Fourth Sunday of Advent, 22 December 2019, Clapham
This is a talk about Joseph: and about when you’re doing the right thing feels like you’re doing the wrong thing.
In the old days when the Christmas story was told, Joseph was treated as a figure of fun. The medieval Mystery Plays present Joseph as an old man who thinks his young fiancee has been unfaithful to him. Comic in the way that Chaucer’s ‘The Miller's Tale’ is comic, with its unfaithful wife and cuckolded husband, in the York Mystery Play the enraged Joseph suggests that it was no angel who slipped into Mary's chamber, but rather a devilish young lover. The comedy relies on the audience knowing that Mary was a virgin after all. But behind this comic tale is a tragic struggle - the struggle which Joseph had, in doing the right thing, when doing the right thing felt to him like he was doing the wrong thing.
Doing the right thing involved taking Mary at her word, and taking her hand in marriage. But to Joseph, steeped in the traditions and culture of his day, this felt so very wrong. If Mary was pregnant with another’s child - whether by the Holy Spirit or by some other man - then everybody knew that divorce was the only acceptable way for Joseph to go. Joseph knew that taking any alternative action invited the derision and shame of everyone around, heavily impacting his standing in the community, his business, his prospects. In the York Mystery Play, weighed down by this dilemma, Joseph breaks down completely with sorrow. Only a divine intervention persuades him to do the right thing and take the bold step of faith in marrying Mary. [1]
I imagine that at some time or other you have faced that sort of dilemma: when doing the right thing felt to you like you were doing the wrong thing. It’s a predicament we sometimes face at Christmastime over those decisions we have to take about which family members to invite to our meal - or whose invitations we should accept. When it’s the case that whatever decision you take someone will miss out, or someone may take offence, then, even when convinced you’re doing the right thing you can still feel like you’re doing the wrong thing.
Doing the right thing when it feels wrong is a long Christian tradition, going all the way back to Jesus who saw that the right thing was to heal people who came to him on the Sabbath, although it was so very wrong in respect to the laws of the day. Jesus, who saw that the right thing was to give Caesar what Caesar demanded - raising the hackles of the anti-Roman protestors, Jesus’ peers, to whom this was anathema; but adding that the right thing was also to give to God what was rightly God’s - the whole of our lives, all our devotion, which was to the Roman mindset entirely wrong, to the Roman emperor treasonous.
Doing the right thing when it felt so very wrong is the mark of the Christian saints and martyrs, like Margaret Clitherow of York whose conversion to Catholicism came at a time when the Roman faith was outlawed in England, and whose convictions led her to be repeatedly imprisoned for failing to attend church, and to risking her life by harbouring and maintaining priests, a capital offence which eventually led to her execution. [2]
Doing the right thing when it felt so very wrong is the mark of those Christians who have campaigned for what they’ve seen as just causes, however little those causes were embraced by others at the time. Like the slave trade abolitionists struggling with popular criticisms that their campaigns attacked their neighbours’ entire way of life, their nation’s economy, the stability of democracy itself; and those Christian abolitionists troubled by the declarations of high churchmen and statesmen that slavery was established by God and sanctioned in the Bible. [3]
When apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994 ‘some Black people wanted harsh penalties for the perpetrators of apartheid crimes. Others thought that investigation of past wrongs would jeopardise the fragile new democracy, while others simply wanted to forget the past.’ [4] But Archbishop Desmond Tutu was convinced that the country needed to engage in a process of ‘true reconciliation’ which would ‘expose the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth.’ [5]
When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up under Archbishop Tutu’s chairmanship, ‘it was not accepted by all parties to the conflict. Senior political and military leaders under apartheid, and former members of the liberation movements, were equally unconvinced that they needed to apply for amnesty.’ [6] When the weight of opinion is against you, doing the right thing sometimes feels wrong. It may take a divine intervention to persuade you to take the right path: the conviction born of faith, forged in a life of prayer and worship, supported by fellow-travellers.
In our society today it feels so very wrong to call for an end to consumerism, to learn to live with less for the sake of the planet. But increasingly voices call us from the margins to do just this, for it is the right thing to do. “Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad,” said Greta Thunberg this year. [7] And though it must have felt so very wrong to protest, alone, outside the parliament building on a school day, to her it was unquestionably the right thing to do.
You know, we can laugh off Greta just as our medieval forebears laughed off Joseph. Or we can take them as exemplars - them, and Margaret Clitherow, and the abolitionists, and Desmond Tutu and others who come to our minds. We can allow ourselves to be encouraged by their examples and harmonise with their willingness to embrace struggle for the cause of right…. whether that struggle relates to a matter of worldwide importance, or whether it’s about a personal situation close to home.
Let us pray.
God, make us bold enough to follow our convictions about what is the right thing to do, even when society is telling us something quite different, even when we feel the censure of those we love, even when the cause - which we cherish as just and true to you - seems a lost cause. Guide us so as not to be misled by our enthusiasms, use us as you have used so many others from the margins to make a difference in following you and building a better world. Amen
Notes
[1] Joseph’s Trouble about Mary in Richard Beadle, Pamela M. King, eds,York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling.
[2] Wikipedia: Margaret Clitherow.
[3] Wikipedia: Christian Abolitionism, Christian views on slavery.
[4] Tutu and his role in the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. South African History Online, 4 April 2011, updated 27 August 2019.
[6] Desmond Tutu, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa. Encyclopaedia Britannia
[7] Jonathan Watts, Greta Thunberg, schoolgirl climate change warrior: ‘Some people can let things go. I can’t’. Guardian, 11 March 2019.
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