Mini-Devotional on Mary

Normally we hear about Mary and read her song, The Magnificat, on the third Sunday of Advent. This year it’s on the fourth Sunday.

I was particularly pleased to discover this because it’s my favorite passage of Scripture and by it being on the fourth Sunday this year - I didn’t miss out on the chance to preach on “Mary Sunday.”

And Mary has been on my mind a lot lately - it’s kind of hard for me to be going through the season of life I’m currently in - AND it being Christmas time - without thinking of Mary.


Mary doesn’t loom large in our Wesleyan tradition - Wesley barely talked about Mary - except in his “Sermon to a Roman Catholic” he does mention that he believes in Mary’s perpetual virginity - although I wouldn’t call that Wesleyan or Methodist doctrine by any means.


But I think we lose out by our tradition not talking much about Mary - and not in a way that glorifies her beyond recognition as a human woman - but by really focusing on her humanity.


When we think of the birth and child-rearing of Christ, we think of a sanitized version.

But what would it really mean to acknowledge the full humanity of Mary in birthing and feeding Jesus?


To have an infant, a newborn, to have GOD as an infant, a newborn, fully dependent upon a human woman for nourishment and love. For her aching back and swollen feet in pregnancy. For her blood, sweat, screams in birth. For the nourishment of her breasts in infancy.


What does that tell us about God’s relationship to us? To humanity? To women?


That God is willing to be vulnerable with us

That God loves us the way a mother loves a child AND the way a child loves a mother - unconditionally, fully, without hesitation

That God wants to be with us more than anything - not only to hold us in the arms of God - but for us to hold onto God, cradling Divinity, wondering at it, being overcome with the magnitude and joy of it, caring for and nurturing our relationship with the Divine as an all-consuming act of Love, that takes body, mind, soul together…


Let us this Advent and Christmas ponder on Mary, the infant Jesus at her breast, and contemplate how God loves us so.