A sermon on Romans 12:1-8 & Matthew 16:13-20 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
Young men behaving badly. If you consume mainstream news, you will have heard that last weekend, five Sydney Swans football players were stood down by the club after a late night hotel room party that involved lots of alcohol and snorting illicit drugs off the naked breasts and buttocks of strippers who were brought to the room and paid for their services. That much of the story doesn’t seem to be contested, as far as I’ve heard, and the five players have issued a public apology for their bad behaviour.
But there are also criminal allegations, and so some of what happened is under police investigation and less certain. What we do know is that the reason any of the bad behaviour came to the attention of the public is that one of the women in that room reported one of the players for sexual assault, for touching her without consent.
Whatever you might think about someone making their living by providing sexualised entertainment, it is still an industry with clear rules and boundaries, and despite what the President of the United States said, being famous does not entitle anyone to transgress those boundaries and grab a woman without her consent. The allegation is that at least one of those players failed to respect that boundary.
Some of you are turning off already because you hate football and don’t want to hear about it in a sermon. But this is not actually a football story. It is a story about sexual assault and about men behaving badly. It could just as easily have been five musicians or stock-brokers or college students. Maybe even five preachers. Footballers have no monopoly on bad behaviour, but sometimes we like to pretend they do so that we can just point the finger and avoid thinking about whether this says anything about the culture we are all part of.
Tonight’s gospel reading had nothing to do with this, but Jesus does something in it that provides a model for us as we look at our responses to the news story. He firstly asks his disciples what the people in the street are saying about him. “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And then when they’ve pondered that for a few minutes, he asks them to answer the question for themselves. Okay, that’s what others are saying. Now “who do you say I am?”
Don’t just get caught up in mirroring what everyone else is thinking and saying. Notice it, but then look deeper. Be open to what God is revealing here.
A breaking news story about men behaving badly provokes all sorts of fairly predictable responses from the public. Our first instinct is to make lazy categorisations. You’ll hear everything from victim blaming and “boys will be boys” at one end of the spectrum through to “toxic men” and “predators” and “all men are culpable” at the other.
One of the reasons we instinctively do that is self-protection. An easy explanation lets me distance myself from the problem. If footballers are the problem or toxic entitled men are the problem or women sexually objectifying themselves for money are the problem, then the problem has nothing to do with me and I’m home free.
Jesus calls us to notice what the average person on the street is saying, but then to look harder, to ask better questions, to see what God would have us see.
Asking us to notice what the general public is saying is good preparation for the deeper look. Often the deeper truths only become clear and make sense to us as we compare and contrast them with our first responses. They are often not opposites. A common public response might be true, but still be too shallow to help us find a way to change anything.
For example, one of the things I notice in myself, and in much of the general public, is a strange relationship between my readiness to express my outrage and to condemn the young men involved in this incident, and even to condemn the culture of toxic entitlement that they are part of, and my eagerness to keep reading about it, to keep consuming the stories, the coverage, the analysis.
As I begin to look at that more deeply, I begin to see the connection. Many of us have an insatiable fascination with celebrities behaving badly. We consume their stories as a form of entertainment. We’d almost be a bit bored and disappointed if none of them were behaving badly. So, in a way, we are tacitly giving permission to a category of people to behave spectacularly badly for our entertainment.
But we are still going to condemn them for it. And yes, it is true that a person is no less culpable for their bad behaviour just because bystanders or the public at large were encouraging them and applauding them, so condemning the behaviour is still appropriate and necessary. But as I look more deeply, I begin to see that when I am loudly expressing my outrage and condemnation, I’m actually doing it for my own benefit too.
When I point an angry condemning finger at five footballers, I’m bolstering my own belief that I am nothing like them and that I am not in any way a part of any toxic culture that they represent. By locating the problem entirely in them, I am protecting myself from any difficult scrutiny, from any awkward questions or doubts about what I might have done were I 25 and drunk and horny and in that hotel room.
Somehow I’m having my cake and eating it too. I get to enjoy the spectacle of celebrities behaving badly, and by condemning them, I get to feel clean and virtuous at the same time. Here’s the tip – the louder and more unanimous the community’s vehement condemnation, the more likely it is that a deeper look will reveal things the community doesn’t want to face up to in itself.
I want to turn to our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans, because I think Paul has some important things to say about what’s going on here.
Firstly, he urges us not to think too highly of ourselves, but to be clear-eyed and unflinching in our judgements. You can broaden that to our judgements of anything, but it begins with being clear-eyed and unflinching in our judgement of ourselves. As my beloved often puts it, we have to stop believing our own fibs. We have to stop imagining that we are utterly unlike those guilty others, that we are on a completely different moral plane.
Then Paul goes on to use an image that most of us are familiar with, but which we can perhaps hear something new in tonight as we bring it into conversation with the news story. He speaks of us being one body in Christ, even though we are many, and says that in a body we are all interconnected and inter-dependent, but that we nevertheless all have different functions and different roles to play. Now Paul is using this image to speak of the church, but I don’t think he would argue with me suggesting that it can equally apply to the wider culture.
So what this image might ask of us in relation to this story of young men behaving badly is whether we and they are different but interconnected parts of a single culture, and whether all of us might be contributing something to the culture that made that drunken, drug fuelled and sexed up party in that hotel room imaginable, achievable and not likely enough to be stopped?
Just because I wasn’t one of the men in the room doesn’t mean I have no part in the culture of what went on. I might not buy into the mindset that regarded the women in that room as objects for the entertainment of men, but that doesn’t mean I have never benefitted from the subtler and more socially acceptable traces of the same thread. There have been plenty of times when I’ve witnessed micro expressions of this culture – a cheap joke, a derogatory comment, a boundary crossed – and I’ve turned a blind eye or made some kind of excuse for someone. “That’s just him. He’s always been a bit like that, but he doesn’t mean anything by it.” I like to think I challenge that culture, but there are plenty of ways I’ve added to it too.
There are others playing different roles to me. There is a whole economy built around football that benefits from the myth of untouchable hyper-masculine young men. There is another whole economy built around alcohol and drugs and the commodification of women’s bodies as entertainment. And then there are the economic injustices that can see one person paid more money than he knows what to do with for kicking around a ball full of air while another person feels that her only way to make ends meet is to objectify and commodify herself in order to part him from some of that money. Even she is both a participant in that culture and a victim of it.
Some of us are culpable for bigger contributions to that culture, or for profiting from it more, but all of us are entangled in it somewhere. Like members of one body, we are all connected and we all play a part. And we can all play a part in unmasking it and doing something about it.
As I suggested earlier, even our expressions of outrage over this culture can sometimes be a participation in it. If our outrage is serving to make us feel good about ourselves, then we are subtly caught up in needing to ensure that we always have someone to be outraged over. And that can mutate in all sorts of directions.
As most of you know, my wife is the deputy head of a large university residential college, and she often has the job of listening to young people pointing the finger at each other over what they vaguely remember each other doing while they were all blind drunk last night. And sometimes their outrage sounds a lot like the public outrage over the footballers last week, because they are doing the same lazy categorisation thing – I am a good person but this happened, so clearly the other person is a bad person who should be punished.
Although they are often both trying to portray themselves as the victims of something similar to what happened in that hotel room, it is often quite different in ways they find inconvenient to see. Unlike the stark imbalances of power and responsibility in that hotel room, many of these incidents are between peers, equals, equally drunk, equally making stupid choices, equally unsure in the morning who did what and who started it, and often equally full of regret and imagining it is all someone else’s fault, needing it to be someone else’s fault.
Returning to Paul and his letter to the Romans, the image of us being one body cuts both ways. Yes, we have all played roles in creating and perpetuating a culture that facilitates this bad behaviour and feeds off it for our own benefit. But more importantly it’s also an image of how we can all play a part in changing that culture, in building a new world in which we are not feeding on one another.
If we are all one body, as Paul says, then pointing the finger of blame at one another is like the body turning on itself, like an auto-immune disease or something. If one part of my body is malfunctioning, I don’t want the rest of my body to turn on it. I want the rest of my body to cooperate in supporting it, in helping it to get better. If that part improves, the whole body benefits.
So Paul urges us not to be conformed to this world, to the current culture that surrounds us and shapes us, but instead to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we may recognise what God wants, what is good and right and true. With that transformation, that renewing of our minds, we can be set free to take that deeper look that Jesus calls us to take. We can be set free because we no longer have to anxiously prove our own righteousness by picking on the sins of others. Instead, like Jesus, we are free to identify ourselves with others in their brokenness, in their failures, in their culpability, and know ourselves beloved all the same. We are free, because together as one beloved body in Christ, we now have a pathway out of the mire, a pathway to resurrection life.
And exactly what that will look like will vary enormously, because in one body, we all have different roles. For some it might look as dramatic as Shiphrah and Puah in our first reading tonight in their courageous non-cooperation with a genocide. That genocide is itself another extreme example of toxic masculinity resorting to violent domination and control when its power is threatened. For others it might look like Jesus staring down the angry mob who wanted to stone a woman to death, and just quietly asking them to look a little deeper and see if they were really so different from her.
And for most of us, it will usually be done one little unremarkable decision at a time to not be conformed to the culture around us, but to show respect, to share love, to look out for one another’s interests, to watch out for one another’s safety and wellbeing, to treat one another as we would hope to be treated ourselves.
Or as football superstar Daisy Pearce put it this week when she was asked what message she had for her male counterparts, “Be a good human.”