Take the risk – Sermon Tamar

This week we continue looking at the lives of women in the Old Testament by turning our attention to Tamar. We began with Hannah and her faithful prayer—a story that many know very well. And this week, brace yourself. Because Tamar’s story is not the sort of tale we like to read in church. Many people are cozily comfortable thinking the Bible is a prim and proper book, full of gentle wisdom and saintly advice.

But the truth is, Scripture is soaked in blood and laughter and betrayal and sex and strange symbols and aching hope. It tells the truth about people. It tells the truth about God. Murder, espionage, jealousy, coarse language, scandal, seduction—the Bible has it all. We’ve just grown used to sanitizing it—through our translations, through our Sunday selections, through what we dare read aloud and what we skip over. But this living word of God is no sanitized scroll. It’s earthy. It’s holy. It’s honest. And an honest Christian doesn’t flinch from the gritty parts. We accept the lofty poetry and the bawdy humor, the reverent laments and the uncouth vocabulary, because they all testify to the same thing: a God who is real—right in the mess and the marrow of our lives. Tamar’s story is one we often brush under the rug. But it’s precisely in acknowledging it, in accepting it, and in absorbing the blow of it that we most clearly hear what God is saying.

So let’s get real.

The dust in Judah’s camp stuck to the skin. Heat shimmered off the goat pens, and the air smelled of wool, sweat, and old wine. Tamar sat still inside her father-in-law’s house, her body clothed in widow’s black, her name spoken less and less.

She wasn’t one of them. A Canaanite girl bound by marriage into a family that worshipped the God of Abraham but practiced loyalty like a game of dice. Judah gave her to his firstborn son, Er—a man so corrupt God erased him. No reason recorded. Just gone. Dead. Then came Onan, the second son. His job was clear: raise a child in his brother’s name, protect the family line, secure Tamar’s future. But Onan treated her like a concubine and kept his inheritance safe. He used her, then pulled away. And God saw that too. Another funeral. Another black shawl. Another night alone.

According to the law and custom of the time, when a man died without children, his brother was expected to marry the widow and raise a child in the dead man’s name. This was a sacred obligation—not just to preserve the family line, but to protect the widow from abandonment and poverty. Tamar wasn’t asking for special treatment. She was asking for what was due to her under the law.

Judah promised her the third son—Shelah. “Wait,” he said. “When he grows up.” But years passed. Shelah grew. Judah did nothing. Tamar understood. He blamed her. Two sons gone, and the only common factor was her. So he sent her back to her father’s house—a legal way to bury her alive. No divorce. No remarriage. No child. No future. She was a name with no line, a woman with no voice.

But Tamar didn’t vanish.

She took off her widow’s clothes. She veiled her face. She went to the crossroads—not for pleasure, not for vengeance, but for justice. She met Judah there. He didn’t recognize her. He offered payment. She named the price. A signet. A cord. A staff. His identity in her hands. The night passed. Life began to stir within her.

When Judah learned she was pregnant, he ordered her death. “Burn her,” he said, forgetting the promise he broke. Tamar said nothing. She sent his tokens instead. She let the evidence speak.
And Judah—cornered by his own unrighteousness—choked out the words: “She is more righteous than I.”

That moment changed everything.

You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to feel the weight of what Tamar endured. She was used. Ignored. Silenced. Trapped in a system that promised to protect her but functionally discarded her. She played by the rules. And the rules betrayed her. There are whole chapters of grief and fear between the lines of her story—whole nights of not knowing if she’d ever be free of mourning clothes, ever be more than someone else’s obligation. If you’ve ever been dismissed, blamed, or left waiting while people with power shrugged off responsibility, you know something of Tamar’s world. It’s not just ancient.

It’s ours.

And still, grace found her.

It didn’t come wrapped in comfort or accompanied by applause. Grace showed up in the quiet clarity of her resolve, in the fire in her gut that said, “No more waiting.” The Holy Spirit didn’t call her to sit still. She called her to act. Tamar stepped into a role no one assigned her, took risks no one applauded, and forced truth into the open. The gospel isn’t always polite. Grace isn’t always gentle. Sometimes it looks like a veiled woman at a crossroads holding a signet and a staff. Sometimes you take the risk because righteousness depends on it.

Tamar doesn’t curse. She doesn’t shout. She doesn’t strike back. She just holds up the truth. She lets Judah’s own seal indict him. That’s righteousness. That’s justice. That’s faith. And like the persistent widow in today’s second lesson, Tamar refuses to be dismissed. She confronts the powerful, not with might, but with bold presence and unwavering demand for what is right. Her act of resistance—like the widow’s relentless cry for justice—becomes the very means by which wrong is exposed and righteousness is upheld. Her story invites us to trust that righteousness doesn’t always look clean or polite—and that faithful action often means unsettling what’s comfortable.

It’s easy to read Tamar’s story and think it’s something far away. But her world isn’t so different from ours. We still live in systems that ignore the vulnerable and protect the powerful. People are told to wait, to be quiet, to stay in their place while injustice seeps through the floorboards. Promises get broken. Survivors are doubted. People with wealth and status walk away while others carry the cost. And the church isn’t immune. Sometimes we love respectability more than righteousness.

We feel it differently depending on our age. Some of us were taught never to speak ill of authority, to hold the family name above the family truth. Don’t air the dirty laundry! Others of us are caught in between—knowing the stories, keeping the secrets, trying to make peace with both. And younger voices? They’re often dismissed as dramatic or disrespectful, when in fact they’re the ones naming what others won’t.

But God isn’t silent.

God is still acting through those the world tries to shame or silence. The Spirit is calling us to tell the whole truth—not just the parts that make us look good. Grace shows up in confrontation, in the unveiling of hypocrisy, in the insistence that justice is holy. Recalling again the parable of Jesus, the widow’s relentless cry echoes in Tamar’s real-life resistance. She made justice unavoidable. Sometimes you take the risk because justice depends on it.

And through Tamar—through her bold, scandalous, faithful action—God delivers the Messiah. St. Matthew tells us plainly, “Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar”—one of the only women named in Jesus’ lineage. Not hidden. Not hushed. Remembered.

God works through unlikely people in unlikely ways—Tamar then, and faithful witnesses now. In Jesus, God fulfills justice and righteousness in their most radical form: not through condemnation, but through welcome. Because of Jesus and his radical justice and righteousness, the family of God is open to all—in the complete scandal of it—regardless of race, gender, occupation, sexual orientation, education, culture, or political affiliation.

And it’s not always who we expect. The pastor in the robe and the man at the finance meeting might be the ones ignoring the hungry man outside the sanctuary. The well-dressed Christian businesswoman may quietly fund policies that keep the poor in debt because it helps her portfolio. Meanwhile, a gay drag queen might be the one sitting at the bedside of a dying neighbor night after night. An undocumented immigrant might be the one risking everything to send money back to feed ten people. A conspiracy theorist might be the only person who notices when a lonely church member disappears and actually checks in. Tamar’s story reminds us: righteousness is not always respectable. It’s faithful. And faith doesn’t always wear a name tag.

When we tell the whole story, the gospel has power—not a scrubbed, staged version, but a real, living Word that reaches where polite religion cannot. Sometimes you take the risk because the whole story depends on it.

We know what’s required of us. The command has already gone out. The call of Christ is not unclear, and the voice of the Holy Spirit is not faint. We are summoned to truth, to justice, to righteousness. We are appointed to speak with integrity, to act with fairness, and to walk in what is right—for our sake, and for the sake of those in our lives. The work is not easy. It never has been. But it is holy.

Heaven does not crown the comfortably polished and cautiously polite. The ones who will be glorified are those who are faithful—the ones who point to truth, who pursue righteousness, who act with justice, who hear the Spirit and follow God into the hard, messy, risky places.

Like Tamar.

Like Jesus.

Like all the countless who bear his name without acclaim but with endurance.

Take the risk—the truth depends on it.