Second Sunday of Advent 2010

My reflections for Advent this year are focusing on the unexpected ways that God shows up in our lives and in the Christmas story. For this second week I want to explore the idea of how unexpected it was that God showed up in a womb.

Obviously kings and messiahs have to be born of women, but that fact is generally overlooked. It is the great men they become that is focus of the narrative, not their humble origins as children. Perhaps if the hero of the story performed some miracle as a child or possessed great wisdom tales would grow around the events of their younger years, but usually the humble story of a woman carrying a child in her womb has no part in the stories of great men. Kings win battles, they are anointed by prophets, they inspire the people – their stories don’t start with God appearing and announcing that one woman’s world will be turned upside down.

Mary was no Bathsheba or Jezebel – women only included in the narrative for their role in destroying the great men in their lives. Mary was ordinary and yet God showed up unexpectedly in her life – and her tale ended up being told. On one hand I can lament the fact that telling the story of a woman’s pregnancy is unexpected. But I can also rejoice that surprisingly the narrative of God scorning not the virgin’s womb is part of the story of redemption.

Often in our theologizing about the role of Mary we forget the unexpected physicality of this part of the story. We want to jump ahead to the story of the child she carried or debate her role as mediator. But God does not just show up in the safe boxes of our sanitized theologies. God was in the womb. Mary’s reality – from suffering bouts of morning sickness to feeling the savior of the world kicking her lungs with an intensity that took her breath away – matters. God showed up and grew in her. It is an easy thing to overlook or skip over in the telling of the tale, but God showed up there nevertheless.

In a church that often despises the offerings of women or sees our contributions as inferior, it is important that God showing up in a womb is remembered. The ability of women to gestate and birth the divine is just as possible today as it was with Mary. Perhaps recalling that God elevated this often overlooked contribution of women can help us not be so surprised when God chooses to speak through women these days. God shows up where the culture least expects just to remind us that perhaps we should have been expecting God there all along.