What If You Had Been Mary?

Listening to a sermon that lacks imagination is like taking a shower with your raincoat on. It’s dull, dry, and pointless. Imagination brings life, color, and beauty to what would otherwise remain dead, plain, and bland. Life is a theater, the mind is a picture gallery, and we link the two through words. When words are carefully chosen and woven together into a story, enhanced by imagination, it is almost impossible not to connect the dots. Solomon wrote, “A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver” (Proverbs 25:11 NIV). But even a story can fail to hold our attention if it’s overly familiar. And that’s what makes so many Christmas sermons so dull, dry, and pointless. Let’s not let that happen this year. Let’s imagine that you are Mary, thinking her thoughts and feeling her feelings as a young, teenage, Jewish girl in the first century.