[00:00:08] Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
[00:00:14] This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:42] Good morning.
[00:00:44] How are you guys?
[00:00:46] Really?
[00:00:49] Okay. All right. I believe you.
[00:00:53] Well, this morning we are going to continue with our adventure theme. Today, of course, as you have already heard, is the second week of Advent, and our theme is peace.
[00:01:06] And so I've chosen a passage for us today that might seem a bit unusual. And occasionally people will point out to me after church, by people, of course, I mean Tina Edwards, after church, will point out to me, like what I had to say seemed to have no correspondence whatsoever to the passage that we read. So I want to let you know ahead of time, by which I mean Tina Edwards, that today might be one of those days. Just as a bit of forewarning for those of you who don't know if you're visiting. By the way, I'm Jason Coker. I'm one of the co lead ministers here along with Janelle. And today we're going to take a look at Matthew, chapter 1, verses 10 through 17. If you have a Bible, you are of course, welcome to turn there. If you don't have your Bible, we're going to put the passage up on the screen. This is actually a snippet of the genealogy in Matthew, chapter one. So I don't know if you've ever had a sermon on any of the genealogies, but that's what's going to happen today.
[00:02:20] And just because I'm a merciful and gracious pastor, I've chosen just a small snippet of the genealogy. But there is, I think, something important to talk about here. And what we're going to talk about with respect to this genealogy is a little bit different because this whole series of Advent that we're doing, which is the four Sundays leading up to Christmas, we're essentially approaching Advent through the eyes of Mary.
[00:02:49] And, you know, because last week, if you were here or if you were watching online, we talked about the Angel Gabriel visiting Mary, and I suggested to you that a very important part of that passage and an important part of understanding the gospel is embracing the femininity of the gospel. And hopefully you didn't hear in that message that masculinity is bad, because it isn't, or at least it doesn't have to be. We have an awful lot of examples of very bad masculinity in our culture and throughout history. But that doesn't mean masculinity is bad, but simply that I think it's important for us to see the Gospel and to see these passages through the eyes of femininity so that we don't do what we historically have done, which is hate and despise and denigrate women.
[00:03:50] It's important for us to remember that the Gospel comes to us literally in the person of Christ through a woman.
[00:03:58] And I think there are really profound implications for us and our understanding of God in that. So we're going to be reading this genealogy through those eyes.
[00:04:09] So In Matthew, chapter one, starting in verse 10, it says this and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh. Now that and should clue you in that the previous nine verses, you know, were also saying similar things. So just trust me for now until you go back home and open your Bible and double check. Yes, just before this, there was a long list of other names, a long list of other dudes names, by the way, which is not irrelevant. But picking it up, in verse 10 it says, and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon, verse 12. And after the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Salathiel, and Salathiel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiyud, and Abiyud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor and Azor the father of Zadok and Zadok the father of Achim and Achim the father of Elud and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of I almost said Manhattan, Matthan and Matthen the father of Jacob. And here we have arrived at the point of the genealogy, which we'll get to in just a minute. Verse 16. And Jacob the father of Joseph and Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, and who is called the Messiah. And so this genealogy obviously has something to do with Jesus, the birth of whom is the whole point of Advent. Would you just pray with me for a moment? God, we thank you for today, for this time and this space that we have. We are humbled that we are gathered here in a space where people have been gathering since 1928 every Sunday to celebrate and to lament and to organize our lives around you and this message of goodness and of peace and the coming of the one that we look toward on December 25, whose birth and entrance into the world promises us peace.
[00:06:36] Pray God, that as we would do those things in this place, pray and sing and receive communion and attend to your scripture, that you would give us a sense of connection, of continuity with all those who came before us and all those who will come after us.
[00:06:57] Unite us around this message of peace in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:07:01] So, again, what we have here in Matthew chapter one is a genealogy. This is a genealogy of Jesus, or at least that is the point of it. It has led all the way up to Joseph, who is the father of Jesus. The point of this genealogy is to essentially establish the legitimacy, the credibility, the social status of Jesus as the proposed Messiah in the ancient near east to the Jewish people. This is very common in the ancient world, and I would say also fairly common today.
[00:07:38] You know, like, we sort of pretend anytime we're reading passages like this, like, this is an old thing, that in the old world, in the ancient world, that tracing the lineage of people was really important to establish, like rights of inheritance, for example, or the fact that you might belong to the right family instead of, you know, the wrong family. We know who the wrong families are, right? And that you don't belong to them, that you're not part of the riffraff, so to speak.
[00:08:04] But this is, of course, common today, too.
[00:08:08] I'm almost 54, FYI, and so that means that sometime in the last few years, I inexplicably became interested in my genealogy. This is very odd for a WASP like me, right? Like, I was raised on Betty Crocker with absolutely no institutional memory whatsoever of my lineage.
[00:08:26] I know in some distant sense that my lineage is English and Germanic, and that's about it, right? Very little was passed down to me. I have no real sense of social identity as a white guy in the United States of America, what my roots are. And so it is, I think, understandable and very common that, like Ancestry.com is blowing up and 23andMe, you know, got very big before it was revealed that they were mishandling your DNA.
[00:08:58] We have, I think, a longing to know what our roots are, what our history is, what our identity is by virtue of where we came from.
[00:09:07] And I became very curious about that a few years ago, I think for all those same reasons. And because of that, I've become aware that, like, I'm attached in my past to different Sort of traditions and different people groups, and that's fun. That gives me a sense of belonging in a weird way, right? Like my culture, my heritage is more than the Betty Crocker cookbook that my mother and grandmother cooked out of.
[00:09:33] Maybe that doesn't mean anything to you, but to me, it's sort of interesting.
[00:09:38] And the same was true for them. The reason we find genealogies in these ancient texts is because it was terribly important to their social status and to their legal inheritances to establish what your lineage was. And the question here, of course, is, what is Jesus lineage? Is he legitimate? You see, the real messiah? Matthew's gospel is written to appeal to Matthew's fellow Jewish compatriots. And so Matthew goes out of his way right at the beginning of his letter to establish Jesus credible lineage to Abraham.
[00:10:25] This hopefully, you know, gives his listeners, his audience, some sense of confidence, some recognition that Jesus is one of them. Them.
[00:10:36] And this is the point of family lineages.
[00:10:41] How do I know who is one of us?
[00:10:45] How do I know that you are a part of my family? We can't necessarily know that just from looking at each other, right? Like, my kids, Janelle and I have three kids. And, you know, we have, like, three kids who are very much like, you know, they have strong resemblances to me and Janelle. Like, it's very common for somebody. If they know Janelle but have never met me, and then they meet any one of our three girls, they'll be like, oh, my gosh, you look so much like your mom.
[00:11:13] But if they haven't met Janelle and they've only met me, they'll be like, oh, you guys look so much like your dad.
[00:11:19] Have you ever noticed that there's some resemblance, like, strong resemblance between Savannah and Judah and Alana, our three girls, and both Janelle and I, it's easy for people to see us in them.
[00:11:34] But that will change very quickly.
[00:11:37] Otis, our new grandson, looks a lot like his dad, Griffin, who doesn't look anything like a Coker. I mean, he's not bad looking.
[00:11:52] But the resemblance begins to fade over time to the point where, like, you know, there are. I know this because of Ancestry.com, there are half a dozen people that I. I am distantly related to living here in San Diego County. And if I met them at the Starbucks, I would have no idea. They don't look like me.
[00:12:14] And this is a problem.
[00:12:16] If you can't look at somebody and know that they are one of you, how do you know they're safe?
[00:12:26] How can they be trusted?
[00:12:28] This is sort of the essential problem of continuity and family lineage and tribal belonging, especially in the ancient world.
[00:12:38] Because if you meet people in the ancient world and they're not one of you, if you can't establish that they are one of you, then they may pose a very real threat.
[00:12:51] And we actually see that threat right here in this passage.
[00:12:57] Going back to verse 11, it says, and Josiah, the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon.
[00:13:08] There's a fascinating part of this otherwise boring list of names of people that you have no idea who they are, that in the very middle of this genealogy, there is this fascinating disruption in verse 11 that says, @ the time of the deportation to Babylon and in verse 12, and after the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Salathiel and so on. Well, this little, like, parenthetical insert in this otherwise long line of unbroken men that established the lineage of Joseph marks a massive collective trauma for the ancient Jews.
[00:13:56] And that massive collective trauma, of course, when a foreign army came in and conquered them and literally carted the majority of their people off to a foreign land in Babylon, this represents for them an incredible wound, an incredible, like I said, collective trauma that has marked in their memories and in their bodies, a memory of the fact that they are constantly under threat because tribes and nations and people groups who are not one of them represent danger.
[00:14:42] And we tend to have that sense today, too, that if you see people and you suspect somewhere inside of you that they are not one of you, whatever that means to be one of you, right? They may not seem like one of you in terms of their race or their skin color, their ethnicity. That is implied by those sort of external markers. They may not appear to be one of you by their gender or their sexuality. They may not be one of you by virtue of all the signals that tell you what socioeconomic status they belong to. Do they wear the right kinds of clothes or the wrong kinds of clothes? Do they drive the right kinds of cars? Did they signal to you in any one of a million ways that they're part of your tribe?
[00:15:31] This is very much how we measure safety.
[00:15:36] Is this person, Are these people safe to me?
[00:15:40] And so I want to suggest to you that the genealogy in Matthew chapter one is essentially a way of Matthew, the sort of traditional author of this first Gospel. It's his way of saying, jesus is one of you.
[00:16:00] In other words, he's safe. He can be trusted. You can trust in the lineage that I have laid out to you, in other words, this genealogy for Matthew is the gospel. It's good news.
[00:16:13] And the good news is this. Jesus is one of you. Jesus belongs to your tribe. Jesus is safe. And in that way, it appeals to a certain way that we build safety and security, a certain way that we build peace.
[00:16:28] And that way of building peace and safety and security is finding continuity in our traditions, safety and security in the ways that we have always done things.
[00:16:42] Does that make sense?
[00:16:46] This is where I lose some of you, because I think that way of finding safety and security and peace is very patriarchal.
[00:16:59] There's a reason why all these names are dudes names, because they're establishing a sense of safety and comfort and peace in the unbroken line of men that go from Joseph all the way back to Abraham. It speaks to a kind of patrilineal institutionalism, because Jesus can be inserted into that structure of safety and security. We can feel comfortable and at peace in that structure of safety and security.
[00:17:32] But what if. What if that is not how God's peace actually works?
[00:17:44] What if God's peace is not found in the unbroken lineage of our institutions, in the security and the safety of our patrilineal constructions?
[00:18:01] What if what we see here is an attempt in Matthew Chapter one to bring the Gospel in a way that actually isn't in line with the way the Gospel works in Christ?
[00:18:19] Remember, by the way, that Jesus is the offspring of Mary and the Spirit of God, not Mary and Joseph.
[00:18:30] Whatever it is that you believe about the literal virginity of Mary is beside the point. The story of Mary is that Mary is impregnated by the Spirit of God. You remember this from last week. The whole purpose of the angel Gabriel coming to Mary is to say you are going to be pregnant and with child. And Mary says, well, this can't be so, for I am a virgin. Which can of course be translated as young woman. But the implication of the story is pretty clear. She hasn't had sex with Joseph yet. They're not married yet.
[00:19:06] That impregnation of Mary is by the Spirit of God.
[00:19:13] So I want to suggest to you that this genealogy is worthless.
[00:19:23] Joseph's lineage does not matter.
[00:19:29] Joseph's lineage is moot. It is beside the point. Jesus is not Joseph's offspring.
[00:19:37] Joseph's line has been disrupted. It has been interrupted. Joseph's line has been transgressed not by Mary, but by the Spirit of God.
[00:19:50] The Spirit of God has transgressed the normal way of doing things. The Spirit's visitation on Mary obliterates faith in a Genealogy. It obliterates faith in any institution. It obliterates faith in any social construct of patrilineal safety and security that we can find.
[00:20:16] The Spirit of God is the one who has conceived something in Mary. And that Spirit of God does not represent one of us. The Spirit of God is not a Jew. The Spirit of God is not a part of that normal order of things. The Spirit of God, as I have told you before, is the ultimate stranger, the ultimate other, the one who exists beyond any of us, the one who is totally foreign to us.
[00:20:49] So the Spirit of God has transgressed the normal way of doing things. What if.
[00:20:57] What if the good news is not that Jesus exists along an unbroken line of continuity that you can put your faith in? What if the good news is that God has transgressed the normal way of doing things?
[00:21:18] What if the Spirit of God's transgression is the gospel?
[00:21:24] We have a tendency, I think, to place so much faith, so much trust, and find so much peace and security in the normal constructs of our society, the normal constructs of our world, the normal way of ordering things and doing things, the things that we have built that we are very impressed with, the demonstrations of strength and security that we find ourselves ensconced in and protected by so that we can claim some measure of peace. But we forget that those very constructs, those very institutions, those very traditions of power are the ones that are so easily corrupted to oppress us.
[00:22:11] And when that happens, when those old institutions, those old constructs, those old genealogies, those old ways of doing things have become oppressive, what we need is not obedience, but transgression.
[00:22:27] We need to disrupt them. We need to inject a new, impregnated conception of good news in the midst of those things.
[00:22:41] We are, by the way, in this church. Some of you guys know this because you pay attention to our emails and some of you don't. That's okay. I'm not offended.
[00:22:49] Some of you know that on November 21, 2024, we celebrated our 149th year as a church. That means we have now entered into our 150th year of existence. And next year, on November 21, 2025, we're gonna have like blowout party that weekend where we celebrate 150 years. That's very cool.
[00:23:10] And that is a kind of way of us celebrating our genealogy.
[00:23:15] I'm not saying this is bad. I'm not saying it's bad to value the past, to value our rootedness, whether that's you as an individual in your family or us as a church or the United States as a kind of construct where people can find some measure of freedom. I'm not saying those things are bad, but we do tend to put too much trust in them, I think. This, by the way, is a sheet that I pulled from our archives.
[00:23:42] This is from 1975, when this church was celebrating its centennial, its 100 year anniversary. And when they did, they took the time to put together a genealogy of the pastors who had served this church since 1875.
[00:24:00] And so here, it's almost as boring as Matthew, chapter one. There is a list of people that you and I would not recognize if we saw their pictures going all the way back to the first, like, paid, actual pastor we had here in 1909. Because prior to that, prior to 1909, this church was in the San Luis Rey Township, which is over by the mission, and there were no paid pastors. They were like three families coming to church every Sunday. And they just like took turns hearing something from somebody, whoever had something to share. But in 1909, the church had moved here to Oceanside and began to, like, build itself into a respectable institution that could actually hire pastors.
[00:24:43] I realize the irony that I'm getting paid and I'm sort of like throwing shade on paid pastors here. Maybe I should stop, actually.
[00:24:53] But Oscar Sweeney was apparently the first paid pastor here, followed by JR Hawley and Ace Wendell. They loved their initials back then. I don't know why. And in 1915, A.A. prophet, and then J.H. whistler and then Mr. Hahn. I don't know why. It's just mister. And then in 1916, J.C. mcReynolds and then J.C. reid, and then Harold Turney, and then Harold hall, who was a student at Chapman University. Because by this time Chapman University up in Orange county, which is affiliated with our denomination, was getting to be a bigger institution. And then Willard learned. That's a great name for a pastor. And then Jesse Mauze, and then George Reeves from 1925 to 1927, who was also a student at Chapman University and later went on to be the president of Chapman university in the 1940s and the 1950s, was our pastor for just two brief years, followed by W.A. ross from 1927 to 1931. And then something interesting happened. The Great Depression hit.
[00:25:54] And this church that had clawed its way to respectability from 1909 all the way up to 1929 for 20 years had grown with the city and finally had enough money to actually pay, you know, theologically trained pastors for 20 of 20 years, suddenly, because of the Great Depression, found itself broke and destitute, and we couldn't afford to hire a pastor anymore.
[00:26:19] And when that happened in 1932, this is a couple years before, you know, the effects of the Great Depression really hit this place hard. When that happened, when this church couldn't afford to hire a pastor anymore, a woman named Grace McDonald, who was the widow of a local pastor and the mother in law of one of the founding members of this church, she said, I'll lead this church.
[00:26:54] And she did it for free because this church had no money.
[00:27:02] And this story just gets me every time that from 1932 to 1536, the widow of a minister stepped up and led this church for four years during the Great Depression for no pay whatsoever.
[00:27:18] And while she was at it, she started a dinner here every single week to feed people during the Great Depression.
[00:27:27] And that started something that had never really been present here before 1932, and that was a care and concern for the poor.
[00:27:39] And that indelibly changed this church. This church has had some expression of outward kindness and compassion for those who are marginalized in this community ever since because of Grace McDonald's.
[00:27:55] Now, Grace MacDonald is, to this church's credit, listed in every list of pastors that I have been able to find in our archives. She is always named, and that's not nothing.
[00:28:12] But there's a kind of tone to those records that's a little bit like, well, then we had Grace McDonald, and thank God, by 1936, we were able to get George Reeves back when we finally had enough money to start paying people again.
[00:28:34] And so there's an unmistakable kind of, like, embarrassment or dismissiveness that I read in our lineage, in our genealogy for this woman, who I think was the transgression of the spirit of God in this place, because you would be hard pressed to find a woman pastoring any church in the United States of America in the early 1930s.
[00:29:10] But that happened here and afterwards.
[00:29:14] This church was never the same.
[00:29:17] It was disrupted.
[00:29:21] Something new was born here.
[00:29:24] The spirit of God impregnated in this place. Something good that transgressed and disrupted the norm.
[00:29:35] And we haven't been perfect since then, but we have been better since then because of that interruption.
[00:29:47] So how do we find peace?
[00:29:53] I think we won't find peace in our past.
[00:29:58] I don't think the past is bad. I don't think genealogies are bad. I think they're actually terribly helpful oftentimes for reminding us just like this story of how God has used every bit of our story to create good things in us.
[00:30:21] But I do think we often miss the disruptions, the interruptions, the incursions of God's spirit because we don't have eyes to see those things for what they really are.
[00:30:36] You know, we have a book upstairs that has newspaper clippings from the Oceanside Blade Tribune from back in the 1920s and the 1930s, because back then, local newspapers would actually print, like, what churches were doing, you know, and there is every single week a clipping in there that mentions Grace MacDonald. But throughout 1932, those clippings will describe what Grace MacDonald is doing as leading a devotion or conducting a reading.
[00:31:09] It's not until February of 1932, after she's been leading here for a year, that somebody dares to describe what she's doing as preaching.
[00:31:22] It's almost like in that moment, reading that history, you can see the spirit of God doing something new.
[00:31:30] And in that way, I think genealogies are helpful.
[00:31:34] But that's not where we find our peace.
[00:31:39] We won't find our peace in the past. We won't find it in our institutions. We will not find it in our identities.
[00:31:47] We won't find it in our list of beliefs. We won't find it in our creeds. We are a church that famously is non creedal. We do not believe in creeds as a test of faith, but we have creeds here. In case you didn't know, we don't call them that. But when you walk in the door, there's a sign outside that says that LGBTQ people are safe here. That's a creed. But it doesn't mean you're actually safe here just because we put the sign out.
[00:32:16] Do you understand the difference?
[00:32:19] We have to do the work to actually be a safe space.
[00:32:25] And the problem with creeds, like genealogies, is we tend to believe that because we make those statements, because we hang those signs, that there's peace in those statements or in those signs. And we think the same thing about our identities. If we drive the right cars and wear the right clothes and come from the right institutions and got the right degrees, then there's peace in that. But there isn't.
[00:32:47] We will only find peace, I submit to you, in one place, and that is in the spirit of God.
[00:32:58] Just like Mary, we find our peace when we encounter the spirit in a real and authentic way. We will find our peace when that encounter with the spirit impregnates us with something new that breaks with the harm of the past.
[00:33:19] And we will find our peace when we have the courage to birth that thing anew in the world by the spirit of God. And when we do, and this is the hard part, I think we have to be okay with the reality that that thing, that peace that we have birthed is fragile.
[00:33:42] It's an infant.
[00:33:45] It's the Savior of the world, the Messiah, the Promised One, born not as a king, not as a warrior, but as a helpless child that we have to care for, that we have to nurture, that we have to actually attend to at every moment in order to make sure that it doesn't starve to death or fall out of its crib and bang its head on the floor and make sure that it gets all the things that it needs in order to grow up and become healthy.
[00:34:19] That's peace.
[00:34:24] It's fragile, it's weak, it needs your attention, but it's so hopeful.
[00:34:35] It's the peace that we often don't want, but it's the peace that God offers us.
[00:34:40] Would you pray with me?
[00:34:43] God, we thank you again for today, for the way that these stories and passages and genealogies and letters in this ancient text stretch us and challenge us.
[00:35:04] I pray that as we read these stories and talk about this journey of Advent through the eyes of Mary, that you would give us the courage to attend to what your spirit is doing, how we are encountering you in small and unpredictable ways and how you are disrupting the normal way of doing things all the time.
[00:35:32] I pray that we wouldn't be afraid of that, but that we would have the courage to nurture it, to give birth to it and attend to it so that it becomes a full grown peace in our lives despite our circumstances.
[00:35:50] Pray all this in Jesus name.
[00:35:56] Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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