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A sermon on Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 & Matthew 14:22-33 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
The image of Peter stepping out of the boat into the storm and trying to walk on water with Jesus is powerful on all sorts of levels. As a metaphor, it can provide insights into all sorts of real things in our lives. It has also fed some of the craziest versions of Christian faith.
Stepping out of the boat with Jesus is neither a bizarre faith test, nor an attention-seeking stunt. It is about what we do in the face of all that is terrifying and out of control in the world around us.
If you’ve been brave enough to turn on the news lately, you’ve probably been confronted with harrowing stories of modern slavery in our food production chains, or predatory marketing in the gambling industry, and that’s even before we leave the local news and turn to overseas stories about wars and genocide. Faced with any one of these real storms, what might stepping out of the boat with Jesus mean for us?
As I pondered where to go with that question, the storm that caught my attention was the news story about the exploitation of temporary immigrant workers picking our fruit and vegetables in conditions that amount to modern slavery, because in tonight’s first reading, Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. No matter how obnoxious Joseph had become under the toxic favouritism of his father, or how understandable the resentment from his unloved brothers was, their actions were still inexcusable crimes – physical abuse, bullying, kidnapping, human trafficking, conspiracy to murder.
As an aside, I need to acknowledge that tonight’s psalm and later sections of Genesis frame the consequences of these crimes as divine providence, and African-American theologians such as Dr Wilda Gafney have pointed out how that idea has been distorted into some kind of exoneration of slavery. The fact that God keeps working for good even amidst and through our worst behaviours does not ever mean that God was directing or condoning those things.
One thing we can legitimately see in this story though is how evil develops one small compromise at a time, rather than in bold and obvious moves. Having been on the verge of murdering Joseph before thinking better of it and scaling back to extreme bullying – dropping him down a mineshaft while they sat around having lunch – the in-between option of selling him into slavery no longer seemed unimaginable, especially as they reinforced one another’s resentments, and even more when Judah pointed to the potential for a healthy profit from the sale. They could almost convince themselves that they were doing the right thing and saving Joseph’s life by selling him.
Here in Australia, I doubt whether anyone ever proposed outright that slavery be reintroduced in our food production chain. They probably didn’t even realise they were doing it. But with the ways that the system works with the harsh pricing pressures imposed on growers by the big supermarket chains and the normalising of outsourced labour and profiteering, one small compromise at a time, people came to be commodified and exploited. Each of those little decisions probably felt unavoidable to those making them, because few if any of them can see or control the system as a whole, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is blameless and we should just look away and try not to choke on our veggies.
Working out what we should do though is much harder, isn’t it? It’s not hard to pump out a social media post about how outraged we are over what is going on, and how despicable we think the decision makers behind it are, but if that is the be-all-and-end-all of our activism, we are kidding ourselves. Jesus would not have settled for keyboard activism, even if he’d had a keyboard.
As Barack Obama said in 2019, we seem to now have an online call-out culture of constant judgment and social media shaming that deludes people into thinking they’ve done something without ever doing the real work of true political activism or creating real-world progress. He suggested that part of it is people trying to perform some kind of total ideological purity, refusing to tolerate any compromise in anyone else or admit to it in themselves. That very unwillingness to acknowledge the messiness and ambiguity of the real world is itself an obstacle to engaging in ways that might actually make a difference.
So for all our outrage, nothing is achieved, but we make ourselves feel pure and righteous, and perhaps we too are making a profit in terms of social applause, as we preach to those chosen by the algorithm because they already agree with us, and gather likes and followers, and perhaps even ad revenue.
Sometimes those who get more directly involved are not really that different. Take Joseph’s brother Reuben for example. To his credit, Reuben is the only one of the ten brothers who stands against the dangerous mood for murder, and advocates sparing Joseph’s life. When a violent unanimity is emerging in an angry mob, standing against it is genuinely risky and takes real courage. Kudos to Reuben for that.
But the storyteller doesn’t seem convinced that Reuben is really a pure model of courageous compassion for the victim. Instead we are told that Reuben was seeking a little profit for himself. He planned to double-cross his brothers, so that he could win his father’s favour by returning Joseph alive to him. He’s looking for likes too. And who can blame him? Given that Jacob’s overt favouritism towards Joseph left all ten of them feeling desperately unloved and fatherless, the only surprise is that only one of them was going to try this.
But even if we overlook the self-interest that underpinned Reuben’s attempted defence of the victim, he still comes up short because he went missing at the crucial moment. Joseph is sold to the human traffickers because Reuben took his eye off the ball. He simply didn’t stick around long enough to see the job through. And it hurts to say that because that’s been me on many occasions – good intentions, but failed to stay the course.
To be honest, mostly I don’t even measure up to Reuben’s rather compromised level of activism. I can see the flaws in all the various attempts to do something, and so in the name of avoiding those mistakes, I end up not doing anything. I can see what should not be done, and why, and what doesn’t work, and why, but I still don’t have any answers as to what a healthy and worthwhile alternative might look like. Often I don’t even take the low hanging fruit of signing an email petition that someone else has gone to the trouble of preparing and sending to me. Paralysed by a sense of futility, I do nothing.
My need to feel successful is no doubt part of this. It leaves me reluctant to do anything that doesn’t seem likely to make a measurable difference. But the systemic issues that create and allow modern slavery even in a country like this are so complex and so out of reach that I feel powerless to make even the tiniest dint. And yet I claim to be a follower of Jesus, and I don’t think there is any possible way to spin Jesus’ social activism as immediately effective. He ended up getting killed for it, and the wheels of empire kept grinding on relentlessly, crushing not only him but anyone else in their path.
Back in the ‘90s, the Christian peace activist Ciaron O’Reilly came and spoke in our church, and one line has stuck in my head ever since. He was quoting something that has been attributed to both Daniel Berrigan and Mother Teresa before him, but I was hearing it for the first time. He said, “God doesn’t call us to be effective, but to be faithful.”
It is profoundly true, and Jesus clearly modelled it, but I can also recognise the temptation I feel to latch onto it in ways that would be far more self-serving. Sometimes context is everything. Jesus and Daniel Berrigan and Ciaron O’Reilly can use that line with integrity because they kept showing up and kept on overturning money tables and taking sledgehammers to the nose cones of warplanes year after year despite not just ineffectiveness but costly consequences – repeated jail time and persecution by the powers. They can fairly claim to be faithful. If all I’ve done is hit the share button on an anti-war or anti-slavery meme, I haven’t earned any real faithfulness credits.
But if I remember rightly, Ciaron O’Reilly also said that real activism was not all about what any of us do individually, but what we all do collectively, and we will all have different roles to play within it. And I know I need to hear that. Another of the things that paralyses me is thinking that it is all about what I do personally that matters. Unless I take a lot of time out to make it happen, it is unlikely that I am going to personally come into contact with either those exploited veggie pickers, or with the labour hire contractors, farm owners, or supermarket executives who benefit from the exploitation.
So while direct action with direct contact is theoretically possible, it is realistically unlikely. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t be part of an ‘us’, like this congregation right here, that might collectively do more than just grieve over our own helplessness and ineffectiveness. What we do as a group doesn’t need to be grand or spectacular either. It might just be that we begin actively praying for and financially supporting the work of Anti-Slavery Australia so that they can continue providing free legal and migration services to people who have experienced or are at risk of modern slavery here in Australia.
If we take on something like that, we need to keep in mind the tragic consequences of Reuben’s briefly engaging and then going missing. Sending a donation might be a step better than sharing and exposé post, but if our interest is fleeting and neither costly nor sustained, it may just be another evasion, another self-congratulation.
How then can we discern whether anything we might do, individually or collectively, is actually an act of faithfulness to the way of Jesus, and not just another evasion or self-serving performance?
Well, the first thing is to remember that point that Barack Obama made about the pursuit of absolute ideological purity. If you can accept nothing less from yourself or anyone else, you will become an intolerant stone-thrower with a growing lack of self-awareness. The world is messy and ambiguous, and you could starve to death before managing to research the purity of every supply chain that brings vegetables to your local shop. But it is not all-or-nothing. Purity might be out of reach, but we can still aim for something and we can still make ourselves accountable to one another for how we go about it.
Aiming for something worthwhile is the right start. Worthwhile doesn’t have to mean effective, but it does mean more than self-serving, more than performing our own righteousness in pursuit of social approval. A worthwhile aim can include supporting others with our money and prayers when they are doing things we can’t do ourselves.
Whatever we choose to do, we need to follow Jesus in loving our opponents, and that means that, to stick with this example of modern slavery in Australia, we address the systemic injustices without disrespecting or demonising the people who are caught up in perpetrating them. They are human beings, loved by God, and even if they are not blind to what they are caught up in, they may have no idea how to get themselves out of it. If we reach out to them or speak about them, we do so with compassion and love, and we keep doing that even if they respond with hostility and violence.
That in itself can provoke hostility from our friends. Paradoxically, getting unfriended on Facebook for a post that resists the outrage cycle might be a better sign than getting a thousand likes for adding fuel to it. Jesus was criticised and condemned from both ends of the political and religious spectrum, and Judas Iscariot turned against him, seemingly because he didn’t pursue the political causes that Judas thought he should.
Which perhaps reminds us that a response that costs us nothing is barely a response at all. The cost might be persecution by the powers, or suspicion from our friends and allies. Or it might be a cost of time as we seek to stay the course. Or money, as we support others to do what they can do and we can’t. But remember what Jesus said about the widow’s two pennies being more costly than many a cheque with multiple zeros. What is it costing you?
So what are we to do with all those criteria? What is our next step? At risk of sounding like I’m falling back into the same patterns of paralysed evasion, it is not my job to tell you what you should do, or even to dictate what we should do together.
But what I do know is that I will have failed if I stay safely in the boat describing criteria while the storms continue. Ultimately the one criterion that will matter most will be my willingness to step out of the boat and have a crack; our willingness to step out of the boat and have a crack.
And if we are having a crack, and all that happens is that we find ourselves sinking in the deep messiness of stormy chaos that we can’t even understand, that’s okay. We were not called to be effective, to achieve miracles. We were just called to faithfully do what Jesus says, to step out of the boat and have a crack. And he will be there, with hand outstretched pulling us back up and putting us back on our feet ready for another go.
One point from this sermon that I often wonder about is the ‘cost’ of following Jesus. And the paradox of God’s extravagance of love and good gifts with the cost of our life. I have previously understood the cost to be something I owe, and that I owe God what is most valuable to me. I think this has been negative and damaging as it’s makes God seem harsh and even spiteful, I have held back in loving and valuing people/things so as to make it less likely I will have to give them up, or if I do it won’t feel as hard. But if God is not like that what is the cost for me? I don’t know, but I wonder about it.