Advent 4
Matthew 1:18-25
Marian Free
In the name of God who moves us to act in ways that are surprising and unconventional. Amen.
Jimmy Barnes, the hard-living, drug-abusing, wild-boy of Australian rock, was born James Dixon Swan. He was the child of an unhappy marriage, the son of an abusive alcoholic. When he was still very young, his mother abandoned her six children to escape the abuse. In his autobiography Working Class Boy Jimmy tells of his life as a motherless child growing up in Elizabeth, South Australia. His father was rarely home, leaving the children to fend for themselves. Over time, the house fell into disrepair and niceties – such as sheets on the beds – became a distant memory. Sometimes Jimmy’s father gave his older sister money. She used to buy a sack of potatoes which was often the only food in the house. Left to his own devices grew up wild and on the streets. He first got really drunk when he was only nine or ten.
In the meantime, Jimmy’s mother was struggling to make a living so that she could reconnect with her children. One day the Child Welfare Agency came to her to say that the children were going to be made wards of the state unless she could provide a stable home for them.
She was at a friend’s house, crying, when Reginald Victor Barnes walked in.
“What’s the trouble love?” he asked.
“I need to find a husband and I need to find a home for me six kids and I need to do it quickly or they’ll put them in a home,” she responded.
“Why did you leave them?”
“I had to run away, my husband was a bad drunk.”
“No worries love, I’ll marry ya.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Someone’s got to save those poor kids.”
So, Reg Barnes married Jimmy’s mother and took on – sight unseen – six troubled, delinquent kids.
He provided them with a home, stayed up all night tending to anxious, frightened and sick children and he didn’t walk away no matter how trying and exhausting their behaviour.
As Jimmy says: “Reginald Victor Barnes was to be an angel in my life.”
Reg, Jimmy believes, had planned to be a priest. In order to rescue children he did not know and to save a woman he had just met, Reg exchanged a peaceful, ordered life for one of heartache and chaos. In gratitude, Jimmy took his name – Jimmy Barnes.
This, I imagine is a rare story, especially for a man of Reg’s generation. No doubt Reg’s friends thought he was mad. Taking on another man’s children was one thing, taking on – and fully supporting – six children, damaged and abused by another, was something else altogether.
When we think of the story of the Incarnation, our first thought is of Mary and the risks that she took and the sacrifices she made when she said her courageous: “yes” to God. We are less likely to focus on Joseph – who throughout Jesus’ life is relegated to the background – a shadowy, but necessary figure who gives the earthly Jesus some legitimacy. Joseph is presented as the strong, silent type. He says nothing, but simply acts on messages that come to him in dreams. Joseph’s role in the story is to save Mary from shame and to ensure that Jesus can claim to be of the tribe of David (from whom the anointed one was to descend).
As was the case with Mary, though, Joseph’s obedience came at a cost. If he married Mary, he would bear for the rest of his life the reputation of someone who has been cuckolded. The scandal of Mary’s pregnancy would follow him wherever he went, and he would almost certainly be ridiculed or pitied for taking on another man’s child and having as his heir a child whom he did not father.
We are told tantalizing little about Joseph. He is a righteous man – a man anxious to do what is right before God. A righteous man would know that Mary’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy was contrary to the law and that as such he had no obligation to assist her. He would know too that any association with her would reflect on him, impact on his standing in the community and call into question his knowledge of and adherence to the law. He would have further cause for concern regarding Mary’s insistence that the child she was carrying came from God – an impossible and blasphemous claim which would have been an affront to his faith, and another reason for his family and neighbours to deride and revile him. For Joseph to marry Mary would have lasting effects. Her shame would become his shame. For the rest of his life, he would be subject to rumours and inuendo.
So, being a righteous man, knows that he must dissolve the engagement, but he proposes to do this quietly so as to shield Mary from public scrutiny. (He is presumably confident that her family will protect her and keep her forever from the public eye.)
God has other ideas.
It is perhaps an indication of Joseph’s righteousness (his closeness to God) that he understands that his dream is not a fantasy, but a message from God and that a message from God is not to be ignored, but to be acted on. He accepts, contrary to everything that he knows and believes that marrying Mary was part of God’s plan. Joseph was a law-abiding, righteous man but he was not so hide-bound, not so fixated on doing what was right that he put adherence to the law before the will of God.
Ultimately faith cannot be neatly bundled up as a set of rules and regulations. Faith, as Joseph demonstrates, is a relationship with the living God, who cannot and will not be confined by the limits of human imagination.
What we learn from Joseph is faith has nothing to do with rigid certainties, and everything to do with risk-taking. Righteousness has nothing to with having a good reputation and everything to do with a willingness to be a “fool for God. Pleasing God has nothing to do with observing certain codes of behaviour and everything to do with an openness to where God is leading us and a willingness to take our part in God’s plan.
Being in a relationship with the living God, means being willing to have all our certainties thrown into question, our values turned upside-down. and our lives turned inside out.
Swallowsrest 