The Christmas story, whether fable or fact, has warmed many, many hearts in the past two millennia. Many a sermon has been preached to illustrate one or more of the angles behind the basic story that the pastor wanted their flock to remember. Today’s topic is credibility.
Try to remember a whopper lie that someone told you. (Exclude the ones where the teller might just have misunderstood the facts, or the ones where the teller exercised bad judgement by repeating a lie that was told to them.) Whether you knew immediately that their statemtent was false, or if it took a bit of investigating to prove your suspicions, eventually your esteem of the person fell. Their words simply weren’t golden anymore. You couldn’t trust them like you once did.
Mary’s unwed pregnancy had all the hallmarks of a miserable whopper. The pregnancies of Sarah (“age of ninety” Gen 17:17) and Elizabeth (“well along in years” Luke 1:18) were miraculous, but for reasons of old age, not sexual “purity”. (For a short discussion on why Christianity’s focus on this type of purity is unbiblical and unhealthy, see this piece in The Guardian, where the author cites later rabbinic texts that claimed Jesus could not be the son of God, because he clearly was a bastard.)
Yet Mary never deviated from her story that she was a virgin, and her finacée Joseph wanted to protect her from public ridicule (Matthew 1:18), though he certainly knew that he hadn’t had sexual intercourse with her. More remarkably, both claimed to have been visited by angels who explained that the child who was conceived in her womb was from the Holy Spirit.
Angel proclamations aside, the couple’s decision to remain faithful to each other could not have been stronger. They each trusted that their partner was blameless and they lived out their lives exemplifying that trust.
How? By refraining from lies and untrustworthy behaviors in all meaningful ways! Can you imagine the creeping doubts that would have been magnified if Joseph had caught Mary in a substantive lie when Jesus was a teenager? Or vice versa? Their trust in each other (and the angels) would have been shattered.
Now comes the part of the sermon where the pastor would probably say, “Let’s close in prayer” — leaving out the next part about Donald Trump, because they wouldn’t want to endanger the church’s 501(c)(3) tax exempt status. I don’t have to worry about that constraint.
I daresay, some readers of this diary are ex-Republicans. Like me, you may have had qualms for some time about certain dislikable GOP politicians, but during that time, you gave a pass to the party as a whole, because at least some of their mutual positions seemed more logical than the opposing (progressive) viewpoints. When Trump’s deceitfulness and disdain for the rule of law got to be too much to stand, you registered Independent or Democrat and started contributing commentary to Daily Kos.
Perhaps our relatively recent “wokeness” has permitted us to see Trump’s untrustworthiness and his disloyalty to the Constitution far more clearly than a non-woke audience might want to admit. However, it does seem his credibility is at a low point today — even among his fellow Republicans.
My hope is that such disapproval of Trump (even if grounded in Republicans’ growing feeling that they are getting tired of losing) will drive party leaders to reassess their willingness to promote any politician or pundit who lies as much as Trump and his minions do.
Sadly, it appears to be true that “you can fool some of the people all of the time”. But for that very reason, in a democracy, it ought to be incumbent on the rest of us (those who can’t be fooled all of the time) to keep trying to convince the deluded among us why honesty and dependability matter more than political platitudes and hype.
And the only way they will believe us is if we earn their trust. Tall order? Yes, but if we sit on our hands, they won’t be hearing the dissonance they need to begin rebuking the liars and resisting the cheaters.
Having a story about the trustworthiness and credibility of Jesus’s earthly parents in your arsenal couldn’t hurt. Having Donald Trump as your primary foil is a two-edged sword at best.