September 26, 2021 “Family Matters” – I Chronicles 1:1-27

I Chronicles 1:1-27 (Chronicles pp. 3-4)
“Family Matters”
September 26, 2021 – Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

“Well, I’m back.” Those are the last spoken words in The Lord of the Rings. They come from Samwise Gamgee as he returns from the sea and saying goodbye to his friend and master Frodo Baggins. Those are the final words of the book, but our daughter kept reading. You see, there’s an appendix. A fair amount of it is like those verses I just read from the beginning of I Chronicles. Tolkien gave us long, complicated, unpronounceable genealogies of elves, dwarves, hobbits and human beings in his stories. He spent years of his life crafting those fictional lineages and their related stories.

My daughter fell in love with Tolkien’s fantasy world, including its complicated family lines. Two weeks ago while going through boxes in our garage we came upon the mobile she made by writing names of elven kings on little slips of paper and hanging them in proper order on lengths of string. I don’t quite share her fascination with all that or with real world family genealogies, but it’s a very human thing. Family matters. Even those long-gone members of our families matter. They matter a great deal here in God’s word.

Yet most of us who have read and loved Tolkien’s great trilogy still struggle with all those lists of names and dates. They are, frankly, mind-numbing, just like even this little bit of the genealogies which begin Chronicles. And, as you will read this week, there are eight more chapters (or 18 pages in Chronicles) of them to come!

As I discovered preparing for this series of sermons, there are absolutely no passages from Chronicles in the church lectionary we read from each Sunday. I’ve never preached a sermon on Chronicles. That’s not so surprising for the nine chapters of genealogy, but there’s also a good reason I’ve done no sermons on the rest. It’s pretty much all repetition of what we found in the books of Samuel and Kings. In fact, it’s repetition with padding, like someone’s first novel before a good editor gets ahold of it. One might wonder why we even need these books in the Bible at all.

Yet here they are, I and II Chronicles, part of God’s word, including all those names you heard me read. Let’s do our best to discover both what the original writer intended in it all, as well as God might have to say to us through it.

The Chronicler didn’t just repeat stories of the kings. Even these genealogies are repetition from previous parts of scripture. The first paragraph on page 3 in Chronicles, the first four verses, are a sketch of what we find in Genesis 5. Leaving out all the story, the writer just gives us names of all those descended from Adam through Seth up to Noah and his sons. Then the rest of the page, verses 5 to 22 in a Bible with verse numbers, draws on Genesis chapter 10 to give us names of the various peoples descended from the three sons of Noah. Then the conclusion of today’s text on page 4, verses 23-27, strips out only the names from Genesis 11 to display the particular lineage of the patriarch Abraham coming from Shem through Eber (from which we seem to get the term “Hebrew”) on to his father Terah and finally Abram.

Part of the story behind these dull, bare lists of names, is a great dividing and diversifying of the human race. The Bible and especially the writer of Chronicles often narrows down, as happens in our last few verses today, to focus on just one family, one tribe, one nation. Yet God’s Word never loses sight of the fact that humanity is far, far more than one people, more than one race or ethnicity.

The Chronicler calls attention to that diversity by dwelling for a moment near the bottom of page 3 (verse 19) on the name Peleg, which means “division,” and mentioning that “in his days the earth was divided.” That’s probably a reference to the Tower of Babel, but it may also signal that the human story is full of division, of families and nations and ethnicities splitting off from each other and living out their own stories. Chronicles will tell how people who came from Abraham divided into twelve tribes, and then two kingdoms, and then became separated from each other and scattered in all directions.

The other name whose story gets fleshed out just a bit is in the middle of page 3, verse 10. Nimrod “was the first heroic warrior on earth.” You may be more familiar with how it’s put in Genesis 10, verses 8 and 9, that Nimrod “was a mighty hunter before the Lord.” But it’s clear that Nimrod was not just handy with a spear or bow to bring home big game trophies. Genesis 10 tells us that Nimrod ruled a great kingdom that began with Babel and spread throughout the Fertile Crescent. He was not just a hunter but, as Scripture tells it, the first king to arise in the world.

That kingdom of Nimrod’s signifies the other trend of human history. Against that dividing, separating force, people work together to build communities, to set up governments, to stand united in the world. Whether you call them kings or chieftains or presidents, human leaders at their best are meant to draw and keep people together so that they may prosper by blending their efforts toward a common good.

Yet Chronicles, along with the rest of the Bible, does not shy away from the fact that these twin motions of history are often at odds with each other and often produce pain and suffering. The division becomes fragmentation and brokenness. All those families and ethnic groups war with each other. In part, the peoples and tribes named here are a record of the enemies of Israel. We recognize the Philistines, along with Canaan and all the nations that came from him, the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites and the rest of the ethnic groups which fought Israel for land.

In the other direction we will see in Israel’s own history how that unifying force of human government so frequently becomes broken and corrupt. The very people charged with gathering, nurturing and protecting men, women, and children, like shepherds, as ancient kings were called, were also those who abused, enslaved, and extorted those people for their own advantage. They loved their power and wealth more than they loved the people they were anointed to protect.

These genealogies are here to help us remember and confess that brokenness of human history, that see-saw between the forces of fragmentation and domination. One of the ugliest parts of this story is that the various people did not merely compete with each other for land and resources, they learned to actively hate each other, and in many cases still do. Antagonism between different races and ethnicities has been and continues to be part of the human story, including in our own country and our own towns.

On August 31 here in Eugene a Black man was attacked with a spear because he is black. Swastikas appear around town and a large Confederate flag flies from the back of a pickup truck. A charge of racism in the Springfield police department was front page news on Thursday. The dividing of the human race into supposed different races is not ancient history. It’s current events in our own community. The beginning of Chronicles calls us to own and acknowledge that reality.

Yet at the same time, this little list of names going back to the first human being, Adam, helps to overturn some of that ethnic difference and perhaps our own ideas about skin color. Genesis 2:7 tells us that God formed the man, Adam, from “the dust of the ground,” the adamah. His very name means “earth,” dirt. Moreover, “Adam” in Hebrew also means “red.” The first human person was made from red clay. We can hardly suppose that his skin was white.

Which leads me also to pause and dwell on another piece of this genealogy. A large part of it gives us the descendants of the three sons of Noah: Japheth, Ham, and then Shem. A terrible misinterpretation and vicious story about that middle son Ham is part of the history of slavery in our country.

In Genesis 9 we read how Ham somehow dishonored his father. Just exactly what he did and why it was wrong is hard to say. But Noah reacted strongly and pronounced a curse on Ham’s youngest son, Canaan, saying he would be a slave to his brothers. The Canaanites became enemies of Israel and eventually Israel defeated and ruled over them. But the sad and false interpretation of that in more recent history was to identify the descendants of Ham with African people, people with dark skin, and to see Noah’s curse as a justification for enslaving such people in modern times. Christian readers of the Bible all over America, especially in the South, accepted that terrible distortion of God’s Word to justify the way Black people were treated. We need to remember and repudiate that falsehood.

You may ask, “Why should we remember such things? Why do we have to keep beating ourselves up about things that happened a long time ago? Why can’t we just move on?” The answer is that Scripture itself does not do that. Even in this little bit of genealogy, the Bible does not just move on and forget the ugly and problematic figures of human history. As we will discover again reading on in Chronicles, the Bible remembers the bad kings alongside the good ones, remembers the failures of God’s people together with their successes and faithfulness.

In her very personal and challenging book, Beyond Colorblind, Christian author Sarah Shin calls us not to forget the brokenness that surrounds our encounters with race and ethnicity. Just like this Hebrew writer who could not leave both Israel’s enemies and her own internal failures out of his history, we all as God’s people need to recall our history of failure to do as Jesus taught us, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to see all people as descendants of Adam and Eve and made in the image of God.

So Shin asks us to listen when Black people wish to remember the painful events of slavery and lynching and redlining which still shape their lives in 2021. She wishes us to recognize how Asian people are still affected by things like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the incarceration of Japanese people during World War II. Shin talks about and I’m sure our friend Krista Martin could confirm how the way Muslim people are viewed in America changed after 9/11, how Muslim businesses were vandalized and how they still experience bias.

Instead of just “getting over” all that division, pain, and brokenness, Shin offers a suggestion from a practice in Japanese pottery, an art called kintsugi or kintsukuroi. It means “golden joining” or “golden repair.” When a pot is broken, instead of being discarded or simply glued back together, the pieces are mended and fit together with a lacquer that’s been dusted or blended with powdered gold. In the words of a Wikipedia article on the subject, “it treats the breakage and repair as part of the history of the object, rather than something to disguise.”

That is how Chronicles invites us to look at human history and ultimately our own lives. We are broken and divided by sin. Some of that sin is racism. The rest is greed, lust, pride, envy, foolishness and all the other vices which we heard Jesus name in us a few weeks ago. They separate us from each other, break our relationships, and leave us alone and fragmented as individuals rather than as healthy communities.

Yet the solution is not to forget all that brokenness, to pretend that it did not and does not happen, even in our own selves. The solution is to bring the pieces back together in a golden way, in an art which keeps the brokenness visible while healing and restoring our lives in a way that makes them even more beautiful than before they were broken.

Ultimately that’s where this morning’s list of names leads us, from the breaking and dividing of the human race to the place where God starts putting it back together. Though he’s named first at the end of the first paragraph, Shem at the bottom of the page is the last son of Noah to have his descendants named in verses 17 to 27. We’ve seen the family tree of the human race branch and then narrow down to Noah, then branch again into all those various peoples and nations. But now the Bible’s focus narrows down again, and at the end at the top of page 4 we come, as I said, to “Abram, later known as Abraham.”

The rest of the story definitely includes many of those other peoples and nations, but it all centers here, around this person Abraham and the people descended from him. It many ways it feels like a very exclusionary story. Even at the beginning, the genealogy left out the other still living son of Adam, the murderer Cain. We only see here the descendants of Seth. Now by narrowing down to Abraham it looks like even more of the human race is being left out, designated as less important or even offensive to God. But that’s not the plan at all, neither God’s plan nor the understanding of the Bible writers.

In Genesis 12, when God calls Abram to follow Him, God tells him, “in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” Somehow, somewhere from Abram will come the gold that is going to put all those families, all those peoples and nations, back together and join them as one.

You probably know how Chronicles is going to go. Abram becomes Abraham, the man who believed God and found righteousness through that faith. His descendants leave the land God gave them and then come back, fighting their own internal brokenness and all the fragments of the human race around them. Finally, they ask God to give them their own Nimrod, a king to rule them. That first king of Israel, Saul, is too much of a cracked pot to be mended and so God replaces him with a man named David. The rest of the story of Chronicles and even of Ezra and Nehemiah is how the kingdom that David put together is shattered apart from both inside and outside. But we also see it continue on in the hope of another King who will mend and restore it to something like its golden age under David.

That promised King is Jesus Christ. He is the golden glue whom God sent for the healing of the world. Jesus can heal and bring together the brokenness of our lives. God showed us that was true by letting Jesus Himself be broken on the Cross and then raising Him upon again in golden glory. And part of that story is that the wounds of Jesus, the brokenness of His body, were still visible when He rose. God did not erase the breaks, He made them beautiful, as the hymn says, “those wounds yet visible above, in beauty glorified,” like the art of kintsugi, a golden repair.

So Jesus came to make it possible for us to reach across the brokenness of race and even our own individual relationships and find wholeness. That’s why our Gospel lesson today in Mark 9:39 shows us Jesus teaching His disciples not to keep broken pieces apart. They were worried someone else was casting out demons in Jesus’ name, but “he was not following us.” Jesus’ answer was a word of golden healing, of the promise that a good work, a miracle in His name, is a good thing whoever does it. He said, “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Let us remember that as we confront our own brokenness and division.

The great hope in Jesus is not that race and ethnicity will disappear into some melting pot, where everyone looks and thinks and talks the same. No, the promise of the King who is and is to come is that His name will bring together all the pieces each in their own difference, uniqueness, and beauty. He will assemble them into a great assembly of praise. Revelation 7:9 says,

…and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and people and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

“Salvation belongs to our who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

May you and I not forget the broken pieces of ourselves and of our history. Instead may we let our Lord bring the pieces back together. May Jesus mend your broken heart. May we then join with Him to draw together all the brokenhearted people of every color and ethnicity and to seek our place in that golden assembly before our God and the Lamb who was broken and slain so that we might be whole.

Amen.