We're talking about being good. Anyone here ever get told to be
good when you were growing up? Get told to be good?
Anyone tell anyone else to be good when they were growing up?
I've said it to my kids. I've said it to my dogs.
Try saying it to the cats. They don't listen to anything I
say. But this question of being good
is important because goodness is important.
It's important for goodness to exist.
A world without goodness is an ugly, awful, nasty place to
live. We seem to see more and more and
more of that these days. Or, or maybe it's just that it,
it gets the, the non goodness, the Vadnais rises up and takes
center stage periodically and it feels like there's more Vadnais
and less goodness than there used to be.
I, I, I think really based on the scripture, we should be able
to say there's more goodness in the world than there used to be
because the church is continuing to grow.
The Kingdom of God is continuing to grow and spread on this
earth. So there should be more
goodness. But if we're going to talk about
goodness, we need to talk about what goodness is.
If we want our kids to be good, if we want our well, we'll leave
the pets aside for the moment. I have a higher standard for my
kids than for my pets. As long as the pets aren't
pooping in the house, we're good.
The kids, it's a little higher standard for that to know what
goodness is so that we can be good.
Because it matters. It matters whether we behave.
I don't like our language on this because it saying that we
behave better makes it sound like we're in a competition.
We're going to do I'm going to do better than you.
I'm going to be better than you. That's not a good way to think
of it. I'm just going to say gooder
knowing that's not really a word, but that's really what
we're talking about here is not being better than other people,
but being good and being as good as we can be and getting gooder
and gooder every day as we are able and enabled by God.
But to under. So one of the ways to understand
goodness is to look at its opposite, which is Vadnais,
which is evil. And, and what a starters, we're
talking about Tamar today and, and her relationship with Judah
in particular. And I said this last week at all
three services. And at the end I was like, I
said that wrong. I said it wrong at all three
services. I kept saying that, that, that
as bad as Judah was in his behavior, Tamar's behavior was
less bad. As evil as Judah was, Tamar's
behavior was less evil. But that's not what the Bible
says. And I really believe it's
important when we're talking about things in the Scripture
that we say what the Bible says and not kind of insert our own
little judgments and evaluations like I was doing.
Because there's a difference between being not as bad as
someone and being gooder than someone.
For your behavior to be good to a higher degree than another's
is different than for your behavior to just be less bad
than another's. And that's a particularly
important distinction here because the things Tamar was
doing, objectively speaking, most people with a moral compass
and moral sensibility would say those things are not good at
all. But when Judah ended up
identifying those things, I'm not going to get into it all
explicitly this week. You listen to the last week's
sermon or just read Genesis 38 if you're not sure what the
things we're talking about are. But if it you can, you can make
a really strong argument that Tamar's behavior was not good at
all. But that's how Judah describes
it. Said Tamar is not less evil than
I was. He said Tamar was gooder than I
was, more righteous than I was. Her relationship with God, her
relationship with her community, the people around her, her
family, her society, her community, all of this was
better, had a higher degree of goodness than Judas did.
Even with what Tamar had done, it was still good.
It was still good. Tamar was not less evil.
She was more righteous. But let's talk a little bit
about evil before we talk about the goodness of Tamar itself.
Tamar was more good. Let's take a look at evil
because we get pictures of evil in Genesis chapter 38.
We can't use Genesis chapter 38 as an excuse to say anything
goes. Whatever you feel like doing, do
it, because evil is identified explicitly for two people in
Genesis. UH was Judah's oldest son,
Tamar's first husband. We don't know what evil uh did,
but we know that the Lord said UH was doing so much evil that
God killed him himself. God intervened.
Divine intervention took her out of the picture.
That's how bad UH was. And so Tamar was given to be
married to Judah's second son, Onan.
We get what he we're told what his evil was.
We're told quite explicitly that Onan was using Tamar for his own
pleasure, not treating her as a human being, not treating her as
a person of sacred worth. Not treating her as someone who
is valuable in and of herself, who has her own dreams, her own
desires, her own hopes, her own plans to participate and be part
of the world in a good and positive and productive way.
Ona didn't care about any of that.
He only cared what he could get out of Tamar, and what he could
get out of Tamar was a little bit of pleasure, and whatever
else she wanted. Forget her.
Who cares? She doesn't matter and we are
told that explicitly that God identifies that as evil.
We're told God said Onan did evil in the Lord's eyes and so
the Lord killed him. Lord was taken no prisoners in
Genesis chapter 38. I said last week, you know this
is a mess around and find out God that we see and and then and
it's the same God we get all the way through the Bible and it's
good for us to remember that sometimes God is merciful.
God is gracious, but you know, don't mess around and find out
with God. It's, it's always better not to.
Now, the third person I have up here, I violated my own rule and
I didn't realize I'd violated my rule until after I'd prepared
the slides. And I was like, I don't want to
go back and change the slides on three different sets of
PowerPoints. So I'm just going to leave the
mistake up here and call it out when we get there.
Because I have Judah listed as under the evil list.
But I did the same thing I did last week, right?
Because Judah didn't say Tamar was good and I was evil.
Tamar was righteous and I was unrighteous.
He just said Tamar's righteousness was greater than
my own. So we've got to really take
Judah off the evil list here and put him on the less righteous
than Tamar list. But what made him less righteous
than Tamar? What was his failure?
He was great at being the morality police, right When he
heard, oh, Tamar's been prostituting herself.
Get her out here. Burn her at the state, put her
to death. That's wrong.
Everybody knows it's wrong, it's evil, it's immoral.
We cannot have that sort of thing in our family, in our
community, in this part of the world.
Can't have it. Can't have it.
At least with people related to
me, because we already know that he goes to prostitutes.
But Tamar was not allowed. So Judah was great at being the
morality police. He was great at identifying
other people's sins, and Judah himself acknowledges that level
of righteousness. Being able to point out what is
wrong with other people is a second class, lower tier, lower
level righteousness. Not as good, not as righteous as
Tamar, because as he was pointing out what he perceived
as Tamar's faults, he was at the same time failing to live up to
his obligations, his covenantal obligations.
He was the patriarch of his family, of his particular tribe,
Judah, one of the 13 tribes of Israel.
And, and this Judah is the Judah that that tribe is named after,
had such a long term impact on his people that the entire
region of that part of the world came to be known as Judea, named
after this guy Judah. And it continued to be known as
Judea until the occupying Roman Empire committed an ethnic
cleansing and killed as many Jews and drove most of them out.
In fact, that's where the word Jew comes from.
It comes from Judah. So Judah's had this tremendous
impact on world history, tremendous impact, but here he
was failing to live up to his covenant obligations.
He was failing to care for his family and the way that God said
a father, a patriarch, a leader must care for the people under
their care. And he had just left Tamar
hanging with no hope, no security, no plan, no safety for
the present or for the future. And however good he was at being
the morality police, that wasn't good enough, however righteous
it was to point out what other people were doing wrong.
It's a lower level, second class righteousness compared to what
Tamar was doing. So let's take a look at Tamar.
Let's look at Tamar's goodness that we can see just here in
this chapter. Tamar's goodness, first of all,
we're going to talk about this one in more detail next week.
This just going to touch on it today.
This will be kind of the the theme for next week's message.
But Tamar rebuked Judah as gently as possible and as
forcefully as necessary. Tamar had choices when she was
in the situation she was in without a husband, no
opportunity to get a husband because technically she was
betrothed to Judah's youngest son.
But Judah was not allowing her to marry his youngest son
because he thought she was a jinx.
And so she was without hope for the future.
She could have done a lot of things.
She could have just become a prostitute.
She could have just curled up and and and said, I'm a victim.
What was me? There's nothing I can do.
When she chose the course that she took and she became pregnant
by Judah, she could have, she had options then as well.
She could have publicly shamed and humiliated Judah.
She could what Judah did. And again, it wasn't against the
law yet because Moses hadn't been given the law by God on
Mount Sinai yet. But what Judah did was, is
explicitly excluded in in sexual ethics and in the behavior of
faithful people of God in the law of Moses that was to come.
She could have shamed Judah for it.
She could have humiliated him for it.
She could have brought him low in the eyes of his own family
for what he had done. But she didn't.
She also didn't let him off the hook.
She sent the message to him. The one who got me pregnant is
the one who owns these. She sent the message directly to
him. She rebuked him as gently as
possible, but as forcefully as necessary.
Because as much as she was intent on not shaming Judah, she
was also intent on not being sacrificed to his stupidity and
his superstitions as gently as possible, as forcefully as
necessary. We'll talk about that more next
week. Tamar, also other part of Tamar.
Tamar exercised agency to care for herself and to contribute to
society. That's what we talked about last
week. She made decisions.
She did what she needed to do. She didn't just lie down and
roll over as a victim and say there's nothing I can do.
She wanted to be a fully participating member of society.
She wanted to have security for herself of the future.
And, and there are a lot of different ways women,
particularly today that women can be full participating
members of society. In Tamar's day, those options
were much narrower. And one of the key pieces was
having children. And so she did what she needed
to do to have children, to make her contribution to the family,
to the society that was part of what she wanted to do and who
she wanted to be. And she took a tremendous risk
in doing this. She was nearly executed by being
burned alive because of the agency that she exercised,
because of the decisions that she made.
She took a tremendous risk. She apparently had enough
confidence in Judah that when he knew the truth, he would do the
right thing. And that's what he did,
acknowledging the children as his own and making Tamar a part
of her household and giving her his protection, although not
treating her as wife after that in the sense of additional
childbearing. She exercised agency to care for
herself and to contribute to society.
And the third thing that Tamar did is Tamar showed faithfulness
to her family. Even when her family was not
faithful to her, they, they let her down in big ways.
I don't know where Tamar's parents were in all of this.
One would think her father would have been advocating for her
with Judah. Hey, you know, Judah, your sons
are dead. Not because my daughter,
something wrong with my daughter because your sons were awful
human beings. Just ask God, He'll tell you.
We don't know where he was. We know Tate, we know Judo was
just being superstitious. She's bad luck.
Two sons married, two sons dead. Not going to give her a chance
to kill my third son. She could have humiliated him.
She could have destroyed him. She could have shamed her own
family just by going off and and doing any number of different
things she could to make her way in the world.
That would have brought shame to her family.
But she didn't do any of those things.
She exercised agency. She took a tremendous risk, and
she guarded the dignity of people who were not guarding her
dignity. That's a very high level of
righteousness. Tamar's story reminds me here of
Jesus's Sermon on the Mount or part of the Sermon on the Mount,
when, when Jesus said, you've heard it said, or you know it's
written, thou shalt not kill, referring to one of the 10
commandments. But I tell you, if you're angry
with your brother or your sister, if you hold a grudge or
a resentment against them, it's just as bad as killing.
You've heard it said, it's written.
Don't commit adultery. I'm telling you, you even just
you know, are, are, are lusting after people, desiring them to
possess and control and use for your pleasure without care for
them. That's as bad as committing
adultery. It's the attitude of the heart
toward the people around us. That's what God wants to change.
That's why being morality police is a is a second tier lower
class in a form of righteousness because the morality police are
just focused on behavior. They just want to make sure
everyone's behavior conforms to their standards.
Maybe sometimes it's that everyone's behavior conforms to
God's standards, but God's after something much deeper than
conformity. God wants His law written on our
hearts so that we out of our hearts treat people around us as
God would have us treat them, regardless of how they are
treating us. Remember the other one?
Jesus said. You've heard it written.
It's written an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
You know that's also in the Bible, right?
God's the one that gave that law an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth that came same place that thou shalt not kill came
from. Jesus said, I tell you, turn the
other cheek, man strikes you on one cheek, turn the other one.
Also treating people as God would have us treat them
regardless of how they treat us. And this is how Tamar was
living. This was Tamar's righteousness.
She could have shamed and humiliated Judah.
She could have shamed and humiliated her family.
But she she did what she did as gently as possible and as
forcefully as necessary so that she could have a secure future,
so that she could give her contribution to the world, and
so that she could guard the dignity and the honor and the
welfare of her family. That's Tamar's goodness.
How does that fit with us? What does that mean for our
goodness? I think we can we can take Tama.
There's AI mean this family stuff.
There's the family structures have changed dramatically over
the years, but these kind of family dynamics, man, it it it
family's tie. Family's tough.
It's hard, it's hard. I love my family, but I got a
Full disclosure. I'm the hard one in my family.
So just so you know, to pray for my brother and my sister, Let's
take a look at our goodness when we rebuke, when rebuke is
necessary, when someone we know has done something wrong, that
we rebuke as gently as possible and as forcefully only as
necessary. This is how God treats us.
The, the, the Old Testament is often we're, we're there have
been arguments made over the years that the God of the New
Testament is different than the God of the Old Testament, that
the God of the Old Testament is a God of vengeance and wrath and
judgment. And there is vengeance and wrath
and judgment in the Old Testament.
To be sure, we got to get dead guys in one chapter here, but
what we see in reality, if we read the scriptures of the Old
Testament carefully is that it was hundreds and hundreds of
years and hundreds and hundreds of generations of God saying,
come back to me, change your ways.
You're running toward a Cliff. It's going to end badly.
God's mercy is so clear as we read through the Scriptures of
the Old Testament because way to God waited patiently and warned
patiently, and God at every point along the way was as
gentle as he possibly could and as forceful only as necessary.
And when all of that wrath came pouring out, it's because that's
the level that we had reached in our rebellion, and that was the
level of force necessary to bring us back around.
Don't rush to that like Tamar. And we need to correct someone
in our life, whether it's a family member or a friend or or
whoever, when, when it's right and not right.
And there's, you know, most of the folks in this world, it's
none of my business to correct them.
None of my business, none, You know, it's not my job, somebody
else's job for the folks that when it is.
And sometimes we do have that responsibility to be as gentle
as possible and only as forceful as necessary.
Second part, which is one that I, I feel like used to be
emphasized a lot. I heard it a lot growing up.
I don't, I don't hear it as much in, in culture around us.
I get the feeling that there's a lot in this church and, and in
the culture here in Meigs County because I, I see it around me
more. But work hard.
Laboring for yourself and for society is good.
Doing hard work that makes the world a better place is good.
And it didn't have to be dramatic work.
You know, if, if you, if you're flipping hamburgers at
McDonald's or serving up chicken at KFC, whatever, whatever
you're doing, you know, you're feeding people if you're, if
you're cleaning floors, if you're, if you're, whatever
you're doing, plowing fields, laying pipe, building buildings,
whatever, whatever it is, you're helping society function and
move forward and people to live their lives.
And that's a good thing. And most of the time there's no
glamour in it. There's no glory in it.
But it's, it's not just a patriotic thing.
It's not just a self interested thing.
It is righteous. It is good.
I've heard things over the years that have broken my hearts.
When I lived in Tiffin, a friend of mine was a high school
teacher. He taught 9th grade English and
the public schools there. And he had a student in his
class who he said was tremendously gifted,
particularly in writing, just a brilliant writer.
And my friend said to him, because this kid got
consistently moderate to poor grades, my friend said to him,
you know, you've got a lot of talent here.
You can do well. You can go to college, you can
get scholarships, you can really make some other of yourself.
And in this kid without, without any sense of irony, without any
sense of abnormality, looked at his teacher and said, you know,
my grandparents lived on Social Security and my parents lived on
Social Security. I'll probably just live on
Social Security myself. That he'd missed the value of
contributing, of working, the importance of intentionally
doing things to not to to to secure our own livelihood and to
make the world around us a better place to live for other
people as well. Laboring for ourselves, laboring
for the betterment of society is not it.
It's good in that godly, righteous sense of goodness.
It was part of Tamar's goodness. It can be part of ours as well.
And finally, to be faithful to our covenant obligations, to
treat the people around us well, to care for family, to care for
friends, to reach out in times of need, to be available to
serve, to lift up, to encourage, to guard the dignity of the
other folks. The opportunities we have,
whether it's at school or work or at ball games or or, you
know, went to Christian School growing up, you'd never know it
by the way the fans yelled at the refs at our ball games, so
never know it. All of these things that are the
busyness of life, sports and clubs and competitions and work
and school, all of these things, every moment there are
opportunities to either guard someone's dignity or rob
someone's dignity, to honor others or to dishonor others.
And the example that Tamar gives us is to make a guiding
directive in our lives that I am going to do everything in my
power to honor others and guard their dignity, even when they're
not doing the same for me. And this, of course, is the
example of Jesus, who, hanging naked on the cross, prayed for
his Father to forgive the people who had stripped him naked and
hung him on the cross, guarding their dignity, protecting their
honor. They don't understand what
they're doing. Jesus said they don't.
They don't understand, you know, realize how far off track they
are. It cost him his life.
It cost him public disgrace. Tamar risked those things.
Jesus sacrificed those things so that he could fulfill his
covenant obligations to us, to love us, to nurture us, to bring
us along, to welcome us into His family, into his fold, and into
His Kingdom. Jesus say, I created these
people. I owe them this to lay down my
life for them even when they've turned their back on me.
And I'm so glad He did, because there's way too many times in my
life that I've turned my back on Jesus, and I need that blood to
cover my sins just as much as anybody else in this world does.
The only chance I have of getting into the Kingdom of God
is mercy. The only chance, Only chance,
ask the people again, talk to my family.
But he he invites us in that and calls to us in that to follow
his lead in that, to follow the lead of of folks like his
grandmother Tamar in that in a system stack against us.
That's what it looks like to be good.
I believe if rebuke is necessary and we make it as gentle as
possible and only as forceful as necessary in a system stacked
against us, we do what we can. We do the work that we can, the
hard, unglorious, inglorious work that we have in front of us
for a livelihood for ourselves and to make our communities a
better place for others. And then we commit to fulfilling
our covenant obligations to the people in our family and our
church and our community and our school, at our place of work, in
our neighborhoods, wherever we run into them.
Our covenant obligations to guard their dignity, to love
them as God loves them, to treat them as people of infinite worth
created in the image of God. I believe that's what it means
to be good and a system stacked against us.
Let's stand.