An Open Table where Love knows no borders

What if it was God?

A sermon on Matthew 1:18-25 by Nathan Nettleton

This has been a horrific week in the news and many people are feeling deeply shaken by the things that have been going on. First we had the siege in Sydney which terrified many and ended tragically with three deaths. Around the same time we had the sentencing of a man who suffocated his own young daughters. Then we had the horrific terrorist attack on a school in Pakistan which resulted in the deaths of 132 children and 9 teachers. And then we had the killing of a family of eight children in Cairns, apparently at the hands of their mother. It is difficult to even speak about such things, let alone to try to make sense of them. What are we to say in a week when we are preparing to celebrate the birth of a baby who grew to be known as the Prince of Peace? How is such a proclamation to make any sense in a world of such senseless violence? In a week’s time, the church calendar will mark the Feast of the Holy Innocents, remembering the children who were massacred in Bethlehem in an attempt to snuff out Jesus before he got started. Perhaps on that day, it would be easier to find a connection between the biblical stories and the events of the news, but what are we to say today? Today we hear the story of Mary and Joseph discovering that they were going to have a baby. Today we are looking forward to celebrating the birth of that baby with a festival that is widely celebrated, both inside and outside the church, as a celebration of happy families. What can we say that doesn’t sound like blasphemy in the face of thousands of people grieving the violent deaths of children, friends and loved ones?

There is something which I think is a common thread between at least three of these violent events and the story we heard of Joseph. It may be involved in the Cairns killings too, but we don’t yet have enough information about that one to speculate about motives, and the link I am seeing is, I think, more common to men than women. By way of trying to explain this link, I want to tell you about a comparatively innocuous little incident that happened to me this week which confronted me with the realisation that I have something in common with these killers, something that is close to the heart of the twisted motivations for their crimes.

There was a subject I have been teaching jointly with another teacher at the college for the last ten years, and I was assuming that it would be taught again next year. When the timetable came out a few weeks back, it wasn’t there. No one had spoken to me about it. It just wasn’t there. I dropped over to the office of the other teacher a few times to ask about it, but I just did it randomly whenever I thought of it, and I didn’t manage to catch her. So when I saw her at the college staff Christmas party on Wednesday night, I asked her about it. I was thinking that it was a just a simple question with a brief answer like “It is switching to a three year cycle instead of two”, or even something more conspiratorial like “I’ve been told not to run the course with you any more.” But instead it was more complicated and for various reasons the course is being replaced with something else, and because it is complicated, she perfectly understandably didn’t want to have the conversation at the Christmas party. Unfortunately, the fact that my course was being scrapped as a result of some considerations and discussions that I wasn’t included in or even told about hit a rather big sensitive button about the way other much bigger decisions have been being made at the college in the past year, and I reacted by making some comments that were rude, unfair, and completely inappropriate in the context of what was supposed to be a relaxed social event.

Now I didn’t shoot anyone, and I didn’t threaten anyone with violence. I didn’t even raise my voice or use abusive language. But I did leave somebody feeling ambushed and hurt, and she didn’t deserve that and I owe her a big apology. What was going on in me?

One of the things that has been said repeatedly about Man Haron Monis in the analysis of his motivations for the siege in Sydney, and in the debates about whether to refer to it as simply a crime or a terrorist attack, has been that his long criminal history is full of what might be called “crimes of entitlement”. He was facing more than fifty charges of sexual assault and a charge of being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife. These are referred to as “crimes of entitlement” because they are things that are done by someone whose sense of being entitled to something is frustrated or denied, and they respond by trying to violently take what they have been denied or by taking violent revenge. The man who was sentenced for killing his two little daughters last April was apparently taking revenge on his wife who had left him and kept custody of the girls. The Pakistani Taliban described their attack on the school as an act of revenge. They believe themselves entitled to get their way and impose their will on the country, and they will seek revenge on anyone who stands in their way. Interestingly, even the Afghani Taliban denounced their actions, but that split probably reflects the fact that the Afghani Taliban have credible prospect of achieving their aims, and the Pakistani Taliban don’t so the anger, alienation and sense of wounded entitlement are even greater and even more dangerous.

And as I reflected on these things, I realised that what motivated me to put down my teaching colleague was essentially the same thing. I felt entitled to be treated in certain ways and to be included in particular decision making processes, and when others didn’t give me what I felt entitled to, I took offence and behaved badly in response.

And as I reflected further, I realised that probably an awful lot of the world’s violence is committed by men – at least it is usually men – whose sense of entitlement has been wounded. Things like so called “honour killings” are an especially obvious example, but I think something similar is taking place in violent conflicts more often than not. In the modern west we are raised on the concept of personal rights, and if we are denied what we believe are our rights, all sorts of violence follows. This gets especially messy when it gets mixed up with religion, as it often does, and we can see this being played out in both the Sydney siege and the Pakistani Taliban attack. We project our own feelings of entitlement onto God and portray God in our own image. We imagine that God is also an angry man who would not tolerate any offence against his honour, his dignity, his entitlement. We imagine God as responding violently to insults against his honour, and before long we are imagining ourselves as God’s warriors who are righteously defending God’s honour. And once we have God on our side, mandating our violence against God’s enemies, well, all bets are off and there is no limit to the atrocities that can be committed. Given the right mix of alienation and fanaticism and mutual incitement, we can even end up committing crimes that seem over the top to other violent extremists.

So what has any of this got to do with the Bible readings that we heard tonight? A lot actually. Because one of the areas in which this sense of entitlement is most acute and most easily wounded is in the area of sexual relationships, as we see in Man Haron Monis’ criminal history. And what is Joseph grappling with in the story we heard tonight from the gospel according to Matthew? Joseph is confronting the discovery that someone else has impregnated his fiancé. Like most men, Joseph feels that he has a right to her faithfulness, and to knowing that any children born to her are his. If you read the laws prohibiting adultery in the Bible and in other ancient legal codes, you will see that they were understood as being all about protecting these rights for men. A married man having sex with a single woman was only accused of fornication, not adultery, because she didn’t belong to another man, so he hadn’t infringed any other man’s entitlements. These laws were framed in a culture that regarded the issue of paternity rights as sacred. So sacred that when Joseph found out that his fiancé was pregnant to someone else, he was “entitled” to ask the town to join him in executing God’s violent judgement and stoning her to death. Now Joseph doesn’t elect to take that option, but initially he was certainly calling off the engagement. His honour was at stake, and he wasn’t going to put up with this insult and raise somebody else’s child.

Nowadays, questions of paternity can be settled with DNA tests, but as quite a number of us here know only too well, the feelings of insult and betrayal and wounded honour caused by sexual infidelity do not require a pregnancy to erupt in grief and rage. The feeling that someone else has tasted a relationship with our spouse that we felt entitled to have as exclusively ours cuts us to the core. My first marriage broke up amidst those feelings when I was just 24 years old, but if you hit me in the scar tissue, it can still open up like it was yesterday. And when I put myself back in that place and imagine Joseph trying to come to terms with God saying, “Don’t worry. It was me,” I’m not thinking that that makes it feel a whole lot better. I didn’t know the man who was sleeping with my first wife, but I don’t think I’d have felt better about it if it had been my best friend. That would have been two relationships betrayed instead of just one. So I’m not seeing Joseph feeling okay because it was only God who impregnated his wife.

So what I am certainly thinking is that Joseph deserves our deepest admiration for his ability to put aside his sense of entitlement and insulted honour, and for hanging in there with Mary and raising her child as though he was his own. But the God-dimension of this seems to me to take this story even further and to make Joseph all the more admirable. As I’ve said, knowing that it was God is not going to make it feel any better, but actually, it makes the whole thing far far more challenging for Joseph. This must have been a pretty major faith crisis for him, because when you stop and think about it, it continues to be a major faith crisis for God’s people even now. We may not be conscious of the connection, but it is there.

We often hear talk about the “scandal of the gospel” in relation to Jesus’s questionable paternity and to his execution as a criminal, but until this week, I had never seen what happens when that “scandal” bumps into the typically male sense of entitlement as it does for Joseph. You see, we typically think of scandals as something that violates the way things are supposed to be, and so normally we think that our job is to avoid being involved in scandals and, if scandals happen, to sort them out and put things back together the way they should be. The way things are supposed to be is God-given, and whether we are just good law-abiding Christians or God’s holy warriors, we see ourselves as cooperating with God in maintaining or restoring the God-given way things should be.

So what are we supposed to think and how are we supposed to respond if God is the creator of the scandal? What if it is God doesn’t act within the rules and the boundaries? What if God doesn’t seem to respect the way things are supposed to be? What if this situation that has wounded your pride and left you feeling robbed of what you were entitled to has God’s finger prints all over it?

You see, when I look back on my broken marriage, I like to think of myself as the innocent victim and the situation as all being caused by other people’s sin. And I like to think of God’s involvement being all about picking me up afterwards and healing my tragic wounds. I don’t want to think about God collaborating in the inflicting of the wounds. I want God to be unequivocally on my side, vindicating me and nursing me back to full strength.

But what if God sees my sense of entitlement as such an obstacle to my own spiritual wholeness and such a threat to those around me, such as those I teach with, that God is willing to collaborate in the breaching of the boundaries of my marriage and leaving me wounded and humiliated in order to expose it and tackle it and point me down a strange and scandalous road of spiritual transformation?

Now I am not saying that God was involved like that when my marriage broke up, or when various other people here have been wounded in deep and painful ways when what they thought they were entitled to has been cruelly snatched away from them. But I am saying that I can’t rule it out, because I see it here at the heart of the gospel we heard tonight. And in Joseph I see a remarkable role model for laying aside that sense of entitlement and embracing the pathway of humility, even when it seems scandalous. And when we see that ability to lay aside the sense of entitlement developed even more fully in the son who Joseph raised as he accepts and absorbs the completely unjust insults, humiliation and violence of the cross, I realise that there is no way known that keeping everything nice and proper would ever be able to help men like me grow into such resilient love, humility and mercy.

In a few minutes, we will be breaking the bread and each of us will be given a little piece. Perhaps tonight we can see that as the breaking of our dreams, our entitlements, our expectations of what is fair and right, and the handing to us of a tiny fragment that we are no longer sure is even ours. And perhaps tonight we can see and hear the challenge in that to allow ourselves to be broken, and to accept the a fragment, and to nurture it as it grows to Christlikeness and transforms us into the people of God, the body of Christ.

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