Advent of the Ordinary

Years ago, my grandmother returned to her ancestral home in rural northern Missouri to do some genealogical research. She drove to Kahoka, Missouri, a podunk town whose population has hovered between 1-2,000 for more than a century. Grandma was searching for records of her mother’s birth, so the Clark County officials pulled out the 1900 census for her. There it was, Mabel Nye, born in 1898 barely two years old at the time of the census. But there was something scrawled beside the name that Grandma couldn’t make out.

Turning to the clerk she asked, “What does this say?”

The clerk studied the handwriting carefully then looked up at my grandmother and replied, “Bastard. It says bastard.”

You see, Nye was great grandma Mabel’s mother’s maiden name. Her mom was a teenager when Mabel was born and didn’t marry Charles Howell until later. The census line under “Father” was blank.

My grandma didn’t know about her mother’s “bastard” status until after her mom had passed away. To this day we know nothing of Mabel’s birth father or the circumstances surrounding her mom’s pregnancy.

I wonder if the word “bastard” was scrawled into the margins of the census records that documented Jesus’ birth. Jesus was conceived and spent most of his life in a podunk town not unlike Kahoka, Missouri. Small towns don’t forget scandals. They may be whispered out of earshot of polite company, but bastard births live on in the rumor mills of little towns.

But more than the scandal of an “illegitimate” birth, and aside from the notable visits of shepherds and magi and angels, I imagine the advent of Christ into this world was bathed in the ordinary. Life is slow and unremarkable in small towns. The snippets we get in the gospels of Matthew and Luke are only those things worthy of being written down. What wasn’t written down were the long stretches of ordinary, the weeks that didn’t even merit a footnote in the most important biography in the cosmos. Two of the four gospel writers have nothing to say about Jesus’ birth.

Advent is a good time to reflect on the sacred ordinary.

In the midst of a world where the miraculous appears to be at low tide, the ordinary, small town scandal of Jesus’ entrance into this life gives me hope. The people who lived where Jesus grew up spoke with that accent which screamed Hillbilly, backwoods, nobody to the erudite Jews of Jerusalem. The kids who grew up with Jesus were flabbergasted, even offended, when Jesus preached suggested in his first sermon that he was the long-awaited Messiah. “Wait, isn’t he just that ordinary bastard?” Most of his disciples hailed from the backwater towns around Nazareth. They were described in the book of Acts as “ordinary” and “unschooled.”

The incredible and scandalous and tragic of our lives are punctuation marks between long stretches of ordinary. Jesus came into an unremarkable town where the Advent of God coming to earth was drowned in the ordinary. Plagues, political intrigue and the occasional scandal of a small-town bastard birth. In this, is the hope of the world.

“It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.” Wendel Berry