The readings we have heard today remind me of one of the famous tales by Jean de Lafontaine’s…Well, maybe those tales are famous only if you’re French! But Lafontaine used to tell stories where animals and / or elements of the natural world were in conversation, and it seems quite innocent at first, and maybe a little childish, but there is always a moral lesson a bit cleaver to finish with. The story I am thinking about today is a conversation between an oak and a reed, where an oak is boasting about its strength and observes that it can resist the effort of a tempest, when the feeble reed has to bow to the slightest wind. Yet in the end, when the storm arises for good, it’s the oak that is uprooted – we have seen so many of those in the summer, I am sure you can picture that easily – but the reed survives because, as Lafontaine puts it, it “bends and does not break”. So as I was reading those stories of the Bible today, those stories that seem to respond to one another, I thought about this oak and this reed, the sturdy and impressive Temple being the oak, and the sensitive and humble Hannah being the reed. And I thought about strength and what the Bible could teach us about standing firm in the storm, and what it could be for us to “bend and not to break”.

It’s kind of funny and thought-provoking to realize that Jesus is not impressed by the Temple. For all of us to whom religion is important, our buildings are part of our pride, they witness to our history and to our common effort to create something beautiful for our worship. As I work as a supply priest, I almost visit a new church every Sunday, and there is always a story about the building…Jesus, though, reminds his disciples that the most important is elsewhere. As solid as it seems, the Temple they are admiring won’t last for ever – and the reader understands the irony of the situation knowing that indeed the Temple will be destroyed 40 years later. There was this movie I loved when I was teenager – “Working Girl” with Melanie Griffith. A young woman of humble origin works hard to be promoted from secretary to executive, and in the end she succeeds and it’s the last shot of the movie when she gets the corner office in a big firm in Manhattan, yet her office happens to be in one the twin towers, so when you watch the movie now it seems ironic and it tells a completely different story. You think maybe it would have been better if she hadn’t gotten the job…And so yes, when catastrophes happen, we are reminded that all our human edifices can crumble to dust and of course it’s only an image for our dreams and our achievements that get shattered in the process as well.

Jesus reminds his disciples about the unsteadiness of the world, its violence or maybe only its messiness, that makes it hard to rely on any certainty. Like the oak, the Temple is impressive, but it can only go as far as its own sturdiness to resist adversity: when it meets a stronger storm, it’s over. And so, I was thinking, maybe the Gospel tries to tell us that if we don’t want to crumble to the ground, we need to find another way than “hanging in there” and “toughening up” in the midst of difficulties.

This is this other way that the reading from Old Testament seems to open up for us today with the story of Hannah, a story that offers us another perspective on being strong. The story of Hannah is used a lot to do women Bible study because many women who cannot get pregnant can relate to Hannah’s grief. Yet the thing is, the story is about much more than wanting a child. In Hannah’s time, having a child was all a woman’s life was about, so the idea here is also that Hannah felt like her life had no purpose, that she was less than other people. It’s a feeling a lot of us, men and women of all ages, can experience as well. On top of that, we see that Hannah was bullied and misunderstood and that also happens a lot in our own time of doubts and troubles too, we may not be made fun of or persecuted but we also often have to cope with the incomprehension around us when we fail or go through a crisis: People pointing out our shortcomings, like the other wife does in Hannah’s story, people treating us with a tenderness that is a little patronizing, like Hannah’s husband, people telling us to pull ourselves together, like the priest. Yet, with Hannah it’s maybe not so much that she is weak, as most people seem to assume, than it is about her having another kind of strength than the strength of the oak, of the Temple, the strength we are expected to display in this world: sturdiness and impassibility. Instead of opposing and resisting the circumstances, Hannah acknowledges the hardship and her raw emotions, but she accepts the struggle and bring it to God and this is in this process that she finds hope and, in the end, deliverance. She makes me think about the reed that “bend and does not break”.

So what can we learn from Hannah that we could apply to our own difficult times?

Well, first thing I guess we could see Hannah not so much as a weak woman as much as someone who is sensitive and allows sorrow in her heart instead of becoming bitter or tough, and it seems to me a healthy example of Christian life. When there is a storm in our lives, acknowledging the grief and the loss is better than pretending it’s not there and closing our hearts both to pain and to love. My father died when I was fairly young and I was trying hard to keep functioning after his death but I had a lot of anxieties. It helped a lot that one day a friend told me I was not going to break if I allowed myself to feel the pain, and actually that would help me to feel better in the end. She taught me that sorrow does not always defeat us, accepting it is like “bending with the storm” instead of fighting exhausting fights against our feelings. With humility, accepting our limitations, our deceptions, our shames, our traumas, our mistakes is hard but important work because it keeps us real. When we keep pretending everything is okay, we may “power through” difficulties, but we can become distant and empty in the process. The story of Hannah shows us that with God it’s okay not to feel okay.

The second thing we could learn from Hannah is her sense of dignity. To her husband who thinks he can tell her how she is supposed to feel, and to the priest who tells her how she is supposed to behave, she responds by claiming her right to be who she is. Mourning in front of God, she owns her feelings, having a sense of her own value and of what she deserves. With humble courage and persistence, she does not let anyone bring her down. She knows her voice is important. She is neither bitter nor angry, she does not seek revenge, but she wants justice for herself, she wants something that gives sense to her life – and I think we deserve that too. Not because God owes us something but because God created us for fruitfulness, and that’s when we are fruitful that we feel really fulfilled and can fulfill our vocation to others. It’s probably not about building a Temple or getting the corner office, it’s about becoming who we are and expressing it with our skills and sharing our gifts to serve. Bringing a child into the world can have several meanings. Hannah understands fruitfulness – she does not want the child for herself, holding on to it, she offers the child back to God and we know Samuel will become this great prophet who will lead the king and the people. Hannah prefigures the Virgin Mary in the song she sings, she has a sense that her story is more than her story but is History for all the people of Israel. We to have something to offer to “make a difference in the world”, as we say.

And so in the end, I think that Hannah invites us to take courage and dare to hope in the midst of our troubles. Not that we believe that we can endure everything if we’re tough enough, but because we believe that with God we can work through the storm and bear fruit, because we are the real Temple – God is not going to come down from the sky to rescue us, but we have God inside of us who collaborates with us. I am not sure that difficulties call us so much to resist and endure until salvation magically happens, I believe that maybe difficulties ask of us to grow, to become flexible, to adapt to new circumstances and God will adjust with us and will help us to go further, God will give us a future. When Jesus tells us that we are in the pangs of birth, it’s not only about us, but it’s also about God birthing us through the circumstances of our lives. Pangs of birth don’t mean that suffering is good for us, but that there can be a fruitfulness to our suffering. And that’s where Hannah’s true maternity is. Her pain is transformed into fruitfulness because she knows God is with her. This is why the Letter to the Hebrews encourage us, as individuals and as a community, to “approach God with a true heart in full assurance of faith”, like Hannah did on that day in the Temple. So let’s just do that as we confess our faith and offer our prayers today. Amen.

As a preacher, I think that one of the main things I learned meditating on the Gospel every week is that the stories Jesus told are always more complicated than they seem to be at first glance. The famous story we have heard today is no exception – and actually this story could be the perfect example of those passages of the Gospel we think we know exactly what they are about, when in fact their true meaning could be almost the opposite of what we assumed it was at first. This story of the poor widow reminds me actually of this well-known optical illusion of the rabbit and the duck. You probably had been tricked by it once. You have this drawing in front of you and you would swear you see the ears of a rabbit but when you turn the picture around or look from a different angle you realize it’s a duck’s beak.

Well, the story of the poor widow is I guess a rabbit we can easily spot. Jesus criticizes certain scribes and how some of those religious people are only seeking their personal advantages, being seen and acknowledged, feeling important and respected, receiving honor and comfortable material compensations. As he finishes speaking, Jesus notices a poor widow entering the Temple and coming to put into the treasury her last penny. Jesus points out to the widow to his disciples and seems to praise her generosity that contrasts so much with the hypocrisy of the scribes – the woman giving everything she has to live on, her whole life, when the scribes only care about appearances.

This is the story of the rabbit and it’s quite a good story to be told during the stewardship season by the preachers who want to encourage their congregation to pledge generously. Jesus invites us to give all we have, not to give only from our abundance, this extra money we don’t really need, but also to make some sacrifices. The preacher would very unlikely go as far as to say you have to give your “whole paycheck”, but certainly if this widow did this much, we can at least walk the extra mile or give the extra dollar.

Now, the problem is – this is probably not what Jesus is saying in this story. Or maybe he says that, but he also says something else that is at least that important, and this would be the story of duck. To see it, we have to read the passage from a different angle, and this is when it will strike our eyes.

Turning to the first verses of our passage, what Jesus is saying is that the scribes, as they cherish beautiful robes, seats of honor and banquets: “devour widows’ houses” meaning that not only do they steal their real-estate, but they steal until the last penny of the household. And so it seems to me that this sentence “They devour widows’ houses” is really when the ears of the rabbit turn into a duck’s beak and give us a whole new perspective on the whole picture. When we woman enters the Temple and put sall she has left to live on into the treasury, this treasury that will sustain the scribes’ expensive way of living and worshiping, this woman is being devoured by religious authorities. As it turns out, Jesus is not first thing praising her for giving her all, he’s mostly just pointing her out to the disciples as an example – not a perfect example of virtue, but a perfect example of what he is saying. Those women who are isolated and vulnerable, the scribes will prey on them and steal them until their last penny. Look! Just what I am saying.

And so the beautiful story of the poor widow who gave her everything, a story that seems so be told for our own edification, is actually the tragedy of a defenseless woman being preyed upon. Now, we could always dismiss the story as a bit caricaturist and overly melodramatic, but we know those things happen in real life. And it’s not only about those poor and gullible people who send their last savings to fashionable TV pastors who promise them fortune and health. For me, the story hit home when, during a service I was presiding, I saw a homeless man taking off one of his shoes during the offering, and pulling off his sock, putting into the plate all the coins that were in it. Suddenly it hit me that the money he needed so badly for himself was to be the money of my church, the money of my paycheck, this money used to buy those fancy vestments for us priests saying our long Eucharistic prayers, when of course, far from the man helping the church, it should have been the church helping the man.

So what can we do with this Gospel? Is it good news or bad news during this stewardship season? Please, when she comes back, don’t tell Rev Dorota I preached it was not worth giving to the church! Don’t tell her, because this is not at all what I am saying.

What I think actually, is that this text is very good news and should absolutely be read during stewardship season because it tells us everything about what stewardship should be. We too often limit our responsibility to give money. But the most important part of stewardship is to think about the way we use money in the church, what is really important, what is accessory, what are the ministries we really want to support – knowing that for Jesus religion should never be about vain pride and parade, but should be always for the service of the poor and the vulnerable, and this is where our priorities need to be. I think Jesus also invites his disciples to hold the clergy and the leaders of the church accountable for the way they use the money of the congregation. Faith is not about blind trust in our leaders, faith is about building the church together and being invested in what the church is doing to serve God best in our own community and in the world. On a bigger scale, the way we try to live out stewardship at church should also teach us how to live out stewardship in the world. If we pay our taxes, we also need to hold the government accountable for the way they spend our money. Same thing if we give to non-profits or invest in a bank. It is our responsibility to ask ourselves if they will use our money for their own interests or for the improvement of the well-being of all.

Maybe one of the biggest questions of stewardship in general could be: “Who pays the price?”. We are not only in danger of being preyed upon or supposed to defend those who are preyed upon, the sad true is that, without even being aware of it, we can also be the predators. We can be the ones who devour the poor and the defenseless. I often think about that when I put on my clothes or eat my lunch. At what cost have those goods been brought to me? Child labor, animal cruelty, wages that don’t make a living, environmental destruction? I guess our world economy and our social organization have become so complex it’s very hard to be innocent from any system of exploitation, as it is very hard also to avoid completely to be taken advantage of. Sometimes we are the widow, and sometimes we are the scribe: The rabbit becomes the duck and the duck becomes the rabbit. But living the Christian life should be a life where, as Jesus, we acknowledge the tension between those who prey on others and those who are being preyed upon, and we should strive to do our best to reduce the tension.

If we decide we refuse to take advantage of defenseless people, maybe we can start not being like the scribes and live a simple life, renouncing to our places of honor and to our banquets. I am not so sure Jesus asks us to give up everything, because maybe renouncing to those things we don’t need could already be a good place to start with. On the other side, if we ourselves are the ones being taken advantage of, caught in abusive situations, at work or in our personal relationships, maybe the Christian thing to do would be to set ourselves free from this bondage, instead of sacrificing ourselves for something that is unfair. The poor widow gave all she had and, yes, self-sacrifice can always be shown as an example of virtue as it probably is. Yet I think Jesus invites us also to think more deeply about the stewardship of our lives, of our institutions and of our world and how we need to reduce injustices.

And so in the end, and especially today, as we remember those who gave their all for their country, we are invited to see both side of the story when sacrifices are being made. We need to remember that a great number of sacrifices are as beautiful as tragic, and a lot of sacrifices could be avoided in a more peaceful world and a fairer society, when giving your life away would only mean loving and serving – not being devoured and killed, as the widow and as Jesus, and as so many innocent people and creatures. Today, I think that as we salute and remember the sacrifices, we are also invited to work for a world where there is no room for sacrifices because we will have no need that some give their whole lives away so others can thrive. Amen.

So you probably know – or maybe not – that one of the verses we have heard this morning in our Gospel is considered to be the shortest verse of all the Bible: “Jesus wept”. And what is interesting is that, if it is indeed a short verse, yet, there have been countless commentaries on these two little words. Most of the scholars in the world of theology, but also people like you and I, have been, over the ages, really puzzled that Jesus would cry at the death of his friend Lazarus. The thing that is so surprising for a lot of us is that Jesus, of course, should have known better than being sad. Jesus should have known better than being affected by the apparent sadness of it all, being God and knowing for sure what we only strive to believe: that death is not the end, that there is indeed a resurrection of the dead and a coming into glory for God’s children – as we remember on this feast of All Saints’.

So why was Jesus weeping? Well, most of the commentators of the Scriptures agree on the fact that this passage shows us “the human face of the Jesus”, his sensitivity. It is indeed to be noticed that Jesus is pretty emotional in this passage, and it is something rather unusual in John’s Gospel where Jesus appears to be always very in control of situations. For example, it is often that John mentions that Jesus “knew what people were thinking” or “what was going to happen”. Yet, here at the grave of Lazarus, Jesus for the first time seems to be overwhelmed by his emotions. Not only it is said that Jesus wept, but, it is also said that he was “deeply moved” and it is mentioned twice that he was “greatly disturbed”. So what’s going on here? Why would John show us an aspect of Jesus that is so out of the blue? Why would John, who always present us a Jesus with divine knowledge, show us suddenly a Jesus so vulnerable? Does John suddenly believe that he needs to concede a little humanity in Jesus? Or is it something else?

Well, as I thought about it, it seemed to me that John’s Gospel is overall so coherent in stating Jesus’ divinity that I had a sense that maybe what John was trying to say is that actually, tears and sorrow are not only human but also divine. It is in God’s nature to be deeply touched and moved by our grief and our pain.

As Christians we don’t always get that, most of the time we say that we believe that God is with us, but we mean in a physical way, like God came on earth in the person of Jesus. Yet, maybe a deeper understanding of the Gospel could bring us to realize that God is also inside of us in all that we experience and feel in our human lives. God is not watching us from above. This is I think what Jesus means when he proclaims throughout all John’s Gospel that He is the life. Life is about being moved and being touched. We have a tendency to downplay sensitivity and emotions, yet if we’d look at nature, from rocks to plants to animals to humans, we would notice that the more sensitive a being is, the more it testifies of a higher degree of intelligence. And so, as the highest form of being, I think that God is not just thinking God’s thoughts with plenty of wisdom, as we often imagine God is, but God is deeply sensitive and touched by everything that affect us. Sensitivity is not about raw emotions or sentimentality which can be pretty basic, but sensitivity is this ability to relate to another being, to put ourselves into their shoes, to let their lives touch us, to rejoice with them for their joys and to mourn with them for their losses. This is when we are sensitive, not so much when we are smart, that we can live a life of love. Life, at his highest level is deeply personal and connected, and so if Jesus says he is the life, it means that God literally “feel for us” because our God is the God of compassion.

Jesus wept. The God who saves us is also the God who weeps with us and share our deepest sorrows. Jesus is not faking sorrow “knowing better than to be sad” deep down. If the gospel proclaims that Jesus is God and that God is life, then we have to believe that God truly hurts when we are hurt or when we hurt one another. Jesus mourns with us, not because “he was also human after all”, but being life itself God is indeed suffering when life is hurt. If God is life, it means that God is truly devastated by the suffering of this world and God is devastated by death – we are not talking here of death as a biological process, we are talking here about how both our fear and fascination with death so often leads us as individuals and as a society to live in isolation, violence and despair. And yet, and this is where John’s story becomes really interesting: in the midst of all this devastating grief, Jesus, as much as he shares our pain, still has the power to save us – the power of life overcoming the power of death.

Today, as we commemorate All Saints’ Day, this is what we are really called to believe and to rejoice about. We have visions of the heavens in the Scriptures, and countless books have been written about people visiting the after life and coming back to give an account of it. I don’t know about that, I think a lot of it was probably inspired by some kind of experience, but I don’t think the church asks us to believe this or that about heavens and how it looks like. I think that what the Gospel teaches us is that the power of life is greater than the power of death, and so, even in those times when we hurt more than we can say, we are truly called to receive the assurance that in the end, we won’t be overcome and defeated. You know, John could have simply shared in his Gospel about Jesus’ death and resurrection, but here, just before starting to tell the story of the passion of Jesus, John tells the story of Lazarus. And I think he gives this account to make a point, that death and resurrection, it’s not only the story of Jesus, it is the story of all of us, of all the Saints. Jesus opened the eyes of the blind and today he gives us a peek on what’s behind the stone of the grave, what’s behind the curtain of this world: Life eternal given to all, if only we are willing to receive it. It’s not only that physical death is not the end for us and our loved ones, it also means that God can always bring us back to life from whatever deadly place we have fallen into.

In the story, Martha mentions that Lazarus has been dead for four days, and it is really important, not just a detail. The Jews at Jesus’s time used to believe that the souls of the deceased were still around for three days, but after that, they were gone for good. And so when Jesus raises Lazarus after he has been dead for four days, when his body already “stinks”, it means that God can still act when all hope is gone. It means that God can truly heal our biggest wounds and can comfort us from our deepest sorrows, and God can indeed “wipe away every tears from our eyes” not because God is a magician, but because God is life, and life is more powerful than anything else. Certainly, you have already experienced some of this work of life inside of you. Maybe you’ve been crushed by a heartbreak, brought to your knees by an addiction, maybe you lost somebody who was everything to you, and yet today you’re at church because you still found the courage to carry on, you found enough life inside of you and around you to keep you going, as difficult as it might have been be…

Well, I think that’s really the work of God inside of us overcoming the power of death – and what happens in this very life in all our little resurrections is like the physical resurrection of Lazarus: As wonderful as it is, it is still only an image of what happens after this world have passed away, when death is completely overcome, not temporally, but truly for ever destroyed.

So let’s remember that as we draw near to the altar to receive the anointing of the oil. There is nothing God can’t heal us from, there is no pain God can’t redeem. Once again, it’s not magic, but when we have faith, we can truly start witnessing and experiencing the power of life over death. And this is what we are called to do when we celebrate All Saints’. To become a sign of life in a culture of death, a culture too often marked by violence, fear and selfishness. Each time we open up to one another, each time we mourn with one another, each time we rejoice together, each time we let God calls us out of our tombs, we will bring a sign of hope to the world, not a fake hope that display mindless optimism but we will bring the hope of those who have truly suffered, those who, because they know that there is a way beyond suffering also know that there is a way beyond death. Amen.

It’s a pleasure for me to be here with you this morning, thank you Liz for your invitation! I appreciate the opportunity to share the message with you today. I am deeply convinced that reading the Gospel together as a church is really about the willingness to hear different voices and different perspectives on Jesus’s life and teaching. It’s not that some of us have better insights, it is mostly because it deepens our reflections and open our hearts to hear what others have to say. Of course it can help, but nobody needs a degree in theology to react to the Scriptures, what’s needed is life experience. And so as a preacher, I know this is something that I really try to do – to try to listen to how different people respond to the Gospel and it is often a starting point for me in writing my sermons.

This week, a comment a woman sent on line about this passage of the Gospel made me pause. The woman said that she did not really know what to do of the story of Bartimaeus, because his healing seemed unfair to her, and she explained why. She said that a year ago her young son had a bike accident and since then he has been suffering from terrible headaches that force him to spend long hours in the dark when as a kid he should be enjoying sunshine, and school and playing outside with his friends. She said she has been praying for one year for her son and nothing seems to be happening so far when, on the other side, Bartimaeus, the blind man was saved from darkness and healed by Jesus “immediately”.

And so I started thinking about that. “Immediately” you have probably noticed, is a big word in Mark’s Gospel, we find it about 30 times, and most of the time, “immediately” refers to the way miracles happen: Immediately the leprosy leaves the leper, immediately the paralyzed man stood up, immediately the ears of the deaf were opened, and so on…And so I think, this woman is right, you know. The Gospel – this is not the way we experience prayer and healing, most of the time we’re like this woman, we spend months and sometimes years praying to finally get a response, if we experience getting a response at all.

And yet. Yet, “immediately”, as I was thinking about this story, another thought hit me. It hit me that if the man was healed “immediately”, “suddenly”, he probably had been waiting for a very long time too. People knew about him, he was Bartimaeus, this man who had been sitting on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, begging while others went on their way. If you have this experience just driving down the same road each day, you probably know about that, there is always this man or this woman you see all the time at the stoplights, begging for money, and sometimes it is a little familiar and good to see their faces, and sometimes it’s a little annoying because you know they are going to ask you again today, and sometimes it’s a little heart-breaking to think that nothing seems to change for them – ever.

Bartimaeus, sitting on the busy road towards Jerusalem, had been waiting a long time for something to happen to him, for somebody to show up for him. Witnessing life moving on around us and feeling left behind, this is something I guess a lot of us can relate to whether we are aging, experiencing disabilities, unemployment, grief or depression, or simply because we are not happy anymore in our marriages or in our jobs, and we can’t see where it’s leading us – we feel stuck. It’s true in life and it’s true in our spirituality, actually it’s often that our relationship with God seems to be on hold when our lives seem to come to a stop, and this is I think the story of Bartimaeus: Surrounded by all those people who seemed to know their way, in their lives and with God, busy, happy, walking towards the Holy City, but he, Bartimaeus, was left on the side of the road. In those times indeed, it is hard to not let darkness overcome us and lose hope – when it seems that nothing good is going to happen to us… So what can we learn today from the story?

Well, the first thing we can learn about Bartimaeus is that, in spite of being stuck on the road, he remained open and alert. I think this is true of a lot of people with disabilities, and we can learn from them. Not being able to use one of their senses or members, they learn to develop the other ones. Bartimaeus could not see, but he certainly could hear. He knew about this Jesus, the Son of David, the prophet in whom he could find help and salvation, and my guess is that he had been expectantly waiting for him, listening to conversations and rumors from all those people around him who probably talked about this holy man and his whereabouts.

It can be the same for us. In those situations where we are stuck, we can stay alert, and even if we are in darkness, we can learn how to discern God’s presence: by reading the Bible, talking to other Christians, writing about our experience, trying something new. We cannot force God to show up, but we can notice the way in which God comes closer. Bartimaeus prayed what came to be known in the monastic spirituality as the “Jesus prayer”’: “Have mercy on me!”. It is a prayer the monks trained themselves to pray constantly, to pray as they breathe, so they would bathe into God’s presence. Maybe a lot of us don’t feel called to pray like that, but I think even in our darkest times, when it seems like we have lost our way and it’s hard to talk to God, still we can keep a short and simple life of prayer – Crying for help, if it is all we can do.

The second thing I noticed about Bartimaeus is that if he could listen, he could also shout and everybody heard him. Bartimaeus had a huge disability and yet, he was not just a poor beggar, he refused to be a victim and he had enough self confidence to make himself known to Jesus. One of the ways we can “unstuck ourselves” from difficult situations is to keep the conviction that we are never one hundred percent a victim. Our doubts and fears and sometimes people we know can try to silence us, or make us retreat in our own places of solitude, but we can also choose to take a step forward, even if it seems very difficult and paltry. Among those conflicting voices of “should” and “shouldn’t” we hear around us or inside of us, we need to strive to go towards where there is greater light and life, and leave behind our insecurities and our comfort – and sometimes even the things we are unhappy about have become comfortable, not that we like them but we’ve gotten used to them. It can be scary for a blind man to see again. His whole life is going to be transformed, and yet Jesus’ s question: “What do you want me to do for you?” seems rhetorical: who wouldn’t want the light to come into their lives?

The last thing I noticed is that the story happened in Jericho – and I wondered about that until somebody pointed out to me that the last time people shouted in Jericho, the walls crumbled to dust and it opened the way for the Hebrews to the promised land. Maybe today we are also asked to cry to Jesus so the walls of our inner prisons will crumble so we can find the way, and in the end I think this is what the story is all about: When the time comes for him, Bartimaeus will spring up from his place of darkness and will follow Jesus on the way.

I read recently the story of a woman who was saying that a week before starting chemo for a breast cancer, she went on a silent retreat and she kept looking at Jesus on the cross wondering what all this suffering was all about. And she said that this is what she heard from Jesus: “Yes, there is suffering, but there is a way”. I think this is really what we are called to hang on to as Christians: there is a way (Weren’t we called the people of the way to begin with?). We often hear that we can be or do whatever we want if we have the will, well I am not sure about that and I like it about Bartimaeus that he stays so humble and aware of who he is. Like him, we all have our disabilities, our insecurities and our weaknesses and maybe we can heal from them, or maybe we never will, but still, there is a way for us to the promise land. We find hope, not so much because we convince ourselves that good things will happen for us, but we find hope within ourselves, in the life we have in us, life that pushes forward in spite of everything. In the end of the story, Bartimaeus left his coat behind and it really made me think of a shed of skin, or a butterfly leaving his cocoon. Jesus says it’s his own faith that has saved Bartimaeus. Faith is not about belief. It can be part of it but mainly, faith is about finding life and energy and desire and goodness in us and around us. Yes, sometimes we feel stuck and we can choose to live like that, but we can also consider it as a preparation to go towards something new.

And so in the end, maybe we are called as individuals, but also as a community, in our daily life, in our society, we are called to encourage one another to head towards what brings us life and to head towards the light. I think this is the conclusion of this strange story of Job we have been hearing about for weeks. Job, like the blind man, is made well again. It’s not like nothing bad happened, it’s like God can bring light in any situation. In spite of all the mistakes, pain and heartbreaks, life begins again. Life begins again, yes, there is sufferings, but there is a way. With God, there is always a way. Amen.

Job 38:1-7; Psalm 104:1-9,25,37b; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45

When I was a child, we were often advised at school to turn our tongue seven times before speaking. It was meant to give us the time to think about what we were going to say and so to prevent us from saying anything stupid. Now certainly, this method can spare you a lot of embarrassment, but of course, it’s far from being the best way to learn. This is typical if you want to learn a foreign language, for example. If you learn a foreign language (trust me) you are going to say a lot of stupid things, but the thing is you actually need to say stupid things – because it’s only in speaking that you’re going to learn how to speak. But, of course, it is hard to put ourselves through such a painful experience. Actually, the main reason why most adults can’t learn foreign languages is not because our brains are slower, it’s because of social anxiety: We are much more afraid than children to embarrass ourselves and so, unless we have to, we never really try to speak. On one hand it’s reasonable because it’s never pleasant to feel like an idiot or to be laughed at, one the other hand of course, if we keep silence, if we never interact, we end up on our own – And so ironically, for fear of looking like an idiot, we may end up being one.

I was thinking about that as I was re-reading this famous passage of Mark, where John and James naively ask Jesus to give them the first places in the kingdom. I don’t really like this passage and as I was wondering why, I realized I don’t like it because I feel embarrassed for the two disciples, because indeed, making this stupid request to Jesus to sit at his right hand at at his left, they look like arrogant idiots. It seems that I am not the only one feeling this way about James and John. The Gospel tells us that when they heard about that, the ten other disciples were shocked and angry, and Matthew felt probably so embarrassed for them that, when he will write down his own Gospel, he will change the story slightly, making the disciples’ mother asking instead of them.

And yet. Yet, I must say I came to feel thankful that such a story would be as it is to be found in the Gospel. Because, as I thought about it, I realized that, personally, throughout my life, I have made a lot of stupid requests in my prayers too, so I find it comforting that it also happened to at least those two who became apostles, martyrs and saints. At any rate, I think it is pretty safe to assume that in front of God, we will always look quite silly and a bit miserable – just because God is God and we are who we are: mortal creatures with very little knowledge and very little power. This is basically how Job must have felt when God had to remind him that he was helpless and did not know a thing: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding (…) Surely, you know!”. Yes, as Jesus points out to the two disciples, most of the time, we don’t even know what we are saying.

The thing is – I hope it does not make us shy. I hope it does not make us shy and prevent us from praying and from talking to God, and if it is not always socially acceptable to say everything that is on our mind, I hope we can do that with God though. Recently, my heart just broke as I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. She told me that one of her best friends had just died, and that she had prayed a lot for God to heal her and now she just felt stupid for having believed that God was going to do just what she asked, for thinking she could get God to go the way she wanted things to turn out. My heart just broke because of course, she was right to pray. Praying for healing is the compassionate and loving thing to do when someone dear to you is very sick, and praying is never stupid even if you pray for something desperate or impossible – what could be too bad would to not pray at all. Learning to talk with God is really like learning a foreign language: you have to talk, you have to pray, in order to learn how to talk and pray and beyond that – even if you never get it totally right: in order to be in relationships.

I guess for most of us, it’s really hard to have this genuineness and vulnerability. We have a book of Prayer, and we’re very proud of it but the thing is we ask the book of Prayer to do just that: to pray for us. In the book are the right words. Ourselves, we don’t know how to pray, and so maybe we think that if we read from the book we will never say something stupid to God – Probably not, but the question is: Will we ever pray? Will we ever reach the bottom of our hearts and open up? Will we ever let God in, so God can work in us and we can learn? The two disciples like Job may have it completely wrong, but at least they are trying to engage from where they are. At least, they’re not like their friends standing in the back saying: Look how silly those look like. And the wonder is that God responds to Job, Jesus engages in the conversation with James and John.

Because of course, prayer is not a monologue. Not only do we need to say what’s on our hearts, to pray with our own words, but actually prayer only becomes prayer if we listen to God’s response, if prayer becomes a dialogue – otherwise it’s just like reciting magical incantations, when what we need is to open up to what God wants to tell us. When I say to some of my friends or family, especially non believers, that I will “pray for them” they often ask if my prayers “work”. Well, not all wishes are granted for sure, and we should not believe that we can force God into doing our will, but I think no prayer goes unanswered – if we listen deeply and long enough. I think it is the same in life as it is in prayer: We are often afraid to look stupid because of what we say but actually, the only time we run the risk to be stupid is when we don’t listen because then we never learn.

And so what do we learn in prayer? Well, as we enter this dialogue with God, not only do we learn who God is, but also, but mainly, we learn who we are in front of God, we learn where our place is. Clearly, we are not the ones in charge, we aren’t the ones who have all the power or the knowledge. Yes, it does not always feel good to be “put into our places”, as God put Job into his place, as Jesus put John and James into their places, yet if we think about it, this is really what we need to learn to accept and to deal with. Our society and our planet are sick because we have forgotten we don’t have the power and we don’t have the knowledge and we don’t know where our place is. We act as if we had all the rights over creation, its resources, its animals, we think of ourselves as having rights over other human beings, or as having more rights than other human beings. Only in our relationship with God can we be reminded of our place in the rank of people and things. It can feel humiliating, it may feel somewhat limited or even dull, but if we open up to the wonder of it all, if we realize that we truly belong to something bigger, to God and to one another, I think it’s mostly comforting and liberating: we realize we are known and loved, and entrusted to serve according to our own gifts and vocations. Power in itself is selfish and, in the end, barren, but service, because it turns us to God and one another, is where we become really fruitful. This what James and John learn in their dialogue with Jesus. It’s important to realize that Jesus does not condemn their desire for greatness – after all, they still want to be close to Jesus – but Jesus teaches them what true greatness is about.

So maybe, being Christian is not about having it right, to always know what to say or to know what to do. But maybe the most important is to have a curiosity and a desire for God, the only thing we have to do is to take the first step as the two disciples did. Whatever is on our mind, we should not be afraid to open our hearts to Christ, after all there is nothing he can be shocked or upset about, he obviously heard it all before. He won’t reject us or make fun of us. But as our great high priest, he will show us the way, how to pray, how to serve, and he will purify our dreams and desires, as he did for his disciples, giving us the perfect example of how to live a godly life that will fulfill us, heal others and give glory to him. I read recently a book by a nun that said that life is about wrestling with God. And we engage with God not only at church, through the words of prayer and baptism and Eucharist, but as Jesus explains to his disciples, we engage with him through the sacraments of our suffering, of our questioning, of our struggles. In the end, God will be real for us, but only if we are real with God. Amen.

I grew up in a conservative church and, as far as I can remember in my childhood, divorce was to me a scary word. I especially remember that I had an uncle who would sit through the service whenever he came to Mass with us. He wasn’t allowed to receive communion because, as my parents explained to me: “By divorcing, he had also broken his communion with God”. I used to wonder if he would go to heaven anyway. I felt sorry for him, but also wondered why he had taken such a risk to be at odds with God. Marriage was such a serious business, you had to make it work no matter what. And I clang to my parents’ belief for a long time.

One day though, without any warning, this conception of things shifted. The phone rang and it was my sister. She was crying. Her husband had been locking himself in his office for three days in a row giving her the silent treatment. He was drinking too, and she said he was smoking so much she could barely breathe in her own apartment. Now, I should have gotten used this, she had been calling and crying for six months. But on that day, suddenly, I just heard myself saying: “You know, I think you should divorce him”. Suddenly, I just could not stand anymore to hear my sister crying, it was too heart breaking. Divorce felt like the only right thing to do.

And so, she did it, eventually, she divorced the abusive man. As for me, it led me to think quite differently about what we are taught to do at home and at church. Mainly, I learned that it is always tricky and sometimes even dangerous, to turn to religion to be taught exactly what to do by clinging to a set of codes, laws and rules, generalities about right or wrong. And this is interesting because looking at the Bible for quick answers, this is, actually, what the Pharisees used to do – this is what they are doing in our Gospel today when they ask Jesus what the rules about marriage and divorce are, and if they should stick to what Moses wrote about them.

We don’t know how the question came up. What we know is that the Pharisees asked because they were trying to test Jesus, a very weak word to say that they were looking for a reason to put him to death, and so I was wondering if they decided to ask him about divorce because it was actually a question about divorce that led John the Baptist to his condemnation – if you remember John accused Herod to have stolen his brother Philip’s wife and they got John arrested and killed for this. Would Jesus accuse Herod as well?

Well, Jesus is going to give another kind of response – a response that can be hard for us to hear, not because the words are harsh, but because, as the Pharisees, we can have a tendency to look for rules and definitive answers, and so we don’t hear what Jesus is really saying. As my family and I when I was a child, we only hear in Jesus’ words a condemnation of divorce. Yet, if we know the Jesus who forgave the woman caught in adultery, who never reduced people to their worst sin, who forgave the thief on the cross, we’ll suspect that this is not what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not giving the scarlet letter to divorced people, and he is not replacing a law, Moses’ law on divorce, by another law even tougher, the law of no divorce at all. Laws are laws, they frame our living together, but as a famous philosopher put it, basically laws are here because man is a wolf to man. What is legal is just the bare minimum we can expect, it is not a guarantee of morality. This is why we have so many debates on death penalty and euthanasia, or the right corporations have to pollute or how fair it is that traders can speculate with our money.

And so I think that Jesus agrees that we need laws to frame our society, but as people of God we have to look beyond what is legal to find what is truly moral, loving and life-giving, because, as Jesus reminds the Pharisees, laws are only there because of our toughness of heart, because man is wolf to man, when Jesus points to another dimension, how it all started when the world was created, how God intended relationships for partnership and joy. At Jesus’s time, divorce was used as an easy way to get rid of your wife when you did not want her anymore – whatever the reason – condemning her to a life of isolation, poverty, sometimes prostitution. This is still true in many parts of the world: a divorced woman has no status and no resources. But as people of God, we have to take care of one another. Basically, what Jesus is saying is: You can’t just get rid of people – this is true for men and women, and not only for marriages, but all kind of relationships, and still today. I heard a new expression recently: “Ghosting people”. It is used to describe the way now people ditch you on line, putting an end to a relationship simply by ignoring your messages, not responding to you anymore – with no warning and no explanation. Well, Jesus tells us: you can’t do that. You can’t ditch people. People are precious and unique. And fragile too.

And I think this is the reason why Jesus puts a little child in the midst of the disciples, to illustrate this truth: You have to take care of the vulnerable ones. It can be a child, it can be a woman who depends on you, it can be the disabled, the poor, the prisoner. You know we live here in DC in a society where a lot of people would define themselves by their relationships meaning: the important people they know. Well, it’s interesting to realize that for Jesus, it’s exactly the other way around: the vulnerable people you’re friends with, that’s the ones who define what’s in your heart and who you are. Do we have friends among the little ones, people with no money, people in jail, people of another race or sexual orientation? Then we may be far from the kingdoms of this world, but we’re not far from the Kingdom of God. We are not defined by our most important relationships, we are defined by the least of these – the most vulnerable our friends, the closer we are to God’s heart.

And so I think this Gospel is much more than Jesus’s teaching about marriage. Using the context of a legal, concrete and precise matter, Jesus gives a lesson to all of us. Not a lesson to shame and condemn, but a lesson to open up and let our hearts be touched. Jesus reminds us that relationships are not first made to be framed and controlled, but to reveal God’s glory.

Now we know that some marriages, as some other kind of relationships, are so broken, they can’t reveal God’s glory anymore, and it’s probably not God’s will we stay in them. I can’t help thinking how I felt for my sister, and since Jesus calls God “our father”, I believe God feels the same way for us when we are caught in abusive relationships. If you have ever married your son, or walked your daughter down the aisle, you probably have wished with all your heart that their marriage would last for ever, not because you wanted your family to have a good reputation, but only because you wanted your children to be happy, you wanted things to work out so your children would not go through all the pain of failed relationships. Well, it is the same for God. God’s intention is for our marriages to succeed, not because God wants us to play by the rules, but because God wants us to be happy, to mirror his glory, to live our relationships to the deepest and to the full. God wanted things to be good from the beginning of creation. Unfortunately, because of our brokenness, things can take a turn for the worst.

This is why I think that when Jesus says that the Pharisees’ understanding of relationships is adulterous, he talks about much more than the technical act of sleeping with somebody, he talks about all the ways we spoil God’s first intent for humankind. In the Bible, adultery is about all the ways in which we are unfaithful to God’s desire, when we use religion, law and people to meet our own needs, to serve our selfish interests. Adultery is not so much about sex than it is about disrespect, violence and abuse of power – exactly what Herod’s was doing when he took the wife of his brother Philip. We talk a lot these days about sexual assault, and it is immoral not so much because of the sexual part, but because it’s violent and an abuse of power too.

Today we will be praying for the healing for bodies, minds and hearts, and as the prayer puts it, the mending of broken relationships. We often hear that marriage is hard work, I don’t know about that, I am not sure anymore we have to make things work no matter what, but for sure, our all our relationships need care and nurturing, a plant cannot bloom if you don’t water it, so we can’t be surprised our relationships get bad if we don’t take care of them before it’s too late. And so today we should ask God to help us to do just that, to pour God’s love in our marriages, families and friendships, in the way we treat each other in our society, because indeed God has intended relationships for our own happiness and to his glory. May we reflect God’s glory as individuals and as a country too. Amen.

We’re starting this week exploring the very first step of Bishop Curry’s “Way of love”. There are seven steps: turn, learn, pray, worship, bless, go, rest. And so, today, we are invited to start our journey by “Turning” “Pause, listen and choose to follow Jesus”. In this context, I found it very interesting the lectionary picks this passage from Luke’s where Jesus calls the disciples to become “fishers of men” with him. I find this pick interesting because when I am asked to “turn to Jesus”, the images that come to my mind are images of repentance – Turning to Jesus to ask for forgiveness for my sins. This is the beginning of Mark’s Gospel – when John the Baptist calls the people to repentance – a significant part of our readings during Lent and Advent, in these Church seasons when we are asked to draw closer to God. “Conversion” actually means to change directions, to turn back because we realize that we are on the wrong path. This is this understanding we have in our collect today: “Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways and bring them again with penitent hearts”. For all those reasons, as I was thinking about the Gospel we have just heard, I was surprised to discover that turning away from sin is not at the center of Bishop Curry’s call to turn to Jesus. According to Bishop Curry, turning to Jesus is not so much for repentance than it should be doing what flowers do when they turn towards the sun for light and nourishment. We turn towards the source of life. This image speaks to me deeply. I have many plants at home and not enough light, so they often grow in strange ways, bend on one side or the other, depends on where I place them by the windows, and as I keep moving them around, some of those plants become all twisted because they are so thirsty for light. Well now, when I look at them, I wonder if I have this same longing for Jesus that would make me look for him in every directions.

Our lack of longing for Jesus – maybe this is the first thing we need to work on to walk the way of love. I don’t know what you think, but I have a sense that in this world – unless something serious really bothers us – we don’t generally carry a painful awareness of our sins. Most of the time, we are just not that interested in the things related to faith. We have our routine, we’re caught in our everyday lives, distracted. Well, I think this is also the place where the disciples are today. In our text, it is said that the crowd is pressing on Jesus to hear the word of God, and yet, when Jesus sits in the boat to teach, the disciples (who aren’t yet the disciples) are busy wrapping up their day of work, cleaning their nets. They are not listening to Jesus.

They are not listening to Jesus not because they are terrible people busy doing bad things, they are just, like most of us, caught in their everyday business, and probably, their preoccupations and worries. As we learn a little further, they haven’t caught any fish and on that day. They were probably wondering how they were going to feed their families. We can almost picture the scene. Jesus is in the boat teaching, and the “disciples to be” are on the shore, turning their backs, lost in their thoughts as they pack up their material. Well, I have a sense that a lot of us can identify with that. You know, we often hear that the disease of our world is our distraction, because we want to have fun and to be entertained, we spend hours on social medias and so on, and there is something true about that. But I think that, more deeply, we are distracted because we are worried about our own lives. It’s not only bad and superficial things that keep us apart from God, there are also a lot of good and important things that can make us miss the presence of God in our lives: our everyday business, our desire to provide for our family, to plan for the future…All of that is very necessary, but the sad part is that we can spend our whole life going on like this – not realizing that something extraordinary could happen to us, not realizing that Jesus is right there to be found, if we would just turn to him.

Because what the Gospel teaches us is that God is not an invisible and mysterious spirit but a God who is among us and one of us. Jesus is the God who comes to us in the midst of our daily lives. And so, turning is not about looking up to the sky and become all pure and holy. It’s about stopping to be so wrapped on ourselves, on our worries and our struggles. As the disciples today, we are all invited to: “Pause, listen and choose to follow Jesus”. You know, I am wondering if on that day Simon was not just thinking: “Well, this all seems very interesting, I guess I will listen to this Jesus when I have time, when I have less to think about” – It’s often where we are, right? We’ll pray when we have time, we’ll do something for God when we get a chance, yes, at some point, we will make a change…Well, the Gospel reminds us today that the change is for right now.

Yet, if the change is for now, Luke’s version of the call of the disciples is different from Mark’s when the disciples leave everything right away, at their first encounter with Jesus. Here it takes them a little more time and I think it’s more realistic. In Luke’s version, we learn that Simon already knew Jesus, that he is actually staying at his house. And so in this Gospel, it’s not like the disciples stop suddenly caring about the everyday things that are important to them as soon as they meet Jesus. But by the miracle of the fish, Jesus shows the disciples that their daily lives are in God’s hands, and so they are freed to become more than what they believed they were meant to be. From the ordinary life of fishing fish, they are called to God’s mission of fishing men. Well maybe, like the disciples, we need to learn that we can trust God with the things that worry us, instead of holding on to them. Then, reassured, we can raise our heads and turn towards what God wants to give us.

This does not go without disruptions of course. Turning to God is never simple. It breaks with our comfort, our habits, the world as we know it. I like it that the Gospel mentions that the nets were about to break, and that it felt like the boat was sinking. Sometimes good news are hard to bear, and the good news of the Gospel is not always easy to carry out. When God breaks in, everything can be put into question in our lives and in the way we understand ourselves. God changes the image we have of ourselves, of the person we think we are: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”. As he understands who Jesus really is, not only a wise teacher but a man inhabited by the presence of God who can change his life – Simon is tempted to look back, to cling to the one he has always been: “A sinful man”. This expression does not necessarily describes somebody who does bad things, it’s more about a social status: People who do not belong to the aristocracy of the religious ones, ordinary men, blue collars, those who had no specific skills or insights. How often, like Simon, we are deep down convinced that we are not called to anything greater than our routine? It can be humility, but it can also be a way of hiding from God. We need to move beyond our feelings of unworthiness to be able to turn from ourselves, from our daily occupations, from being caught in our own nets, to turn to Jesus and open up to God’s plans.

Because it’s not about who we are – yes, of course, we are unworthy and sinners, Paul reminds us today we are only clay jars– but we have to trust that God is bigger than that, it’s not about who we are, it’s about what Jesus can do of us, can do with us. Jesus calls the disciples to become “fisher of men”, and it is an image that should really speak to us those days we hear about so many flooding. Because when you fish fish, take them out of the waters, it kills them and you eat them or sell them for your benefit. But when you take a man out of the waters, you save his life. Jesus calls us to be, with him, life givers in a world where death is the ultimate horizon. We are freed not only for ourselves, we are freed to bring the message of love, hope and liberation of Jesus. We are not meant to be slaves of every day life, we meant to be the sons and daughters of eternal life.

Turn. Not so such because there are so many bad things to leave behind, but because there are so many good things to be found in God and shared in community.

I love Moses’ example of turning. Moses was busy doing his business, because you know, he also had a family to feed and he had the humble responsibility of taking care of his father in law’s sheep, but in the meantime he opened his eyes, he was curious, he wanted to know more and to understand, and so he came close to the burning bush. And because he came closer to God, his life – not only his life but the life of all the Hebrew people – were changed in such a dramatic and unbelievable way. Starting this week, maybe we can work on taking our first step on the way of love by looking around, working on our curiosity for God, see what catches us into God’s net, what catches out attention and catches our hearts. Maybe starting this week, we can work on our thirst, our longing for God, as plants thirst for light. Maybe starting this week, we can work on our open-mindedness in everyday life, in the midst of our routine, believing that God is up to something, that God is there to be found in the midst of it all. Amen.

After six weeks reading about the “Bread of life” in John’s, we are back today in Mark’s Gospel. I don’t know how you feel about it, but when I had a look at this text, I had a sense I had already almost forgotten about Mark’s style. It is indeed very different from John: John is very meditative, giving us long discourses, sometimes it’s even a little hard to know exactly what he is talking about. Mark, on the other side, is always telling concrete stories, very detail oriented. And our Gospel today is indeed detail oriented and at first glance, it could seem almost trivial. After all, it’s about washing hands and, our lectionary cut off the more down to earth verses, actually it’s about “what enters the stomach and goes out in the sewer”. So maybe we can be tempted to think that there is not much theology in that.

Yet, when it comes down to the word of God, we should know we need to beware of what may seem deceivingly simple. Mark’s Gospel, even if in a different way than John’s, also invites us to meditation, and I was actually surprised to realize how, studying this text, from one level of understanding to another, I was taken deeper and deeper into ethical reflection – and this is some of those reflections I would like to share with you today.

The first level of understanding of this Gospel is quite obvious. It is about the difference between true and false religion. Though quite obvious, this is not a level of understanding that should be overlooked. I felt quite concerned this week, even troubled and shocked, hearing about another scandal in the church with the terrible child abuses committed by priests. When we hear about that I guess a lot of us wonder, as I did: “How is it possible that religious people would do that?”. It is so ugly and immoral, some Christians may be tempted to walk away from the church. Indeed, they are right to feel offended. Jesus points out to religious people that rites are only rites and do not mean much if they are not followed by actions of justice and goodness. James reminds us that being religious is not only about hearing the word of God, but it is about doing God’s will. James refers specifically to the care of “orphans and widows”, who were the most vulnerable people in his society. If we don’t act in a way that honors the most powerless, then our religion is vain.

It does not mean that religion is vain in itself, though. Religion is important, as it is the vehicle of God’s words and sacraments, the place where by tradition and Scriptures we come closer to know God. Yet, religion is a body of things: hearing and doing. Rites and behavior. Prayer and Justice. This is what our collect today underscores, asking God to: “Increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness AND bring forth in us the fruit of good works”. Religion calls us to wholeness. Indeed, there is nothing more terrible than somebody who pretends to be religious but does not behave with righteousness, it can bear false testimony against the church, faith and even against God! How many victims of abuse by priests say they have lost their faiths! We may not commit that kind of offenses, yet it is a serious warning for all of us as Christians: We need to be very careful about the kind of testimony we bring into the world by our actions.

The second level of understanding of our Gospel goes deeper into the ethical reflection in the sense that it does not only describe what religion should be ideally, but it reveals some of the flaws of our behaviors as religious people. The Pharisees today are put into question by Jesus because they look at the outside, instead of looking on the inside. It means two things:

First of all, the Pharisees focus on physical appearance instead of looking at the heart. It may happen to a lot of us that we judge somebody on their looks, and indeed if somebody looks dirty, as did the disciples who apparently did not wash their hands, we can easily act defiant towards them, thinking there is something wrong with them. To be honest, it is the reason why we often hesitate to engage with the homeless. Because of lack of commodities, most of them look dirty and so we assume that they are dangerous or, at least, cannot be trusted. Like the Pharisees, we make judgments based on what we see, and then we generalize and make assumptions. The Pharisees say of the disciples that: “They do not live according to the tradition of the elders”. Well, I don’t know what you think, but it seems to me a huge stretch when what happened is that the Pharisees just did not see the disciples wash their hands! But how often do we do that as well? Making assumptions and generalizations about others, based on their sex, social class or race. We are often very prompt to judge.

Yet, looking at the outside instead of looking on the inside, is not only about making quick judgments about others based on their appearances. What Jesus also notices is that the Pharisees look at others – to criticize – instead of looking at themselves – to correct their behaviors. James reminds us that true religion is about being able to look at ourselves in a mirror, even if it does not please us. You know, we live in a society not that different than the society in which Jesus lived: There is always this fear to be contaminated by what comes from outside. We have many hygiene rules to protect our assumed integrity from diseases coming from the outside. Yet, Jesus reminds us that, in the case of sin, it starts in our own hearts, on the inside. What we really need to work on is ourselves, instead of trying to change others. It can be easy to forget when a lot of wrong things happen in the world. We can be tempted to waste a lot of time criticizing or just feeling very discouraged. Yet there is something we can always change, it’s ourselves. We can “Be the change we want to see in the world”, as the famous saying by Gandhi goes. So, maybe next time we feel like we want to criticize someone, we could look inside of us to see what it actually says about us. For example, maybe, like the Pharisees, we don’t like careless people only because we are too rigid?

The third level of understanding of our Gospel is harder to see, and I think I would probably not have paid attention to it, if it hadn’t been because of the news. Because what I think this story is ultimately about is about people who want to assert their power by making others feel inadequate and dirty. And this is what sexual abuse and sex offenders do to their victims: they make them feel “dirty”: shameful and guilty. Sexual aggression is not so much about sex, it’s about having power over people, making them feel less than they are, humiliating them. It does not only happen in case of sexual abuse, it is a very painful realization to see how, throughout history, we have made one another feel dirty: Dirty because of race or religion or social class, dirty because of sexual orientation. Well, Jesus’s consistent teaching is that it is nothing on the outside that can make us dirty. Not who we are, and not what people do to us. In a verse that our lectionary skips, Mark says that “Jesus declares all food clean”, but more than that I think, as Jesus refers to the process of digestion, I think what he does is to declare human bodies and bodily functions clean. Jesus touched even the lepers. Sickness does not make us dirty, as surely as being a victim of abuse, rape or rejection does not make us dirty in God’s eyes.

So what does make us clean or unclean?

Well, clearly it’s sin that makes us unclean. Jesus today gives us a list of those sins: “fornication, theft, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly”. All those sins describe a variation on what sin is: a breaking of relationships with other people by judging them, attacking them, abusing them. The uncleanliness we see in others starts often in our own heart, when we fail to see their real beauty, to respect their sacredness as persons, when we treat them as objects, and deny life in them. There was this poster in the Metro at some point of a victim of abuse saying: “I am not the one who should be ashamed”. Well, I think this is very true. Uncleanliness is about the wrong we do to others, not about the wrong done to us.

And so in the end, I think that what our Gospel tells us today is that we don’t sin so much when we break a rule or a tradition, we sin when we break people. We don’t sin when we break a rule or a tradition, we sin when we break people. Jesus often reminded people that God’s commandments (the ones we hear about in our first reading) are not so much a list of things to obey, the commandment is a commandment to love. If love “commands”, it means that love should come first, in all we say, do and in the way we look at the world and at one another. It means love is also the way we need to look at those who offend us and sin against us, by not limiting them and denying in them the possibility of new life and redemption – but that would be for another sermon. Amen.