options available to Joseph. First, he could get the opinion of people in town. Somerset Maugham said one time that the most fundamental and strongest disposition of the human spirit in civilized society is to get the approval of the people around you. Go to the coffee shop, What do you think I ought to do? Get on the phone, attend the sewing circles, take your problem to work, talk about it over coffee, talk about it everywhere, tell everybody. Did you hear about Mary? What do you think I ought to do? Spread it everywhere, spread it everywhere. But Joseph will not go that way. He will not disgrace Mary, will not expose her, will not humiliate her. Then what is he going to do?

He has some friends just fresh from the synagogue who say, Just do what the Bible says. You can’t go wrong if you do what the Bible says. What about that for an answer? I have heard that all my life. Just do what the Bible says. Well, I will tell you what it says. From Deuteronomy 22: She is to be taken out and stoned to death in front of the people. That is what the Bible says.

I get sick and tired of people always thumping the Bible as though you can just open it up and turn to a passage that clears everything up. You can quote the Bible before killing a person to justify the killing. An eye for eye and a tooth for a tooth, the Bible says. Do you know what the Bible says? If a man finds something displeasing in his wife, let him give her a divorce and send her out of the house. It’s in the Book. Do you know what the Bible says? Let the women keep their heads covered and their mouths shut. Do you want me to find it for you? It’s in there. I run into so many people who carry around a forty-three-pound Bible and say, Just do what the Book says.

Joseph is a good man, and he rises to a point that is absolutely remarkable for his day and time. He loves his Bible and he knows his Bible and bless his heart for it. But he reads his Bible through a certain kind of lens, the lens of the character and nature of a God who is loving and kind. Therefore, he says, I will not harm her, abuse her, expose her, shame her, ridicule her, or demean her value, her dignity, or her worth. I will protect her. Where does it say that, Joseph? In your Bible? I’ll tell you where it says that. It says that in the very nature and character of God.

I am absolutely amazed that Joseph is the first person in the New Testament who learned how to read the Bible. Like Joseph, we are to read it through the spectacles of the grace and the goodness and the love of God. If in reading the Bible you find justification for abusing, humiliating, disgracing, harming, or hurting, especially when it makes you feel better about yourself, you are absolutely wrong. The Bible is to be read in the light of the character of God. As my old friend down on the other side of the mountain in East Tennessee used to say over and over again, Well, Craddock, I know one thing. God is just as good a Christian as we are. That’s not bad; that’s not bad at all.

You know, I am feeling good about Christmas. The baby is not born yet; Mary is not even in labor, but it is Christmas already because of Joseph. Through an angel, God said to Joseph in a dream, I want you to marry Mary. I want you to go ahead and marry her. I want you to take care of her. I have chosen you to raise her boy. So please do not forget Joseph. God said, Joseph, I want you to raise the baby. You feed the baby. You care for the mother. You care for the baby.

Christmas for me has already started because I know that when Jesus is born, the man who will teach him, raise him, care for him, show him how to be a carpenter, take him to the synagogue, teach him his Bible, and teach him his lessons is a good man and he will do right. When you have somebody like that, it is already Christmas, and Christmas will last as long as God can find in every community one person who says, I will do what is right.

What is right is to read the scripture and to read the human condition in the light of the love and grace and kindness of God. As long as there is one in every community, it will be Christmas. The question, of course, is whether or not you will be that person.

Chapter 2

Attending a Baptism

Matthew 3:13–17

Our scripture