Matthew gave us a long list of the ancestors of Jesus Christ at the start of his Gospel. Most of us are content to skip over or skim through the names to get to Matthew’s stories, but every name represents a story and some of them are juicy. The Hebrew Bible provides enough detail to know that among the five women listed, two were prostitutes and one was an adulterer. One woman was a widowed immigrant and one was young and poor. All the men probably have scandalous stories, but history hides the sins of men more deeply than those of women.

I suspected from a young age that my father was a scandalous man. I remember riding with my father in his truck and stopping at a house in the country far from our home. A woman dressed in a pale nightgown came out of the house to talk with my father in the driveway. It was the middle of the day and I was surprised she came outside in her night clothes. They talked for a few minutes and then my father told me to stay in the truck and he would be back. He disappeared with the woman. I wondered what he was doing with a strange woman in a nightgown in the middle of the day. He was gone for a bit. I don’t know if it was 5 minutes or 20 minutes, but he came back, got in the truck, and we drove away. I didn’t ask any questions. My father and I did not talk about it and I did not say anything to my mother then or ever. But I wondered if my father was doing something with that woman that he should not have been doing. I was probably 6 or 7 years old at the time.

When I was 15 years old and hanging out at the Standard Oil gas station near my house, I had a very distinct fantasy one afternoon of catching my father in his car with another woman who was not my mother. I did not see my father in his car alone or with another woman that day. I don’t know why that fantasy came to my mind, but it haunted me a bit. I figured that my father was the kind of man who might have girlfriends even though he had been married 25 years.

I did not know for certain that my father had girlfriends until 1995 when I was 38 years old. My older brother told me for sure an hour before my wedding. Our mother typically refused to travel, so her absence was no surprise, but our father’s absence was. My brother explained that our mother had recently discovered that our father had a mistress. Our mother was furious and would not let our father leave the house to go anywhere.

My brother explained that our mother was angry at both of us because we did not tell her our father was cheating on her. That seemed outrageous to me because I did not know, but it turns out my brother did know and had known for years. He was surprised that I was ignorant.

My brother and father had a closer relationship than my father and I did, so it wasn’t a surprise that he knew things I didn’t, but I asked how he learned. He asked our father, “Where are you on Tuesdays and Thursdays? You are never at home if I call on a Tuesday or a Thursday.” Those were the days daddy went to see his mistress and when my brother asked where he was, he told him.

I did not call regularly, so never noticed a pattern of absence, but hearing what our father was doing on Tuesdays and Thursdays explained a mystery that had puzzled me for years. I spent much of the summer of 1982 living with my parents. I had graduated from seminary in May of 1982 and would begin Clinical Pastoral Education in the fall. I had nowhere to be for the summer, so I lived with my parents and worked on clearing the fence rows of the old home place. On Tuesdays and Thursdays my father would get on his motorcycle and go off “to drink coffee with his friends.” He never invited me to go. When I was a teenager living at home, I sometimes went with my father to ride backroads on his motorcycle and drink coffee with his friends. I wondered why he never invited me to come along since I was now a successful young man that any father would be proud to have his friends meet. Now I knew.

Both of my grandfathers were scandalous men. Both were alcoholics. My mother was raised by her grandparents because her mother ran away when she was an infant and her father was incapable of raising a baby. My mother left her family after high school and communicated with them only through Christmas cards thereafter, so I know very little about the scandals of her side of the family. My father had contact with his father while growing up, but his father abandoned his first wife with 5 children, married another woman and raised another family on the other side of town. I learned that bit of history when I met another boy named Denham in high school. My father explained that we were cousins and that we shared the same grandfather.

I meant to leave my family behind like a bad memory when I left for college. Maybe it is telling that I left for college in the middle of the night without saying goodbye to anyone. My car was already packed. I was so excited to go that I could not sleep, so I took off at 3 AM while everyone else was asleep. I might have left a note.

I visualized myself as starting a new way. I was not a branch of my family tree. I was new growth and I would be the root of something special. I became an evangelical Christian at 17 years old and believed my new birth meant that my old birth was irrelevant to who I now was.

I was wrong. I am now and always have been my father’s son. I am my grandfather’s grandson. I am not the root of a new way. I am a branch of my family tree. And now that I am 61 years old, I think maybe I would have done better owning my family ties instead of trying to pretend they had nothing to do with me.

The work of being good and special has nothing to do with divorcing from one’s history or pretending your history is not really your history.

Matthew gave us a long list of the ancestors of Jesus without worrying one bit that Jesus might be limited or stained by such associations. If scandalous history was good enough for Jesus, it must be good enough for me too.