This is an especially holy season for my colleague and friend Father Ramon Alvarez, along with our sisters and brothers at Ross Avenue’s Cathedral of Guadalupe. Just two weeks ago they celebrated the placing of a new icon in the apse of their sanctuary. It is a seven-foot painting of the Virgin Mary, a replica of the 470-year-old original that hangs in Mexico City, featuring a dark-skinned version of the Mother of our Lord. Our Lady of Guadalupe is the patroness of the Americas. Legend has it that nearly 500 years ago the Virgin appeared to a poor peasant boy named Juan Diego and told him to build a church in her honor. As proof, the boy was to pick roses from a bush that was blooming out of season. When Juan opened his coat to show the roses to the bishop, the image of Mary appeared to him.

Baptists like me have had a hard time understanding the devotion of Latin American Christians to the Lady of Guadalupe, in the same way Protestants generally have never gotten the piety surrounding the Virgin Mary in Catholicism. But maybe today we could try not speaking past each other and instead learn something from each other by listening. There has been an amazing and undeniable love for Mary among oppressed women of the world. They see in her someone they can identify with. They feel that she knows their suffering, the agony they feel over their children, the powerlessness they sense about their future. If God could look upon her with favor, perhaps there is hope for them after all. There’s something about Mary.

It isn’t just Mexican peasant women who identify with the Virgin. We recently baptized Samira Izadi. She and her husband Hassan and sons Keyvan and Ali, escaped Iran and settled for a time in Mexico, and then finally here. Years ago in Iran, Samira had a vision of a woman with a child. She said it made her feel close to God; she loved them before she knew them, she says, though she did not know what to make of it all. After she was free of the religious establishment in her country and could inquire about it, she came to see it was the image of the Madonna and Child, Mary and Jesus. What do you make of that? There’s something about Mary.

But it isn’t just oppressed women of the world who identify with Mary. Jean Burns—hardly an oppressed woman, she—was telling me about this figurine she has of a Madonna holding up the Christ child in front of her. Jean says she can’t walk past it without stopping and touching it, picking it up and admiring it. Now, is that just because it is a good piece of art, or because, at some level we have rarely acknowledged, there’s something about Mary?

Even I—a middle-aged Baptist preacher man—have to admit a certain fascination. Everywhere I went in Italy two summers ago, I found another artistic rendering of Mary, some of them quite touching. My favorite painting of the annunciation scene is a fresco by Fra Angelico in the Convent Church of San Marco in Florence. It captures both the surprise and the humility of Mary at the angel’s announcement. I stood in front of it until it seemed time stood still. So, yes, I admit, there’s something about Mary.

But what is that something? What is it about Mary that compels our attention if not our affections, our admiration if not our adoration? Let’s look again at the story in Luke.

Mary is about fifteen, we think, when the angel Gabriel breaks into her world. It was a small world in the hill country of Galilee. Nazareth was so small you had to go four miles to a 7-eleven. The Jews there were the hardshell type, following the law to the letter. It must have been like living in Appalachia: off the beaten trail and maybe the last place anyone would have guessed to look for the mother of the messiah.

Isn’t that the way it is with God? And isn’t that part of the appeal of Mary? Because she doesn’t have worldly credentials that outshine her peers, she is a model of hope for all of us. She is accessible to all of us. I mean, imagine if Mary had been a wealthy blue blood from Jerusalem who never got her hands dirty and saw to it that the King of Kings would be born in silk swaddlings in a palace, not a stable. We would forever be thinking things with God are the same as things with us—that you have to be born on the right side of the tracks, go to the right schools, make something right good of yourself in society, and then you will be in the right position for God to use you in the work of making the world right.

If God plays favorites like that, how many of us would qualify? Sooner of later the Peter principle catches up with all of us: we rise to the level of our own incompetence; we all of us reach a point sooner or later where we are over our heads. No one is ever good enough to be the mother of the Lord. So if we think Mary earned the favor of God by virtue of her virtue alone, what hope is there for any of us? We could not identify with her because we are all inferior to her.

I was in Borders Books this week Christmas shopping for a biography for a friend. I walked all over the store, unable to find the biography section, unwilling to ask directions. Imagine that. My futility finally got the better of me, and I stopped a girl on the floor who was stacking books. Oh, well, we don’t have a biography section, she said. What biography were you looking for? Well, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be looking for the biography section, I told her. I wanted to see what they had. I ended up picking one off the best-seller rack and went to check out, where I plunked down my books and took out my MasterCard. The clerk asked me in that perfunctory Southern way— you know, where they don’t really want an answer—Find everything all right?

Now at this point I might have been delivered from what followed if my wife had been with me, but, Yankee that I am, I went ahead, not a little snippily, and told him, No, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t have a biography section. To which he replied, Well, we put them in the section where the person’s contribution was made. I quickly instructed him in the way of righteousness. He apologized and then said, Aren’t you the pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church? I hate when that happens! Seems he and his ex-wife and son had visited some years ago. I tried in vain to recover with some faintly pastoral remark, but to no avail. There’s something about George, don’t you know?! And it’s not a something like Mary.

This really is the Protestant point, you see. Catholics see Mary as the symbol of the infallible Church that bears the Christ and offers her to the world. But for that to be so, Mary herself has to be what the church cannot be because we are more George than Mary: we cannot be sinless saints, virgin pure. What we want to say in response to all the Mary devotion is that salvation depends on the fact that there’s something about God more than something about Mary.

But we shouldn’t rush to that so quickly that we miss the Catholic point that Mary is a genuine model of faith and faithfulness for us all.

When Gabriel greets Mary, he says, Ave Maria! That’s the familiar Latin for the phrase, Hail Mary. And everyone who grew up Catholic in the room also knows that the Hail Mary prayer comes mainly from these words of the angel Gabriel: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Then the next phrase comes from Elizabeth’s words: Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. But the question is, why is she blessed? Why is she favored so that she should be the mother of the Lord?

Mary is full of grace either because she has proved to God her gracefulness or because God has made her graceful. Is Mary worthy of God’s favor, or has God made Mary worthy by bestowing favor on her? This is the rub between the Catholic emphasis on being faithful like Mary and the Protestant view that it is the Christ inside of her that makes her faithful.

Do we really have to make such a choice, though, between the two views? Isn’t there truth in both? Isn’t light both particle and wave? Doesn’t it take two to tango? When you are in love, is it so one-sided? Can you say that one is only an empty vessel being filled by the love of another? Is God’s love so one-directional? Isn’t it possible that God sees something in us besides our sinfulness and neediness that connects to God’s own heart? Maybe a reflection of the divine image even?

God loves Mary in the hidden chamber of her being, taking the initiative and proffering the divine presence to her. And this is true for us all, isn’t it? When you came to faith, wasn’t it only after God had sneaked up on you, making you believe that God believed in you even before you believed what God might be able to do in and through you?

Yet God never forces faith on anyone. God announces his love and asks permission to enter into the most intimate relationship possible with us. A relationship that will allow Christ to enter us and grow within us. A relationship that will require gentle nurture and painful new birth.

Mary says yes to God. Let it be to me as you say, she says. Let there be life, she says. And just as on the first day of creation, when God’s Spirit hovered over the faced of the deep and God said, Let there be …, so it was with Mary, and so it is with any of us. The something about Mary we can all aspire to is her faithful willingness to be used by God. You and I are given grace to say yes to whatever God wants to do in us and through us. But God will never force us or coerce us.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, wrote John Donne in his famous sonnet. … [B]end/ Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new. … Take me to you, imprison me, for I/ Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,/ Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. Methinks only a man could have written that. And though I could make a poetic case for Donne’s passion, Mary would have us know that God doesn’t batter and ravish us; God woos and courts us.

And yet Mary’s first Yes only sets in motion a lifetime of Yeses to God’s call. Mary is a model of faith for us not only because of her initial willingness to give birth to the Christ child, but because of her willingness to be his faithful Mother and finally his disciple. We celebrate Christ’s birthday because of his faithful life and death. We honor Christ’s mother, who gave him birth for the same reason. She was a faithful mother all her life, and a disciple of her son. And this is our call, too: a call to faith and faithfulness both, all our lives long.

There is indeed something about Mary, because there is something about the Christ that she always points us to. Is the something about Mary also the something about you?