The Story We Find Ourselves In

Series: Who is Jesus: Gospel of Matthew

“The Story we Find Ourselves In”

Message @ Jericho Ridge– Sun, April 11, 2021 (Series: Gospel of Matthew)

 

Thanks, Otty, for sharing your story with us and your warm invitation to walk with you as a community.  On behalf of the Jericho family, I say “welcome”.  And I want to add my welcome to you, friend, as you join us in this online space for a time of learning and exploration together. My name is Brad. I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge. 

 

If you are new of visiting with us, this is a great time to be along for the ride.  If you do me a favour and head to jerichoridge.com/connect and fill out the 30 second connection card, that lets us know how we can serve you better. If you are watching on our interactive Church Online platform, the button will be up for you now to click.  Thanks for being with us today.

 

Today we are launching into a new teaching series entitled “Who Is Jesus” where we’ll be going through the whole gospel of Matthew over the next two months.  So today I want to set the stage for us by helping us get some of the big picture things that Matthew wants for us to know.  Over the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing from a variety of diverse teaching voices in our community as well as wide range of journey stories and my hope is that you’ll get to know each other better, you’ll get to know Jesus better as well. 

 

Because the way that we get to know about a family is through the stories we tell ourselves.  Family stories have an identity shaping function.  Think for a moment about the stories you have heard or told about your grandparents or other family members.  The way these stories are told has an important function in identity formation. 

 

Take, for example, the stories I heard growing in in my family about my grandparents.  On my mom’s side, the story that gets told is about her father, who pulled a help wanted ad off the bulletin board at the University of Toronto as an engineering graduate and went to work for an energy company.  He started at the bottom and eventually worked his way up till he was president of that company.  The story is told in such a way that it communicates the value of hard work and reinforces the value of being a self-made person. 

 

On my dads’ side, the story that is told about his father is a story of overcoming adversity.  He lost an eye to an accident in his teen years and then lost his leg to cancer in his mid-life.  But instead of becoming bitter or adversarial, he chose to help others and to become an advocate for others who faces barriers or disabilities in their own lives.

 

These stories are powerful factors that shape and form identity in my family.  And your family likely has their own set of foundational stories that have embedded in them their own sets of lessons or values. Dr. Amanda Mbuvi talks about his in her helpful book “Belonging in Genesis: Biblical Israel and the Politics of Identity Formation’. She argues that the stories we tell ourselves shape our understanding of who we are in the world.  Our stories give us certain assumptions and so we need to think carefully about the kinds of stories we find ourselves in. 

 

And the same is true for us as Christians.  We have a family story. And this story shapes our identity and our actions and convictions.  So today, we’re going to dive into part of our origin story and we’re going to see what our stories as humans make the most sense and come most alive when we locate them within the story of Jesus. 

 

Turn with me in your Bibles or on your devices to Matthew.  Matthew is the first but not the earliest of the 4 written accounts of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus called gospels.  The gospel of Matthew is written primarily to a first century Jewish audience with a particular desire to help them see the story of Jesus as a continuation of their own story.  And this is something we still struggle with today. 

 

Because Matthews gospel begins in what to us, might seem like a strange way.  It begins with a list of begats. A genealogy, which is to say a record of the ancestors of Jesus, the Messiah, a descendant of David and of Abraham.  Then for 15 verses, the text simply narrates a family tree: Abraham was the father of Isaac, who was the father of Jacob who was the father of Judah and his brothers, etc, etc. 

 

And it is helpful to pause and ask “why in the world would you start the story of Jesus in this way?”  Why not start like the gospel of Mark does – boom, right into the story of John the Baptiser.  Or why not start like Luke does, who gives a nice little preface that helps us understand the meticulous historical research that went into the story of Jesus.  Or like John does with a philosophical prologue.  Why a boring list of names that most of us (be truthful) skip over when we get to something like this?  Why not save that for the credits or an appendices and not bore us with it up front?! 

 

Putting aside for a minute the helpful tidbits of information about the women in this genealogy (we did a whole series on them two years ago entitled Hidden Figures well worth a listen if you missed it), and putting aside for a moment how WE might like to hear a story told, we have to ask a better question; “what meaning might this kind of a start to a story have for the readers that Matthew is addressing – be they in the first century or in the 21st century?  And it’s here that the power of this list really begins to open up for us. 

 

You see, Matthew is giving us a family story map.  A geography of belonging.  Matthew is helping his readers, and us, to locate the story of Jesus inside and alongside the story of the people of ancient Israel.  Sometimes you hear people talking like “all the old Testament stuff is rubbish… now Jesus came and it’s out with the old and in with the new’. (that’s a theological error called dispensationalism).

 

But that’s not a helpful way of thinking about things because the Gospel of Matthew is interested more in the radical continuity of the storyline.  Look at, for example, the ongoing language of fulfillment in even just the first 3 chapters of Matthew.      

In chapter 1:22, All this occurred to fulfill the lord’s message through His prophet. 

2;15 – his fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet:

2;17 – this brutal action “fulfilled what God had spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:’

2:23 – “his fulfilled what the prophets had said:”

3:15 – Jesus did this to fulfill all righteousness. 

 

In other words, whatever else we are going to take away from the gospel of Matthew, we must first get ahold of the notion that in Jesus, God has come to fulfillment of all of the ancient promises in the Old Testament.  What were those promises?  They were the ones make to Abraham that his family would be a blessing to all the nations. .  They were the promises made the Ruth that she would be included as an outsider in the family of God.   They were the promises to David that a King would come and would rule the world with justice and peace.  And many, many more!   

 

I love the way that theologian N.T. Wright speaks about this.  In a class I took with him at Regent two summers ago, he put it this way “In Messiah Jesus, something shocking has happened.  God has acted surprisingly and unexpectedly just as he always said He would.  The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has done what he always promised and launched His new creation”. 

 

So in order to understand the story of Jesus, we have to understand the story of Jesus’ people, which is reflected to us in the Old Testament.  Jesus is not the first chapter in the story of God’s dealings with humankinds… and it certain is not the last.   

 

Now, I should pause for a moment and clarify secondly how I am using the term “story’.  Because when I use the term story, I am not talking about a fairy tale or make believe narrative.  I am using it in the sense of author and theologian C.S. Lewis who wrote that:  

 

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences.” 

 

The story of Jesus is not just some mythical tale about a good teacher who helps us understand how to be good people.  The story of Jesus is an historical story, a very human story, that is located in a particular time and a particular place. 

 

Look at the start of Matthew 2, the story of Jesus’s birth.  It is not just given a sense of continuity with the identity of the ancient people of God, but it is given a particular time and date stamp; it was launched during the reign of Hetod.  It happened in Bethlehem and Nazareth and Egypt and Judea…. These are real places which even today you can visit and verify some of the historical details of this story. 

 

I have stuff in my office that helps remind me of things.  I have family photo to remind me to pray for my kids, I have a pocket watch from my great uncle to remind me of my connection to my family history, and I have a rock, given to me by my friend Peter which he picked up on a trip to Israel. 

 

Now, I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to pack out rocks on the tour, but this rock reminds me that though I can’t[ travel there now, there are real places where Jesus walked.  A real tomb that He rose from on the third day that we celebrated last weekend. A real place where he gathered with his disciples to pray.  And I get that much of it has been commoditized over the centuries but this rock reminds me that there’s still some very real dirt kicking around on his planet that was touched by the sandals of the rabbi that I follow.  The story of Jesus is an historical story.  

 

 

As C.S. Lewis says Jesus happened ‘at a particular date, in a particular place, followed be definable historical consequences”.  This is something that I want you to grasp and be confident of if you are a person who claims to follow Jesus.  That our story is an historical story.  It is a story rooted in earth and soil and sky and sea and people.  And that’s why, in our teaching times here at Jericho Ridge, you’ll hear us talk about elements of the world into which the Bible was written. 

 

This is also why you’ll hear me and others push aback against a sense of a Jesus who is colonial or Caucasian.  Jesus was born as a person of colour.  Much of the medieval art and even contemporary movie depictions of the life of Jesus have a very, very white man.  But Jesus would have had dark skin.  He did not descend from heaven in a pristine white robe, blue sash, ever smiling face and say “ta da!  I’m here!”  He entered our world as a helpless infant through the birth canal of a middle eastern woman named Mary to who was married to a carpenter named joseph who lived in a town called Nazareth.  Who might have stepped on this rock (I’m kidding about the stepping on my rock part but you take my point). 

 

I think when we over-emphasize the deity or divinity of Jesus, we miss out of this dirt under the fingernails Jesus.  We’re going to talk more about this next week that Jesus was tempted like you and I are tempted. 

 

There’s a new book by my friend Seattle pastor Kurt Willms called “Echoing Hope: How the Humanity of Jesus Redeems our Pain”

 

In in Kurt is trying to help us come to grips with the implications of the humanity of Jesus.  He talks about how if we only emphasize the divine aspects of Jesus nature, we can’t really understand how Jesus enters into our places of pain and suffering.  Kurt says reminds us that this matters that Jesus took on our nature so that we might take on his.”   It

So I love how Matthew reminds of of this in gritty detail in chapter 2.  The pageantry of the wise men from the East, the horrible and tragedy of Herd’s murder of the innocents, the flight of Jesus as a refugee to Egypt. 

 

All of this helps us understand the reality that the story of Jesus is that it is located in a particular time and a particular place.  This makes it not only historical, but defensible and intellectually credible.   

 

So first, Jesus story is a story of radically disruptive continuity between the old and new thing that God is doing.  Secondly, Jesus’ story is a story of real historical places, and persons and spaces. 

As we flip the page over to Chapter 3, I want to briefly that the story of Jesus is a story of radical obedience.

 

In Mathew 3, we come across the story of John the baptizer, who is a cousin of Jesus and the last in the line of the Old Testament prophets.  John has a unique ministry: he is practicing the ancient ritual of immersing people in water to demonstrate that they have been cleansed from a live of evil and sin and have turned to God.

 

And his ministry is going really well.  There are lots of people who have spiritual hunger and thirst and so john is preaching up a storm in the Jordan River valley.  And he identifies for people that they need to not just talk about how much they love God, they need to show it.  Look with me at Matthew 3:

 

“Prove by the way you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God. 9 Don’t just say to each other, ‘We’re safe, for we are descendants of Abraham.’ That means nothing, for I tell you, God can create children of Abraham from these very stones. 10 Even now the ax of God’s judgment is poised, ready to sever the roots of the trees. Yes, every tree that does not produce good fruit will be chopped down and thrown into the fire.

 

11 “I baptize with[d] water those who repent of their sins and turn to God. But someone is coming soon who is greater than I am—so much greater that I’m not worthy even to be his slave and carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit”

 

John was clear that someone amazing is coming and that someone is Jesus.  But then Jesus comes to John and says “I’d like to be baptized”

 

Look with me at Matthew 3:14: “But John tried to talk him out of it. “I am the one who needs to be baptized by you,” he said, “so why are you coming to me?” 15 But Jesus said, “It should be done, for we must carry out all that God requires.[f]” So John agreed to baptize him. 16 After his baptism, as Jesus came up out of the water, the heavens were opened[g] and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and settling on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.”

 

One of the powerful things that I wrestle with is that I feel a sense that I need to do the right things in order for God to love me.  I need to read my Bible or pray a certain amount or give money or serve or fill in the blank.  And while obedience to God in these areas of powerful and life-giving, note that Jesus here had not done a single thing to earn God’s favour or the words of blessing spoken over him.  He hadn’t preached his first sermon, he hadn’t healed anybody that we know of.  This was a moment of being before doing. 

 

And in that moment, where Jesus submits to the pathway of obedience, the symbolic moment of baptism where Jesus says publicly to God and to others “this is the path that I will walk”, God the Spirit descends in bodily form, God the Father speaks a voice of blessing” This is my dearly loved child, who brings me great joy.” 

 

Friend, maybe for you, you need to be reminded in this time of profound non-doing that we are in together, that you belovoendness is not connected to your ability to produce things for God.  Your sense of son-ship, your belovedness as a daughter of the King is not bound up in what you Do or do not do.  You work, my work, is to learn to receive the words spoken over us.

 

When we can learn to do this, we begin to understand that the story of Jesus is not just any story, it is OUR story.  It is your story, it is my story.  If you choose to enter into it and participate not as a dispassionate observer, but one who is beloved by the Father, empower by the Spirit and in family relationship with Jesus the Son.  Let’s pray together. 

 

 

 

BENEDICTION

 

God of grace and glory,

you call us with your voice of flame

to be your people, faithful and courageous.

As your beloved Son embraced his mission

in the waters of baptism,

inspire us with the fire of your Spirit

to join in his transforming work.

We ask this in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ,

who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

 

~ from Revised Common Lectionary Prayers copyright © 200

The story of Jesus is not just any story... You and I are invited to choose to enter into it and participate, not as a dispassionate observer, but one who is beloved by the Father, empower by the Spirit and in family relationship with Jesus the Son

Speaker: Brad Sumner

April 11, 2021
Matthew 1:1-3:17

Brad Sumner

Lead Pastor

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