Don't toss the trash

I’m not into genealogy—it’s not my thing. But I’ve engaged in conversations with enough folks who are really into it to sense that most likely all our family trees could be called nut trees. There always seems to be, somewhere in the lineage, at least one crazy one, and undesirable or two, maybe a criminal, or any number of jaded, twisted or wicked folks should one go back far enough. In some cases, they are the relative that no one wants to acknowledge or talk about. Some might say that they are the family trash. Can you relate? I sure can. I have an uncle, who all I know him by is Uncle Bill, who I never, ever, learned anything about, because no one talked about him at all. Period. He was simply a name in the family line. That’s it. I’ve often wondered why, and I’ve always been under the impression that he was the family “trash”, but I have never known.

If you have read the first chapter of Matthew, perhaps you found it to be, well, rather boring. It’s genealogy at it’s finest. It offers to the reader, the full lineage of Jesus, name by (in some cases) unpronounceable name. And, you know what?  If you were to do a bit of study on the lineage you will find that it isn’t pretty, just like our family trees. In fact, it’s quite ugly. There’s some real trash in there by today’s standards, which, in my humble opinion, would have made them very, very undesirable folks back in those times. There were adulterers, a murderer, prostitutes, an outcast, and an idolater. Since this isn’t a Bible Study piece, I will leave the exploration up to you, but know this—there were no less nuts and undesirables (trash) in Jesus’s family tree than there is in any of ours, and perhaps more.

I think the point Matthew was making (excuse me, the Holy Spirit through Matthew) was two-fold:  1) God always has a plan, and He never fails to execute it, and 2) God’s plan involves everyone, those who we might label trash, and those we wouldn’t. Matthew didn’t toss out the trash in his narrative for just that reason. We shouldn’t toss out the trash for the same reason.