I watched the priest board the plane and then proceeded to watch everyone look away, hoping that he was not assigned the seat next to them. Even a staunch atheist might find him or herself praying in hopes to not sit next to a priest for a three-plus hour flight. Not so for me. I secretly hoped he would sit by me, as I cherish theological conversations. When he did, indeed, sit next to me and saw me reading Buber, we began a rich dialogue that lasted for hours.

Somewhere along our conversational journey, we ended up talking about women in the church. I mentioned that I held a complementarian theology but felt that, all too often, churches within my circle failed to adorn the doctrine we espouse with grace and beauty. Through pooling tears, I told my new friend that, while I do not believe women should be pastors, I do deeply long for women to see spiritual mothers set before them as significant members of the body of the christ. I mentioned that, while women cannot be priests in the Roman Catholic Church, there was such a rich tradition of spiritual mothers as seen through various orders of nuns. He smiled and said, “Well, at the center of our theology is a mother and her son.”

He gently approached a typically contentious difference in our theological traditions, saying, “It seems that with all the distance the Protestants keep from Mary, you might have lost a deeply significant model for the value of women in the role of the church. Mary is the New Testament ideal of strength and submission to God. Where Eve failed and demanded her own way, Mary succeeds in being a humble handmaiden of God.”

As a good Protestant, I gently reminded him of the priesthood of all believers, as rediscovered through the Protestant reformation. But I also admitted that, outside of the traditional (and deeply, deeply significant) roles of wife and mother, sometimes we struggled to show off that priesthood of all believers in the full spectrum of life within the body of Christ. I also pushed back on the Immaculate Conception, the Catholic idea that Mary was sinless. To me, the incarnation is even more powerful when we realize that Christ was housed in the womb of a sinful, normal woman.

Women & the Wonder of the Incarnation

It’s one thing if God descends to be housed in an immaculately holy woman; it is quite another if God chooses to be born in the womb of a fallen human woman. In the words of C.S. Lewis from his book Miracles, “The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that.”

I do think my priest friend made a valid observation, one that has stuck with me for a few months since. In our desire to draw a clear line of distinction between Catholic veneration of Mary and a Protestant approach to her, I wonder if we have lost a powerful angle to the value of women in God’s eyes.

During Advent season, I think often about Mary and the Christ child whom she carried in her womb. While I don’t think she was sinless, I do see in her response to God a powerful picture of humble yet fierce faith.

In the J.B. Phillips translation of Luke’s telling of the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel told Mary, “Do not afraid, Mary; God loves you dearly.” Gabriel then proceeds to let her in on the plan for the Holy Spirit’s conceiving of the Messiah within her. According to J.B.Phillips translation, Mary responds, “I belong to the Lord, body and soul. Let it happen as you say.”

As I prepare my heart for the preparation of the Advent season (some of y’all put up Christmas decorations already; don’t judge my preemptive Advent-ing), I am choosing to hold my heart right there.

The God we serve is the kind of God who approached a normal, human young woman with a message that he dearly loved her, not because of her unique holiness, but in spite of her pedestrian unholiness. The Messiah is one who came to a sinful world through a sinful womb to save us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5: 15). The Holy Spirit is one who can overshadow and undergird and indwell fallen humanity in such a way as to transform us into the likeness of our Triune God.

In light of this Triune God, I long to be the kind of woman who responds with great fear and trembling, “I belong to the Lord, body and soul.”