An Advent sermon series or Bible study idea

Looking for something that is feminist, covers both Testaments, and incorporates art and pastoral care concepts?

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Many of us in ministry were taught at one time or another - such as in a pastoral care class or a unit of CPE - how to draw a genogram. Genograms are depictions of family lineage, but they contain much more information than simply who is related to whom. Using shapes and symbols, they can indicate such details as quality of relationships, patterns that repeat across generations, significant events with ripple effects across time, and physical and/or mental illness in individual family members. (Here’s a short video that uses the Skywalker family from Star Wars to give a basic overview of how genograms work.)

I was taught to use genograms in kind of a diagnostic sense, almost a “well, we can see here where things started to go wrong” way. This can be helpful. We can’t address unhealthy behaviors until we identify them and get a sense of why we/they are acting that way.

But genograms can also track more positive events. For example, I have a grandmother who was diagnosed with cancer and told she had months to live. She left that doctor’s office with defiance and purpose. For the next thirty years she traveled and saw her grandchildren grow up and saw the births of some of her great-grandchildren. I like to think I get some of my stubbornness from her. (I love the flexibility of genograms, which gives space to choose the kinds of qualities and events to track through the generations.)

In my swag bag at Nevertheless She Preached last month, there was a black-and-white version of “The Genealogy of Christ,” a beautiful piece of art by Lauren Wright Pittman of A Sanctified Art. As I was coloring it during worship last week, it occurred to me that the women of Jesus’ genealogy would make for a great Advent sermon or Bible study series. Each of us is shaped by so much of what has already happened in our families, as genograms show us. (This reality is backed up by therapists/scientists as Gabor Mate, who recently published The Myth of Normal, and Galit Atlas, who wrote Emotional Inheritance.) Though Jesus was fully divine, he was also fully human, so it seems fair to say that he was powerfully impacted by his forebears. He no doubt heard narratives from the histories of Mary and Joseph as well as his heavenly Parent as he was growing up. And women’s stories tend to be rich with bittersweet events, resourcefulness, and resilience.