This Christmas season I've been thinking about Mary as much as Jesus. I know this is unusual for a Protestant, especially a Protestant inclined to theological ruminations. We like to snicker as the Catholics do acrobatics around passages referring to Mary's other children, or slowly shake our heads when they treat her as a mediator between God and man. In our haste to dethrone her we neglect to consider how changed must be a life that carries God within it for nine months. Man who is transformed by a whisper from his Creator should not be so quick to dismiss she who knew not simply God with us -- Immanuel -- but God in me.

I don't think this gave her supernatural power, either during or after her death. She was indeed Mary full of grace, but she remained Mary the farm girl, the gentle creature on whom Christ last looked before gasping to his friend to take care of poor mother, cast down and broken as she was on Golgotha.

I think of how scared she must have been, even after the angel's visit, as her clothes stopped fitting and the whispers began. We forget how easily the grind of day after day in the muck of earth can wear away any remembrance of those rare holy times, so that even the most grace-filled of us finds himself muttering what first brought down mankind: "did God really say?"

And then she and her husband, poor Joseph who stuck by her only because he too had been visited by a figure in glowing white, set off across strange countryside, without their families, it seems, carrying the God-child though only children themselves. Did they share their stories of angels, or did they travel in grim silence, each keeping buried within the secret that would have unlocked joy in the heart of the other, as so often we do?

So the baby was born. The poor virgin descendant of kings and slaves strained and cried and pushed out divinity to join the rest of us in this earthly muck -- and surely this must be a theme of the story as much as kingship, because it strikes right at the tongue of every priest and preacher who would separate us again from God. Remember the muck of the stable, because it refutes the lie that our Savior was born because the salvation of the elect somehow pleased him in the cold and distant way of an alien god. He wallowed with us in the muck because he loves us as fiercely and desperately as Mary loved her baby.

They lived for a time in Bethlehem, where they were known by their neighbors as that nice young couple with the healthy baby boy who liked to crawl away from Mama, prone to wander even then, no doubt. Joseph worked with wood and Mary kept up their hovel and Jesus saw the world of his Father from inside a baby's skin, and marveled at it as he must have marveled when first it was made.

One day strange and regal men appeared at their gate, men who would in no other circumstances stoop to speak to such as Mary and Joseph and their grubby little crawling baby. But these strange and regal men dropped down to their faces in front of that smiling child. Perhaps he sat transfixed at the spectacle, as were his parents and their neighbors, or perhaps he caught hold of the nearest wise man's hair and gave it a tug.

I wonder if Mary screamed when they brought out their gifts for the child King. First there was the gold, more money than she and Joseph had ever seen. How changed would their lives have been had this alone been the gift. But then there was the strange offering of frankincense, as if she and her husband lived in a temple. And finally there was the gift that reminded Joseph of the angel's words, perhaps neglected in all this talk of a new King: "He will save His people from their sins." If Mary did not gasp at the gold, or chuckle at the frankincense, she may well have screamed at the embalming ointment, the tool of undertakers.

We think of these as the first Christmas presents, as simply three more of the strange names and habits of that time and place. Yet were Jesus born today, it would be as if the Pope, the President, and a handful of Nobel laureates rolled to a stop in their limousine outside a welfare tenement, searching for the chubby baby in 3B. And finding him, they would do something very unstately and unscholarly; they would grovel and weep at his sight. Finally, to the amazement and horror of his parents, they would lay before him the draft book to a fat Swiss bank account, an ornately carved altar, and a coffin.

I wonder, when Mary saw that coffin, did it pass through her mind that God had arranged for her baby to be born in the place where sacrificial sheep are raised? In the book of Luke we read that she kept the words of the awe-struck shepherds in her heart on the night of the baby's birth, and pondered them. Did it strike her as odd, even before seeing the coffin, that men whose job was to raise lambs for the slaughter would come to see the newborn child, as if appraising a new addition to their sacrificial flock?

So there lay the jar of embalming ointment, and lingering in the air was the sorrowful look of the man called by God to bring it, even as he and the others turned to leave by a different route, that Herod might not find the Christ child before an angel could shepherd this tiny family to Egypt.

And to Egypt they fled, but surely not so far that word of the slaughter of innocents couldn't reach them. As they wept and prayed the night they heard, Mary must have thought again of that jar of myrrh, tucked into their little sack of possessions, wrapped even more tightly and secretly than the gold, as if to banish it from her knowledge. Now it would be never far from her mind, afflicted as she was with the knowledge that the world sought to murder her child.

Perhaps then Mary, alone among all the others on Golgotha except for her gasping boy, was not surprised. Perhaps she had carried it all these years, seeing it draw closer as her son grew distant, called up into the whirlwind of his mission, this knowledge that she would bury her firstborn child. Maybe she even spied this day from thirty-odd years out, when it was just she and Joseph and a muck-covered newborn mewling in a stable, and the faintest sound of what seemed to be a choir in the clouds.

So I've been thinking about Mary, and how invested with holiness was everything around her, even the blood and muck itself. And I think about how we have divested everything of holiness, even this season, and lent ear to the question: "Did God really say?" I recall that though he was the Lamb, it is we who are the sheep, all of us gone astray, and him given over as a sheep to the hungry shearers, that we might gather at Christmas and sing, "O Holy Night" and "Immanuel," and that some of us, if only for a fleeting moment, might actually believe the words, every single one of them as precious as the gold of the Magi, and as solid as the wood in that empty coffin, that coffin sized for you and for me.

When I think of poor Mary holding that jar of myrrh, watching the wise men leave in a cloud of dust, it becomes more real for me, the birth and murder and resurrection of her child. So I think on Mary, and on that baby born in the muck of a stable, in the hometown of a king and the gathering place of sacrificial lambs. And when I hear that whisper, as we all do at times ("Did God really say?"), I think to myself, yes, he did. He said it so loudly that we think it a myth, and so quietly that we cannot hear it behind our chatter, but there it is nonetheless, like the star in the silent night, drawing the lowest of the low as well as kings and wise men, to Mary's baby.