It’s difficult to be a teenager in a small, rural town. One quickly learns that gossip spreads quickly and little things come back to haunt you. Anything unusual that happened with you and your friends at lunch time is something your folks know all about before you get home for dinner. It was this kind of town that she lived in. How was she going to tell her parents about what happened?
They were a religious family. She probably didn’t know much about sex. She was pregnant. She had no reasonable explanation as to how it happened. Her boyfriend was a bit older and was a bit wiser about life. He knew he wasn’t the father.
The family did what any good family would do: they sent her to live with a cousin in a larger town. Some families, especially the religious ones, would have disowned her. But these were good people. They wanted to save face as best as they could while also trying to protect their daughter. The boyfriend agreed that even though the baby wasn’t his, he’d marry her.
Hidden far below the tinsel and twinkly lights, this is the beginning of the Christmas story. It’s not a pretty story. It begins with a series of events that pushes us up against the hard places of life where there’s little comfort to be found. Yes, it gets worse.
There’s a long journey in the last trimester of pregnancy. There are deep cycles of poverty. Who are the people to offer care and comfort to the young, confused mother? Among the noteworthy are a few laborers who lived with a herd of sheep. Then, out of nowhere, some foreigners show up and gave her things used to embalm a dead body. How weird is that? As if nothing else could go wrong, the governor wants this baby to be killed. The family escapes and becomes refugees in another country.
The Christmas story is one tragedy after another. We’ve made it a feel-good story and think of it as a silent and holy night. Pay attention to the details: it’s really a story about how cruel life can be.
Those ancients who handed down the legends about the birth of Jesus were trying to convey something very significant. These were people who understood that life could be very harsh. They lived in an occupied land. They were so poor that they lived from hand to mouth. The literacy rate was less than 1%. These were people who worked hard and died young and were quickly forgotten. In this context, the Christmas story has the audacity to offer hope to people such as these who have no hope of anything better than hardship and turmoil.
As I look around the city in which I live, I see many people without hope, who know hardship and turmoil in life. Atlanta is often called “a city in a forest.” It’s a very green city, with wooded areas and forests throughout the city. The tree cover makes it difficult to see the number of homeless who live in the forests around Atlanta. When our neighborhood association had a “clean-up” day a few weeks ago, we found where someone had been living in a drain pipe the in woods beyond my backyard. This man is not the only one homeless in our neighborhood. On sunny days, at the corner gas station, a group of homeless men and women cluster together. The poverty is visible beyond the homeless. This week, at the grocery store pharmacy, a woman in the line ahead of me was told by the pharmacist to be sure to take her medicine with food. She responded, “After I pay for this, there’s no money left for food.”
Social conservatives would have us believe that people who experience systemic economic marginalization are nothing more than lazy freeloaders looking for a handout. Yet, the same social conservatives continue to refine an economic system that depends on people becoming poorer and poorer so that a relative few can be rich. Government funded corporate welfare assures that the programs of the wealthy are subsidized while the marginalized sink further into the pit of economic disaster.
The legends of the birth of Jesus make it very clear that the hope born on Christmas is first and foremost for the marginalized: those who suffer in life and struggle to survive. The legends serve as ways to introduce the readers of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew to a startling realization: that this Jesus was born to bring a new world order. That new world order is best described in the Song of Mary from the gospel Luke, chapter 1, verses 46-55. This song is Mary’s response to learning of her mysterious pregnancy. (The follow translation is from Eugene Peterson’s The Message.)
I’m bursting with God-news;
I’m dancing the song of my Savior God.
God took one good look at me, and look what happened—
I’m the most fortunate woman on earth!
What God has done for me will never be forgotten,
the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others.
His mercy flows in wave after wave
on those who are in awe before him.
He bared his arm and showed his strength,
scattered the bluffing braggarts.
He knocked tyrants off their high horses,
pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet;
the callous rich were left out in the cold.
He embraced his chosen child, Israel;
he remembered and piled on the mercies, piled them high.
It’s exactly what he promised,
beginning with Abraham and right up to now.
The Biblical legends of the birth of Jesus challenge us to wake-up and realize that top-down economic systems are out of order. If the stories of the birth of Jesus and his subsequent teachings are taken seriously, then fundamental social and economic changes would come about. This is the message of “peace on earth” and “goodwill to all.” This peace and goodwill come about when people are freed from the tyranny of poverty and want.
Indeed, it will be a Merry Christmas when the followers of Jesus come to understand that the good news for all people includes social change that levels the playing field for everyone.
Most people are sufficiently “beaten down” by the “system,” that they cannot envision anything different, except pie in the sky when they die. Maybe. Indeed, international trade agreements, which increasingly give corporations control over government and government policy, hold out no real hope of change to a more humane life. So people will continue to be beaten down by the “system.”
You are right: “the Christmas story is one tragedy after another.” Just like today, and tomorrow, and the next day. And people will continue to have to choose among food, medicine, and a roof over their heads. Especially in a day when there are more vacant houses than there are homeless people, as I learned recently. And as the few gain more and more, they will grow increasingly mean-spirited, as I also learned recently. We could end poverty rapidly if we wanted to do so. But the vast majority of people who could make that happen are simply not interested.
In the end, I fully expect that the vast majority of us will be driven into the conditions into which Jesus was born. Not in my time, perhaps in my children’s time, certainly by the time of our grandchildren. And people in small groups, living at the subsistence level, will try to help one another.
Christmas blessings!
Christmas should be a time when the masses rally to support one another and rise up against the tyranny. Jesus despised the tax-man (more broadly the economic system), therefore Christmas should also be a time of revolution. I often wonder of the social change possible if all ‘men’ around the world acted in unison for a better world. No soldiers pulling triggers, an end to the perception of scarcity and the widespread act of giving. Caring for mother nature and so on….Happy Xmas.