Scripture: Genesis 38 ¥ Matthew 9: 9-13,
18-26
"Lord, grant us passage through these and all our other transitions, teach us
to befriend our own strange and unsightly edges so that we may better befriend others, and
keep us alive in imagination and courage of heart, 'that we may so pass through things
temporal that we lose not the things eternal.'"
- Gail Godwin, Evensong
Some years ago, a colleague was teaching a preaching course at a local seminary. His
course focused on how to preach on the texts that return each year in the church calendar:
how do you find something new and fresh to say when you've already preached 12 Christmas
Eves to the same congregation, and an equal number of Easters?
One young seminarian, particularly full of himself, always refused to prepare his
sermons in advance. He was certain God would tell him what to say when he stood up to
preach. Finally, Bill had had enough. "All right, then," he said. "Next
week the class will preach on the Christmas story, but you will do your Christmas sermon
today. Your text is Matthew 1:1-17."
Still full of himself, the seminarian went to the front of the classroom and boldly
opened his Bible. His face fell, then with anger in his voice, he said, "This is a
genealogy! There's no sermon here!" Bill responded, "There are several sermons
in that passage, but you'd have read commentaries and study and pray to know what they
are."
At the time, I didn't know that genealogy held such riches, but ever since, I've been
intrigued by the possibilities to be found there. Today's sermon has its roots in that
study.
When we think of the great ancestors of our faith, we tend to think of Abraham and
Sarah, King David and Solomon, the prophets, Peter and Paul. But there are other heroes
and heroines of the faith whose names are less familiar to us. I want to tell you one of
those stories today - the story of Tamar. She is one of five women included in Jesus'
genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew.
This is Tamar's story.
Listen for the Word of God in the 38th chapter of Genesis [adapted for public reading -
the items in brackets are my commentaries on the reading].
It happened at that time that Judah [one of the patriarchs of Israel, one of
Joseph's brothers, in fact the one who recommended that Joseph not be killed but rather
sold into slavery so the brothers could divide the money for his sale] left his brothers
and settled near some Canaanites. He married a Canaanite woman, the daughter of Shua.
Together they had three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah.
The eldest son married a Canaanite woman named Tamar. Er was wicked in the sight of
the Lord and the Lord put him to death.
Then Judah reminded Onan, his middle son, that it was his religious and familial
duty to help his widowed sister-in-law bear a son in his brother's name. But since Onan
knew that if Tamar had a son, that son would inherit the family wealth, he practiced a
particular form of birth control whenever he went in to his brother's wife, so that he
would not give offspring to his brother [You can check out what he actually did on page 35
of the pew Bible, verse 9]. His greed and dishonesty were displeasing in the sight of the
Lord, and God put him to death also.
Then Judah told Tamar to go back to her father's house and live there until the
youngest brother would be old enough to fulfill his duty, but Judah was really afraid that
this son would die like his brothers. So Tamar returned to her father's house.
After some years, Judah's wife died, and after the time of mourning was over, Judah
and a friend, Hirah, went north for the sheepshearing festival at Timnah. [You can imagine
the kinds of activities that happen at a sheepshearing festival!] Tamar heard that her
father-in-law was going to the festival where he would be drinking and carousing. And she
knew that although Shelah was now a young man, but she had not been allowed to marry him.
Tamar put off her widow's garments, put on a veil, wrapped herself up, and sat down
at the entrance to Enaim, on the road to Timnah. When Judah saw her, he thought her to be
a prostitute, for she had covered her face [in the way that a prostitute in those times
would]. He didn't recognize his daughter-in-law and asked to lay with her. "What will
you give to me?" Tamar asked. He answered, "I will send you a kid from the
flock." And she said, "[Oh, right. I'll believe that] only if you give me a
pledge, until you send it." He said, "What pledge shall I give you?" She
replied, "You signet and your cord, and the staff that is in your hand." [These
were the items a man used as his legal signature, for signing contracts, etc.] So he gave
them to her and went in to her, and she conceived by him. Then Tamar got up and went away,
and taking off her veil she put on the garments of her widowhood.
When Judah sent his friend back with the kid to retrieve his pledge from the woman,
Hirah could not find her. He asked the townspeople where to find the prostitute who sits
by the wayside at Enaim. But they said, "No prostitute has been here." So he
returned home and told Judah what happened. They agreed to keep the whole matter quiet.
About three months later Judah was told, "Your daughter-in-law Tamar has
played the whore; moreover she is pregnant as a result of whoredom." And Judah said,
"Bring her out, and let her be burned." As she was being brought out, she sent
word to her father-in-law, "It was the owner of these who made me pregnant." And
she said, "Take note, please, whose these are, the signet and the cord and the
staff." Then Judah acknowledged them and said, "She is more in the right than I,
since I did not give her to my son Shelah." And he did not lie with her again. When
the time of her delivery came, she had twin sons.
- Genesis 38
Tamar's story does not seem, at first blush, as though it would belong in Holy
Scripture: a tradition that requires a widow to try to conceive a son with her dead
husband's relatives; a man so greedy he would destroy the reputation of his brother's
widow in order to take the inheritance that would go to her children; a woman who dresses
up as a prostitute to attract her father-in-law, who doesn't recognize her, but when he
finds out his widowed daughter-in-law is pregnant he has her brought from the neighboring
town so he can burn her to death for adultery. At the climax of the story, the woman pulls
out the evidence that her father-in-law is the father of her children, her life is saved
and she is proclaimed the most righteous one in the whole bunch. The story seems more
appropriate for HBO than for the Bible.
Yet Tamar's story has been told and re-told for centuries, and her name is included in
Jesus' lineage in the Gospel of Matthew. Why would this be? The answer to this question is
part of Matthew's root understanding of who Jesus is, and how God works through those the
world would be likely to consider unrighteous, or at the very least, those who are at the
very bottom of the religious pecking order.
The story of Tamar and Judah turns on its head our notion of who is righteous and who
is not. Judah thought he was the righteous one and could finally get rid of his
troublesome daughter-in-law because she had transgressed the law. But it turned out that
she was the righteous one and he the transgressor.
Tamar had, you might say, only bad choices before her: remain a dependent widow in her
father's house and acquiesce in the dishonoring of her husband's name or plan and carry
out a set of actions so beyond what we consider moral that we are embarrassed to tell the
story in church. Tamar went to extraordinary lengths to do that which she believed God
wanted from her and, therefore, to receive that which was her right. Her desperation made
her brazen, outrageous, gutsy and willing to take incredible risks. From the bad choices
presented her, Tamar makes the better choice, and good comes from it.
It's often said that the most difficult choice is not between good and evil, but
between two goods. An even more difficult choice, however, is between two evils, those
occasions when all our options are distasteful, contrary to our basic values and our core
being, yet we have to choose one of them. Those are the decisions that trouble us most,
when we have to dig down inside and choose the action that has some kernel within it that
connects to what we believe God would want us to do, given the choices we have. With fear
and trepidation, and prayer, and with confidence that God is with us, we hold our nose and
act. At such times, we walk in the shadow of a righteous woman named Tamar, whose
difficult but faithful choice was blessed by God.
It is this tension between righteousness and unrighteousness that I find so fascinating
in today's scripture readings. As we celebrate the educational ministries of this
congregation, as we celebrate graduating seniors and send them on the next part of their
life journey, we celebrate the journey of faith and those teachers and mentors who give us
the foundation to make difficult decisions and to grow in righteousness, those teachers
and mentors who wrestle with us in the struggle, who teach us the fundamentals and
encourage us in the nuances, pick us up when we fall, encourage us in the right, and love
us even when we fail. Through them, we come to know the love and mercy of Jesus and the
strength of community.
It is this love and mercy of Jesus that leads us into the tension between those who
appear righteous and those who are considered unrighteous, between those who are certain
they are right and those who know they are standing in the need of prayer. In today's
Gospel reading, Jesus encounters a variety of people, and through it all, connects with
what is good in the others, accepts the gifts of their unsightly edges, and befriends them
in their need. He is not fooled by those who appear outwardly righteous but aren't really.
He sees below their pious carriage to the hardness and sickness of their hearts.
Nor is he fooled by the named unrighteousness of those who have been thought by others
to be beyond the pale of redemption: tax collectors, sinners, a woman with a hemorrhage.
He recognizes within them the good, the righteous parts, the longing for God, for
wholeness, for acceptance and life. They have the courage to bring him their
"unsightly edges" and trust that he will help them "pass through things
temporal in such a way as not to lose the things eternal." And he does. He honors
their presence, their acknowledgment of their need for God, and their desperation that
leads them to risk rejection from the rabbi in whom they hope to experience the welcome,
the love and the mercy of God.
Jesus throws his lot with the ones who don't fit in the tightly righteous box. Imagine
how grateful those are who have felt unwanted, excluded, degraded. Jesus has said they are
important to God, by his acts of calling one of their own as a disciple and eating and
talking with them. What a burden must have left their heart. What gratitude must have
filled it instead. Go and learn what this means, he told the Pharisees. "I desire
mercy and not sacrifice."
This would appear to be a straight-forward story about the Pharisees' thinking they are
righteous and Jesus throwing his lot with the outcasts. But there is a twist. While Jesus
is at dinner with the tax collectors and sinners, after his argument with the Pharisees, a
leader of the synagogue comes in. Probably the other dinner guests thought, "here we
go again." After all, most leaders of synagogues were Pharisees or Sadducees, both of
whom were often out to get Jesus.
The Pharisees had just blasted at Jesus with both barrels and he had put them in their
place. Then one of their kind asks, in desperation, for help for his daughter. Imagine the
possibility of retaliation, how tempting it would be for most of us to find some good
reason why we can't leave the party right now and do something for a man whose compatriots
have so recently been nasty to us.
Not Jesus, however. Once again, he connects with the good in the other, no matter who
that person is or what group he belongs to, no matter what the others in the room might
think of the man. Jesus sees the man's love of God and his need for God that the man dares
to act upon. "I desire mercy and not sacrifice." Jesus leaves the party of tax
collectors and sinners and goes to heal the daughter. Having welcomed the outsiders in, he
now steps outside their circle to care for the insider. "Go and learn what this
means. I desire mercy and not sacrifice."
On his way to heal the leader's daughter, he encounters and heals a woman considered,
for no cause under her control, to be unrighteous and unclean. Her faith and her
desperation are great, and once again Jesus responds to the goodness within her with mercy
and love. Back and forth he goes between those the world calls righteous and those the
world calls unrighteous, healing and welcoming all who recognize their need for him. Not
holding grudges, not counting our sins against us, responding always to our desire for new
life.
Who is righteous? Who is unrighteous? All of us have sinned and fallen short of the
glory of God, says Paul. What seems to matter most to Jesus, and to our God, is our
willingness to recognize our sinfulness and seek new life, our willingness to recognize
our need for God, our need for a physician. Sometimes we take on ourselves the world's
judgement of us as unworthy or unclean or unrighteous. God sees below the world's
judgement to who we really are and connects to the goodness within us. And that connection
can lead us into greater faith and faithfulness, even in the face of life's difficult
decisions.
Sometimes we consider ourselves more righteous than we are and refuse to acknowledge
our own culpability, duplicity and injury to others and self. We act as though we have no
need of that physician. Even at these times, if we allow God to break through and we can
ask for God's help, Christ is willing to meet us, walk with us, and bring the healing we
need.
"Go and learn what this means," says Jesus. "I desire mercy and not
sacrifice." May God grant us, on our journeys of faith, the grace to acknowledge our
need for God, the wisdom to know the difference between who the world says we are, and who
we really are in the sight of God, an experience of the healing power of God's mercy, and
the grace to show that mercy to others. Amen.
