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Mira Turner was born in Reading in 1829. As a young girl she went to be
a serving maid in a well-to-do household in Llanelli in Wales. When she
was 22 years old, with her life before her, she committed suicide by taking
laudanum. Why? Because she had been made pregnant by the master of the
house, who was married with children and would have disowned her, and
faced disgrace or ruin or committal to an asylum – so she took what
seemed to her the only way out. At least that’s what we can guess.
Her name is remembered, and her ghost is reputed to haunt Llanelli, but
the name of the man who got her pregnant and destroyed her life is not
– he just has a walk-on, and walk-off, part in the story.
The Christmas story has always been more popular with the public at large
than Good Friday and Easter: Santa Claus and presents, popular songs and
carols, Christmas trees and lights; the ‘aah’ factor of a new
baby; the knockabout innkeeper and shepherds, and the mysterious wise
men from the east. Even the wicked king Herod and his massacre of the
innocent children of Bethlehem is sung about in the Coventry carol, giving
a dark and realistic tinge to an otherwise light and hopeful story. Christmas
all hangs together; as a story it works much better than putting Easter
eggs and bunnies alongside the momentous and earth-shattering events of
cross and resurrection – without which, of course, we wouldn’t
be celebrating Christmas at all.
The Christmas story comes from two of the gospels. Luke tells us in detail
about the lead-up to the birth, including the shepherds, and then notes
the special happenings at the religious observances of circumcision and
thanksgiving a few days after the birth – and then moves on to Jesus
becoming an adult. Matthew has no shepherds, but has the wise men and
the flight into Egypt, but his version of the birth, read this morning,
is told entirely from Joseph’s perspective. Traditionally on the
4th Sunday of Advent we think about Mary: but Matthew reminds us that
you can’t think about Mary without thinking about Joseph, who in
Luke’s gospel simply has a walk-on part with no real engagement in
the story.
Dua Aswad was 17 when she was killed six weeks ago. She was a member of
the Yazidi group, a separate religious sect in Northern Iraq. Her crime
had been to go to see a 19 year old Sunni Muslim man who she wanted to
marry. She was still a virgin, but her clan decided she had dishonoured
them, and against the will of her father and close family who wanted to
send her away to cousins in Syria they dragged her outside and battered
her to death with stones. The police watched them do it. The local sheikh
said: “There is no father who does not love his daughter. When such
a father kills his daughter to wash away their family shame, it breaks
his heart to do so. But fathers are obliged to do this, otherwise they
will be ostracised.” Dua’s father refused, and so his family
home was attacked with grenades in the few weeks since her death. During
2007 over 600 women have been killed in North Iraq in the name of family
honour.
Men have a pretty chequered history about dealing with virgins who get
pregnant when they’re not married. Especially if they’re the
ones who’ve got them pregnant, or could be thought to have done so.
Joseph could have been very different. He could easily have disgraced
Mary. They were betrothed, which meant they were already legally married,
just waiting for the consummation of the event. Joseph could have accused
Mary justly of adultery and had her stoned by the fundamentalists of his
day – who would have cared about a minor domestic honour dispute
when King Herod was executing people left right and centre? He was a righteous
man, says Matthew, and he could easily have hung onto his righteousness
as a cloak for callous judgement and indifference. But being righteous
means to be compassionate. Even so, righteousness for Joseph meant just
divorcing Mary quietly without making a fuss – though the reason
why would have been pretty obvious a few months down the line, and Mary
would have been pretty unmarria¬geable as a single mum in the Judea
of her day.
It took a revelation from God to get Joseph to change his mindset: to
move from being a cuckolded husband to a compassionate surrogate father
for the Son of God. And the words of the angel echo down the years: Joseph,
do not be afraid. Do not be afraid to be different; and if you are not
afraid, then many will come to know the salvation of God. If Joseph had
stayed afraid, if he’d been an ordinary man, then Mary and her baby
would have had no home, and maybe no future at all.
The Christmas story isn’t so very far from our world either. British
people don’t do honour killings, do we? Well actually they do, but
they tend to call it a domestic dispute or provocation nowadays. We’ve
got beyond treating young pregnant girls as criminals haven’t we?
Well, to some extent, as long as they’re not benefit fraud cases
of course, or even worse prostitutes, in which case they lose their righteous¬ness
and respectability and can only expect to be treated badly by men. And
the hundreds of thousands of men who abuse the internet and are complicit
in the exploitation of vulnerable people aren’t all somewhere else
- you and I know them; we may even be them.
Jesus was born not just to save fallen women, but also fallen men. And
the first man who Jesus saved, the first man he converted to a new way
of living, was Joseph.
Joseph was afraid, but Joseph listened to God, and changed. Just as, in
a similar way, Mary was afraid, and Mary listened to God, and Mary changed.
What is it that we most fear? In our own lives? In the way that other
people will see us? What makes us ashamed about who we are and how we
live? You and I may in our own personal lives have different issues from
those faced by Mary and Joseph. But God will still come to us where we’re
afraid, and tell us that we don’t need to fear – that we can
look at the world differently, and begin to see it as God does.
And the same is true of the society in which we live: that God comes to
us in Jesus and tells us that we don’t need to be afraid of treating
others with compassion and justice, and working for the freedom and interdependence
of all, men and women, adults and children, of all races and religions
and none. And that we can be forgiven for our shame, and find a different
kind of honour and uprightness in God.
Mira Turner and Dua Aswad should not have died violently. Dua’s father
took Joseph’s road of refusing to see things the way the people around
him did. Would we have the courage – will we have the courage –
to do the same?
‘Do not be afraid Joseph; you are to name the child Jesus, for he
will save his people from their sins.’
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