Luke 1:26-27 “In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.”

There are number of things we can collect from these words about the kind of family into which Jesus was born. It was a humble family. There were no celebrities here, no attention seekers, no news-makers. Nazareth was the kind of small town where just about everyone was poor. If a person had a lot of ambition, big dreams, and the ability to make a good living for themselves, they probably moved to Jerusalem, or Caesarea, or one of the other leading cities of the area.

That’s not to criticize Mary or Joseph. They were honest, hard-working people. You probably would have liked to have them as neighbors. But they weren’t prominent citizens. They weren’t influential. They were ordinary, working-class people, not so different from you or me, who never expected their names would be written in a book, or their story told in a movie.

Isn’t that an interesting family for God’s Son to grow up in? You and I didn’t get to choose the families we were born into. For us it was potluck, like winning the lottery (or losing it, as the case may be).

This was like an adoption in reverse. The child chose his parents. Jesus chose Mary and Joseph to raise him. He chose a home without extra privileges, where people had to work hard just to eat, where you didn’t care about whether your clothes were in style, you just wanted something to cover you and keep you warm. There is no vice, no shame, in being poor and struggling, no matter what some politician or pundit might have to say about it. Jesus dignified it by choosing this kind of family for himself, and then more or less living this way his whole life.

You see, these are the kind of people he came to save–not from poverty, but from sin and death. Yes, he came to save the rich people, too, though he knew it was harder to squeeze a camel through a needle’s eye than to squeeze a rich man into heaven. But because he came to be the Savior for everybody, he passed on power and privilege, where people might think salvation is for the elite. He plopped himself down squarely in the middle of a common, ordinary family, perhaps not extraordinarily poor by the standards of his day, but certainly poor by ours. As your Savior, he wants not so much to impress you as he does to draw you, to attract you, to convince you that he is safe and approachable, and you can come to him. That’s the kind of family God chose when he came to save our world.

There is a second thing to note about Jesus’ family. It was a pious one. Luke mentions twice that Mary was a virgin. She was also engaged. She and her fiancé Joseph were faithfully practicing an old-fashioned virtue known as self-control until the day of their wedding. In fact, because of the child she would be carrying, Matthew’s gospel tells us that Joseph even abstained from any union with her until after the baby was born.

This couple is such a refreshing alternative to the lurid scandals of sexual harassment, abuse, or unfaithfulness that dominate our news. Alongside the scandals come the debates about what constitutes “consent,” questions like, “Does yes sometimes really mean no?” These are examples of how the moral rebellion popularly known as the sexual revolution has created havoc for the world in which we live.

Mary and Joseph had the issue of “consent” sorted out. Consent came when God consented to their union after they were married. What Mary or Joseph wanted didn’t matter so much, unless they wanted what God wanted. Our Lord chose such a pious family in which to be raised.

And we shouldn’t be surprised, then, when Jesus doesn’t jump to approve every exception to the “one man and one woman committed in marriage for life” rule established in Scripture. People in a free society may be legally free to deviate from it. They are also free to suffer the consequences for thinking they have a better idea than their God and Maker.

Piety, however, didn’t mean perfection. These were no moral crusaders full of their own self-righteousness. They remained ever humble, ever aware of their own need for God’s forgiveness and grace. Jesus remained their Savior, too. Let’s welcome him as ours, in the spirit of his godly family.