Fly-Over Country?

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR Matthew 1:1 NIV This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham: CONSIDER Fly-over country.  For the longest time, that’s how I treated these biblical genealogies—fly-over country—those endless expanses of unpronounceable names. I mean, why would the greatest story ever imagined start this way; fly-over country. And for the longest time I flew right over the forty-two names spanning three sets of fourteen generations covering some 2,062 years? Something tells me more than a few of you have done the same thing.  This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham: But . . .  What if I told you these first seventeen verses of Matthew—the first Gospel account listed in our Bibles—were the most important verses in the Gospel; indeed the whole Bible? Would you believe me? And what if I told you I could summarize this heretofore not so seemingly relevant to our everyday lives into a single word? Would you be willing to land the plane, get out and walk around on the ground of this heretofore fly-over country?  This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham:  So what’s the one word summary? Thanks for asking.  Family.  Jesus has a family.  He had MiMi and a PaPa, a Peepaw and a Meemaw.  But it was no Ward and June Cleaver, Cliff and Clair Huxtable, Brady Bunch, Keeping Up with the Kardashians family. Jesus has a family and its more broken and dysfunctional and chaotic than even ours. Look carefully. It is filled with sin and death, embrace and exile, failure and success, insiders and outsiders, murderers and masquaraders, prostitutes and polygamists, and more. This family tree even breaks all the rules of the patriarchy by naming five women of heroic proportions and questionable reputations.  Family.  Jesus has a family. It’s the place of our greatest blessings and deepest brokenness. And he was born into this lineage so you and I could be born again into his family. Jesus was born into his broken family so he could bring redemption into our broken family.  This Gospel is a story about a family; about how the family of Jesus becomes the family of you and me—the redemption of all the sin and suffering, all the darkness and death, all the chaos and conflict. It will all come down to a tree.  This broken family, our broken family, our broken lives, will lead us to a tree on which Jesus will be broken for it all. Thank God he didn’t fly over this country of our families. He got down on the ground and walked into our lives and he gave his life on a cross. Jesus has a family tree. That’s where we are headed over these next eighty-eight days—into the family tree of Jesus.  This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham:  PRAY Our Father, if not me, then who. If not here, then where. If not now, then when. And, Lord Jesus, if not you, then how? I belong to you. You belong to me. You are my family tree. Come, Holy Spirit, and let it be so for my whole family. In Jesus's name, amen.