The God of Us Imposters
When we read the Gospels and come to know them thoroughly, we realize there are other reasons why it was necessary that there be no room at the inn, and why there had to be some other place. In fact, the inn was the last place in the world for the birth of the Lord. …
We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quality, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration. …
As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the Earth.
As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet. There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.
In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for man.
- Thomas Merton, 19661
“Who, Me?”
I’ve been asking questions throughout Advent, and this fourth week—Mary’s week—I’m asking questions about the question she asks.
Upon receiving the news of her role as Mother of God, she asks about the mechanics of this providence. This is a question unrelatable to most readers (for a few reasons):
“How can this be, since I am a virgin?”
Luke 1:34
Her question is not just, “So…how’s exactly this supposed to work?” Within it is Mary’s imposter syndrome: “Who, me?”
“Me, a Jewish teenager engaged to a nice blue-collar guy, is giving birth to the savior of God’s people?”
Mary’s Nazarene social world only reaffirms her imposter syndrome: who, the girl hardly more than a child herself? This person—structured by society to not have authorship of her life—she been chosen by the Author of life to midwife glory? Thus saith the Bluth family, “Her?”
One minute, Mary can’t make sense of her fear-inspiring, joy-toppled universe. The next, she’s running to hear about her cousin Elizabeth’s runner-up miracle pregnancy and belting out an epic praise song about dethroning the powers of the world. With a soul so filled with God it doesn’t wait for a stage, she sings one of the most powerful poems in the Bible with a hell of an opener: “My soul magnifies the Lord.”
How can that be?
The Universal Syndrome
The time of the end is the time of demons who occupy the heart (pretending to be gods) so that man himself finds no room for himself in himself. He finds no space to rest in his own heart, not because it is full, but because it is void. Yet if he knew that the void itself, when hovered over by the Spirit, is an abyss of creativity, he cannot believe it. There is no room for belief.2
Scripture doesn’t tell us what was running through Mary’s head at Gabriel’s bombshell. But if Mary suffered from imposter syndrome, she could be forgiven.3 I preached on this a few months ago, but didn’t write on it here. For the unaware, imposter syndrome is typically described as people in high places, new jobs, and new stages of life feeling like they aren’t qualified for their new role. Imposter syndrome emerges from the dissonance between how you see yourself and who the world suddenly expects you to be. I felt it immediately, and still feel it, in becoming a pastor. Apparently, more of us feel like imposters these days; the term’s Google interest reads like a Bitcoin chart:
And that’s just for our more mundane imposter situations compared to Mary’s. Anybody should feel unqualified to carry God to term.
For some imposter syndromes, it’s good to remember the low self-esteem underneath it is a liar. For example, if your inner imposter voice says, “I can’t be a dad,” it’s good to remember, “No, really, if all you have is love, effort, and a willingness to sacrifice, you’re qualified enough. The rest will follow.”
But what if sometimes your imposter syndrome is right, and denying it is wrong?
Elitist rackets encourage cultures that say, “You may feel like an imposter, but you deserve to be here.” “Don’t worry,” says the institution to its actors, “You may feel like our brand exceeds our legitimacy, and you may feel like you did nothing to deserve associating with world-shaping power. But trust us, you—we—are worthy of power.” As I’ve said before, the powerful are not any more or less sinners than anyone else, but they’re sinners with outsized ability to inflict the consequences of their sin on the rest of the world in the delusion that they’re saving it.
I always thought the more honest way to deal with imposter syndrome is to realize that actually, yeah, everybody is an imposter. At minimum, every preacher probably should feel like one at least a little bit. The best I can do is to keep owning it in hopes of being a little less of one. I know there’s no more wisdom in the people posing as wise, no more light in people who claim it as a virtue, and all too much manipulation is clothed in counterfeit love language. Too many spiritual people turn their “namaste” or “peace be with you” or whatever into a spiritual corset until they burst, denying the imposter within because it can’t live up to the image they feel they must embody, instead of the full, often ugly situation of being human.
Rather than deny our imposterity, we might embrace “imposter” as a useful stand-in for “sinner.” We are all made in the image of God, yet we betray it every day. Christians are double imposters, God’s little hypocrite club, because we claim we follow Christ. We are imposters of that image to each other for the sake of our preferred false image. While attractive contemporary spiritualities erase shame by eliminating the concept of sin altogether,4 including some Christianities, I recognize this as the patented “cleaning your teeth by avoiding the dentist” strategy.
Denial is a popular fix to our imposterhood. The path of discipleship, such as in Peter’s weeping realization after denying Christ, begins (and begins again each day) by admitting our phoniness.
To be sure, we are more than just imposters, and it is not our most essential identity—we are God’s children, after all. But if we do not own our imposter status each day, not only will we not treat everybody we meet as Christ, we will begin to act with the impunity of believing we are gods ourselves.
While we may be imposters compared to the image of God we hold, it would be foolish to evaluate ourselves by how successful we are at exponentially phonier human status games. These dehumanizing games tell the downtrodden, unlucky, and powerless that their intrinsic value is worthless and they deserve what they get. This, of course, implies that those who have power deserve theirs, which also dehumanizes them through inflation. While people argue about who deserves to be the president of Harvard, I don’t think anyone deserves to be the president of Harvard—and not just because I wouldn’t wish that curse on my enemies. No human can earn the throne of an unreal place that cannot live up to the veritas it posits, propped up by a global mass-shared illusion of its superiority, an illusion cracking in recent months. It makes one wonder whether Tolkien’s Ring has its shape because power desperately bends towards itself in craving itself while being hollow at the core.
It is thanks to such places that, like any other time in history, it is those at the bottom who need two scoops of mercy: one for their own sins, and one for the sins they suffer of society’s forgers.
If Mary had imposter syndrome, it was not just because of the impossibly high calling of bearing God, but because her society would have said her existence was an imposition: a poor, unmarried, pregnant teenage girl from Nowheresville, Judea. But as we know, this is exactly the kind of person who God loves to choose.
Mary, the Human
There is no room for him in the massed crowds of the eschatological society, the society of the end, in which all those for whom there is no room are thrown together, thrust, pitched out bodily into a whirlpool of empty forms, human specters, swirling aimlessly through their cities, all wishing they had never been born.5
Even though we’re all imposters, God still chooses us to do his work. And Mary was entrusted with Christ not because of her divinity, but because of her humanity.
The four gospels paint four different pictures of Jesus. In each of Christ’s origins stories, God attempts to demonstrate Jesus’ exception to the imposter rule in different ways: Matthew gives Jesus’ Jewish credentials through his lineage, while in John’s prologue, we get Jesus’ cosmic credentials. While Luke does have a genealogy (and it differs from Matthew’s), he holds off on this until much later in Jesus’ story.
In court, evidence used must also be presented with a “chain of custody” to verify its authenticity. If Matthew opens with a chain of Messianic custody, Luke instead opens with Jesus’ chain of humanity, which is a chain of relationships beginning with the story of his extended family: Zechariah, Elizabeth, and John the Baptist. There are many more reasons people say Luke is the most human gospel of the four.
And we have a very human reason for Mary’s questions. Why you, Mary? Because Christ had to be born through one of us. In her, we see God’s desire to be even more human than our humanity, which so often dehumanizes each other. God does this by having more solidarity with our humanity than we can have for ourselves.
What is sometimes lost is that right before Mary’s story is Zechariah’s, the priest husband of her then-barren older cousin Elizabeth. Before zooming over to Mary, Gabriel visits Zechariah and tells him a similar proclamation of a divine miracle pregnancy. Zechariah responds in a similar fashion to Mary: “How can I know this will happen? I’m old. Too old. And frankly, so is my wife.” This bears a resemblance to Mary’s question. But note carefully that while Mary asks, how it can “be,” implying acceptance of the new reality the angel has told her, Zechariah asks, “How do I know you’ll be right?” It is a subtly more skeptical question and a bit crazy to ask a guy who just inflicted angelic shock-and-awe tactics. So Gabriel makes this religious authority mute, removing the medium of his religious power: his voice.
Mary’s response may not look that different than Zechariah’s. But God flips power on its head all the time, and we see it here too. Rather than sheepishly sinking into believing she was unworthy because men told her she was unworthy, Mary accepts God’s naming of her as worthy. Not only does she accept this, she accepts this with the words emblematic of Hebrew prophets: “Here I am.”
With those three words, said by several prominent Old Testament prophetic men, she accepts in holy obedience that she is holier than society’s imposter vision of her. She steps into the lineage of her ancestors, which also includes many women who first struggled to give birth. “Who, me? Who, Sarah? Who, Rebekah? Who, Rachel? Who, Hannah?” In saying “Here I am,” her obedience is not passive, but assertive: I belong in God’s story.
What we might ask ourselves this Advent (and all the time) is this: who is it among us today that we believe is unworthy to nurture God within them? Forget the simple narratives and be honest: who is the last person you, personally, would expect? If you need help, I recommend starting with your enemies. But the outcasts and strangers we ignore work just fine, too.
Consider the last time you thought that God might be working in the people lowest in the kingdom of your mind. Can you believe God is recruiting them to be a laborer in his field, whether it fits your image of God or not? Can you believe that they are part of God’s story?
For God loves them, and you, and all of us so much that God became like us to get closer to us. He sent a few prep messengers, but when it mattered, he came through one of us. He did so not only so that we might know him, but that we might trust he can work in any of us he wants, in the times and places he seems like he isn’t.
Christ Comes Uninvited
It has been said by many commentators that while popular memoirs of hero’s journeys center on our search for divinity, the Bible is the story of God’s search for us. In this light, I want to share my favorite part of my favorite Advent reading, quoted throughout this piece, Thomas Merton’s “The Time of the End is the Time of No Room”:
Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it – because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it – his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak; and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.6
If you’re in a low place, you’re in the perfect spot.
If you’re in no place, you’re where you need to be.
If you’re down and out, you are where God is and wants to be.
We’re all imposters. We should admit it. But if you find yourself so detestable that you think you are beyond God coming to life through you, maybe you should just ask what Mary asks: “Who, me?”
Yes. There she was. Here you are.
Thomas Merton, “The Time of the End is the Time of No Room", in Raids on the Unspeakable.
Ibid.
Okay, Catholics would say she can’t be forgiven because she was sinless, but let’s drop our weapons.
For those allergic to the word, I think sin needs more unpacking than I can give it here, but “original sin” may be thought of something like a “default consciousness” that suffers in suffering delusions, or “God’s perfection enmeshed with human imperfection.”
See note 1.
See note 1.