Joy That Blooms in Wilderness Places

Last week, I shared a sermon and a reflection on how this Advent has been quietly stitching together a theme I never planned: growth, emergence, and the kind of becoming that happens slowly, beneath the surface. (If you missed that post, you can read it here.) What I couldn’t name then, but can now, is how deeply those themes were converging in my own life.

On Saturday, surrounded by family, friends, clergy, and the communities that have shaped me, I was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church. It still feels tender and astonishing to write those words. The whole liturgy was full to the brim with beauty and holy weight, but even more moving were the familiar faces in the congregation: people from so many communities who have prayed me into this moment for years. If you weren’t able to join us, you can watch the service here.

What strikes me most today, standing on the other side of that threshold, is how seamlessly this moment picks up the threads woven through Advent’s scriptures and last week’s reflection. In that sermon, I wrote about God’s hidden work, about the roots that grow long before branches appear, about the winding paths that form us more deeply than the straight ones ever could. Saturday felt like the visible blossom of years of unseen tending. A moment of “here it is”—not as an ending, but as another beginning.

And so stepping into this Sunday, my first sermon as a clergy person, felt like a homecoming layered inside another homecoming. I was returning to the place where my own discernment began almost four years ago. Returning in Advent, the season that holds waiting and returning in its very bones. Returning with a heart full of gratitude for the detours and the unexpected guides who brought me to this threshold.

This sermon holds all of that for me: the winding journey, the quiet joy of Gaudete Sunday, the reminder that we are never the center of the story and that grace often arrives from the edges.

As you read, I invite you to pause, to breathe, and to wonder:

• Where are you noticing God’s quiet work in your own life?

• What beginnings might be emerging in you this Advent?

• Where is joy—tender and unexpected—trying to take root?

May this reflection meet you right where you are and take you to new places ever closer to Christ, who was and is and is coming again this Advent.

Sermon: Joy That Blooms in Wilderness Places

St. Paul's Newnan

December 14, 2025

Advent 3, Year A

Isaiah 35: 1-10, Matthew 11:2-11

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Being with you today, at this turning point of Advent, is especially poignant – coming home during a season knows something about waiting, about returning, and about the slow unfolding of what God is doing. It’s hard to believe that the last time I stood in this pulpit was in May. Because so much has changed in these last few months since we’ve been together, I’ve been reflecting on how certain moments in life become turning points. They’re often not dramatic, movie-scene moments, but small, almost imperceptible shifts where you realize you’re being reoriented, redirected, and asked to see differently.

For me, one of those turning point moments happened just a couple of weeks ago. I realized just how full circle today would be for me when a Facebook memory popped into my feed. The picture was of me, taken by the ever-talented Geoff Matera, standing here at this altar, Bishop Wright’s hands on either side of my face, blessing me as he welcomed me into the Episcopal Church. It was still in those early days of return from Covid, I could tell from the mask he was wearing.

I was brand new to this community, having moved here from St. Andrews, and on that very day, I turned in my last paper to complete my master’s in theology. I knew I wanted to serve in the Church, but I had no idea what form that ministry would take. It was that very day, standing in the parish hall after the service, that Bishop Wright and Reverend Hazel asked me if I would be interested in beginning the discernment process in January, a year-long process for those considering ordained ministry. I had such joy and awe on my face in that photo, so excited about the journey ahead of me. I had no idea the road that was actually in store for me.

It feels surreal to return to this community almost exactly four years later in my first service as an ordained person. Nothing has unfolded in these years the way I expected. God didn’t follow the map I drew. The road was full of detours, unexpected teachers, detangling old assumptions, healing I didn’t know I needed, and insights that came slowly, often through struggle. You have all been part of that journey, whether you knew it or not. Thank you doesn’t even begin to say how much that means to me.

But here’s the thing: those detours didn’t take me off the path. They were the path. They shaped me in ways that linear progress never could have. And that small moment a couple of weeks ago, sitting on the floor in my office, seeing that photo of my confirmation, helped me see that anew.

That picture reminded me that the way God works is rarely straight or predictable. It’s winding, surprising, sometimes disorienting, and yet full of grace. And as strange as it sounds, that’s exactly the posture Advent invites us into. We enter this season not with everything figured out, but with open hands, honest hearts, and a longing to see where God is leading next.

There is a kind of quiet joy that comes in Advent, a joy that doesn’t pretend everything is perfect but insists that God is still drawing near. This third Sunday of Advent marks the halfway point of the season with a call to rejoice in the approaching celebration of Christmas. Traditionally known as Gaudete Sunday, a Latin term meaning "rejoice,” today signifies a shift from the more somber themes of the first two weeks of Advent to a hopeful and joyful anticipation of Christ's birth. 

Today’s readings, though, don’t scream “joy to the world,” do they? Isaiah’s message this morning is not spoken into a peaceful or stable world. It emerges from a people who have lived through devastation—exile, displacement, and national trauma. Their sense of identity and security has been shaken. They are asking the most human of questions: Where is God now? Has the story changed? Has the promise failed?

Into that ache, Isaiah speaks: “Be strong and do not fear." This is not comfort of distraction or denial, but as a reorientation. This comfort is a way of saying: The story is not over. God is not done. Lift your eyes; the landscape is shifting.

Isaiah uses language of the landscape changing - water gushing in the wilderness, grass and reeds will grow, highways will be there. In other words, the world as you know it will be reordered so God's presence can be recognized again. This is not going to be done by your effort, though, but by God's movement toward you. Isaiah is inviting them to trust that, even if they can't see it, God is already preparing a way.

Gaudete Sunday asks us to rejoice, but not the kind of rejoicing that’s loud or triumphant like on Christmas morning. It’s more like a small flame in the dark. A rose candle lit in a season of longing. Joy that is as tender and surprising as a crocus blooming in a desert.

Isaiah paints that picture for us today, not joy because everything is fixed, but joy breaking through precisely where things feel barren. “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad… the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” Isaiah isn’t speaking into comfort; he’s speaking into exile, into fear, into a people who have waited so long they’ve nearly forgotten what hope feels like. He tells them: God is coming. God is already doing something you can’t yet see.

And then, Matthew gives us another strange reading for a Sunday about joy. We meet John the Baptist, centuries later, picking up that same imagery, quoting Isaiah almost word for word. Isaiah and John are linked across centuries because they speak into the same human experience, that life does not go the way we plan. We build our maps, and God draws different ones. We imagine straight lines, but God leads us on winding paths that shape our hearts more than efficiency ever could.

And in both passages, God’s arrival does not depend on people having everything figured out. God comes into ruin, into wilderness, and into disorder, and speaks comfort, direction, and hope.

The people of John’s time were also living under pressure: Roman occupation, religious tension, and political instability. They, too, were wondering: Where is God? When will change come? When will the world be made right?

John appears in the wilderness, not the city. He’s not in the temple, but out in the wild, calling people away from the places where life feels predictable. He’s calling them to listen again to the ancient promise: “Prepare the way of the Lord.” His call to repentance isn’t about guilt or shame or moral scolding. Repentance literally means to turn around, to face a different direction. Repentance is to become aware of what God is doing that you might have missed because your attention was elsewhere.

John is the wilderness guide whose whole vocation is to remind us: God is coming toward you. Your job is simply to turn and see.

In this gospel passage, John the Baptist—the fiery one in the wilderness, the one who baptized crowds and called people to repentance—is now sitting in a prison cell. He is alone, waiting, and wondering. And he sends his disciples to ask Jesus the question none of us really wants to admit we ask: “Are you the one? Or should we wait for another?”

It’s not a question of theology. It’s a question that comes from the ache of life not being what he imagined. John had proclaimed a Messiah with an axe at the root of the trees, a Messiah who would shake the world, a Messiah who would bring justice that looked like power. But Jesus is healing blind beggars and eating with tax collectors and wandering around Galilee’s backroads. There are no armies, no thrones overturned, no prison doors opening for the prophet who prepared the way.

And I love that Jesus doesn’t scold him. He doesn’t say, “John, you of all people should know better.” He simply says, “Go and tell John what you hear and see.” And then he quotes Isaiah, the same Isaiah we heard this morning: The blind see. The lame walk. The poor receive good news. It’s happening, Jesus says. Not in the way John expected, perhaps, not with the force or spectacle he imagined, but in the quiet, ordinary mercy of God breaking into the world.

It strikes me that John, who spent his whole life saying who he was not— “I am not the Messiah; I am not Elijah; I am not the prophet”—now receives the same gentle reminder from Jesus: You are not the center of this story. You never were. And that is good news. Because if we are not the center, then the weight of saving the world isn’t on us. Our job is not to be the Messiah. Our job, like John's, is to witness to the One who is.

And friends, I have to tell you, standing here today —my first sermon as a clergy person— that truth is sitting very close to the surface of my heart. Yesterday was a blur. It was a day so many years in the making for all of us who were ordained. I spent years in discernment, yes, but also months preparing for that actual day. I sent a message over a year ago to a friend in Bangladesh asking if she could arrange to have my first stole made there. My Beloved Community in California blessed a cross for me weeks ago and had it sent for me to wear on the day, as they couldn’t be here with me on the day. I bought special red shoes, a tradition for many of the women clergy in our Diocese.

There were weeks of preparation, invitations sent, liturgy prepared, and music rehearsed—all of it leading up to one moment. For me, even with all that pomp and circumstance, it didn’t feel completely real until the moment I was kneeling at the altar. There were 6 of us kneeling there, the weight of hands on our heads, the vows spoken, the Spirit invoked, the whole room praying us into a new way of life. It was full and overwhelming and beautiful.

But today, as I stand among you, the community where my own discernment began four years ago, I’m reminded of something deeply grounding: yesterday wasn’t about us. It wasn’t about what we have done or accomplished. It wasn’t about titles or stoles or recognition. It wasn’t even about the long, winding journey to get there.

As meaningful as that journey has been, as sacred as yesterday was, I am not the main character in this story. I never have been. And the holy order I entered yesterday, the diaconate, exists to remind the whole Church of that very truth.

A deacon’s role is not to stand in the center but at the threshold, pointing outward. The deacon connects the Body of Christ to the needs of the world. Holding open the door between the altar and the streets, she says: “Look. There is Christ. Right there. In the one who hungers. In the one who weeps. In the one we overlook.”

But this isn’t just the work of deacons. This is the work of all of us: To witness, to point the way toward Jesus. To be the community that says, day after day, in our words and our choices and our compassion: “Here is your God.”

John did that. Even from prison. Even in his doubt. Even when the story wasn’t going the way he imagined. He kept pointing. Kept preparing. Kept trusting that joy was not the absence of suffering but the presence of God.

And maybe that is the invitation of Gaudete Sunday: To rejoice not because everything is perfect, but because God is here, moving in small, often unseen ways, transforming deserts into places of life. Maybe Isaiah and Jesus and John are all telling us the same thing: Joy is not something we manufacture. Joy is something we witness.

Joy is what happens when we begin to see as Jesus sees: the blind receiving sight, the poor lifted up, the broken made whole, and the overlooked becoming the very place where God is revealed.

And perhaps that is why Jesus ends by saying that the least in the kingdom is greater than John. Not because John failed, but because the kingdom turns everything upside down. Greatness is not about strength or certainty. It’s about openness. It’s about humility. It’s about being small enough for God’s joy to take root in us.

So, on this Gaudete Sunday, as we light the rose candle and hear Isaiah’s dream and John’s question and Jesus’ quiet answer, may we find the courage to witness to joy. Not perfect joy. Not triumphant joy. But the kind of joy that blooms in wilderness places, the kind that whispers to fearful hearts, the kind that reminds us we are not the center, and that is exactly where grace begins.

Amen.