The feast of the Annunciation is the nearest we get to the moment that Christ was conceived. And the church has decided that we should celebrate this timeless miracle exactly 9 months before Christmas day.

And at the heart of it is a young girl, Mary, the mother of our Lord. She’s generally regarded as a bit of an icon, a kind of mythical ideal female, the sort that turns up in fairy tales, the kind of perfect woman, that perhaps a male-dominated church always needed to believe in - all beauty, virginity & subservience.

And yet, when we try to sort out exactly what the Bible has to say about Mary, who she really was, what we really know about her, the answer is… we actually have very little to go on - in fact next to nothing if you take away a brief mention in Luke´s gospel chpt 1. Mary is simply a girl, engaged to a man called Joseph, and, from what we know of the customs of those times, she was probably 15 or 16 years old, and, of course, she would have been a virgin. And it is her insignificance, her simplicity, her ordinariness, which comes through the strongest.

God comes to, and through, the mundane, the everyday. And more than that, that is how he gives of his goodness. He doesn't come to reward good works or reward some particular characteristic: he comes and he gives something of himself - without condition, to the most ordinary.

Picture above is the Annunciation stained glass window at the Taizé community in France