MCCNY
December 14, 2025
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of our God, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God, who will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. Who will come and save you.” …For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the rebellious shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of God shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. Isaiah 35:1-4, 6b-10
A Blue Christmas hymn, for a Longest Night service, says: “How can we sing a joyful song?
O God, our sorrows hem us in. When pain and grief seem all too strong, How can we sing a joyful hymn?”
I doubt I need to make a list with you, but I’m going to, to name the things weighting us and pulling us away from whatever joy is. Isaiah and Matthew today name and validate our fearful hearts. Everything feels a desert. John the Baptizer is locked up and – we all know this, Matthew’s first readers knew this – he is about to die. Matthew sees us.
Isaiah sees us. Isaiah talks about the oppressed and brokenhearted and captives, and we know that it is talking about the returned exiles coming home to a country that’s been ransacked, coming home to a wasted temple and a conquered nation that will not know self-rule again for millennia. We know the realities of those dominated and transported people are our realities, always and now especially for trans military and trans children and trans everyone, and people with disabilities and any Black federal employee regardless of how high a position he has achieved. For any woman who had a military command. For graduate nursing students, including nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, clinical nurse specialists, nurse anesthetists – most of whom are women and women and men of color, all medical providers in advanced practice roles critical to health services for rural poor communities. For people who will benefit from cancer research and vaccine research and development. Folks who need affordable groceries. Latine citizens living their lives, neighbors working through the process of legal documentation, refugee communities minding their business, all snatched up and caged and shipped to port-o-prisons, street vendors and landscapers and, now as much as ever, always for every Black adult and child ever to set foot in this county on any day in its’ history. Last week I learned that they have vandalized the official portrait of former Assistant Secretary of Health Admiral Rachel Levine. And this is before we even mention losing five and a half hours a day of sunlight. Before we even name USAID or national parks or the Department of Education or killing boatmen in international waters or AI deals, decommissioning of renewable energy infrastructure, or crypto and air jet bribes and pay to play pardons and visas. Before we even name the shootings and deaths at Brown University yesterday or the attack on an Australian Jewish community yesterday celebrating Hanukkah. We know Isaiah is talking to us, too, talking about our lives and hells, and a cold, wet, pitch black season.
“How can we sing a joyful song? O God, our sorrows hem us in. When pain and grief seem all too strong, How can we sing a joyful hymn?”
But Isaiah doesn’t stop at grief and fear. Strangely, foolishly, Isaiah also promises a crocus. This ridiculous text is aligned today with Gaudete in the Advent roster, this stupid hopeful crocus. Encouraging us to acknowledge and recognize and solemnize the complexity of our lives. To salute how joy and struggle are intermingled. To celebrate alternating hardship and relief. This ridiculous day. Gaudete. This foolish Advent third Sunday reminds us to rejoice.
Certain questions feel inevitable: How do we rejoice? What does joy look like? Does it hurt? Do I have to smile? Do I have to be there?
Isaiah says this transformation from desert into wetland comes from the glory and majesty of good. That God, that good is present and powerful. Incongruous, inexplicable. Queer. And the glory of good is filled to bursting with life, even in the desert. Bananas, Isaiah, the barren, broken, addicted, lonely places contain fullness and a recipe for life: love, wellness, happiness. Even joy, whatever it is. God’s majesty, good’s majesty means nothing is impossible or too strange to be true. A green shoot springs from a dead stump. A river springs up from a desert. Life from no life. Wonderful. Marvelous. (Mighty nice. Paradise.) This is predicted and promised.
John, meanwhile, hundreds of years later but, through the magic of the printed word and oral history, John simultaneously today is locked up in prison. When he got wind of Jesus, he sent his own disciples to ask, “Are you the One we’ve been expecting, or are we still waiting?” Jesus told them, “Go back and tell John what’s going on: …Those of the earth who are in need learn that God is on their side. Is this what you were expecting? Then count yourselves most blessed!”
A while back, the DC paper had a story about some guy playing the violin in one of the metro stops. Nobody was really paying any attention to him. Some people tossed him money, but others just walked by without noticing. The reason it was such a big deal to the Washington Post was that this guy was the concert violinist Joshua Bell who had just sold out the Boston Symphony Hall a few days earlier, and his violin was a Stradivarius.
Are you the one we’re expecting, or are we still waiting? What are we waiting for. A fancy concert hall and an expensive ticket and satin and gold gilt seats and ceilings. Waiting to wear heels and a waistcoat and our shirt buttoned all the way up. Waiting to stand in line. When there is beautiful music there already, in the subway, free, in our jeans and sweatshirts, with a half-empty I-Heart-NY paper coffee cup balanced in one hand and twenty newly released photos of a child sex trafficker hobnobbing with political and Hollywood notables in the other.
What are we waiting for? It’s already here. Why are we waiting, when John and Jesus are already gathering a movement. When the crocus is already blooming.
Most of us know that MCC started with twelve people in some guy’s living room. Now we know his name is Rev. Elder Troy Perry. GMHC started with eighty gay men in some guy’s NY apartment, and their hotline was someone’s home answering machine. Now we know those guys were Larry Kramer and Rodger McFarlane. A group of college professors and writers gathered in a Massachusetts community center and created the Combahee River Collective statement and Kitchen Table Press and revolutionized publishing and justice frameworks across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class. We know their names now, Barbara Smith, Florynce Kennedy, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Hattie Gosett…
These folks were all just people, just regular folks, no-name, neighbors or professors or whatever we are. They were people like us. We know them now as prophets, as truth tellers and leaders who seemed fearless and unfazed. You are just like them.
When John’s disciples left to report, Jesus started talking to the crowd about John. “What did you expect when you went out to see him in the wild? A sheik in silk pajamas? Not by a long shot. What then? A prophet? That’s right, a prophet! The best prophet ever. No one in history surpasses John the Baptizer; but in the realm he prepared you for, the lowliest person is ahead of him.
That is who we are, each of us: June Jordan said it. We are the ones we are waiting for.
John asked, Are you the one who we are expecting? Are you going to bring about God-with-us? And Jesus answered, Those of the earth in need learn that God is on their side. If that is what you are waiting for, then celebrate. It is here!
It is here already. Justice is an abiding effort that thrives, that festers and propagates in community, maybe especially in fearful-heart times. Joy is an abiding whatever it is – spiritual happiness, existential hope – something that doesn’t rely on whether things are going well or going terribly. The stupid, stubborn crocus in the desert is the pilot light in the stove, still on when the stove is cold. And when it’s time to roast the turnips or bake the buckle, what the pilot light does warms the oven and the kitchen. It warms the kitchen and the house. It’s the fire banked in the stove for the night. It’s the ridiculous, persistent evergreen and the holly and the wintergreen berries buried in the snow that Almanzo Wilder and his sister Alice dug up from the south slope. It is enduring. It is nourishment. I don’t feel it. I don’t understand it. But I know it, I believe it. I think we must.
Joy needs hope. Harvey Milk is famous for saying, “My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you.” Harvey Milk is slightly less famous for saying, “We have to have hope.” Maybe hope and joy find and fuel one another, and maybe drive us to act and are also our reward: Rabindranath Tagore whispers,
I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.
Something about that crocus makes it feel like a given, like a gift, like a miracle from God or good or salvation. And it is like salvation, as I understand salvation, always there and for everyone regardless of our actions. And also, though, it’s not. It’s also work, also hard work. We are responsible for joy (and salvation), we’re accountable through our attitudes and actions, our doing and not doing and undoing. The crocus is both an assurance and an exhortation. Mitzvot, commandments, are both laws and blessings.
There’s been a post-it note in my offices for fifteen years that says “emotions are habits.” It was my first tattoo, inked so that I can read it on my arm, to remind me that joy isn’t entirely a mystery, that peace isn’t a product of my circumstances that day, that lovingkindness isn’t necessarily something I feel. We don’t have to be at the mercy of our feelings. We can cultivate them, and at the risk of sounding like I’m telling anyone what to do, we probably should cultivate them. If we wait around until we actually feel like loving people, if we depend entirely on feeling peace or joy or patience or gentleness of self-control, we might be in trouble. I will be. They are gifts of the spirit, but like all ultimate gifts we get to participate and we probably must. God has no hands but ours, you know, no mouths but ours…
And that is actually pretty exciting; it is joy-as-subversion. It’s a practice that can tear down the empire of Rome, that can dismantle something that doesn’t value us or care about our welfare, that tries to dictate what’s – and *who is – important and what we should feel. We can create a new thing, a crocus, a road, (a Calibri type font) that all enjoy, that all can read and travel on. For pity’s sake. And it’s practice, like flashcards and music scales, it’s a discipline, a discipleship. It’s cultivating emotions and actions that transcend our circumstances and our fear.
Something about that crocus makes it seem to appear suddenly, immediately. And I think that’s possible, I think that’s what grace is sometimes. But grace is also slow and steady, plodding. Stupid. Stubborn. Habitual. I think of e. e. cumming’s spring, this thing he invokes that is alive and childlike, and pernicious and unselfconscious. This thing that is sensual and hopeful and joyful and what he also called “Yes.” He called it, Yes! and it’s everywhere in his work:
in just spring when the world is mud-licious and eddieandbill.
i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes.
O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked thee, thou answerest them only with spring.
I want to connect cummings’s spring and joyous yes and Isaiah’s desert crocus, connect it to a lifetime work and discipleship practice. A daily quiet work. I want to invoke the spring cummings writes of that that is unseen and unappreciated, like subway buskers, often unnoticed and unannounced but stubbornly practicing and laboring and organizing and collective creating and healing the sick and raising the dead and bringing good news and appearing to, or thought to materialize suddenly and dramatically in the sky at some future mysterious time, but always there, always giving life and saving life: cummings writes:
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.
How can we sing a joyful hymn? Absurdly, incomprehensively. Stupidly. Stubbornly. Daily. Daily. Together. We already do.
I love you. Peace.
Rev. Miller Hoffman 