IMPOSSIBLE FAMILY

The more you love people the more it hurts when they hurt you.  That’s why the pain of family betrayal is so nearly impossible to get over.

Now think about what family did to Mary, Joseph, and Jesus .

When Mary became pregnant with Jesus, she had done nothing wrong.  She hadn’t violated the law or dishonored her parents’ teachings.  But they thought she had.  If Joseph hadn’t intervened the men of the village, including Mary’s own father, would have publicly stoned her.  In fact, Mary’s father would have been expected to cast the first stone in his daughter’s execution.

Imagine how you would feel if you knew that your own father had been seriously contemplated bashing your head in with rocks while you were pregnant.   That’s the thought Mary carried with her to Bethlehem.

After Joseph agreed to take Mary as his wife,  they were still ostracized.  Mary couldn’t stay with the other women, so she walked from Galilee to Bethlehem with her new husband.

In Bethlehem their entire extended family turned on them.  They were alone, in the dark, in the cold. When Mary went into labor none of the women in Bethlehem came to her aid.  Not one auntie.  Not one cousin.  None of them.

They went back to Nazareth but soon returned to Bethlehem, probably because no one back home would hire Joseph. 

Imagine that.  You’re a new husband.  A new father/ stepfather.  You’re an honorable man who has done nothing but honor your vows to God and to your fiancé, but you can’t get a job.  Not because of the economy or the market, but because your own people, the folks you grew up with, won’t hire you.

After all those years, all the things you’d done for so many people in your family (cause a man who’d stick with Mary is a man whom everyone in the family would call for help) this is how they treat you.

At every turn, it was strangers---- shepherds, Eastern magi, and Egyptians---- who had encouraged and supported them.   Family had given them nothing but pain.   Years later, when the family returned from Egypt, Joseph didn’t want to go home to Nazareth.  He wanted to return to Bethlehem.

But when Joseph heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea instead of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And being warned by God in a dream, he turned aside into the region of Galilee. And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth (Matthew 2: 22-23)

Too much wrong had been done by these folks in Nazareth.  Too many so-called loved ones had turned their backs in their moments of greatest need.    After years--- YEARS--- the family was too broken to heal.

But with God, nothing is impossible.

In Luke chapter 2, when Jesus was 12 years old, he, Mary and Joseph had established a family tradition of traveling to Jerusalem for Passover.    

His parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. (Luke 2:41)

But Mary, Joseph, and Jesus weren’t alone.  They made the yearly road trip in a caravan full of family and friends from Nazareth and the surrounding area.

By the time Jesus was 12, the extended family were all so close that Mary and Joseph thought nothing of Jesus spending the entire day off playing with friends and cousins.

Supposing Him [Jesus] to have been in the company, they went a day’s journey, and sought Him among their relatives and acquaintances. (Luke 2:44)

In the few years since their return to Nazareth after the death of Herod something impossible had happened.

A broken family had been healed.

What happened? 

Jesus happened.

In Nazareth, “the Child grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him.” (Luke 2:40)

The entire family loved Jesus, so they stopped looking sideways at Mary and Joseph.  No one really believed their story about not having sex until after Jesus was born, but they loved Jesus so much that they let it go.  The Nazareth family didn’t necessarily accept Joseph’s theology of the Messiah, but they loved the boy anyway.

1 John 4 teaches that genuine love for God will manifest as genuine love for each other.

If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?

And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also. (1 John 4:20, 21)

We might not agree on doctrine.  We might still think you were wrong for what happened back in the day.  But if we can all just love Jesus, then He will heal the hurt between us.

I know.  I know.  After everything they did and everything you did, reconciliation is impossible.  That’s O.K.

It was impossible for Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to reconcile with their family in Nazareth. 

But it’s Christmas, and with God nothing is impossible.

Merry CHRISTmas.

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com

Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves

You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.

You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 

Miles Chapel CME Church

P O Box 132

Fairfield, Al 35064

IMPOSSIBLE CHRISTMAS (part 1)

And God said to the serpent, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed.  He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.” (Genesis 3: 15)

We can’t be sure how well our proto-parents understood human reproductive biology, after all, at this point in history, there had not been any human reproduction.  Well, except for that one time God used Adam’s bone tissue to clone a female version of him (Genesis 2:21, 22).  But Adam was unconscious when that happened, so anyway.

Adam and Eve may or may not have realized what we do: that  Genesis 3:15 is impossible.  Biologically and legally a woman can’t produce the prophesied male “Seed.”  

Biologically impossible

In the non-scientific vocabulary of the Bible, the seed is a euphemism for either offspring or sperm.  Women don’t mthe former alone, and they don’t produce the latter at all .  For a woman to bring forth a male seed to the serpent’s head, you’d have to have a pregnant virgin. 

And that, as everybody well knows, is impossible.

Legally impossible

One of the conditions of mankind’s punishment for Adam’s and Eve’s sin was patriarchy.  God declared that part of the woman’s/ women’s sorrow would be that “Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you.”  (Genesis 3:16)

Generally speaking the Paradise of gender equality (equality, not equivalence) in Eden was replaced by a hierarchy in which women wanted but never quite achieved the same level of authority their husbands enjoyed.”

That’s why the line of inheritance was traced through male descendants.  (By the way, if you’re looking for an example of Divine reprieve from that clause in the Curse, read about the daughters of Zelophedad in Numbers 27 & 36). 

The point is that even if a virgin did miraculously conceive and give birth to a male seed, the son still wouldn’t have had the legal right to fulfill his destiny.  The law only recognized the rights passed on through the male line.

Genesis 3:15 calls for a virgin-born child whose “father” isn’t his biological father but is from the same genetic line as his mother.

That’s freakin’ impossible.

Except, there was this one time.

Biologically (im)possible

One day the angel Gabriel appeared to an betrothed but unmarried virgin named Mary.  He  told Mary that she would conceive asexually and have a son who would be named Jesus, and “He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1:32, 33)

“Then Mary said to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I do not know a man?’ “ (Luke 1:34)  Basically Mary said, “That’s impossible, Gabriel.  I’m a virgin, and that ain’t about to change.”

Gabriel’s responded,  “For with God nothing will be impossible.”  (Luke 2:37)

The same God who formed Adam directly from African dust and Eve from Adam’s tissue sample, formed a body for Jesus in the unfertilized womb  of a Jewish virgin.

“For with God nothing will be impossible.”

Legally (im)possible

Matthew 1 and Luke 3 list two different genealogies for Jesus.   Matthew gave us the line of Jesus adopted (i.e. legal) father, Joseph.   Luke gave the lineage of Mary, Jesus’ biological mother.  If, as traditional history maintains, Mary was an only child or the oldest of only daughters, then her husband would have been her dad’s legal heir.  Which is why Luke 3:23 calls Joseph the son of Heli, even though Heli was Mary’s dad.

So legally, in accordance with the culture of the times, Jesus was the proper heir of the Davidic line of promise going all the way back to Adam and Eve and that impossible prophesy in Genesis 3:15.

“For with God nothing will be impossible.”

The impossibility of impossibility in God became the theme of Mary’s life and perhaps the family’s motto.   Surely she taught that motto to her eldest son, her miracle baby.    We can hear echoes of that theme in Jesus’ teaching.

In Matthew 17: 20, when the disciples began to doubt because they’d failed to cast out a demon, Jesus said to them, “if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”

In Matthew 19: 25, when the disciples worried that Jesus’ they would not be able to live up to Jesus Divinely high expectations, they asked “Who then can be saved?”  But Jesus looked at them and said to them, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

From the very beginning, when mankind first begin to screw up God’s directions, the Lord made a point of showing that He could do the undoable.

Your biological, medical, or physical situation may be actually be impossible.

But with God nothing is impossible.

Your situation under the law, in the culture, according to the social expectations may be genuinely impossible.

But with God nothing is impossible.

You may be in a state of absolute spiritual darkness and lostness with no possible outcome but despair.

But if God can make a virgin conceive without losing her virginity, then God can bring your lost soul back into fellowship with Him.

If God can make two lines of genealogy meet at just the right moment to fulfill the impossible requirements of a fallen world AND a prophetic destiny spoken when the world was freshly fallen, then God can save even you and me when we know that it’s impossible for us to be saved.

You see, with God nothing is impossible.

Merry CHRISTmas.

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com

Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves

You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.

You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 

Miles Chapel CME Church

P O Box 132

Fairfield, Al 35064