History

Matthew 1:1 An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. 2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, 3 and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Aram, 4 and Aram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, 5 and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, 6 and Jesse the father of King David. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, 7 and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, 8 and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, 9 and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, 10 and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, 11 and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon. 12 And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoniah was the father of Salathiel, and Salathiel the father of Zerubbabel, 13 and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, 14 and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, 15 and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, 16 and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah. 17 So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.

So we’re taking a few weeks to talk about the Bible, about what kind of thing it is and why that’s important for us. We read these stories every week and part of what we’re doing here is trying to make sense of our lives, trying to find some inkling of love and grace—the presence of God—in the midst of this world where those things often seem difficult to find, so it’s probably important to think about what these stories are that we’re telling together, not least because the people who wrote them seemed to want us to read them with discernment, with what they call wisdom. This is why last week Heather shared the analogy of a writer named Irenaeus, that the words of Scripture are like tiles in a mosaic—you can arrange them into almost any shape, it requires wisdom to see how they fit together into a picture of Jesus.

One of those writers, Paul, even said regarding Scripture that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life. However the divine reveals itself to us in our interaction with these words, it’s not in a straightforward way. The Bible is not the Christian (or the Jewish) Constitution. Like so many of our traditions, these words reveal who God is like light curling around the gravity of a Black Hole, giving shape to a mystery that remains beyond them even as they do reveal it. If that’s what these words are doing, it doesn’t mean we leave the letter behind, but it does change the way we approach it. It allows us to pay attention to it in different ways. We approach these stories, and the stuff of our own lives, looking for things that make sense, for continuity, for the familiar, while also knowing that the truth about God, the world, and our lives, often emerges in the breaks, in the strange, in the unexpected.

Which is why this week, I wanted us to think about the relationship between the Bible and History. I think the storytellers of our Scriptures are pretty self-conscious about this back and forth between continuity and interruption when they give their testimonies of how they see God’s work in the world. Now, when we talk about “history,” there’s an important distinction we need to make. Because what a lot of us mean is, “Stuff that actually happened.” And there are books of the Bible purporting to give us an account of things that actually happened, especially the records of the Kings of Israel. Then there are books that give us a mythological or legendary or theological account of things that happened, like much of the book of Genesis. And so when people talk about “history” and the Bible, often they mean subjecting these stories we read to modern, scientific approaches, using archeology and linguistics and comparative literature to make a judgment about whether or not something actually happened. And that kind of study can be really illuminating (it can also be really tiresome when people act like it’s some “gotcha” when they point out that mythological texts aren’t historical). Studying historical approaches can help us understand the background of what we’re reading together, it can help us pay closer attention to details we may have missed. There doesn’t have to be anything scary about that and I think that’s pretty straightforward.

Now, where things get more interesting, I think, is when we remember that there is a distance between the things that happened and how people tell the story of things that happened. So there’s a second sense of “history,” that it is the practice of finding cause and effect relationships and narrating those relationships. So History is not “the things that happened,” it is people’s attempt now to tell a story that gives order to the things that happened. Which is actually often really complicated. Like, historians still argue about what caused World War I. The school answer is that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, but the relationships and the alliances and pacts are so convoluted that 100 years later, it’s not entirely clear to people who study this what all of the cause and effect relationships were that put the whole world at war.

Sometimes, maybe even often, we don’t even know how to make sense of the events of our own lives, and we were eye witnesses to them! So much of our psychology comes from these stories we tell as we make connections and interpret the events of our lives. This is what trauma actually is—it’s not just a bad thing that happened, its the narrative, the logic, in the aftermath of that event where you start to tell yourself, I’m not ever safe, I’m always gonna mess things up like this, this wasn’t just a bad thing that happened but it is a characteristic pattern of my life. Healing or processing then is really about learning how to re-narrate your own history.

We’ve all heard that phrase, history is written by the winners, which doesn’t just mean that history is always biased, it also means that the stories we tell about the past are also stories justifying our present. Which is why I’m always a little skeptical of people who make an argument for something saying “We need to be on the right side of history.” I hear what they’re trying to say, but it’s not like people in the future inevitably come to moral conclusions, and even when it seems like they do, it’s often by sacrificing what actually made an event good in the first place. Think of Martin Luther King, Jr. who was largely reviled by white Americans in his time, but now everybody loves him, as long as you quote like two lines from his I Have A Dream speech and forget the rest of that speech, all his other writings, and the ways that his “nonviolent” protests shut down local economies. That longing to be found worthy in history is real, but I think it mistakes what history is. It’s searching for a continuity that can only be achieved, that isn’t inevitable.

Philosopher Walter Benjamin puts it this way when he says, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”

I think the storytellers of the Bible are very much aware of this dynamic, this back and forth between continuity, cause and effect, and interruption, crisis. They invite us to cause an emergency that threatens fascism and every fascistic impulse.

In our Scripture this morning, the writer of Matthew places Jesus within a history, a history that stretches back into the legendary past, but that draws a line of continuity across the whole history of the Jewish people. A genealogy, while maybe not always accurate in the first sense of history, provides a cause and effect narrative in the second of history.

He’s not a ghost or an ethereal spirit who floats down and gives esoteric wisdom that can fit in and out of any context. Jesus had a body. He was born, from a mom, who had parents and they had parents, and on and on. And through those events, he was born into a community that’s occupied by a brutal empire after having been exiled under other brutal empires. And his work is to bring about the Kingdom of God in time. That’s not just a metaphor. That’s not just a spiritual truth that can make us feel warm in our hearts while everything falls apart around us. The Kingdom of God is supposed to be a historical reality, or it’s supposed bring history to a crisis, it’s supposed to rearrange history so that different logics can go to work.

And this means that God meets us in the particular details of our own histories, not the propagandas, not the nice testimonies where our memories are neatly ordered, but even in those events that unravel meaning. In this genealogy, that is giving us Jesus’ royal lineage so that we know he’s here to reorganize the world, Matthew includes that “David was the father of Solomon by the wife if Uriah.” This is not a pristine mythology of great men. The storyteller includes one of David’s ugliest moments, one of the most violent moments in the whole Bible, in the lineage of Jesus. This doesn’t justify that moment or make it so that it’s OK because everything worked out in the end. It means that in the way this story imagines history, we have to tell the truth about all of the ugly details, too. You can’t gloss over the stuff that doesn’t fit a prettier narrative. We have to tell the truth even when the truth doesn’t flatter us, even when it turns out we or our lineage was on the wrong side of history. This is why we continue to acknowledge that when Jubilee was founded, we had a pastor accused of sexual misconduct that occurred before that person worked here. That’s part of our history. We can’t just move on. We have to acknowledge that that’s in our lineage so we can create a new genealogy. We have to acknowledge that we have this land because Ephesus Baptist Church had this land and Ephesus Baptist Church had this land because it was set aside by the Leigh family, who owned slaves. We can’t break those lines of continuity until we at least tell the truth about them and reckon with the fact that they are our lineage.

Because ultimately, God wants us to break those lines of continuity. We’re supposed to interrupt them. God meets us in the world in Jesus, but not to continue the timeline of history, the same old logic of cause and effect. One theologian say that Jesus’ resurrection isn’t a historical event, not because it didn’t happen but because whatever happened there didn’t arise out of any historical process. It was radically new. This writer says that if history is a timeline, then Jesus is like a crater blown in that timeline.

Which I think also comes across in the fact that, in our Scripture this morning, we come to the end and find out that this whole genealogy leads up to Joseph, who in the story we tell is not Jesus’ biological father. This lineage is and is not his. It is his, this is the family he’s born into, he emerges in their context and receives that history. But he also represents a radical break with history, a break with the endless repetitions of empires and dynasties and conquerings and the stories we’ve been taught to tell about their inevitability and our smallness compared to them. He’s in history but not of it. His presence introduces a different logic, a different way of making meaning of our context. If this is true, then we can acknowledge our lineages, we can tell the truth about them without glossing over them, but we don’t have to accept them as the only way things could be. Life doesn’t have to continue on the way it has. There’s not a right side and wrong side of history, there’s the world we shape together now, over and over and over again, through the generations as we work with and push against what we’ve received.

So our Scriptures give us histories, but they also give us a kind of storytelling that invites us to tell new stories, live in new ways, reach beyond and beneath and against the flow of history for a better way to live. To say that some parts of the Bible engage in “history” is to say that the shape of God’s mysteries, that Black Hole where meaning is lost and made again, both emerges within our timelines, but does so to give us space to make a new timeline, as we tell stories about our world and our own lives. Amen.