Matthew 1:1-17

November 29, 2020

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

The sermon starts around 20:00 in the audio file.

Or, Some Anticipation Required

Series: Advent 2020 #1

Introduction

I have never preached a series of advent/Christmas messages before. For a number of years I’ve taken the four advent Sundays and connected four confession exhortations or communion meditations, but never four sermons. I prefer keeping the course through a book of the Bible, at least up until the Sunday immediately preceding Christmas. Even then many times I try to link the providentially appointed next paragraph with the holiday theme.

But it’s 2020. If the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself, then could we say that change feels like the most normal thing? That obviously breaks down, and quickly, but I thought, why not? Revelation 17 and 18 go together, so pausing in between is sort of like parking on the downhill side. After these Christmas sermons and some sermons on our worship and liturgy, we’ll pick up in the Apocalypse and speed toward the finish sometime in the spring, Lord willing and the ‘rona don’t rise.

So, four whole messages for advent. Advent (from Latin adventus), as we’ve learned, means coming. Some people advent naturally, others of us have learned to appreciate the discipline of the season, and even how the annual month of conscious re-waiting for celebrating Christ’s incarnation (His first coming) orients us for Christ’s parousia (second coming). Not everyone gets excited about the Christmas holiday, and fine, but every Christian should be getting ready for the great day of the Lord.

What I’d like to do in these messages is consider some Christmas meta, not just sub details, but some of the overarching narrative that gives a pattern or structure for our beliefs. Christmas is a message about the coming of God’s Son, and Christmas gives meaning to God’s people.

To start that, I want to take a look at a part of the story that most people skip, or skim. We’re going to take a look at, and a look through, the genealogy of Jesus in the first chapter of Matthew. If your family reads Scripture on Christmas morning, you probably start in Matthew 1:18, “Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way” (or you read Luke 2 instead). And yet the first verses of Matthew’s gospel, the first verses of the New Testament are, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ” (1:1).

There are (at least) four large-scale encouragements, applications, plot points, object lessons, etc., in this genealogy. Don’t get anxious about how bored you’re going to be, at least wait a little before deciding you’d rather quietly disagree about the millennium.

In fact, the first lesson is just that: wait.

Waiting is an appropriate subject for a heavenly host of reasons, including that this is the first Sunday of advent, so it is the furthest Sunday from Christmas. Christmas is on Friday this year, so we’re almost as far away as we could be. We are at least post-Thanksgiving, which makes it lawful to talk about the next festivity, but it is also still November.

Waiting is also appropriate because 2020 has demanded it. “Fifteen days to flatten the curve” was 259 days ago. Lockdown deadlines approached, pressure built, and then deadlines were extended, restrictions added, inconsistencies multiplied, apparently arbitrary decisions magnified. We turned some anticipation energy toward elections, and what a sinus headache with your head in a vice on a plane climbing altitude that turned out to be. Whence comest relief? We can’t crescendo forever, right?

I like movies the same way I recommend marital engagements: short and sweet. Anticipation can be fun, if it doesn’t go on forever. I appreciate Melville’s work in Moby Dick, how he so successfully gave me a sense of how tedious months on a ship in the [...]