I have always loved living in the rhythms of our liturgical calendar and corresponding lectionary, and now after a few years in ministry, I have found that sermons take me back to where I was at this time in other years.

As I looked back this week, I remembered that four years ago, I preached my first sermon as a priest. Jonathan and I were ordained with our friend Kathleen two days prior, and so this fourth Sunday of Advent was our first day to celebrate the Eucharist at our respective parishes. I preached about how much I loved Advent and how meaningful it was to be ordained in this season because to me, it embodies how we live as followers of Christ – knowing that Christ has come and is among us and yet eagerly expecting his Kingdom to come fully among us still.

Three years ago, on the exact lectionary we use today, I preached a very different sermon. This time we were only days past the shootings at Sandy Hook. The story I remember most from that day was about a boy locked in a closet hearing the shooting and saying, “I just want it to be Christmas.” After years of lauding the spiritual practice of waiting in Advent, I felt that this boy proclaimed a truth that I had lost in my love of Advent.

We talk about the goodness of waiting all through Advent. We slowly light the candles one by one as the weeks go by. And we as Episcopalians often look down on those who get caught up in the rush to Christmas, but in celebrating what Christmas truly means, it is we who should be in the greatest hurry; we should be longing for it to be Christmas already. The truth is that all of our Advent waiting cannot be separated for a desperate longing for Christ to be here among us, now, because our world is aching for our Savior.

Living in Advent is living in a hope that truly goes against everything we see. Such hope can seem crazy in our world.

As we turn to our Gospel passage today, when we turn to that first time of expectant waiting, we are given our example of living in hope that goes against everything we see. Two women are pregnant with impossible pregnancies… Elizabeth, barren for her whole life and now past childbearing years, and Mary, a virgin. Each were marginal in society – Elizabeth had lived most of her life unable to do produce children in a day when that amounted to her worth as a person, and Mary is an unwed pregnant peasant.

And yet it gets crazier. Not only the circumstances of their pregnancies, but the substance of them are incredible. Elizabeth carries a child who was promised by an angel in the temple to be set aside to prepare the people for the coming of the Lord. Mary is pregnant with the one prophesied, the Messiah, the incarnate God.

She is carrying God.

All the craziness of this passage fades in comparison to this. Perhaps we even get distracted by focusing on the fact that God chose her, a poor unwed peasant girl in a conquered, weak nation, because really – isn’t it crazy enough that God is being carried in a human?

As I remembered my ordination this past week, I cannot help but remember how I had to be carried up to be ordained because my knee had been injured when I was hit by a car days before. When I’ve reflected on that time, I’ve always understood those who helped carry me, literally in that moment and figuratively at other moments, as being the hands and feet of Christ to me. We tend to think of God this way – even think of the classic footprints poem where God carries someone through the rough times. Being carried is something we do when we cannot do anything else, not something we do by choice, and not something we think of as Godly. But here in Advent, I am struck by this reversal – the image of Christ being carried.

This is what we celebrate at Christmas – that God chose to come into our world through a person – not just in human form in Christ, but so completely like us that he had to come through a human, by waiting and growing and being carried by this woman.

It is the absolute opposite of what we expect of God, and this causes Mary to break into a song.

These chapters from Luke sometimes remind me of a musical – people seem to break into song all the time, in daily life. Mary sings when she meets Elizabeth, Zechariah will belt out a song when his son is born, and the elderly Simeon will break into song when he sees the days-old Jesus brought to the temple for the first time. It can seem as unbelievable in some ways, but perhaps regular words could not express the hope that they proclaim and they must turn to song.

The Magnificat is the longest we ever hear the mother of God speak in the Gospels. These are the primary words we have from her, and this song has been said and sung over and over throughout the centuries because it beautifully expresses the world we long for, the world in which we were created to live, a world that seems crazy compared to what we see today, the promise and hope that she bears within her body.

Her words are still revolutionary today. Mary proclaims her own blessedness but goes on to know that it cannot be separated from the salvation of all. Sometimes her words can sound scary – God not only fills the hungry with good things but scatters the proud and brings down the mighty. That sounds unstable – sometimes I wonder if I want my world overturned. But then I think of how I have felt many days this season, after attacks in Paris, and Colorado Springs, and San Bernardino, and I realize that I am not as upset as I was after Sandy Hook, that I have gradually become more and more numb, paralyzed by fear because there does not seem to be any easy answer to what could possibly get us out of so much struggle. We truly need this God our Savior, and we need our world to be turned upside down.

Mary’s song proclaims hope for us today as much as her day. In a day of growing income inequality, when wealth increases for the few and poverty increases for the many in our own country, Mary’s song envisions a world where all have access to what they need in order to live, and those who believe they need no one else realize that their life depends on others, the good news that they are not in fact alone in this world.

In this season, we celebrate the God who created the universe coming to be carried by a peasant woman, for his life to literally depend on her. This shows us how humans are intended to live, that even God chose not to be self-sufficient, and Mary’s song envisions a world where this is realized by everyone, where this truth saves us all.

Like Mary, in Advent we too are called to refuse to believe that the world is stuck like it is, that what we see around us is all that can ever be. Perhaps we sometimes have to turn to song as well to express this hope that God will transform our world. This morning, while terrorism is spreading in our country and our world, when we seem more polarized than ever and unable to even talk across political lines, we gather and sing,

“O come Desire of nations, bind in one the hearts of all mankind; bid thou our sad divisions cease, and be thyself our King of peace.”

Perhaps we are crazy to believe such a thing. But that is our call in Advent.

In Advent, we refuse to believe that the problems around us are permanent and unfixable. We refuse to accept that violence is simply part of our nature and join in its cycle. We refuse to consider that good news is a good guy with a gun taking down a bad guy with a gun. We hold out that there is a better vision. We refuse to believe that people are so broken and because we cannot prevent all tragedies, we give up our responsibility to prevent any of them. We refuse to believe that those we spend the holidays with are unworthy of forgiveness and incapable of change – and we refuse to believe that we are either. Whoever we are, whatever we have done, God is longing to be born in us.

Living in Advent means living like Mary, living in hope that goes against everything we see, and bearing that hope for our world. The 13th century mystic Meister Eckhart said, “We are all called to be mothers of God – for God is always waiting to be born.” Like Mary, we are to bear Christ to our world, to be the hands and feet that carry the hope of a world turned upside down, a world made right, a world made whole.

As we live these last days of Advent waiting for Christ, may we know waiting as a desperate longing for God to be here with us. May the prayer of our hearts come forth as a song,“O come, emmanuel, o come, God with us. Come, Lord Jesus, come.” Amen.