But maybe you feel more like Mary. Good news:you don't have to be a woman or even a virgin to feel like Mary. The most important thing about Mary is that she was… well, she was pregnant.
Some of you have been pregnant. It may well be beautiful but it's undignified. There's morning sickness and I'm told you can't see your feet for the last trimester. There's all the birth-giving, the sweating and straining and all that business below stairs. And that terrible indignity - crowned by the further indignity of it all happening in a stable - is the miraculous path that God forges to come into this world. In Genesis there's a suggestion that pain in childbirth is some sort of result of sin… and yet God weaves even that into his weird plan to become human and save us. The Jews had (indeed have) a thing about childbirth and even menstruation making women unclean. Even a couple of generations ago women were expected to be "churched" after childbirth. Do you know how difficult it is to find a picture of a pregnant Mary? That bulge has been airbrushed out of things, as if it were shameful rather than beautiful.
How we wish we looked when we're pregnant.
But God takes this dangerous and undignified process and makes it his own.
Anyway, not all of you will pop a sprog in a city farm. But indignity… we will all face indignity. Sooner or later all of us will have medical procedures that leave little dignity. Cameras go down, cameras go up (get that in the right order!). You sit on a draughty ward with a hospital nightgown that doesn't quite fasten all the way up at the back. Someone may have to feed us or take us to the toilet or bath us. Indignity, I'm afraid, is part of being human, and while we shouldn't invite it, we should notice that God graces even the lack of dignity involved in childbirth and pregnancy. When King David worshipped God in the Old Testament wearing nothing but a linen ephod - effectively his y-fronts - the only person who came out of the story badly was his wife who sneered at his lack of dignity.
Possibly accurate. Probably no crown. Who knows?
You may be suffering indignity already. You may be fearing it. You may need to cast yourself as Mary in this nativity story, because God gathers up even the worst indignity and lets you know you're still his, and he even weaves it into his long game of winning everyone back. How we are in our worst moments may win more people to Christ than a lifetime of grace and poise and looking fabulous darling.
Go on, hoover and dance to the Lord.
It's okay to feel like Mary. God hasn't forgotten you.
It's okay to dance like a loon. God loves it.
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