Well… looks like the networks are rearranging things once again, so I’m back. In the hour class I came out of chapters 2 & 3 of The Real Mary. Since this was my first time teaching at BCC, I was planning a one-off event at the end of which I’d float the idea of a 4-6 week class on the rest of the book. (I’ve got enough interest to look into it.) So, in keeping with the Christmas season, I kept to the pre-Nativity Story in Luke 1.

“May It Be”

My goal here was to drive home Mary’s courageous faith as expressed in her simple statement of acceptance. I asked folks to share any stories they had about teen mothers. (I asked folks to talk about “a friend” regardless of the true relationship, since there was no established trust of confidence.) To these stories I added some recent statistics, such as:

• More than 75 percent are on welfare within five years of the birth of their first child
• Only about one teenage mother in four ever completes high school
• Seven out of ten marriages fail among women who had a baby while in their teens

A picture of hardships and struggles quickly becomes clear.

Then I tried to take us back in time. Back before women’s lib when women went from their father’s household to their husband’s household with little to no freedom to choose otherwise. Back before the sexual revolution which has altered society’s reaction to sex and childbearing out of wedlock. (Whatever your ultimate opinion and judgment on these social movements, the above is undeniable.) Back before WIC, Medicaid, and the other social programs that provide assistance to teen mothers. I tried to take us back to a poor girl from a poor family in a poor town, a girl who was suddenly pregnant for reasons most would assume was adultery and who didn’t know what the reaction of her parents or husband would be. This was the girl who said, “May it be unto me as you have said.”

“He Will Cast Down Rulers”

The reason, I argued, that she could say “May it be” is because she believed what the angel said to her. She believed that her son would be the long-awaited Davidic king who would cast out the oppressors and restore Israel to her glory. The hope was expressed in her magnificent song, the… er… Magnificat. I talked about how Mary’s song was rooted in her nation’s expectations for the Messiah, and how these same themes are expressed in Jesus mission statement, Luke 4 quoting Isaiah 61 back in his home town. After doing a little bit of history and such, I got to the tough question:

How do we, wealthy suburbanites, identify with this thread of liberation that runs throughout the Messianic story without – and here’s the key – super-spiritualizing the whole idea? That is, to say the Scriptures talk about spiritual liberation and freedom from spiritual oppression is accurate… but incomplete. We cannot strip away the physical component without neutering and fundamentally changing the Gospel. So, how do we pray and live out this story of physical liberation when we are not physically oppressed?

I’ll share my answer to this question in another post.