In place of all our rituals of cleansing, Jesus established the sacrament of baptism as a symbol of the spiritual cleansing that we must all undergo to become truly Christian. And in the place of all the rituals of sacrifice, he established the Holy Supper as a symbol of our need to come into the presence of the Lord, and together with our fellow believers, accept the Lord's love symbolized by the bread and the Lord's wisdom symbolized by the wine into our lives. The Lord commanded us to observe these two rituals for all time. And they have formed the core of all the ritual traditions that have developed in our Christian lifes. Tradition does have its place. The glue of outward ritual and prescribed behavior can hold our families and communities together when we might otherwise be driven apart by interpersonal friction, and by outside forces beyond our control. There is good reason to move forward but are we ready to listen to the Lord's call to move out of our bondage of the past, and carry the rich treasures of our life forward into a new height are we ready to reach out and grow beyond anything we have ever been or known. I think the Lord has given us this challenge.

To better understand the genealogy of Jesus, it is important to know some of the notions Jews had regarding ancestral records. It proves that our Lord Jesus is of the nation and family out of which the Messiah was to arise. The promise of the blessing was made to Abraham and his seed; of the dominion, to David and his seed. It was promised to Abraham that Christ should descend from him, Ge 12:3; 22:18; and to David that he should descend from him, 2Sa 7:12; Ps 89:3, &c.; 132:11; and, therefore, unless Jesus is a son of David, and a son of Abraham, he is not the Messiah. Now this is here proved from well-known records. When the Son of God was pleased to take our nature, he came near to us, in our fallen, wretched condition; but he was perfectly free from sin: and while we read the names in his genealogy, we should not forget how low the Lord of glory stooped to save the human race.

Mary was still engaged to Joseph, she miraculously became pregnant through the Holy Spirit, as foretold to her by the angel. When Mary told Joseph she was pregnant, he had every right to feel disgraced. He knew the child was not his own, and Mary's apparent unfaithfulness carried a grave social stigma. Joseph not only had the right to divorce Mary, under Jewish law she could be put to death by stoning.

Although Joseph's initial reaction was to break the engagement, the appropriate thing for a righteous man to do, he treated Mary with extreme kindness. He did not want to cause her further shame, so he decided to act quietly. But God sent an angel to Joseph in a dream to verify Mary's story and reassure him that his marriage to her was God's will. The angel explained that the child within Mary was conceived by the Holy Spirit, that his name would be Jesus and that he was the Messiah, God with us.

When Joseph woke from his dream, he willingly obeyed God and took Mary home to be his wife, in spite of the public humiliation he would face. Perhaps this noble quality is one of the reasons God chose him to be the Messiah's earthly father.