An Open Table where Love knows no borders

God’s Suspect Sexual History

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

One of the criticisms I used to receive when I was first involved in advocating for the acceptance of homosexual people in the church was that I was risking the church’s reputation and God’s reputation, because it was essential that the church always maintain the highest standards of moral behaviour, and maintain a clear and safe distance from any whiff of sin and scandal. And so there were those who thought that I might be right that homosexuality might not be the great sin that the church had often made it out to be, but who rather timidly felt that it was best to maintain the status quo, because the presence of homosexual people raised too many complicated ethical questions and was likely to confuse the people and cloud the witness to solid family values. One of the most deep seated and unhelpful myths about the meaning of Christian faith is that it is primarily focussed on getting us all to behave, to conform to a set of good moral behaviours. The basic message is presented as “Jesus died for you. Now behave!” And of course, it is not only gay people who have been made to feel like unwanted failures by such teachings. Most of us carry things in our pasts or in the secret desires of our hearts that would have us thrown out of many churches if they were made known. Anything to do with sex is especially likely to invoke guilt and anxiety. Among the problems with this view of Christianity are that it is thoroughly unbiblical and thoroughly inconsistent with the life and witness of Jesus.

If that claim seems a bit far fetched, you need go no further than the opening chapter of the New Testament, part of which we heard as our gospel reading tonight. Judging by the things it emphasises, Matthew’s gospel was written to a church whose people were prone to thinking that the most important thing was keeping pure and maintaining strict moral standards. And Matthew begins shaking them up right from the get-go.

The only thing that comes before the story we heard tonight is a rather lengthy family tree of Jesus. It is not often read out in church because it is mostly just forty two lines of so-and-so was the father of so-and-so, and so it doesn’t sound very interesting and many of the names are not so easy for westerners to pronounce. But for those with eyes to see, there is some hidden excitement in it, and it is worth a quick look here, because it relates to what I’ve just been saying and it is actually quite important in the way it sets up the story we heard about Mary and Joseph.

The forty two lines mostly follow a repetitive pattern: this bloke was the father of that bloke, and that bloke was the father of another bloke, and so on and so on. But every now and again, just five times out of forty two, it breaks the rhythm and names the mother as well as the father. So if you are reading the whole thing out loud, it is the names of those five mothers that wake you up and grab your attention. The fifth one is Mary, the mother of Jesus, but the other four are all well known to those who know their Hebrew Bible stories, and none of them are the role models of sexual modesty that the moral majority want their daughters to grow up to be and their sons to grow to marry. In fact all four of them are associated with some sort of sexual scandal, and at least three of them are also gentile outsiders. Tamar disguised herself as a prostitute to have sex with the father of her dead husband and publicly expose him for failing to fulfil his social obligations. Rahab was a foreign prostitute. Ruth was a gentile woman who seduced a Jewish man and then got him to marry her. And Bathsheba was the married woman who King David dragged off to his bed and then had her husband murdered to cover it up. Matthew’s choice of who to highlight in Jesus’s family tree is not good news for the traditional family values lobby!

Then, having drawn our attention to this line-up of sexual scandal, Matthew names a fifth mother, Mary, and takes us straight into the story we heard tonight, which of course, is a story about how Mary’s pregnancy caused a scandal in her home town, and nearly cost her at least her husband, if not her life. The story tells us that Mary “was found” to be pregnant before she was married. This branded her as an adulterer, because although she was not yet married, she was already betrothed to Joseph, and in that culture, betrothal was a lot more binding than engagement in ours. Joseph knew enough about the facts of life to know that since he hadn’t had sex with Mary, someone else had, and he knew enough about biblical law and the cultural norms of his society to know that it was not the right thing to do to marry a woman who was carrying someone else’s child. Of course, even apart from the sense of hurt and betrayal he would be feeling, Joseph had his own reputation to think of, and sticking with Mary was a no win for him. If it became known that his girl was carrying someone else’s child, he’d be humiliated, and if it was thought that the child was his, his reputation as a respectable and honourable young man was shot since they weren’t married yet. Pre-marital sex might not cause much angst nowadays, but it sure did then. Either way, he loses. So the only right thing for him to do is sever ties with Mary, and his only choices are whether to make a public issue of it or not. If he does, he draws more attention to his own embarrassment, and there is a possibility that Mary will be stoned to death. He’s not up for that, so he opts to make the best of a bad situation and cut off the betrothal quietly. Mary will still be disgraced and be left pretty much unmarryable, but if she keeps herself and her illegitimate child behind closed doors, she should at least survive.

But then a messenger from the Lord turns up in a dream and tells Joseph that it was God who impregnated his girl, and that he should go ahead and marry her. Now I don’t know about you, but if I’m Joseph and someone turns up and confesses to having impregnated my fiancee, I don’t much care if he happens to be God, I’m not happy about it, and I’m certainly not taking orders from him. Especially when those orders are essentially about covering up for him, shouldering the blame myself, and raising his illegitimate child as though it was my own. “You caused the problem, God. Fix up your own mess. Count me out.” But Joseph seems to be a man of rather more nobility of spirit than me, and he’s up for the challenge of cooperating with whatever the hell it is that God is up to here.

Now, there is no good news for the traditional family values lobby and the sexual morality police here. They have of course, tried to wriggle out of it by focussing on Mary and Joseph as models of premarital sexual abstinence, but the fact is that if God thinks it is terribly important that he and his followers have nothing to do with anything that contains a whiff of scandal or suspect morality, then he really stuffed up here, because it is only by pretending that this story has no biblical context and no social context at all that you can hold it up as some kind of eulogy to virginity. The way Matthew sets up the story, he makes it very clear that not only is this a scandalous situation, but that it comes from a long family history of infamous sexual scandals.

Now it might not be good news for those who want religion to be all about policing people’s behaviour, but it is very very good news for pretty much everyone else. Whatever it is in your past, or even in your present, that you thought put you undoubtedly on the outer with God and made you a person who could never be someone God would want to be associated with or someone who God might ask for help in bringing about the things that God is doing in the world, then this story tells you that God is not nearly that precious about his reputation, and that God is not only working in and through those who have managed to live up to some standard of squeaky clean moral perfection. If you are gay, or you once had an affair, or an abortion, or you worked in the sex industry, or maybe it had nothing to do with sex but you have fallen foul of some other standard of social acceptability, and you’ve been told or made to feel by some church that you are thus a leper for life and can never be more than a second-class Christian, then grab a hold of this first chapter of Matthew and know that God is a lot more willing to be associated with you than with the sorts of judgemental moral crusaders who would cut you off. When God takes the big action to send his love into the world in tangible human form, he is just as likely to do so through people just like you.

And let me conclude with a more general observation as well. One of the reasons that the traditional family values crusaders use the word “traditional” is that they assume that things have been better in the past and that new changes usually take us onto slippery slopes of sin and wickedness, and therefore maintaining healthy morality means maintaining things the way they have been before. But God does not seem to be on about always doing things the same old way. God frequently wants to do something new and unprecedented. No God has become human before, and no God has allowed himself to be crucified by his own creatures before, and no God has raised a dead person to life and glorified him as lord of all before. But because religious peoples are always so prone to mistaking opposition to change for faithfulness, they are almost always scandalised when God begins doing anything new. Just look at the Jesus story. He is born in scandal, and he dies in scandal. And then his body goes missing and there is more scandal still. And God is thoroughly in the thick of it all and the religious people have got their noses right out of joint. They are far too scandalised to get on board with God. So when you hear religious people saying we can’t ordain women or we can’t accept homosexuals or we can’t criticise governments or oppose wars because the church has a long history and we’ve never done it that way before, don’t assume that that settles it, for it is just as likely to be a sign that God is well and truly involved and is challenging us to accept the incarnation of love in a new way, even if it be as startling as a virgin birth in questionable circumstances or a resurrection from the dead. God’s new world is coming, and God is not going to let the moral scruples of the religiously unimaginative and hung-up derail it. Come, Lord Jesus, come!

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