Pastor's Blog

Today we began our Advent series: “Christmas @ The Movies”. Along the way, we will see how the popular stories of our day contain echoes of the Great Story that God is telling through Creation. First up is Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, and unless you’re Amish (and if you’re reading this, you’re not), you’ve seen it. It’s the story of a misfit, an outcast, who finds many other misfits along his way and eventually becomes a hero. Robert May, the original creator of the Rudolph story, drew on his own childhood memories of being a misfit and an outcast in creating this iconic character. The theme of a misfit becoming a hero is common in our culture, whether it’s Peter Parker or Luke Skywalker or “Chuck”. It’s common because many people feel like  misfits at one time or another in life, and who doesn’t dream of being a hero. No one wants to stay a misfit.

Yet this is precisely how God chose to reveal His son Jesus to the world: As a misfit and an outcast. Mary and Joseph were nobodies living in a tiny backwater town. The only notable characteristic Joseph had was that he was “righteous”. To be known as “righteous” meant acceptance within the religious community. God put Joseph into a position where he had to sacrifice his only notable quality, his “righteousness”, by accepting Mary as his wife and the child to come as his son. In the same way, Mary’s only distinguishing quality, her virginity, had to be sacrificed for God’s Son to be born. Mary and Joseph were made to be misfits and outcasts even within their own religious community and their families to accomplish God’s purposes. God chose to reveal Jesus to the world as someone with none of the normal characteristics of respectability, the characteristics that the world finds attractive (Isaiah 53:2-3).

This illustrates a truth that we don’t like to admit: We are all called to be misfits. Citizens of the Kingdom of God will never feel at home in a world that is twisted and corrupted by sin. The way of Jesus is the way of the misfit, to reject what this world finds lovely and valuable and to find our worth and purpose in Him. Then we fulfill the purpose for which we were created: Building God’s Kingdom. When we do that we truly become misfits in this world…and heroes in the Kingdom of God.