Trailer Trash Savior

I am reading the book The New Friars by Scott Bessenecker. It is an excellent book about serving the poor and oppressed and trying to view poverty through the lens of Christ. While I don't agree with everything in the book, I still highly recommend it.

As I am reading though I turn to chapter 4, and am immediately hit by the title: " The Voluntary Poverty of God". Now over the course of the past 4 years I have greatly come to a new realization of what poverty is and a biblical view of poverty. I grew up knowing that Jesus was poor and never had money and lived a nomadic lifestyle, never really calling any where home. But there is a difference how you interpret that, depending on where you grow up and are raised.

The book though illustrates how Jesus came into the world, from a completely different view point than I am used to having been indoctrinated by middle-class white suburbia christianity. Read what Scott writes:

" Unwed teenage pregnancy brings disgrace in any culture. But in the rural towns of the Middle East it is scandalous. Even more so when the girl claims her fiancé is not the father. In a village of four hundred families there is little chance for anonymity . Everybody knows everybody else's business as soon as it happens. Such a pregnancy brings reproach not only on the girl but on her father and brothers, whose job it is to ensure something like this doesn't happen. Even a righteous family would suffer the shame of such an event for a long time. Interesting, isn't it, that God would choose to some into this world via a peasant family, stirring up a cloud of shame by the way he entered? Jesus was considered the illegitimate son of a carpenter by every family in that village. Did he really have to show up on earth in a way that produced such dishonor?.......... Those from Nazareth in Galilee were considered hicks by the hicks! Why on Earth would God choose to be born among a defeated people in a backwoods town under a shadow of dishonor through a dirt poor, unwed teenager? "

Think about that for a minute, ponder it. Ill give you a few seconds.........................................
Do you realize who we are talking about. Let me try to give you a modern day illustration. Jesus was the bastard child of a 14 year old girl who due to no health insurance probably has some missing teeth, and grew up in a trailer park with a flea infested bed. Any way you look at it its not pretty. This girl then gets married later, and the family of the husband, now father, is beating him over the head cause he's marrying into an instant family. All the while people look and stare and gossip about them while they drive down the street with their car that is painted red with rust and fueled with hope that it will get them to the store to buy formula for the baby. That is Christ's family.

We would look at that this picture or hear this story and huff at the shame and disgust of it. God doesn't.

So next time when a girl who's not married comes into the church with a baby, or anyone that you would look at with disgust, like the homeless man that sitting next to you on the bus, who has two weeks of stench permeating from his body. Think twice and act once. Love don't judge. Remember who are Savior chose to be his family.