October 3, 2021 “God of Our Ancestors” – I Chronicles 1 – 9

I Chronicles 1 – 9 (Chronicles pp. A9-20)
“God of Our Ancestors”
October 3, 2021 – Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

“God has no grandchildren.” I don’t know who coined that phrase, but I’ve heard it often, beginning in the Baptist church I grew up in. But it’s widely used, even by Catholic writers. The implication is that Christian faith is not something you inherit. It can’t be passed from generation to generation. Instead, you must encounter the Lord and accept Jesus as Savior for yourself, on your own behalf. You may not rely upon the fact that your parents or grandparents were believers. You yourself must embrace faith.

Yet our reading in Chronicles this past week has me wondering if that “no grandchildren for God” principle is altogether true, whether it might, in fact, be a little misleading. For one thing, as I live in the hope of seeing, in less than two weeks, our only grandchild in-person for the first time, I wonder how it could be that God misses out on something which can bring so much joy to human life. If God is always and only just Father, never grandfather in at least some way, then He’s missing out on a privilege and happiness that many of us human beings enjoy.

Nonetheless, there does seem to be something to the general idea that faith does not transmit down the generations like DNA. In Romans 4:11, Paul calls Abraham the “father of all those who believe.” Yet here in these Chronicles genealogies not all Abraham’s descendants were people of faith. He handed off faith to his son Isaac, and even in some way to Ishmael. Isaac leaves a legacy of faith with his sons too, particularly with Jacob, who is called Israel here in Chronicles. But after the list of Israel’s twelve sons on page 5, chapter 2 verses 1 and 2, we discover that some of them were definitely not faithful. In the genealogies which follow, two of them even get left out completely, Zebulun and Dan.

Yet if God has no grandchildren and faith is always and only a matter of the present generation apart from previous generations, then why does the Bible devote so much space to genealogies? Why does did it matter as much as it did to the writer of Chronicles to record the family history of those alive in his time when people had returned from exile and were renewing their life of faith there in Judah and the city of Jerusalem? Could it be that God has and wants to have grandchildren of His own?

The story of the Bible makes it abundantly clear, not just here in Chronicles, that God is and intends to be a God who relates to and engages with multiple generations of people down through history. At the top of page 12, chapter 5 verse 25, we read about three tribes of Israel about whom it’s said, “But these tribes were unfaithful to the God of their ancestors.” That’s clearly not the way it was supposed to be. Faith and faithfulness were meant to be received and embraced from their ancestors.

That phrase, “God of their ancestors,” literally “God of their fathers,” occurs 66 times in the Old Testament. 35 of those occurrences are here in the history we are currently reading, in Chronicles and Ezra. It’s a way of talking about God that captures the heart and theology of that ancient historian. God is not just a God of the present, a God of individuals who are alive at the moment. God is a God of those who have gone before us, a God of our ancestors.

So one way of looking at all these stupefying pages of name after name is to see the writer, the Chronicler, trying to establish the identity and validity of the people of God in his time by carefully remembering and recording the people from whom they came.

Those difficult words from Jesus today in our Gospel lesson from Mark 10 show us how seriously God takes this business of ancestry. By insisting that marriage is final and that divorce is contrary to God’s will, at least part of what our Lord is telling us is that family connections matter, matter deeply. When we let them break and become fragmented, then that ancestral passing along of faith becomes problematic, more difficult, as some of you know and I myself understand by experience from my parents’ divorce.

Yet as I said last week, our Savior Jesus came to pick up the broken pieces of our lives and put them back together in beautiful ways. Divorce is not at all the unforgivable sin. In the Covenant church we believe that God can offer the hope of a fresh beginning to men and women and children coming out of a broken marriage. Despite the divorce and my unbelieving father, my mother was able to pass her faith to me. Some of you have done and are doing the same for your children or have received your faith in similar circumstances. The God of our ancestors is greater than any mess we might find in our ancestry.

For some of us, faith may even skip a generation or two, like the recessive genetic trait of red hair. We see that in Israel’s genealogies. Some are unfaithful but the line is restored to faith further on. I’ll leave you to look up the sordid tale of Judah and Tamar alluded to in the middle of page 5, chapter 2 verses 3 and 4. The complete story is in Genesis 38. Judah failed to act in faith, but in the end God uses his very unfaithfulness to create the family line which leads to David the king and on to Jesus our Lord.

Over on the top of page 9, chapter 4 verse 9, you find that recessive gene of faith popping up again in a name you may know. Jabez, it says, “was more honorable than any of his brothers.” The “prayer of Jabez” in verse 10 became famous twenty-one years ago when Bruce Wilkinson wrote about it. He argued that buried here in these obscure verses in Chronicles is a prayer that can change your life. Wilkinson wrote that he prayed Jabez’s prayer every day for thirty years and God blessed him. He challenged readers to pray the prayer every day for thirty days and see if God did not also change their lives for the better.

For Jabez, “expand my territory,” meant asking God to give him more land, a blessing that God definitely gave to His people at that time. Wilkinson thought that phrase “expand my territory” could apply metaphorically to almost any area of personal endeavor, like expanding one’s stock portfolio or one’s influence for good in the community. Wilkinson’s and Multnomah Press’s territories certainly expanded as they made millions selling Jabez along with companion books and other items like a Prayer of Jabez journal, women’s and children’s versions, and music. There were also Jabez key chains, mugs, backpacks, Christmas ornaments, and scented candles.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with reading the story of Jabez here and being inspired to ask for God’s blessing. Jabez was honorable and his prayer was clearly sincere and full of faith. Yet to pull those two sentences out of all this history and record of God’s dealings with the ancestors of His people and set them up as some sort of model for Christian prayer, even a sort of mantra as some have suggested, is a mistake. Jesus Himself gave us a much more important prayer, which we will pray together in a few minutes.

To go back to what I’ve been saying about ancestry, the big problem with setting up Jabez as our example of prayer is the utterly individual focus of his prayer. He asked for his own success and protection but nothing for others or future generations. In the Lord’s Prayer which Jesus taught us, we pray saying “us.” It’s “Our Father.” It’s “Give us this day our daily bread.” It’s “lead us not into temptation.” It’s a corporate prayer of faith that asks God’s blessing while recognizing that we each are part of something bigger than our own selves. There’s nothing wrong with Jabez’s prayer, but it is Jesus’ prayer which is the model for what you and I ought to pray every day.

You can see that larger, communal, ancestral sense of God’s work in the record of the descendants of the sons of Israel, which makes up most of what you read last week. While the narrative does focus down at points to individuals like Jabez and David and finally on page 20, the transition from chapter 9 to chapter 10, to Saul the first king of Israel, the point is ultimately to establish the history and spiritual legacy of the whole community of Jewish people gathered back in Jerusalem after the end of the exile.

It’s for the sake of the current community of Jewish people that the Chronicler is so interested in how land was allotted to the descendants of each tribe, and how priests and musicians and gatekeepers were appointed to serve in the Tabernacle, then the Temple. God is almost more concerned with how His people order their life together than with how one individual here or there responds or doesn’t respond to Him. When God is concerned with individuals it is often for the sake of the whole as well as for that particular person.

Go back to those harsh, difficult words we heard today from Jesus about divorce. You might think the point is some cruel, impossible standard of personal sexual morality. God just wants us to live miserably with choices we’ve made when we were young and foolish, or old and foolish for that matter. But it’s not just about a man or a woman and individual happiness. The very next thing Jesus does and says in Mark 10, verses 13 to 16, is about the blessing of children. Jesus is hard on divorce because He’s concerned about children, about posterity, about having a society where children are blessed and treated well and can grow up to know God’s love through faith in Him.

It may be far from obvious as our eyes glaze over and our heads droop when we read all these names at the beginning of Chronicles, but part of what it’s about is that there is and always will be a God of our ancestors, a God guiding history toward His purpose for it. That purpose is one, as I said last week, which belongs to and includes all people, gathered together in a great society of faithfulness and love toward God and toward each other. It’s what all through the Bible is called the kingdom of God. God is using all our smaller families and societies to get us there, get us together into His kingdom.

That’s why all these lists, all these names come to a close for the time being on page 20, the end of chapter 9, in a somewhat strange place. For one thing, the final bit, verses 35-44 in a Bible with numbers, is a repeat. Go back to the bottom of page 17, chapter 8 verse 29, and you will see it starts exactly the same way, “Jeiel (the father of Gibeon) lived in the town of Gibeon…” and goes on pretty much exactly the same as on page 20, the end of chapter 9. It’s the later part of the descendants of the tribe of Benjamin. But why?

The point is near the middle of page 20. It’s verse 39,

Kish was the father of Saul.
Saul was the father of Jonathan, Malkishua, Abinadab, and Esh-baal.

When the next section begins, where our reading for next week picks up (at chapter 10), the narrative is about Saul and his sons. Last week I called Saul, the first king of Israel, a “cracked pot” and set him aside. But he was more than that. Though he was not the best king Israel could have had, Saul was a sign of God’s plan to unite all those disparate tribes and bring them together as one people for God.

It’s ultimately David who does what Saul could not. David was God’s plan all along, a “man after God’s own heart” who, despite his own failings, stood for the unity and blessing of his people under the ultimate kingship of God. Saul was merely a stand-in until David came along. As Christians we believe, as I intimated last week, David himself was a stand-in for the King who will gather us together forever. Jesus came to be our king.

We will complete our reading of Chronicles on the third Sunday of November, the Sunday of Christ the King. We will celebrate the fact that all this that we are reading is pointing there, to the promise of God that Christ is risen and Jesus will return to bring all our brokenness back together in wholeness and joy in His kingdom.

In the meantime, Chronicles tells us about Saul, and David, and Solomon, and the split of the kingdom and all the kings good and bad who followed. And we ought to realize that if God is truly a God of our ancestors, then they all have their purpose and their place in the human story. And leaders and government still have a purpose and place in the human story. Jesus is and will be our King forever, but we still need good government and society right now.

After living in our current house for six years, I noticed we were paying a small amount in dues each year to our homeowner’s association. But I never heard what the association, the HOA was doing. I went to a web site but it was not up to date. I began to inquire and found the HOA board had fallen apart and not met for two years. No meeting of homeowners had happened in even longer. Dues were collected. Bits of common area got mowed, but nothing else to make our neighborhood better was being done.

So I started talking to a couple people left from the old board. We figured out how to notify 250 households and hold a meeting and elect a new board. I served on it for five years. It was awful. As soon as we put up a new web site and “opened for business,” we began to hear the most idiotic requests and complaints you can imagine. Many people were responsible or just ignored us, but every cracked pot in the neighborhood started venting. I watched arguments erupt in our board meetings and once or twice someone stormed out in a huff. The HOA had to defend itself from a totally frivolous lawsuit brought by one crazy homeowner. I sighed with relief when my terms ended and I went off the board.

Yet during that time, even with all the craziness, our board got new, safer, locked mailboxes put up in some neighborhoods. We made sure the roads got cleared when trees fell in snow and ice storms. We headed off some of the more egregious violations of the common space we all share between our homes. We got our private streets resurfaced and set up regular street cleaning each year. In short, having even our squabbling, messy, hard to work with board was better than having none at all. That’s the way it was and always is with the governments God allows for us.

Saul was a dud, but Saul was far better than no king at all. You may remember that resounding phrase about the chaotic and awful time of the judges in Israel, “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” The God of their ancestors gave them a king to bring an end to an ugly time with no government. God wanted to keep having grandchildren, to have his people live in a land peaceful enough that faith in Him could grow and be passed along.

In our time we’ve had governments and presidents who were duds. You decide which. But even a not-so-good president or governor or mayor or other government that at least tries to do what is right and good for people, is better than none at all. That’s why January 6 this year was such a frightening day, a day on which it appeared we might end up with no government at all. Yes, there are a few governments here and there that are so bad that none at all would be better, but not often. Just ask people in Haiti who would like their government to settle down and just be steady for a while.

Chronicles tells us how the God of our ancestors keeps raising up His grandchildren and great grandchildren. The Lord works down through the generations to move us toward a common faith and trust in Him. He helps us stumble along trying to cooperate and work together for things like justice and liberty for all people. Chronicles is also the brilliant record that God constantly appears in this family here, in that government there. And it’s the glorious promise that God in Christ Jesus is bringing it all together in the end, that the God of our ancestors is also our God, now and forever.

Amen.