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Listen to this article\u00a0\u00b7 7:46 min\u00a0Learn more<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n I was reminded of this while listening to a sermon<\/a> this month at Groveton Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va. Chris Davis, the pastor of the church, took as his text the first 17 verses of the Gospel of Matthew, known as the genealogy of Jesus. Those verses, a long list of names that ties one generation to another, are often skipped over in favor of the story of Jesus\u2019 birth. To the degree that they have any meaning at all, it\u2019s usually because for Christians it establishes Jesus as the heir to the promises God made to Abraham and David.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But as the pastor pointed out, Jesus came down to us through broken families: \u201cone generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation.\u201d There were murderers, adulterers, prostitutes and people who committed incest, liars, schemers and idolaters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jesus may have been sinless, but those in his lineage were not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just as remarkable is that the Gospel of Matthew didn\u2019t hide this troubled family history. According to Michael S. Keller, senior pastor at Redeemer Lincoln Square Church in New York: \u201cThese genealogies were an ancient type of r\u00e9sum\u00e9. It\u2019s Jesus\u2019 DNA \u2014 because your family, your lineage,\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0your r\u00e9sum\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So why was this material there in the first place? Perhaps it\u2019s to show that what could have been a source of shame for Jesus wasn\u2019t \u2014 and therefore that it need not be for those of us whose families and histories have shadow sides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Someone once described churches as being places where we present highly edited versions of ourselves. We want to project to one another, and to the outside world, that we have our lives all put together, that we are \u201cshiny happy people<\/a>,\u201d even when we\u2019re not. This is Potemkin village Christianity. What Jesus seemed to have had in mind is the church being more of \u201ca field hospital after battle,\u201d in the words of Pope Francis<\/a>. Heal the wounds, he said. Then we can talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Churches ought to provide a place for people to share their struggles, sorrows and traumas, not with everyone, of course, but with a few wise and trusted people. We all long to be more fully known and yet still loved. And among the greatest gifts churches can provide is to help us become good stewards of our pain<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What might this mean? \u201cAt its best the church is a place where the \u2018beatitude people\u2019\u201d \u2014 the merciful and the gentle, the peacemakers and pure in heart, those who thirst for justice \u2014 \u201care the heartbeat of the congregation,\u201d Shirley Hoogstra, president emerita of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The disreputable lineage of Jesus reminds us of something else as well: Past is not prologue. If Jesus himself came from a line of murderers, adulterers, cheats and frauds, the Rev. Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., told me, \u201cthen there is hope for all of us. He\u2019s a cycle-breaker showing that generations of dysfunction don\u2019t have to be predictive of future events. Cycles can be broken. Systems can be replaced. Families \u2014 and therefore whole nations \u2014 can be healed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today, put it to me this way: \u201cMany people believe that they are destined to live out and to carry forward whatever awful family characteristics shaped them. A Jesus whose family tree was distinguished and revered would have suggested that maybe they were right. A Jesus who showed up from nowhere, fully grown and without ancestry, might have too. The actual Jesus, though, shows us something different. We are not our bloodlines or our family histories. In Christ, as we sing of Bethlehem: \u2018The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Jesus\u2019 awareness <\/strong>of broken lives wasn\u2019t restricted to his family tree; it defined his ministry. He identified with the least and the lowliest, not just those in his lineage but those in his life. \u201cJesus did not stand aloof from our human brokenness but dove into the very depths of it,\u201d Kerry Dearborn, professor emerita of theology at Seattle Pacific University, told me. \u201cFrom the very beginning, Jesus entered into solidarity with even the most disdained and marginalized of people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jesus was drawn to the social outcasts, to those whose lives were most fractured and fragmented, those who were considered unclean, unworthy and reviled. Men and women in need of love, forgiveness and a healing touch. It was the religious authorities and the self-righteous, the enforcers of purity codes, people eager to condemn and judge whom Jesus called \u201chypocrites\u201d and \u201cwhitewashed tombs.\u201d They hated him for it; and their kind still exist, in large numbers, not just in the world at large, but in buildings with steeples and crosses, pulpits and pews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The genealogy of Jesus is also a story of radical inclusion. Several of the women listed in the first chapter of Matthew are Gentiles. This incorporation has significance, according to Craig Barnes, a former president of Princeton Theological Seminary. \u201cThe church has always struggled with insiders and outsiders,\u201d he told me. \u201cIronically, we Gentiles keep trying to make others into outsiders.\u201d The irony Dr. Barnes is referring to is that it was the Gentiles who were once the outsiders. Yet today, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in blatant, many who claim to be followers of Jesus are holding up Not Welcome signs to others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you enter our church doors, the message is, you do it on our terms. It\u2019s not \u201ccome as you are\u201d as much as it\u2019s \u201ccome as we want you to be.\u201d Sometimes the signal sent from church leaders and congregants is that first you have to clean up your life; other times it\u2019s first you have to clean up your doctrine, meaning that you have to embrace the \u201cright\u201d set of Christian teachings. Doctrine matters; it\u2019s why we have creeds that are essential to faith communities. But doctrine can so easily harden and rigidify. It can promote an \u201cus v. them\u201d mentality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is antithetical to the ministry of Jesus. We see it in his parable of the good Samaritan, in which the man who helps a wounded traveler on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho isn\u2019t a respected religious figure but a despised foreigner. The Apostle Paul said in the Book of Ephesians<\/a> that Jesus has broken down \u201cthe dividing wall of hostility\u201d between Jew and Gentile. And yet there is a strong impulse of human beings, within my heart and perhaps within yours, to build up new dividing walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s an aphorism that says that God writes straight with crooked lines. Translation: God can use even imperfect lives to achieve great purposes. So yes, there were a lot of broken vessels in the genealogy of Jesus, but as the Christian writer Philip Yancey told me, God uses the talent pool available. Before his conversion, Paul was, by his own account, a persecutor of Christians; after his conversion, he referred to himself as the chief of sinners<\/a>. And yet he managed to write some of the most important and profound religious epistles in history, including an extraordinary meditation on love<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n