How can you be Christian without caring for the poor?
The minuscule Galilean town in which Joseph and Mary spent their lives and raised their son Jesus, was, quite literally, a joke. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” asked one disciple, when he heard where the Messiah was from. Some scholars posit that this was a popular saying in the 1st century. In any event, Nazareth was on the fringes of the Roman Empire. Roman roads avoided it until the 2nd century. Jesus came from a backwater of a backwater; he and his mother and father, the figures at the heart of the Christmas story, were most likely considered throwaway people.
The Gospels tell us little about Mary other than to say that she was a parthenon, a young woman, a virgin, most likely illiterate. The life of women in 1st century Nazareth was difficult: filled mainly with labor.
But life in Nazareth was difficult for everyone, not just women. Life expectancy was in the 30s. Those who reached 60 were rare. In “Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit,” a fascinating study of daily Jewish life in Nazareth, the scholar Jodi Magness points out that we tend to view the life of the Holy Family through a “highly sanitized lens.” Garbage and sewage were tossed outside into the alleyways, perhaps by Mary herself. Magness describes conditions in Galilee as “filthy, malodorous and unhealthy.”Joseph is described in the Gospels as a tekton, a word that opens a tantalizing window into Jesus’ early life as well, since he followed his foster father in his profession. Tektons were generally seen as ranking, socially and economically, below the peasantry since most didn’t own a plot of land. It was probably a hardscrabble life, building doors and tables, but also likely digging ditches and building walls. Today many scholars translate tekton not as carpenter, but as handyman or day laborer.
Jesus came from a backwater of a backwater; he and his mother and father were most likely considered throwaway people.
You can detect growing discomfort with this lower-class status in the Gospel narratives. When Jesus reveals his divine identity in Mark, the earliest Gospel, people say, “Is this not the tekton?” Writing a few decades later, Matthew transfers the label onto Jesus’ foster father: “Is this not the son of the tekton?” people ask. Finally, in Luke and John, written even later, all vestiges of Jesus’ former occupation disappear from the question: “Is this not the son of Joseph?”
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-martin-throwaway-holy-family-20171221-story.html
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Reposted a message about how fortunate we are to have Trump in the WH so we can once again celebrate a “Christ-centered Christmas.”
I usually don’t respond to her crap (like her “like this if you think Hillary should be in prison”) but I couldn’t ignore her on this one.
I told her that if she truly wanted a Christ-like Christmas she would turn off FOX news and read the New Testament where it tells you to care for the sick and the poor and not to be obsessed with money.
Haven’t heard back from her yet. 
