Pregnant, single teen… gives birth to Saviour!

Susan Isaacs December 22nd, 2009

This past Sunday’s New Testament reading was from Luke 1: Mary Visits Elizabeth and Mary’s Magnificat. If you’re like me and you’ve been going to church for years, it’s easy to gloss over the Christmas stories with detached calm. You know it turns out OK: Joseph doesn’t divorce Mary, Jesus is born, and the wise men return home by another way. Personally, I have a hard time visualizing the players as anyone other than the figurines from my childhood crèche: blonde Mary in her pink dress and blue robe: a couple of barn animals and a shepherd boy who looks like Percy Bysshe Shelley. My placid nativity diorama didn’t change until my husband added a lacquered piranha and a Norwegian troll to the scene. You know, to mix things up.

But the story was mixed-up from the very beginning: the rulers were brought down and the humble were lifted up. God used the unqualified and the scandalous in his plan to enter the world; and the proud missed it.

I have to be careful not to miss it myself, and for that I need to get down into the story: understand the culture and circumstances into which Jesus arrived. It took a scholar, a sermon, and a movie to do that for me.

First the scholar: N.T. Wright’s study guide, Luke for Everyone, brought to life the setting and circumstances into which Jesus was born, in a way I’d missed all these years.

We all know Israel was occupied by Rome and longed for Messiah to liberate them. But the Jews were divided on how it would happen. The Sadducees didn’t really believe in an afterlife, so the best was to cooperate with the Roman authorities. If a messiah were to come, he’d compromise to keep peace. Peace was a kind of liberation, wasn’t it? They had their token throne, and Herod sat on it. That was as messiah-y as they were gonna get. Their eyes were on the house of Herod. Boy, were they off.

The Essenes gave up on the world, went out to live in the desert in community. Like the hippies. They ate bugs, took enemas to purify themselves, and hoped Messiah would arrive via some transcendent experience. They were partly right. But it’s a good thing they didn’t have telescopes to see Hale Bopp, or it could have gone terribly awry.

Then there were the Pharisees. God promised a Messiah, and God didn’t lie. If Messiah hadn’t come, it was Israel’s fault. If only Israel would obey the law God had given, then Messiah would come! So they did whatever it took to get messiah to come: even if it meant bludgeoning the people into obeying. Oh, we love to hate the Pharisees, don’t we? They were the whitewashed tombs; they got Jesus killed. But they were true believers, weren’t they? They hadn’t forgotten God’s promise. We love to peg our modern day Pharisees, too: the bible thumpers, the fundamentalists, the people who flame out everyone else as a heretic. But be careful whom you call a Pharisee. As Pastor Matt Chandler said at Right Now Conference in November: "Liberal hippies versus old white guys. I've never seen the Christian world so polarized by secondary idiot issues." Besides, God didn’t arrive in the camp of the compromisers, the hippies or the fundies. He went thatta way, and none of them were looking.

Jesus showed up in some cow town, in the womb of an unmarried teenager. If Jesus arrived today, what would his mom look like? A Hispanic girl in the barrio? A dropout in Appalachia? The girl “Precious?” I wouldn’t have noticed. Or believed it.

It took a movie, “The Nativity Story” (2006) to see it more clearly. Mary’s parents were good solid people, but they were nobodies. The actress who played Elizabeth was over fifty; imagine her getting pregnant sans in-vitro? The actress who played Mary was 15. Okay so she went and got pregnant the next year, but at least she didn’t parade it all over Entertainment Tonight like some other single-mom celebs. But I digress.

The movie showed the characters’ humanity, too. Joseph was heartbroken over Mary’s ‘infidelity’ but he was a good guy: he wouldn’t have seen her stoned for it. And when an angel revealed the truth in a dream, he didn’t write it off as bad lamb the night before. He trusted it; he trusted Mary. I watched that relationship blossom on screen, in the midst of very difficult, even dangerous circumstances.

Into those circumstances a teenage girl, maybe 8th or 9th grade today, hid out at her cousin’s. Maybe she was unsure how Elizabeth would react. Maybe Elizabeth was unsure herself. But when Mary walked in, Elizabeth’s baby kicked and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then Mary broke into song. Imagine an episode of Glee.

Mary: 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.
– From The Message

But were perils ahead, and the movie showed through every one; the difficult journey to Jerusalem; the escape to Egypt, and of course the inglorious birth – not in a Gainsborough pastoral but in a cold dark cave; and no one to marvel at Jesus’ arrival, save a few dirty barn animals, some migrant workers and three tarot card readers.

It took a sermon to help me realize that last point. Last Advent, I visited my sister’s church. Her pastor used to be a Buddhist and even ran a dojo in California – where else? (Hey I can say that, I’m Californian). He came to faith in Christ but never lost compassion for the seekers he met all those years. He was quick to remind us who the wise men were. They were astrologers! They were reading horoscopes, my dear devout friends, and that’s how God spoke to them! In the stars! Their methods were wrong, we cry. But their hearts were right, God cries back.

If Jesus were born today, would God reveal it to you and me? Or would we be so sure of our scriptural purity or cultural relevance; so busy arguing secondary idiotic issues, that God would move on to Miss Eugenia the palm reader? Would Juan, the illegal-immigrant grape picker, be the only guy available to come marvel?

But hold on, it’s a happy story! Before we despair over how blind and unlike God we are: remember that’s why Christ came. Because scriptural knowledge and cultural relevance won’t make us any more like God. That’s why God became like us. Because he could; because he wanted to.

Preach it, Linus:

Susan Isaacs is a writer, actor, and comedienne with TV and film credits including Planes Trains & Automobiles, Scrooged, Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, My Name Is Earl and more. She is an alumnus of The Groundlings Sunday Company and the author of Angry Conversations With God: A Snarky But Authentic Spiritual Memoir.

Click here to listen to Susan's appearance on Steve Brown Etc.

| | Digg This!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 9:17 am and is filed under Advent, Angry Conversations with God, Christian, Christmas, Elizabeth, Jesus, Joseph, Linus, Luke, Mary, NT Wright, Peanuts, Religion and Spirituality, Steve Brown, Susan Isaacs, The Magnificat, The Nativity Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.