Once upon a time, your ancestors lived in a small house by the railroad tracks. They dreamed of what their future might be: grand plans of wealth, of children, of possessions, of “making it big.”

To symbolize all this, they bought little tchotchkes. They called them their hope. Hope sat there on a high shelf—delicate, decorative, fragile. Whenever a train roared past, the whole house trembled, and the tchotchkes fell.

Each time this happened, they replaced the broken treasures with cheaper and cheaper ones, until nothing remained but a collection of unbreakable plastic things.[1]

Your ancestors realized they could interpret this loss of hope in a few ways.

Some wondered about nihilism: Why hope? Nothing matters. You dream, you plan, you place your treasures carefully, and then life shakes, and everything shatters. Beauty doesn’t last. Investments evaporate. If that’s how the world works, why care? Keep your head down. Endure. Die with whatever dignity you can scrounge up.

They knew a few people like this. Those folks were miserable, and determined to spread that misery. Your ancestors decided the hopeless path was not theirs.

Others thought the broken tchotchkes meant they had simply aimed too high. Perhaps they were too ambitious. Maybe it’s best to leave castles to the landed gentry. Maybe their own dreams should be more modest, since they hadn’t learned how to protect the treasures they bought.

Maybe—just maybe—they could have learned. They might have worked upward. Saved for a house away from the tracks, one that didn’t shake quite so much.

They lived with this interpretation for a while. They brought more children into the world, children who became your third and fourth cousins, and eventually brought your direct ancestor into being.

One day, a grandchild (who would later become your grandparent) asked why these cheap plastic tchotchkes were displayed with such care and prominence. So the story was told.

After hearing it, that child offered a new interpretation. It’s good to have hope that doesn’t break. It’s good to be able to change your hope.

Ah, the wisdom of children. Direct and uncluttered, the way the best wisdom often is. We see this wisdom in today’s scriptures.

For Abraham was the father of Isaac. Abraham hoped not to be an idol-maker but to follow the living God, the source of love and creation. He found God and was promised descendants as numerous as the stars. He and Sarah had Isaac.

Isaac’s hope was different. After barely surviving his father’s “test,” he found love in Rebekah. Scripture tells us his soul was welded to her at first sight. They had twins: Esau, the outdoorsman; and Jacob, the home-dweller, the schemer, the mama’s boy who tricked his father and brother, and carried off the inheritance.

Jacob wrestled with God and walked away limping with a new name: Israel. That name became the name of a nation following his grandfather’s God. The name means “one who struggles with God,” or “one who prevails with God.” Both are true.

We know what it is to struggle with faith: to try believing in love, peace, and kindness in a world so full of hatred, war, and unkindness. We wonder why mosquitoes exist… or childhood cancer… and a thousand other afflictions.

And yet we also know that love prevails. To prevail, we must love all the harder.

Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, the first woman named in Matthew’s genealogy, even though every man listed there had a mother. Tamar, who had to resort to trickery and sleep with her father-in-law to secure what was promised to her.

Then come the next two women in quick succession. “And Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth.”

Rahab, as Matthew names her, is traditionally understood to be the same Rahab from Joshua—the woman who sheltered Israel’s spies in her brothel in Jericho, survived its fall, joined the people, married Salmon, and became the mother of Boaz. A foreigner with a complicated past becomes an ancestor of both David and Jesus.

Matthew loves weaving such threads. Rahab’s story shines in the genealogy like a lantern: an outsider, folded fully into the holy family line.

Her son Boaz married Ruth, a Moabite. Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David, Israel’s greatest king. Another outsider who learned another way and brought blessing. It’s almost like immigrants are good people who are capable of love.

Solomon also became king, but it isn’t all kings and glory. Some names in that genealogy have faded from memory. Perhaps they lived simple, loving lives, or perhaps they were better left to the dust of history. Some names carry reputations they may or may not have earned… like Jehoshaphat and his supposed jumping ability. Yet I loved that they didn’t treat history like a resume, leaving in only the good stuff. They kept the bad stuff in there. We can learn from all things, good, bad, and somewhere in between.

Each life carried a different hope. Every generation must gather the fire of hope and pass its embers along or pass along the unbreakable plastic version into the hands of descendants they will never meet.

For Isaiah, son of Amoz, saw a great hope concerning Judah and Jerusalem: all nations streaming to Zion, eager to worship at the house of the God of Jacob. Love—not war—becoming judge of the nations. Swords reshaped into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks. Unbreakable hope.

And we see it in Jesus the Anointed One, who comes to us with a genealogy. Hope has a genealogy. Of course it does. Ours does, too. Jesus, Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham. We, sons and daughters, kith and kin of God.

We stand in that line as well. Our hope has changed through the years—perhaps simpler now than before. Across the generations, there have been ups and downs. Across our own lives, the same. Our ancestors knew slavery and freedom, famine and abundance, suffering and celebration, exile and homecoming.

Within our family trees, there may be slaveholders, abusers, and people who caused harm. But also within them are the ones who refused to continue those patterns; those who broke unhealthy systems and forged a new hope.

Viktor Frankl wrote powerfully about hope. Having endured the concentration camps, he wondered afterward why some survived and others didn’t. In Man’s Search for Meaning he wrote: “Don’t let them steal your hope; without hope, you lose everything. When we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes instead of exchanging them for food, we already knew that he had given up trusting his strength to go on and that, once the will to live was lost, he rarely recovered.”

Some held on because they had a book they still needed to write. Some hoped to bear witness to tell what happened so future generations, both of the victims and of the perpetrators, would know and never repeat it. Some held only the simplest hope: not to die today. And that was enough.

As we go through life, our hopes change. We hope to do well in school, or simply survive it. We hope to find meaningful work. We hope to find love. We hope to build a family. We hope to find a community that helps us grow the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, gentleness, and self-control. We embody these gifts so that they can be offered freely to the world, with the hope that they might take root in someone else.

And so God’s vine in Christ grows through the Spirit.

As we age, our hopes become simpler:
I hope the kids or grandkids visit.
I hope I don’t fall.
I hope for a peaceful transition from this life to the next.
I hope I leave the world better than I found it, and that I’m remembered with love.

Yes, hope is essential. Whatever it looks like. Wherever we are on life’s journey.

May we speak our hopes here. And may we remember the hope handed down to us by generations before.

We have hope for God is with us. God is everywhere in our genealogy. God will be with our descendants even though they might not call it God. They might call it love. And to that we take great hope, for God is love and perfect love casts out all fear. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Works Cited

[1] Story inspired by Laurie Anderson, Four Talks (installation), 2021. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.