Being Good (Chester UMC)

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.

Genesis 38 · chapter mention

We can't use Genesis chapter 38 as an excuse to say anything

Genesis 38 · chapter mention

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

Genesis 38 · chapter mention

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.

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.