Second Friday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Ruth 4:13-17
13 So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When he made love to her, the Lord enabled her to conceive, and she gave birth to a son. 14 The women said to Naomi: “Praise be to the Lord, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! 15 He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.” 16 Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him. 17 The women living there said, “Naomi has a son!” And they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.
Psalm 146:5-10
5 Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God. 6 He is the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them— he remains faithful forever. 7 He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free, 8 the Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous. 9 The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. 10 The Lord reigns forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord.
2 Peter 3:11-18
11 Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives 12 as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. 13 But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. 14 So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. 15 Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. 16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. 17 Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position. 18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.
Jesus’ Great-Grandmothers
by Jacqui Mignault
Jacqui Mignault, M.A., Regent College, works in campus ministry at the University of Calgary and is a pastor at The Road Church in Calgary, AB. She contributes regularly to the Centre for Public Dialogue’s Do Justice Blog and writes about contemplative practice, justice and theology at theabbey.substack.com. She and her husband, Brad, have two daughters, too many pets, and spend most of their spare time in the forests of Fish Creek Park.
Richard Wagamese, in his novel A Quality of Light, has a white father say to his adopted Indigenous son, “You’ve got all the chapters and verses. The only thing you don’t understand is the begats. And believe me, son, no one ever reads the begats.” But that’s not true. Wagamese’s story reveals that the son did need to understand his “begats.” He needed to know the stories and details about where he came from.
There are begats at the beginning of our Christmas story, too. Even though hardly anyone reads them, the genealogies included in the gospels are not inconsequential. They tell us something about who this Christ Child is, and by extension, they tell us something about who we are by telling us who he came from. Luke’s gospel, glaringly and daringly, included four women’s names in its genealogy. The inclusion of these women says a bold word within the Christmas stories that have been sentimentalized too heavily for too long.
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba are all named as Jesus’ great-grandmothers.
All of them were outsiders to the story of Israel in one way or another.
All of them were bound within stories of sex and family that rendered them suspect, tainted, and discounted.
All these women made choices, born from their own desires to live, that led the Israelitese deeper into the story God was telling.
Tamar, out of her need, took her sexuality into her own hands, subverted convention, and put the patriarch Judah to shame for reneging on his responsibility to her (Genesis 38).
Rahab, living at the margins as a prostitute, threw her lot in with Israel’s spies, hiding them, saving them, and eventually finding her home with them (Joshua 2).
Ruth had few options for life when her husband died. But she chose solidarity with her aging mother-in-law, Naomi. She was bold in asserting her needs and reminding her kin of their responsibilities (The Book of Ruth).
And Bathsheba. Triply wronged when she was taken by David, widowed by David, and whose child, born from this unlawful union, was killed because of David’s arrogance. Then in later years, far past her prime, she risked her life to remind King David of his promise to her next son (2 Samuel 11, 12 and 1 Kings 1).
These are Jesus’ grandmothers, all participating in the lineage of Christ. These women at the margins could have been forgotten or left out, like so many others in so many generations. Yet their inclusion in our advent journey reveals that their lives are woven inextricably together in a bigger story that reverberates through time, all the way to us who trust this story even now.
To those trying to cope in a discontented world during this season, attending to the “begats” could feel unnecessary. But the truth of living as if Advent mattered is that the lineage made up of genetics, histories, and meaning is exactly what God had in mind when he asked to be born of a woman. He did not grudgingly become a human with all its attendant generational traumas, choices, wounds, and wins. God said a wholehearted yes to those things, allowing the human stories to become the I AM’s own story.
We, the ones who steward this story now, are meant to know this lineage and to reckon with it as we are meant to know and reckon with our own.
In our own lives, we will all have to reckon with both the gifts and wounds we receive in our families as well as from our church-within-empire traditions. As a nation, we have been thrust into a reckoning of our history of exclusionary policies and the stories of colonial erasure that have benefited some and wounded others. Our “begats” are showing. And as participants in the mystery of faith, our “begats” need to be woven into our story with God.
The gift of Advent is that we spend time making room for this sort of weaving by using practices that can reshape our imagination. We wait. We are silent. We light candles in the dark. We tell old stories. The mystery of Advent is that it is about God choosing to come, not from above but from within. This story is about making new—from the inside—the “begats” we all are bound to—the choices, the people, the personalities, the political, social, and physical realities that are so...human.
The grace of reading the stories of Jesus’ grandmothers is not that everything mysteriously works out in the end, like a Hallmark movie suggests. The grace is known when our long-tangled stories are seen, tended to, and drawn into the web of God-With-Us and God-For-Us. It is there that our long stories, some of which we would rather gloss over, are healed and wisdom can take root. When we finally acknowledge that what we get in our Christmas story is not a “how-to” but a “welcome home,” we enter grace. Advent grace is a mystery that we will not solve, but only participate in.
At the end of his novel, Wagamese has the son say these words: “Perhaps we need to remind each other that we have these old fires in common...That each of us possesses the memory of drums, prayer songs and offerings to the great and tremendous mystery around us...We cannot change history. We do not seek to. We only seek to use its woundings, its poisons, its pains and its failings to strengthen us for the march forward.”
Advent is a story of God’s work. Of redemption, of solidarity within the web of wounds, and of giving us back to ourselves. Not by removing us from the world, but by delving deeper into its most human of stories and revealing God’s very self has been present the whole time. And so we attend to “the begats” and let them be rewoven, by grace and mystery, into something beautiful.
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