I have to admit, over these last few months I have found myself weary and struggling at times to find hope.  There is a lot of pressure during this season to get into the spirit of celebration as we anticipate and prepare for the joy of the Christmas season.  However, sometimes that hope is hard to find, especially in a world that is so divided.  Hope and joy can feel like a luxury in the face of war, discrimination, and concern that there won’t be enough.  Hope and joy are hard-fought things to come by it seems.  And yet, our Gospel today reminds us that these times are not unprecedented, because our two women, Elizabeth and Mary, experience some of the same fears, the same difficulties.  And yet, they are able to find a stubborn and sustaining hope in relationship with one another.

These two women occupy a world that attempts to render their bodies and experiences wrong.  Elizabeth, an older woman, is given the gift of a longed-for child, after years of suffering public humiliation for being baren.  Then we have Mary, a young woman, not yet married, who is pregnant, and that is wrong too.  Her condition puts her at risk, as unmarried pregnant women of her time have been known to be sentenced death.  Two women, with two different experiences, both judged and boxed in by what their bodies can or cannot do.  Through their own stories, they invite us into our experience and affirm that it is indeed holy.  They invite us into our bodies and beg us to listen, for the Spirit is within and longing to be expressed.

To understand their invitation, however, we must go deeper than the fairytale version that we can often tell ourselves.  It is the version that I have been known to hope for, where there isn’t a hint messiness, and the path is clear - say yes to God and we will be rewarded with the fuzzy and comforting feelings of being on the right path.  Meanwhile, that pesky anxiety, doubt, and desire to just be that plagues us will finally magically disappear.  In our attempts to achieve this reward, the pedestal we put Mary and Elizabeth on grows more and more unreachable and we grow further and further from the wisdom of our experience.

As I sit in my own struggle to dig for hope, I realized that I need to believe that these women were scared and felt the freedom to say yes anyway.  I need this to be true because I feel scared.  I feel the knots of worry in my stomach, and yet I also long to be free enough to say yes to all that God wants of me and of us.  As I prayed with this need for a messy story, Mary and Elizabeth met me in my own fear, where I could begin to ask my fear, “where are you coming from?”  They sat with me as I felt my fear, and at the bottom of it was anger.  I am angry that the world described in our Gospel today doesn’t feel very different from now.  I am angry for the boxes I have put myself in, and the society that has tried to tell me who and what I should be.  I am angry that we live in a world where there are some bodies that are dismissed, oppressed, and destroyed.  I traveled down through my anger and found grief.  Grief for a world that values power over people, and that lives are lost because of it.  I feel the pain of the promise of the great love of God in a world that would discard and marginalize.

As I sat with my messy feelings, Mary took my hand and said, “and given all of this, Christ still comes.”  Mary’s yes was God’s hope and longing fulfilled to be among us.  Her yes was not a straight and clear road, but a yes in freedom even though the road would not be easy.  And even she needed a source of hope amidst her realities.  So, she goes to Elizabeth, and upon their greeting, Elizabeth feels the leap of joy in her womb, and she responds by crying out the joy, wonder, and blessing of the miracle within Mary.  Mary responds in song, which joyfully proclaims that God has brought down rulers but lifted up the humble, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.  Mary, in a world would condemn her, sings of a world of abundance instead of scarcity, a world of love that seeks justice.

Mary and Elizabeth’s meeting is the prophetic defiant joy that God is not only among these women, but within these women.  They create a space beyond the boxes and are filled with wonder at the miracle of God, the miracle of their bodies that carry stubborn and sustaining hope.  Their defiant hope is happening now, among us, within us, if only we are vulnerable and aware enough to notice it.  For we are a people of the incarnation, we believe that Christ is within all of us, including you.  How do you long to express it?