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"The Nativity Story" movie, which
tells the story behind the Greatest Story Ever Told, the birth of Jesus Christ,
has an important message about faith, honor and purity for today's teenagers.
[No actual doctors would use this kind of language. And of course, they're not: Baehr is a "juris doctor," which is a Latin way to say "lawyer." Snyder has a PhD in film studies.]
The movie depicts Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Joseph, the step-father
of Jesus, as a young, upstanding couple of their [Jewish] community who are touched by
the Holy Spirit of God. As devout believers in the God of the Holy Bible [Torah], Mary
and Joseph are confronted with a moral dilemma that creates tremendous social
pressures on them.
Keisha Castle-Hughes as Mary. [Too bad - she was really good in Whale Rider.]
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Oscar Isaac as Joseph. [His first name means "Lover of Deer;" his last name is Biblical in origin.]
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Although this Christmas Story took place 2,000 years ago, it has great
resonance for our world today.
First, despite the problems and pressures it would cause for her, Mary gladly
accepts the call of God to become the Holy Vessel for the Son of God. [But didn't the Angel Gabriel have to appear to her and tell her not to be scared? She'd never even spent a night alone with Joseph, and here she is preggers. That is scary.] Though she
suffers the scorn of the community, she sticks by her faith in God and what He
is doing through her.
In fact, back in the days when this story took
place, it was not uncommon for unwed mothers to disappear, deliver their babies
secretly and leave their babies out in the wilderness to die. [This type of thing still happens in some countries around the world. Are the writers upset about that?] Instead of killing
her baby, however, Mary treasures her baby, Jesus, as a miraculous, divine gift
from God.
As C. Raymond van Pletsen writes in "The Nativity Story: The
Faith of Mary," Mary "responded" to God's love and believed in
Him.
Second, Mary's betrothed, Joseph, was able to stand by his fiancee
because he too responded to God's love and believed in Him. [Imagine the act of faith this must have required - to believe that your teenage fiancee had not, in fact, had an affair, or been raped, but instead was impregnated by God - whose interactions with humans, legend has it, weren't so much gentle as violent.]
Joseph's
faith and trust in God gave him great courage to obey God, resist social
pressure and take Mary home to be his wife. That courage, trust and faith
inspired Joseph to protect Mary's holy child, Jesus, when His life was in
danger.
Today's teenagers are daily bombarded with hedonistic, pagan
images and sounds of sex in the mass media.[It is very rare that I have heard the "sounds of sex in the mass media." And I had no idea that the sounds of sex were pagan.] No wonder that a recent medical
study revealed that half of all of today's teenagers will get a Sexually
Transmitted Disease (STD) by the time they are 25-years-old! [Not so. A study in 2004 cited on this page by the Centers for Disease Control says half of all new infections of HIV (just one STD) will be in people under 25. That's very different from what this "doctor" is alleging. And another study, this one cited in a news report by the American Medical Association, gets closer, but still proves the assertion false: "one of two sexually active young people" will get an STD by age 25 (emphasis added). But despite this inaccuracy, perhaps the rhetoric might sink in, if not the facts: still no movement on condoms or sex education?]
Today, of
course, an STD can kill you. In fact, some STDs can kill you long before any
second-hand cigarette smoke will! [All the more reason to focus our resources on teaching kids how to stay safe from any kind of hazard.]
Another recent study, by the journal of
the American Association of Pediatrics, [It's the American Academy of Pediatrics] found that teenagers listening to music
with explicit sexual lyrics fornicate sooner than teenagers who do
not. [The others just "mess around," we presume. They haven't heard the songs with those "nasty" words, like "fornicate." And by the way, here's the abstract of the study, which clearly states that "degrading sexual lyrics" are the problem - not "other sexual lyrics."]
These two studies show clearly that following the example of sexual
purity and honor set by the Virgin Mary and Joseph i |