12/14/2025 - Blooms in the Wilderness

I  blame the Early Church Mothers and Fathers for making me a priest.

My gaze was fixed on getting into med school when I took that first Classical Latin class —- I was immediately obsessed.

Then I learned the writings of the early church…
And that desert that was my faith was cracked open.

Reading those fourth-century Mothers and Fathers I heard them doing the very thing I had been told my faith was not supposed to do: they were wrestling — with scripture, with one another, with God.

Again and again, they came to the same conviction: to know God more deeply was also to know ourselves more truthfully. 

Let’s be honest, they were definitely all about winning arguments. And at it’s heart — it was about human becoming — lives shaped by love, justice, humility, and transformation.

How to live faithfully when life is fragile.

As if knowing God more deeply, Christ more deeply, the spirit more deeply — helped them know themselves and understand their purpose. While reading… Irenaeus, the 2nd-century bishop of Lyons, I was struck by his words in Against Heresies, “the glory of God is the living human being, and the life of the human is the vision of God”

He reminds us that God’s glory is not an abstract light in the distance but God’s life blossoming within humanity — in the aliveness of humanity — especially where healing, justice, and joy take root.

Through the centuries, as war and pandemics hit, as women created ways to be educated and began interpreting scripture for themselves, black, brown, queer, trans folks have taken claim of the church and leadership therein — as the church was challenged, shifted, grew — our sacred texts became living texts. 

That is the church I so deeply love. A church of passion. A church full of people who say, “Do not underestimate what God can awaken.” A church that says, God is not finished yet. A church that continues to rejoice and blossom — because “the vision of God is the fountain of life.”

This is the very vision we hear in Isaiah — this vision coming to a weary people on the edge of exile, offering a radical promise:
even in the places that look barren, God is not finished yet.
“The desert shall rejoice and blossom… waters shall break forth in the wilderness.”

This is Isaiah insisting that God’s restoration is real, embodied, and communal. Weak hands strengthened. Feeble knees made firm. Blind eyes opened. 

This is creation itself participating in God’s healing.

This is defiant joy. 

Gaudete — this weird Rose Sunday — invites us to pause here — now, where things are —- and rejoice.

Definitely not because everything is resolved — but because life is already stirring.

In our gospel, we find John — this fierce and wild desert prophet — in prison after challenging Herod, doing what he thought he was supposed to do.
He is surrounded by stone walls that make hope feel small, and his question feels honest, full of frustration and pain: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?”

Jesus responds with reassurance drawn straight from Isaiah: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind have been receiving their sight, the lame walking, the deaf hear. The poor have good news.”

Healing is already happening. In the dignity of humans being proclaimed in vigils outside Immigration Courts, in vigils outside of hospitals demanding care for our trans siblings, in honoring the lives of those who died on our streets, in buying diapers or adding to San Quintin library…

Jesus is saying: John, rejoice — God is already at work. Participate in it. “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.”

Isaiah announces it.
Jesus enacts it.
Irenaeus names it: joy is found wherever life is being restored.

This is the heartbeat of the Magnificat — which I want to say is based of the prayer of my girl Hannah in 1 Samuel 2. 

Like Isaiah, Mary’s fierce song of joy sung before anything is resolved. 

She rejoices not because the world is fixed, but because God has begun to reorder it:
the lowly lifted,
the hungry filled,
the proud scattered.

Gaudete joy is not denial.
It is resistance.
It is choosing to rejoice in signs of life when the world insists on death.
God’s transformative love is found precisely in the places we call impossible.”

In the prison cell with John,
in the wilderness with Israel,
in the vulnerable body of a pregnant teenager like Mary—
joy is already rising.

So on this Gaudete Sunday, Can I - can you rejoice in what God is already doing?

Where is life being restored around you?
Where is dignity being reclaimed?
Where is justice quietly taking root?

Isaiah promises a Holy Way through the wilderness — a path where sorrow does not get the final word. And maybe that way begins whenever we dare to rejoice — not because the desert is gone, but because flowers are already pushing through the sand.

So rejoice, beloved.
Rejoice with trembling hands and hopeful hearts.
Rejoice with Mary and the prophets.
Rejoice because God is not finished yet.

And may you discover — perhaps slowly, perhaps quietly —
that your wilderness, too, is beginning to bloom.