A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. A family record of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah, and his brothers. Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar. Perez was the father of Hezron.
Hezron, the father of Ram. Ram was the father of Amminidab, and Amminidab, the father of Nashon. Nashon, the father of Solomon. Solomon was the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab. Boaz was the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth.
Obed was the father of Jesse. Jesse, the father of king David. David was the father of Solomon whose mother had been the wife of Uriah. You'll remember that horrible story. Solomon was the father of Rehoboam Rehoboam, the father of Abia, and Abia, the father of Asa.
Asa was the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat, the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah. Uzziah was the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz. Ahaz, the father of Ezekiah, and Ezekiah was the father of Manasseh. Manasseh, the father of Amos, and Amos, father of Josiah. Josiah became the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the Babylonian exile.
After the Babylonian exile, Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, and Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel was the father of Abiud. Abiud, the father of Eliakim Eliakim, the father of Azor. Azor was the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Akim. Akim the father of Eliud. Eliud was the father of Elijah, and Elijah the father of Mathan.
Matan, the father of Jacob. Now we're coming down to something we recognize. Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. It wasn't heard that Jesus, who is called the Messiah, was born. Thus, says a Matthew, the total number of generations is from Abraham to David, 14 generations.
From David to the Babylonian captivity, 14 generations. And from the Babylonian captivity to the Messiah, 14 generations. And this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Of course, as we rattle off these names, they don't mean an awful lot to some of us, to most of us. They're characters from the old testament and may mean more or less to us. Some of those names we recognize, others we don't, depending on how much we know of the Old Testament. But the main thrust of this statement from Saint Matthew is not just to review the Old Testament. That's why we have a we're beginning the special liturgies beginning with the December 17, edging into the anniversary of our lord's birth.
And so this text is chosen on this Monday for very special reasons. It is an effort to put Jesus Christ and his birth and his ancestry in an historical setting, in the actuality of the of the time and space limited events of this world. And no matter how you read this, you can't escape that idea. And yet, you see, today there's such an effort on the part, and there's nothing new about this attitude, that after all, the facts of the matter, that is what actually happened, is not of very great importance. Whether Christ was born of a virgin suffered and died or whether he rose from the dead, whether these are actual facts, you have these very elevated spiritual people.
We used to call them Gnostics. They say, it doesn't really matter, you know. What matters is whether we have a savior. And what do they mean by that? Not that that Christ, the son of god, actually was born of a woman at a definite time and in a definite place, and that he had a definite ancestry, and that he had a very definite history.
No. Those things are immaterial. They are of this world. They are of physical space time limitations. They are finite.
You you see, they are grubby. What we want are the spiritual truths which elevate our minds and our souls. It's the resurrection of Christ. Whether that's just a myth, so what? It works.
That and and they'll say that's the reality. That's what that and then we have this the whole sequence of this love business. That is not the attitude of the holy Roman Catholic church. We're grubby. We are very grubby.
It was the Catholic church in the third and the fourth and the fifth centuries AD over there in Asia Minor, in Ephesus, Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon. It was the church who stood up and was grubby, grubby that the body of Christ was a real body, not just some kind of a phenomenon. That the birth of Christ was a reality and a fact, not some kind of an apparition or an illusion or some kind of a product of collective imagination. No matter how spirits and elevating the thing would be, the question is, did it happen? Did it happen in time and space?
And the church has said, write down the centuries consistently, it happened in time and space. And that the baby of Mary was a real baby, not of an illusion, not a phenomena in the sense of of of of something that isn't real, that it was an actual body. See, these very elevated spiritual people, these neo Platonists, they couldn't great they couldn't admit that. That God Almighty, the omnipotent being, had taken upon himself a human body. See, they had a very low regard for our old bodies.
They were they were the hangover from Platonism. And it's still with us. It is still with us, you know. The church is grubby. The church is factual.
The church is circumstantial. The church faces up to sometimes very unpalatable truths. Very unpalatable. You see, today we are much more interested, you might say, in morrow than we are in dogma. Much more so.
Because people will say, Oh, well, what difference does it make what you believe? It's what you do that matters. Well, that's a lot of malony, you know. The then the a worse thing than doing evil is doing good for the wrong motive. You ever thought about that?
And so when they here as the church is did any of you see that rerun of Oh God? You'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Many of the views voiced there are the views of good, sincere, honest to God citizens of The United States. We mustn't be devising. After all, it what it what matters is whether we love one another.
And if we have an image of God that helps us to do that, that's fine. But let's not get all embroiled in whether God did this, or whether there was a paradise or whether there was an Adam and Eve and all of those things. They are so insignificant. Just live happily and love one another. See, that's the guff.
Because you see, it sounds pretty good, but there's no substance to it. There is no substance to it. And one of the great little old facts that it completely ignores is that men and women are not essentially perfect. We are all polited and tainted, and you don't have to be a great psychologist to know that. And that's obvious.
Even those who absolutely have no concept of God admit that. And so the church comes back today, and and it gives us this boring series of names and names and dates and who was the father of whom and all of you will say, oh, so what? So what? What the church is saying is that Christ actually came into this world. Christ was born.
Christ had an ancestry. He didn't come out of the thin air. He was born of a woman whose husband was Joseph, and we know where Joseph came from. That's what the church is telling us today. That and you see, if you sit down and think about it, if you saw this, oh, God, I've seen about three or four there's a lot good of good in it, of course, but there's a lot of hogwash in it.
But if you sit down, you see, and you think of it that God almighty became something in the womb of a virgin girl named Mary and was born and became one of us in everything except sin, that is absolutely incredible. And the church knows it. The church is a good psychologist. Doesn't have a PhD yet, but it's working on it. That the human nature, we cannot really imagine that.
Of course, we can't imagine that. The church says it happened. It happened. It's a fact whether you like it or not or whether you can accept it or not, it happened. And the main thing that I value is that it did happen.
Perfect past tense. In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.