For Jesus, the Oppressed Have “Names and Stories and Lives that Mattered”

Monday, December 14, 2015 

            Today’s advent devotional will begin with a quote from Ann Voskamp’s book The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas.  (All the quotes in today’s devotional are from this book, including the one in the title above the date in this entry.)  A word of explanation / warning: The author of that book may focus only on women as the oppressed, but I do not.  To the gentlemen and young people who are reading this: I believe you have been oppressed, too, and throughout this entry and beyond, I will share my thoughts that explain why I feel this way.  So, men as well as young women and young men, please give me a chance this week.  Jesus believes in you, and I do, too!

            Now for the quote from Voskamp’s Christmas book.  “The family tree of Christ [in Matthew prior to the birth narrative of Jesus] startlingly notes not one woman but four.  Four broken women – women who felt like outsiders, like has-beens, like never-beens.  Women who were weary of being taken advantage of, of being unnoticed, and uncherished and unappreciated; women who didn’t fit in, who didn’t know how to keep going, what to believe, where to go – women who had thought about giving up.  And Jesus claims these who are wandering and wondering and worn out as His.  He grafts you into His line and His story and His heart, and gives you His name, His lineage, His righteousness.  He graces you with plain grace.  Is there a greater Gift you could want or need or have” than the one who comes in this Christmas season (ix).

            I know that men and boys are among the oppressed that are referred in the above quote.  They, too, have been raped and abused and ignored…sometimes in the name of love by their spouses (whether they are female or male), sometimes the young men by the police, sometimes by other people who murder them.  In patriarchal cultures, they are given responsibilities that seem to me to be overwhelming – they are expected to carry their families and the whole world.  Sometimes women blame all of them or most of them for the way one or two men who have harmed them in the past; I know this to be true for I am among those who have been so unfair in this regard.

            The Christ child offers solace and affirmation and the comfort to heal your wounds, too, during this advent season.  Let’s all join hands this week as we try to discover in new ways how this Jesus, even as an infant, has reached out to us even when, perhaps especially when, we have felt embattled, worthless, or ignored.  We are not alone: We have God and we have one another.