Oops
Brothers and sisters, let me tell you what I used to think when I hear today’s Gospel reading.
“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob…”
I thought: This is where I can tune out. This is the part that doesn’t really matter. Lets just skip to verse 18 where the actual story begins. Mary, Joseph, the angel—that’s the real Christmas story. But this? This is just biblical housekeeping. Names and numbers. Fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile, fourteen from the exile to Christ.
And honestly, when I look at our Christmas service schedule as a priest, I wonder if some of you feel the same way about what we’re asking you to attend. Royal Hours on Christmas Eve morning followed by Vesperal Liturgy. Then Matins and Liturgy on Christmas morning. To someone new to Orthodoxy—maybe even to some of us who aren’t new—it can feel overwhelming. Why so much? Why can’t we just have one beautiful service and call it Christmas?
Ugh
But stay with me in this genealogy for a moment, because something remarkable is happening here that we miss when we skim past it.
Matthew isn’t just giving us names. He’s giving us a pattern. He’s showing us how God works.
Look at who’s included: Abraham, yes—the father of faith. David, yes—the great king. But also Tamar, who had to disguise herself as a prostitute to get justice. Rahab, who was a prostitute. Ruth, a foreigner, a Moabite, someone who had no right to be in this line at all. Bathsheba—Matthew doesn’t even name her, just calls her “the wife of Uriah,” reminding us of David’s sin.
This isn’t a list of the righteous. This is a chronicle of God working through failure, through scandal, through exile and occupation and waiting. Fourteen generations to build a kingdom. Fourteen generations to watch it fall. Fourteen generations in exile, wondering if God had forgotten them.
The genealogy is telling us: God doesn’t work in moments. God works in patterns. In rhythms. In the long, slow preparation of a people who keep forgetting who they are and where they’re going.
And here’s what strikes me: the people of Israel knew these names. They’d heard these stories since childhood. The genealogy wasn’t new information—it was remembering. It was the community saying together: “This is who we are. This is where we came from. This is how God has been faithful even when we haven’t been.”
It was preparation. Not for something they had to do, but for something they had to become ready to receive.
Aha
You think about this suddenly, you might understand our Christmas services differently.
They aren’t obligations. They aren’t even, primarily, things we do for God.
They’re how God prepares us—body and soul—to receive what He wants to give us.
Think about it: Why does the Church give us the Royal Hours on Christmas Eve morning? Because the Hours are filled with Old Testament readings—prophecies from Isaiah, psalms of longing, glimpses from the Prophets. They’re doing exactly what Matthew’s genealogy does: they’re reminding us of the pattern, the preparation, the centuries of God working toward this moment. They’re teaching us to see Christmas not as a sudden event, but as the fulfillment of everything God has been doing since Abraham.
We need those Hours because without them, Christmas becomes sentimental. It becomes a baby in a manger that we coo at and then move on from. The Hours root us in the soil of Israel’s waiting, of prophecy, of promise. They teach our hearts to recognize what’s actually happening.
Whee
And then—and this is beautiful—after the Hours, we have the Vesperal Liturgy. Now, I know that sounds like two services, but it’s actual one service. It’s part Vespers and part Liturgy, which includes Holy Communion.
Do you see what the Church is doing? As enter Christmas Eve, we’re standing in the threshold. We’re in the space between the Old Testament longing and the New Testament fulfillment. And right there, in that liminal moment, we don’t just talk about Christ coming—we receive Him. In the Eucharist. We receive His Body and Blood.
This is the pattern made real. This is genealogy becoming flesh that we can taste.
And then Christmas morning: we’re back … Matins and the Divine Liturgy. Again with communion.
Now, some of you might be thinking: “Didn’t we just do this yesterday? Why again?”
And here’s where we have to understand something essential about Orthodox Christianity: We don’t celebrate feasts the way we celebrate birthdays—one cake, one party, check the box, move on.
We celebrate feasts the way Israel remembered their genealogy: by entering into it, by letting it form us, by returning to it again and again until it becomes part of our bones. This is normal Orthodox Christianity.
You cannot truly celebrate the Incarnation, God becoming flesh, without communing with the Incarnate One. You cannot truly feast on Christmas without receiving the Feast Himself. This is why the Liturgy is at the center of our celebration—not because we’re being legalistic, not because the Church wants to make things hard, but because receiving Christ in the Eucharist is what it means to celebrate that Christ has come. This is how we practice our Orthodoxy.
The ancient Christians understood this. When you were baptized, when you became Orthodox, you became part of a new genealogy. You became Abraham’s descendant, part of that fourteen-generation pattern. And just as Israel’s identity was shaped by remembering—Passover every year, Sabbath every week—your identity is shaped by communing. By receiving over and over again the God who made Himself receivable.
Yeah
So I’m not going to stand here and tell you that you have to come to all these services.
But I am going to tell you what they are.
They’re not a list of obligations. They’re not hoops to jump through to be a “good Orthodox Christian.”
They’re the Church—your mother—preparing you the way God prepared Israel through forty-two generations. They’re the pattern made present. They’re the way God shapes a people who are ready not just to know about the Incarnation, but to receive it, to taste it, to be changed by it.
Come to the Royal Hours if you want to hear the prophecies the way Mary heard them. Come to the Vesperal Liturgy if you want to stand in the threshold between promise and fulfillment. Come to Christmas Matins if you want to sing while the world is still dark, proclaiming that the Light has come. Come to the Liturgy on Christmas morning if you want to be the kind of Christian who celebrates not by thinking about Jesus, but by receiving Him as all Orthodox Christians before us have.
Because that genealogy Matthew gives us … well, it ends with you now being a part of the family.
The pattern continues. God is still working through failures and foreigners, through people who forget and people who are just learning, through sinners being made into saints.
And He prepares us still—in hours and hymns and the taste of bread and wine—to become the people who can receive what He most wants to give: Himself.
Amen.