The Gospel we’ve just heard is known as the “Parable of the rich fool”, a title which offers a convenient and easy key of interpretation. Indeed, we encounter in this story a rich man who – for some reason, b/c his land produced more abundantly than usual – finds himself suddenly very comfortable, and literally does not know what to do with his money, or at least with his harvest. So he begins to think about it and as he finds a way to secure his gain, he also starts plans about how he could finally enjoy the good life. But that’s when he hears the voice of God calling him a fool, telling him that he’s going to die on that very night.

And so the point seems obvious: Life is short, and we worry too much about money. This interpretation of the parable makes sense, of course. It’s hard to argue with the fact that we give too much importance to money and material things, our “stuff” as we say. I was recently attending a diocesan meeting about stewardship and the speaker brought up an interesting study showing that 80% of our lives are about earning money, spending money or worrying about money. It even claims that we think about money more than we think about sex (I wonder how they do the math!).

At any rate – that’s where we are in the Gospel: warned that life is not all about material things. Actually, Jesus’ words today can remind us of the conversation he’s just had with Martha (the Gospel from 2 weeks ago). The dialogue starts the same: “tell my brother / tell my sister (to do this…)” and Jesus downplays the request to point out the importance of privileging heavenly things instead of worrying over earthly things. It is worth pointing out that Jesus does not so much condemn money than the fact that we worry about money. It usually makes wealthy people feel better (It’s okay to have money as long as you don’t worry too much about it) but I guess it is more actually to include also the poor (who were the audience on that day). The poor are also invited to not worry too much about money b/c this is not what matters ultimately, even if it feels like it matters a lot.

And so that’s a good story, as we start thinking about stewardship season. Give you money away so you can focus on spiritual things and save your souls! But when the sense is obvious, especially in the Scriptures, there is often a hidden meaning as well. And sometimes the way to find it is by focusing less on what the story says, and focusing more on how it feels.

To me, it feels like a strange story. One of those stories Jesus told, like the story of ten bridesmaids, that has a little something eerie to it and givesyou a few goosebumps when your hear it. If you think about it, it’s strange, this man alone in the night hearing the voice of God telling him that his life is being demanded of him. As far as I remember, people in Jesus’s stories rarely interact directly with God. Jesus generally uses images: A king, a Master, a bridegroom. Sometimes it’s an angel or a prophet who brings God’s message. But Godself? No.

So, it’s a strange story, yet there is a familiarity to it – a familiarity that does not make it comfortable, a familiarity that actually feels a bit threatening, b/c it feels real. We can relate to the experience. This man, it could be anyone of us. Because he worries about money, but more deeply we can picture ourselves in the story, lying in the little hours, alone with our thoughts, making to do lists. All would be quite good if we didn’t have this voice inside of us telling us that maybe it’s not going to work out, that maybe our plans are in vain. Ever had that?

We don’t always know where this voice comes from. Is it the voice of our wiser self, or the voice of the foolish one? Is it common sense, or insecurity? Yet sometimes it feels powerful enough, it could be the voice of God. I was actually wondering if in fact the rich man wasn’t having a panic attack! When suddenly something inside of you tells you that you are going to die on the spot…although no danger surrounds you, only the weight of your own anxiety!

But we all have those voices and we’re plus or less good at dismissing them. And yet, Jesus tells us today, there is something we need to pay attention to. There is something inside those voices that could be indeed the voice of God. There is something deep in us that knows how our plans for our lives are threatened by our own mortality. There is something inside of us trying to remind us something to fear that is deeper than our fears. There is, if you will, an anxiety inside the anxiety. We’re worried about money, but more deeply we’re worried we’re not going to make it. We’re worried that everything is going to stop before we can be happy. We’re worried that we may come to realize that life does not make sense.

And it seems to me this is exactly the point Jesus is making with the parable: this kind of life does not make sense and the man starts shaking and trembling as he realizes the emptiness of everything he values. Maybe he is not so much going to die than he is already dead inside. His heart is dead. A lot of commentaries of this Gospel underscore the fact that the man speaks to himself and even speaks to himself inside his monologue (“I will say to my soul”), b/c he is utterly lonely: he has nobody to talk to, he has nobody to dream about, he has nobody to share his bread with.

Today, Jesus warns us against greed (Be on your guard against all kinds of greed!) and in the Epistle, Paul points out that greed is idolatry. We know from the Old Testament that idols are gods of stone. And this is what happens here: the man’s heart has turned to stone. A theologian gives this definition of sin: “Sin is when life freezes”, and in our story, God is actually not saying to the man that he is going to die, the Greek says: “These things are claiming your life”. “These things are freezing your life”. We often think of sin as doing something wrong or dangerous. But for Jesus, sin is doing nothing. Sin is when we don’t live this life God is giving us and instead we try to preserve and secure it. The man trying to secure his harvest could be a counter reference to the gift of the manna, and the way God ordered his people to never store the manna (otherwise it will rot…). Jesus has just told his disciples to pray for their daily bread, not their saved bread. Jesus is the living bread, the bread that is alive and given to all.

Real life is the life of the heart…Life is not about saving stuff, it’s about giving one’s heart away. Jesus’s words are not condemnation though. Jesus invites us to consider the abundance around us (Consider the lilies is the passage that follows) consider the beauty, the way God acts through the world instead of focusing on never having enough. Jesus invites us to respond to God’s generosity by our own generosity. This is ultimately what it means to be rich towards God: to have this ability to give all the time. Well, if you have the ability to give all the time, it must mean that you are very rich, right? Or at least there are treasures in your heart!

But to become generous, we have to be freed from worries…How can we do that?

Well, to me – and that will be my last point – Jesus’s teaching in this parable is this: What you’ve always been taught about life is not necessarily true. Maybe the anxiety at the root of all our anxiety is that we suspect the lie: a successful and material life does not make any sense indeed. But that’s what we’ve been taught to believe. That’s the culture we live in, and that’s often the example our parents showed us or the expectation they had for us. With his parable, Jesus does not make any reproach to the man who is asking the question about the inheritance! I think the character Jesus pictures is the father of this man, a father who died suddenly, without sharing his wealth, b/c of his selfishness and anxiety. My clue is that God says to him: “The things you have prepared, whose will they be?” and that’s exactly the question the man is asking to Jesus! This man and his brother cannot agree what is for whom, and doing so they let their hearts be captured by the material things, in the same way their father did. Jesus by telling this parable tells the man: Just don’t go down that road b/c what you saw your father do was foolish. Jesus wants to free us today from carrying the anxieties of our fathers and mothers and all those who told us that worrying was the reasonable thing to do. Instead, Jesus asks us to consider the lilies and want to teach us airiness…It’s not about filling ourselves with food and wine (actually addictions are a side effect of worrying!)…it’s about finding holy anxiety – addressing the anxiety behind all other anxieties by living out our call to live God’s dream, instead of reenacting our parents’ dramas or the myths of our society…

As in his sermon of the Mount, Jesus gives his own teaching, a new teaching: “You’ve been told…but now I tell you…”. Will we listen to his voice inside of us?

Henri Nouwen: “From the beginning of my life, two interior voices have been speaking to me: one saying, Henri be sure you make it on your own. Be sure you become an independent person. Be sure I can be proud of you. And another voice saying: Henri, whatever you are going to do, even if you don’t do anything very interesting in the eyes of the world, be sure you stay close to the heart of Jesus, be sure you stay close to the love of God. You are here (…) to discover and believe that you are a beloved child of God…Life is just a short opportunity for you during a few years to say to God: I love you too.”

Amen.

– Can you recite the “Our Father”? Do you know it by heart?

“Our Father” is in the Gospel. Jesus taught it to his disciples…(Lord’s Prayer). Twice in the Gospel: Luke and Matthew. 2 different ways of saying it…Luke has “a shorter version” than Matthew.
Is it weird or not really important? The fact that there are two different versions shows us that it is not about the exact sentences. Yet “Teach us how to pray”…became “teach us what to pray” : We end up just reciting the Lord’s prayer w/o thinking about it much / BCP. Nothing wrong w/ those prayers, they’re great prayers, except when we start reading / reciting instead of praying.

– Praying: having a conversation w/ God instead of having something ready made. Like when you receive a Hallmark card and the text is already written and the person just sign or when they took a blank card and made time to write something very special just for you.

Jesus wants us to feel at ease with God. I think this is what Jesus tells his disciples when he tells them to call God their “Father”. Father b/c Mary was his mother / the idea is = there is a relationship of trust between us and God, like should be between parents and children…Trust: not being afraid.

God is close: Version of Luke – not even mention that God “is in heavens”
God close to the children, the little ones, humble (not pretending to be something else) those who open their hearts. Requests are very direct in the Lord’s prayer.

– Which means: be honest w/ God, tell God what’s going on, what we need, ask for good things (even if you can say you’re angry!). We ask for our needs, material or spiritual: Bread or forgiveness, help when we have difficulties.

Prayer is not complicated. When we talk to our parents, or to someone we really trust, we don’t worry about finding the right words…We know we won’t be judged or rejected. (It’s not like when we have to talk to someone who is difficult)

Simple words. Different ways of saying “Hello / I love you / Please / Sorry / Thank you”.
Sometimes we need to say more than that / sometimes we can’t say anything b/c we’re too sad but important to remember that Jesus tells us that his door is always open.

– Sometimes we need to ask Jesus to help us how to pray…he is still willing to do so. We may ask something and then realize we need to ask something else.

We may experience at times that God does not answer but it isn’t b/c God does not give us exactly what we want that God does not answer. Sometimes God just give us the strength, comfort to carry on… (Like a good friend) Need patience to see the results of God’s work – its hard for us!

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

– Prayer is meant to transform us. Your will be done: your pleasure, your dream for me. Transforming me in the person you would like me to be. Not somebody perfect who never does any mistake, but somebody full of life, joy and love. Someone happy who wants to make other people happy (=the meaning of love).

God transforms us so we can help others. Look what God did through Paul, Peter or Mary. We give God’s authorization to work through us when we pray…Sometimes we would like to change the world and we can’t…but we can let God change us and that can make a difference.

– Other part in the Gospel we’ve heard today: Prayer is like helping a friend. Giving an egg or a fish to a child / or in the story: giving bread to a friend or for a friend’s friend. In God, even other people’s friends are our friends and we need to help them.

– We often think about the prayers requests we make to God but what about the prayers requests God make to us ?
If we forgive, God forgives. When we give, God gives. People make prayers to us all the time, ask us to help them, and we don’t realize. Yet we could experience that often the response to our prayers come in the help, attention of somebody else. We have a phone call, a hug, a nice meal…

– The question we can ask ourselves is: How can we answer each other prayer? Help them with their needs and their dreams? Our Father: we all are a big family. So we do things for one another.

– This week I had a letter from a friend. Like when Paul wrote letter to other churches, my friend sent me a letter / sent a letter to us at Christ church…Asking me for help / asking me…not for bread but close enough! (read the letter)

Guilène studied with me and became a priest too and now she is in Haiti…

Anyone knows where Haiti is? She has a church and a school…
How can we help her? Money…but also our prayers and our love.
Send cards. Sometimes you just need to know you are seen, you are important.

As I was preparing this sermon, I was reminded of a joke my mother used to tell – She was an English teacher – the joke goes like that:

“What is the feminine form of Sitting on the couch?”
and the answer is: “Standing in the kitchen”

The Gospel we have today, the short story of Martha and Mary, has given rise to a lot of comments because of the way Jesus seemingly dismisses the value of the humble domestic work, telling Martha it’s more important to sit with the boys, listen to the Master rather than to worry about her pots and pans.

Of course, it’s such a stereotype, offending feminist sensitivities…We know somebody needs to get those things done, right?

So today our task is to wonder if we can pass beyond the stereotype and hear afresh what Jesus is really saying. My guess is that actually you can’t really understand this Gospel if you’ve never had a big sister bossing you around – but we’ll come to that later!

The first thing we need to notice is that when Jesus talks, his words teach – there is information, meaning in what he says – but also – as the word of God – Jesus’s words do something, they have a certain effect on reality, like when he says to people: You’re healed, you’re forgiven…Something we can experience at our level when we promise or apologize. We say words not only to inform but to do something: a vow, an excuse…(Performative)…And in this Gospel, Jesus is not only teaching something, but doing something.

Let’s start with what Jesus is saying / words themselves / the teaching: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

– So we often understand this saying as Jesus downplaying earthly realities for the sake of heavenly ones. Downplaying those humble tasks nobody notices that need to be done and are often taken care of by women. This interpretation does not make sense though, b/c of the rest of the Gospel. Jesus always notices the humble tasks: the woman putting yeast in her bread, the widow giving her last coin…Jesus himself did humble tasks, like serving food, washing the feet of his disciples. The examples are legion, actually half of the characters Jesus meets in Luke’s Gospel are women – often shown as examples: witnesses of the Resurrection, founders of the early church in the book of Acts (written by Luke). In some stories of the Gospel, sometimes Jesus even changes his mind after having talked with women! Like with the Canaanite woman who tells Jesus even the little dogs get the crumbs, we see that at Cana when his mother asks him for a miracle!

– So in this wider context, we can hear that Jesus’s words aren’t negative but positive, there are words of empowerment b/c of the way he believes in women. If we are offended by what Jesus responds to Martha, imagine what if would be if he had said: “Mary, your sister is right, return to the kitchen (where you belong)”…Mary has her place at Jesus’s feet – listening to Jesus’s teachings with the men in the house, which was very unusual at the time.

For Jesus, women are not second class disciples. This scene may remind us of Jesus at 12 sitting in the Temple with the doctors of the law. Jesus invites us to think outside the box about the roles society has in store for us based on our age, our origin, our gender…Not only for women, for men also! I read recently a book written by a man who talks about this culture of violence most men grow up in, how they are taught that they “can’t be a real man if they’re not tough” and the author says it has been a very liberating experience for him to realize how Jesus dared to express his feminine side, being open about his emotions, like when he cries in public, talks about his fear of dying…

– Indeed, Jesus teaches today about human limitations, “God given roles” in life that are actually not “God given” but cultural!…More than what society teaches us to be/do, we are first called to be disciples, doing “the one thing” God gives us to do. God has a very different work ethics than we do. In our society, the more we work, the better. We pride ourselves on being busy. Yet, work in the Bible isn’t always seen in a positive way. Amos, 8th c BC: God does not approve prosperity that enslave people or abuse them. People are meant to serve God first, then they can work to make a living. Most of us, we are only gifted at doing a few things – maybe it’s because God does not want us to do too much but to do well what we have to do, to have our hearts in it so by our work we may be drawn closer to loving God and our neighbor. Doing better instead of doing more.

– Sometimes we can’t avoid being very busy of course but always doing more isn’t a holy way of living in the sense that it does not make us closer to God. Jesus notices the way Martha is worried and distracted, and of course it is something that should speak very strongly to us today in a world where we worry a lot and are more distracted than ever. But it’s not new! Worries and distractions are part of who we are. A movement of philosophers beginning of the 20^th century: being human is about being worried b/c we are finite. We look for completion and accomplishment…But what those philosophers say is that we can spend our lives running from one thing to another and probably wasting our time and energy, or we can go deeper and try to understand what we really long for: “the one thing” – this could be our quest for God / meaning. We cannot get rid of anxieties but maybe, we can try to look at our anxiety in the face: What is it I am really worried about / what is it I am really looking for? I wish I had an answer to this question..I don’t…Maybe it’s different for everyone of us, but one thing is sure: Jesus tells us we’ll come closer to find our answer if we accept to sit and listen, than if we just keep on doing business as usual frantically.

– So yes, for Jesus there is more to life than pots and pans…it does not mean you can’t find God in pots and pans! Brother Lawrence (17c) used to say: God is in the kitchen. He found God while cooking as well as when he went to worship because he made himself fully available. Sitting and listening: It’s not so much about what we do than about the way we offer ourselves, we made ourselves present to God whatever we’re doing.

That’s for the teaching…Now, what is it that Jesus is doing by saying what he says to Martha?

– Well, maybe we are right to be a bit offended by his words b/c they are probably a little harsh. My guess is that Jesus is putting Martha in her place / sort of telling her to mind her own business…but he does so to take Mary’s defense, to side with her. He is not criticizing the fact that Martha is doing the cooking – Jesus is upset by the way Martha is treating Mary. The reason I said you can’t understand this Gospel if you’ve never had a big sister to boss you around! Yet, if Martha would have really wanted her sister to help, don’t you think she would have asked her directly, discretely? But now, if you can imagine the scene, she interrupts Jesus as he is teaching, in front of all the guests, to point out the fact that her sister is being useless and lazy, when she, Martha, takes care of everything. Martha is also doing something when she speaks this way: She is humiliating Mary in front of all the guests and of this Jesus Mary loves so much (She is also the one who poured the perfume at his feet)…We don’t know how cruel it is, but it is certainly mean…and yet, does not this scene feel terribly real? How often do we do that? Putting people down to make us look better? And also: being controlling, knowing what people need to do, or not? How often do we spend time criticizing the way people do their work / don’t do their work correctly? Our spouses, co-workers, the employee at Walmart…

– And we don’t only criticize people in front of others people, we criticize them also in front of God, like Martha criticizes Mary in front of Jesus! We had to have a good laugh last week during adult education, talking about prayer, when we realized how often the way we pray for others turn out in the end to pray God that God may change their behaviors… “Jesus, tell my sister to help me!”. Actually we should ask God to be the ones to change and to see people in a different light, with their very own gifts. We often rejoice in our diversity, and we are right to do so, but diversity is not only about race, age or gender. It’s about doing things differently. Being introvert or extrovert, fast or slow, active or contemplative…

– Last thing Jesus is doing is that he’s keeping Mary with him / to himself – She won’t go back in the kitchen. Jesus likes Mary as she is – and it’s not the first time he takes her defense. Judas and the disciples criticize her harshly when she pours the perfume on his feet. It seems that Mary forgets everything when Jesus is here: how she is expected to behave, what she is supposed to do…Jesus acknowledges the great love Mary has for him and no doubt he finds comfort in it as he heads to Jerusalem and to his death. Hospitality is more than food, it’s about enjoying each other’s presence. We are even more sensitive to that when we come closer to the end of our lives. Most of the people who are about to die will tell you: All the little worries, distractions, our little wars with one another… they really don’t matter at all.

– To conclude: The Gospel we have today follows the one we heard last week, Good Samaritan, where Jesus reminds us of the great commandments: Loving God and Loving neighbor. Last week we heard how the love for neighbor was about serving them / doing extraordinary things for them as did the Samaritan, but today Jesus reminds us that sometimes love can be as simple as this: Enjoy. Enjoy God for the mere pleasure to be in God’s presence, enjoy who your neighbor are, just because they are who they are. Amen.

Parable of the good Samaritan is well known, but it’s interesting to hear the whole passage though b/c the story is so striking that we often forget the context in which it was told: A lawyer comes to Jesus and asks: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”. It’s not the first time Jesus is asked this question – You may remember the rich young man in Matthew…in Luke it’s actually a lawyer like today, in Chap 18, who asks the same question:  A certain ruler asked him: “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”. So I was wondering, maybe Luke made two stories out of one, as it happens, he found a way to integrate one of Jesus’s parables into a wider context. Yet my guess is that Jesus was probably asked the same question often: How to “Inherit eternal life”…We often think about: living for ever / living beyond our physical death – yet the hope of Resurrection wasn’t a belief well spread among the Jews: Some of them believed in R (Pharisees), but some didn’t (Sadducees). The question is more about: What is it to live the life God intended for us to live, to live a godly life? What is the meaning of life? All these things you teach about, Jesus, what does it come down to, in the end?

And Jesus, as always, recenters on the love of God and love of the neighbor. It all comes down to love. “Love and do what you want” (Augustine). Jesus, as a good teacher, says it again and again many times…each time, there is something more to learn though. Story of the rich young man: How wealth can get in the way. So the question for us today: What does the parable of the good Samaritan have to say to clarify the great rule of loving God and neighbor?

Centered on “who is the neighbor?” It adds a certain tension / a certain delay to the dialogue. The lawyer gets it that he has to love God and neighbor but yet…He is not really ready to do so. He wants some specifics. When we read the passage of the Gospel we have today, we may overlook it because we know the story of the Samaritan so well…But it is interesting that, instead of just listening to the words of the text, we also have a look at the structure of the text: its rhythm (like a poem: sometimes the rhythm says more than the word themselves) and the way it is structured is:

Q/A (the rule) + “Do this, and you will live”
Q/A (a story to illustrate the rule) + “Go and do likewise”

There is a parallelism. Jesus is urging the man to act…“Just do it”. Love the foreigner / love the one who is wounded / love the one you find on the road. Love everyone / Love anyone.

And Jesus tells a very simple story / apparently simple / almost a joke. A priest, a Levite, a Samaritan…(Joke inside the joke, since the third person you would expect would have been a lawyer, or an Israelite instead of a hated foreigner like the Samaritan) and then Jesus asks…Who has been a neighbor? when the response is obvious, of course. Does Jesus want to say that religious people are all hypocrites? Not sure. Nothing tells us that situation is tense between Jesus and this man (“Test” was common between rabbis, they argued about the law all the time), but there is maybe this consideration that simple people get it better, they just know what to do when a situation shows up. They don’t ask that kind of questions / they don’t ask too many questions. They get it. Not so focused on doing the right thing / they just do it. That’s why the story is so simple, the response so obvious. You just have to help the man.

And it should probably speaks to us as well – As Christians, we often wonder what God expects of us…what is God’s plan for us…What is the best we can do with our lives…And maybe at some point, we start to take ourselves a little too seriously. Jesus reminds us to do the good that is right in front of us, to have the obvious response to the obvious problem. The neighbor is the one in front of me, the one who need helps. Even more – since actually Jesus says that the one being the neighbor is the Samaritan, the one who helps not the one being helped – I can choose to become a neighbor / I can be proactive: come close, help out, comfort, heal. To the question: Who is my neighbor? Who deserves my attention, my love, my help? The answer is: “Be a neighbor”, love the one who’s right here. Take your eyes off the sky, or even stop looking right in front of you “eyes on the prize”, but look at those who are in the ditch and pick them up. This parable should speak to us very strongly when we know how immigrants are treated right now at the border. The question is not about what’s right or wrong, we may have very different ideas about immigration, but what God asks of us it’s just behaving like decent human beings towards these people: feed them, give them to drink, give them a place to sleep and some soap and a toothbrush, and you let them hug their children. You don’t blame it on them: They knew the risks, they knew the road (between Mexico and Texas)was dangerous (as was the road from Jerusalem and Jericho).This is really a no brainer for Jesus: We have to act as decent human beings, and we cannot try to find a way around that – a loophole, as did the lawyer, asking: Surely, not everybody is my neighbor? Well yes…

Brings us back to the question of knowing what is right and what is wrong: How should I know what God expects from me? Simple response: Have mercy – Eleos / gut feeling. Word in this text is also used by Luke when he speaks of God: God has mercy. We already know deep down what to do. We may try to rationalize, but most of the time, we know what is the right thing to do. If it feels wrong, it’s probably wrong. If it feels right, it’s probably right. It’s not only in our heads, it’s in our hearts, in our bodies, with our guts, with all we are. It’s our humanity. We recognize the other one, our neighbor “as ourselves”: we connect on the level of our humanity. (We already mentioned that in other sermons, to be godly, we have to be humane / to inherit eternal life we have to live this mortal life). I find it interesting that the Samaritan let the man touch him (in his heart) before he touches him (physically) by pouring wine and oil on his wounds (to disinfect and to soothe). He let himself be touched and that’s so important. Barbara Brown Taylor once said that at some point, she realized she had become a good priest and it scared her. Scared her b/c yes she did everything “right” but she didn’t “let anyone near her heart”, she realized she was acting out of duty but she didn’t let herself be touched anymore to avoid being hurt by the pain she encountered in her ministry: people leaving the church, suffering, dying…It’s not only what can happen to ministers, it’s true for all Christians, for all those who strive to love: we may get hurt. Yet we have to take the risk. And I think this is what the Samaritan is willing to do. To be touched and to take a risk: The risk of feeling for this man, the risk of stopping on this dangerous road, the risk of going down in the ditch, the risk of being mugged, the risk of touching somebody unclean, the risk of carrying him on his back, the risk of giving his money, the risk of being a fool…

And so in the end, I think the specific Jesus adds in this parable to his bottom line “Love God and neighbor” as the key to everything in life, is that love takes chances and love takes risks. Love is brave. You cannot love if you don’t take a chance, you cannot love if you don’t risk losing something, getting hurt or being taken advantage of. If you want to love, you can’t always walk on the safe side. You know, the attitude of the priest and the Levite was very reasonable, it was indeed a dangerous road, a road on which you didn’t want to stop. But you cannot love if you’re always afraid to do something stupid. It does not mean you have to be stupid all the time, but if you really have to make a choice, well, I think Jesus tells us that maybe it’s better to be stupid by taking chances for the sake of others. Famous lines by Paul we hear at each weddings: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. It’s a beautiful summary of Jesus’s teachings, but there is maybe even more, because love is brave.

Love is brave. Powerful parable but we made something so dull with it: The good Samaritan, we call it. The nice one. Some translations go “the one who showed kindness” instead of “mercy”. It’s great to be kind. It’s great to be a good Samaritan, to be a good Christian. But it takes more than that, to love truly, to live the godly life, to inherit the kingdom: you have to be brave, to have mercy, to go with your guts sometimes not really knowing what you’re doing…

So maybe we need to think about that today, this week…What is the brave thing to do in our own lives to be more loving, to be closer to the godly life, to whom do we have to come closer to? Where do we need to stop on our journey to meet the unexpected?

– This morning we have just heard a famous story from the OT, featuring the prophet Elijah, fleeing from his enemies in the wilderness. We see Elijah afraid and weary, seeking for shelter and help, and finding comfort in unexpected ways: an angel coming to bring him something to eat and to drink so he might be on his way, and then God in person finding Elijah in a cave…a God not met in the wind, earthquake or fire but in a “sound of sheer silence” (Something we want to remember, after all the storms we’ve had recently!) and then God talks with Elijah and sends him back on his mission. And so we have here a story of human discouragement and divine encouragement – a beautiful and touching story we all know well and enjoy. Yet, if we pay attention to the first lines of our text, we may also see a bigger story, a more disturbing story maybe but also a richer story about what’s going on with Elijah. And I would like to unpack that a little bit with you today.

– Elijah, we read at the beginning of our passage, is fleeing from the Queen Jezebel after having killed her prophets, who worshiped the God Baal. In the previous chapter, we learn that the men were about 400, caught by the people of Israel after they offered their sacrifices, it is said that Elijah himself came down in the valley to cut their throats, as a retribution for all the prophets of God who have been killed before. A real bloodbath.

Knowing that, I wonder what’s really happening to Elijah in our story, and if there is not more going on than mere fatigue and discouragement, as we generally assume. I wonder if Elijah is not just seized by the horror of the war, the violence he has witnessed and the violence he has participated in. The text tells us actually that he sat down under a solitary tree and asked that he might die. He says to God: “O Lord, take away my life, for I am not better than my ancestors”. Those words jumped at me because I read recently a book written by David Peters, a priest who is an army chaplain and served in Iraq, and he talks about the trauma of violence and war, and part of the trauma, he says, is to discover that you are not better than other people, not better than those of your friends who have died before you, but, even worse, you may also realize that you are not even better than the people you have just killed. Peters says that we go to war because we see our enemies as a threat, we think of them as violent and dangerous, but on the battlefield we may suddenly discover ourselves as violent and dangerous too. At any rate, some end up feeling so guilty and scared that they feel they don’t deserve to live anymore.

– It seems indeed that Elijah is going through much more than a simple meltdown due to discouragement, he actually presents symptoms of trauma: He seems lost and has depression (he does not want to feed himself and wishes only to sleep and die), he feels utterly lonely and seems to have lost his faith in God, or at least his faith in the God of life. Elijah expects to find God in storm, fire and earthquake – in all things violent – but he’ll have to learn anew how to relate to God coming to visit him in silence and gentleness. Peters’ main claim is that violence, inflicted or endured, as we discover either that we are not safe for others or experience that we have no safety in the world, can destroy our sense of self, our ability to relate to others and also our ability to relate to God. And so to me, the story of Elijah is not a story about how God can cheer us up when we have a bad day, more deeply, it is a story of recovery, healing and a story of resurrection, of finding new life when you “have been to hell and back” as Peter puts it, when you have experienced the depths of terror and despair. As we acknowledge that, we can notice the deep connection of this story to the Gospel we’ve heard today.

– This Gospel is probably not a favorite passage: A man wearing no clothes, wandering in a cemetery, shouting and hurting himself, breaking his chains and shackles. It sounds like a horror movie. What’s going on with this man? Certainly some kind of mental illness, but more precisely, it could also be trauma due to war violence. He calls himself “Legion” which clearly points to the Roman military power, and the geographical area of Gerasenes is known to have been a battlefield. We can’t know for sure of course, but what is obvious is that the man has lost his sense of self, his connection to his community and his faith in God: He is afraid when he sees Jesus and feels inhabited by many demons. He hides in a cemetery probably because he can’t get rid of images of violence and death – or maybe he does not want to live anymore.

– And so the Scriptures confront us to difficult problems, yet those problems are very real for us. Yesterday was Refugees Day, a day dedicated to think about the ways we can welcome those who are going through the traumas of wars, genocides and exile, and so for us as Christians it’s important to learn what the Bible has to say for those who have experienced violence in a way or another, whether physical our psychological. How can God bring healing to those suffering from trauma and how can we be witnesses of the power of God’s grace by being a safe community for those people?

1 – What we learn from the Scriptures is that the first step is to help people reconnect to self and identity. We see that Jesus understands that it does not work to just restrain the man or to shout at him to get him back to his senses. Jesus engages the conversation. I heard recently a cancer patient saying: We are not problems to be solved, we are people to be loved. That’s true with all those who are suffering. We first need to hear them, to listen to their stories even if the stories are painful to hear. We see that the man is sitting at Jesus’s feet and this assumption is that he is listening to Jesus, but I like to think that Jesus is listening to him too. Jesus asks the man his name. We see that the man can only define himself by his afflictions, he has to go back deeper to remember who he used to be. He is not “Legion”, he is more than the trauma. Jesus reminds us that in God’s sight, we are always more than what we did, more than what was done to us and more than what others made us do. This is what Paul tells us in Galatians. Our identity is to be found in Christ, not in our social status, our gender or our race or what we have experienced. Paul says we have to be “clothed in Christ” and indeed it is said in the Gospel that the man is now “fully clothed” once he is healed by Jesus!

2 – Then the Scriptures tell us that people need to be reconnected to their communities. Jesus is not afraid of the man when all the village rejects him. The demons are made fun of in our Gospel, they end up in pigs and then over the cliff, because the demons aren’t the problem, the problem is that there are people left alone with their suffering. We say that “Jesus spent his life engaging people we spend out lives avoiding”, isn’t it the truth! As a community of faith, we need to make room for all kind of people. That’s why so many Christians go to visit prisoners, engage with homeless or welcome refugees. The people of the village are upset when Jesus heals the man because they have to admit he is one of them and not a demon. In our world, we don’t believe in demons anymore, but we believe there are people who are “monsters” or who deserve the bad things that happen to them and it can be very convenient to believe so! But if we are repentant enough to acknowledge that we are all both hurt and capable of hurting others, then it’s easier to see everyone else as brothers and sisters.

According to Peters, recovery from trauma must happen through reconciliation and it’s only by not losing sight of our common humanity that we can be reconciled. It does not mean we don’t have to seek for justice. But we need to seek for justice from a place of forgiveness. If we do it out of hate, then it’s just revenge and the cycle of violence never ends and there is no healing.

3 – And so finally, when experiencing trauma, we may also need to find reconciliation with God. Either we need to be forgiven for what we did, or we need to forgive God for what happened to us. This is the time when we can experience God not in profound theological conversation, but like Elijah, in simple things: the comfort of a meal offered by the angels God sends us, the bread and the wine at the altar, listening to the Scriptures at the feet of Jesus, praying, like in our psalm, about the heaviness of our own soul. Little by little, we may be able to hear again God’s voice in the “sound of sheer silence”. It can be a long a process and we need time to heal as God puts us back together. Yet in this, as we experience the depths of human suffering, we may become deeper and more soulful people, not just contented with banalities about God and about life, not seeing God as the one who can pat us on the back on a bad day, but knowing a God who visits our deepest wounds and know our darkest thoughts. “One deep calls to another” says the psalm. The depths of our pain can become the depths filled with God.

As a conclusion, I would say that I love it to see that in our stories, the two men aren’t just back to normal. They are sent as prophets. Elijah to anoint the new king and the man in the Gospel to tell the wonders of God to his community. Those who have been “to hell and back” are not people to be pitied, or even just supported, they can also be powerful witnesses, testifying that new life is possible – and that is the center of our faith, faith in Resurrection, faith is the power of God whatever we’re going through. Amen.

I watched a movie this week on the theme “Girl meets boy” and the movie starts with the girl talking to the boy she meets for the first time and she says to him that once a friend musician told her: Don’t ask me to talk about music, talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Meaning: There is nothing in common between words and music. Only music has something to say about music. And the girl says to the boy: Well, don’t ask me to talk to you about love, talking about love is like dancing about architecture. Meaning: only love can know what love is, only in loving you will find out what love is all about. You have to be on the journey.

As I heard this dialogue, I thought it might not be a bad place to start a sermon on Trinity Sunday, this day when we are invited to contemplate God’s being. And I want to say: Well, don’t ask me to talk about the Trinity because talking about the Trinity would be like dancing about architecture. It’s not that I would need a more complex vocabulary or more theological knowledge, and then I would be able to talk about the Trinity, as if the concept of God was just a little beyond our grasp but maybe by building words upon words like a grammatical tower of Babel we could finally understand the Trinity. No. Talking about the Trinity would be like dancing about architecture. Because it’s like music. You have to play the music to know what music is all about. Only in loving, you will learn how to love. In the same way, only in being on a journey with God, you will get to know who God is. A famous theologian says: I can say that I am a Trinitarian because that term describes my experience of God. The Father element of the Trinity means the experience of God as anEternal Other that is beyond anything I can imagine. The Spirit means the experience of God as an internal reality that is deep within me and inseparable from my humanity. The Son means the experience of God made manifest in a particular life. The Trinity is not a description of my God then, but of my God experience (…) My experience of God and God aren’t the same. God is not beyond my ability to experience, but the nature of God is beyond my ability to describe.

1- We cannot use words to describe who God is, but maybe we can use words to describe our experience of God and what we discover about God is that God is on a journey with us, and maybe that’s the first meaning of the Trinity: Yes, God is beyond our grasp, yet we can still experience God inside of us as Spirit, and we can recognize God in the person of Jesus. Our belief in the Trinity means that an unknowable God comes to us and communicate with us. I love this reading from the book of Proverbs because it says so much about this God we believe in. We don’t always realize how counter intuitive this is, that wisdom would come to us, that wisdom would be out there at the crossroads, at the gates, seeking us and calling us out almost like an easy woman – if you noticed the irony. Still today, but even more so in ancient times, wisdom was portrayed as a difficult woman you had to conquer and to be worthy of.

Philosophers used to think you had to live a very virtuous and intellectual life to find wisdom and then maybe at some point, when you are very old, you would be able to come closer to God.

Yet, here in the Bible we have this idea that God offers God’s closeness, God literally goes out of God’s way, goes on our ways to bring us closer to God. And we know this is how John’s Gospel understands who Jesus was: In Jesus, God poured all of God’s wisdom, God poured in Jesus all of God’s intelligence, all of God’s love and literally came out there at the crossroads, at the gates, calling us out.

This openness and seeking out is whom we understand God to be. We don’t believe in a God high above in the heavens, although we also believe that God is high above in the heavens, but we believe, as Ste Teresa said once, in a God who is big enough to become incredibly small, the host that fits in the palm of our hands every Sunday morning. We heard Jesus say last week to Philip: If you have seen me, you have seen the Father. They are one, although Jesus said “The Father is greater than I am” they are the same, share exactly the same nature. If you want to see some water, it does not matter if you see the ocean, a pond, or even a drop of rain. The drop of rain is as fully water as the ocean is. If you see Jesus, well, you have seen God – you have seen God because Jesus loves as the Father loves, loves the Father as the Father loves him and this outpouring of love whom we call the Holy Spirit seeks to include each one of us.

2 – And that’s the second point of our experience of the Trinity: God was fully revealed in our humanity, not only showing God out of the mere desire to be seen, but God acted in Jesus whom came on earth not to say hello, but “to die for us”, came to inhabit all the dark places where we lose ourselves in rejection, loneliness, and even despair, so that neither sin or death could ever separate us from God. God comes to us and takes us back into God’s being. Before he leaves this world, in the Gospel we hear today, Jesus promises his disciples that God’s spirit will keep glorifying him, make Jesus known, make the disciples understand his teachings and how God is present. Although Jesus is not present in his physical body, by reading the Gospel, receiving the sacraments and saying Jesus’s name when we’re praying, God continues to come close and make us share in God’s life, we are on the journey. Even if the journey is full of trials and filled with confusion, God will work through it. I think this is what Paul wants to say to us today, that, although we lament our trials, God works well through the adversity we encounter in our lives, God works well through our suffering. That’s when God reveals God to us. We may instinctively back off on hearing that because so much of bad Christian literature has been written about how God wanted us to suffer to teach us something. But I think it’s more about the suffering that is inevitable and maybe what we call suffering is those places God sees first as poverty and vulnerability, when we experience simplicity, honesty, humility and trust. In those places, we are brought closer to God because this is exactly where God is and who God is. Jesus wasn’t like an eccentric billionaire in disguise, a wealthy God pretending to be poor. Jesus was poor because this who God genuinely is: contented with very little and at home everywhere. When we are ourselves with God, God can be more totally with us. And this is very good because actually God delights in humanity.

3 – This, and it will be my last point, is maybe the most important in our experience of the Trinity. Who are we that God would seek us out asks the psalm? We are called to dwell in God but even before we were called to dwell in God, God came to dwell in us, and for this reason there is a dignity to human beings we need to be reminded of when we hear so many negative messages today about how human beings are stupid, cruel and vain. What God has to say about us is that God sees us as so worthy that God decided to dwell in us for eternity in the person of Jesus Christ. It calls us to act with so much respect – respect of others but also self respect. There is something of the divine in each one of us, and actually to be really humane, we may have to be divine. That’s probably what we mean when we say about a behavior that’s it’s “inhumane”. Only humans can be called inhumane, animals don’t behave in inhumane ways. What we mean by that is that as humans we have to do better than just human nature, to be human is defined in the dictionary as the ability to show compassion. Well, compassion this is what God is all about and it may be the meaning of Trinity, of a God who came to suffer with us and bring us back. Muslims also know that who always call God The merciful one. God has so much compassion that God does not just only spare us, but makes room for us, not merely by withdrawing from creation (as we often believe) but much more deeply make room in God’s own being. That’s what you do when you love someone, right? You just don’t make room for them in your life. You make room for them in your own heart, you give something of yourself. The Trinity means that God’s essence is to be self giving, and the wonder is that, like God, we cannot be whole without being self giving, without getting out of our way to be with those who aren’t like us. Only in loving as God loves us can we get to know God – this is our Christian journey. Amen.

– When do you think the church started? At the birth of Jesus? When he was baptized in the Jordan and called the disciples? At the Resurrection? Well, actually, we use to consider Pentecost as the day the church started. When the Apostles were gathered in the house – 50 days after Jesus’ Resurrection – when they received the Holy Spirit and started going out, speaking in different tongues to all kind of people, proclaiming the good news of Jesus-Christ. We sometimes call the feast of the Pentecost the “birthday” of the church. Until this day, the disciples had been following Jesus, trying to gain insights from his teaching, make sense of his life, death and Resurrection, but on that day – as Jesus had promised – the Holy Spirit was sent to them that gave them a clear understanding of what God did in Jesus’ life, and this sudden realization irresistibly led them to testify / to proclaim.

–It’s important to look at our History because it helps us understand who we are. A lot of people here in the US try to find their ancestors by making their family trees, looking up archives, sometimes they even have their DNA tested. When we know where we come from, it often helps us figure who we are and who we are called to be. It is the same for us Christians when we look at the History of the church. We are reminded what the church is about, what God wants it to be from the beginning. What is very clear from our passage, and what I would like us to reflect on today, is that the church is not a building, maybe not even a community, but first of all it is a movement outwards. From the house to the streets, the market place and the world. From the disciples to the foreigners and the newcomers and those who have never heard of Jesus. The church is a movement outwards. The church is, paradoxically, not made for believers but for people who are outside the church.

– We have to think about that because it goes so much against our human instincts / aspirations. We generally like it better to keep to ourselves, and we have a clear illustration of that in the famous story of the tower of Babel. We usually don’t understand very well this story so it’s good to hear it again today. We often assume that it is about people who wanted to build this great building to defy God, to make themselves as high above the earth as God, but then what happened was that God was not happy about that and so God confused people’s speech to send them back to the ground. Yet, if we listen closer to the story, we realize that it is much less about competition with God than about people wrapped up on themselves, choosing to defend themselves against the rest of the world, and claiming an identity that has much more to do with uniformity than unity.

– We read that the people in the story: “had one language and the same words”. I think it says a lot about their way of living, because language is indeed much more than just words (You know that probably if you speak a foreign tongue). Language is a culture, a way of seeing the world and understanding things. We don’t see reality in the same way based on where we come from. For this reason, languages are not only tongues. Languages are the way we express ourselves: it can be a form of art for example: Painting, poetry, music. And for each one of these languages, there are multiple dialects: church music, jazz, pop songs and so on. And so what the story of Babel tells us is that the world as God wants it is unbelievable rich, dynamic and creative, but men and women were afraid of this diversity and they just wanted to keep to themselves, to protect themselves and have dominion over the world instead of trying to understand the world and participate in it.

Their quest for uniformity is really something we can see at work in every totalitarianism. Each dictatorship teaches that people have to be the same (Based on race, social class…) when God wants all people to be different and enjoy different gifts. At Babel, people wanted to stop the movement of life, set it in stone, but by ignoring what life was really about, they were actually building a prison for themselves. Don’t we see that sometimes around us – People building their own prisons? Contractors tear down perfectly nice little housing to build big houses that forever belong to the banks because those who try to buy them never manage to pay off their loans and spend their lives working like crazy, while their houses remain empty because they end up not having enough money to buy furniture and not enough time to invite their friends? Sometimes we do the same with our churches as well. Buildings take up all our finances, our attention, our worries…and there is not so much energy left for God and our neighbors.

– Of course, it’s not only about physical buildings, there are plenty of other prisons we build in our minds: The way we cling to some beliefs, traditions, way of doing things…our obsession with self-preservation and survival. In this context, the “punishment” from God we hear about in the story of Babel looks more like salvation than actual punishment. God frees us from the prisons we build for ourselves, and God scatters us over the face of the earth.

– And indeed, this is the story of the church. The story of the church does not start with the ground breaking of the first cathedral! The church starts with the breaking in of the Holy Spirit, this wind that rushes by the windows inside the house and scatters the Apostles outside on the streets! The first thing the Apostles do to build the church is to go out to talk with other people, all sorts of people! The story of Acts tells us something really fundamental about the church: Building the church and being the church is an outward movement because the church does not exist to make the Apostles and the believers happy, the church exists for the people who are outside the church! We say here at Christ Church that we “don’t put God in a box”….We don’t put God in a building either. The first (and only) mission of the church is to go out to bear witness of the risen Christ and help people come closer to God by engaging in a relationship with Christ. Not because – as I have mentioned in my last sermon – because we’d believe that people “outside” are not good enough, or wrong, or because they may go to hell if they don’t convert, but we want to bring them the good news of the love of God shown in Jesus because it is for us a deep transformative experience, because it brings us joy, hope and purpose and because ideally, as the Apostles, our hearts are so full that we cannot not share the news!

– We cannot not share the news…Yet, looking at our own hearts, we may realize we are not there yet. Maybe we too would be tempted to believe that the Apostles were drunk on that day of Pentecost because we don’t always recognize ourselves in their enthusiasm. Most of us, we keep our faith much more private and quiet, a little locked inside of us. And I think it does not mean that our hearts are not in the right place, maybe they are just not oriented in the right direction. We keep looking inside when we should look outside. I was reading a book about church growth this week, and I came upon those lines I really needed to hear and I would like to share them with you as we are reminded on this Pentecost feast of who we are supposed to be.

The author said:

The church’s heart must change (…) the leaders and the people of the church need to experience a spiritual transformation that shifts their focus from playing church to reaching people for Jesus. For the church to return to sustained health, a growing core of people need to realize that the church isn’t about me. My preferences aren’t as important as the people we are trying to reach. My needs aren’t as important as those outside the church. My faith is meaningless if it isn’t backed by actions to carry out God’s mission.

– How do we do that? Not a natural tendency indeed! We are turned inwards, towards self-preservation / survival. We see that at Babel, but even the Apostles were like that to start with. They were gathered together in the house. The opening, scattering, witnessing comes from God, when God fills us with the Holy Spirit. So we can pray. Pray that God turns our hearts towards God’s mission field / set our hearts on fire for God. Does not mean that we are going to be jumping all over the place! Maybe at our age we can’t do that, but there will be so much love, and passion when we speak about God that people will want to check this Christian thing out…

– Next step for us: Learn their language. How do we speak about our faith? We are starting conversations about faith today, revisiting the basics of Christian beliefs. What the church teaches, how we think about it, how we can articulate it today…Because as the Apostles we should not expect people to speak our language, but we have to find a way to talk about God today that can touch unchurched people’s hearts and bring them closer to Christ. I invite you to join us after the service – because, once again, it’s not about us, it is for this world that needs God so much. In this world, each one of our testimonies matters. Amen.

– After Easter, we read from the book of Acts that focuses on what happens for the disciples after the Resurrection. It’s the story of the birth of the church or, as the pastor of my sending parish used to say: “It is the story of the Holy Spirit”. We call it the Acts of Apostles / what the Apostles did but it could be also the “Acts of the Holy Spirit” / How the Holy Spirit acted through the Apostles.

– We can truly see the Spirit at work through Paul in the passage we have today – how Paul was moved by the Spirit. His zeal for the Gospel is amazing. Evangelism literally kept him up at night! Not only it kept him up at night, but it wasn’t a thought he was willing to dismiss when the sun came up. He acted on it, he acted on the intuition / inspiration the Spirit sent him. Paul was willing to cross the sea to go spread the good news. Greece was the other end of the known world!

– I am sure we can all admire Paul’s zeal / have some respect for that but maybe we also wonder what such a story has to say to us today. A lot of us have ambiguous feelings about evangelism, and maybe rightly so. After 2000 years of Christian history, we have to admit the mistakes of the church, and not only its mistakes, but also its sins and sometimes its crimes as we carried on the mission. In the name of bringing the Gospel and making Christians, a lot of abuse of power have been committed. It was not only in the past centuries. I recently read the book “Boy Erased” in which Conley describes how his church sent him to “conversion camp” to “cure” him from his homosexuality and the psychological (as well as the physical) violence he had to endure from his religious mentors.

– And so when we grow more aware that we can be Christians w/o holding universal truths on what to think and what to do, or at least w/o wanting to impose our vision on others, the task of evangelism can be problematic to us. We don’t want to be dismissive of other people’s religious experiences, we don’t want to sound judgmental about their behaviors and most of the time, we simply don’t believe that people will go to hell if they don’t read the Bible and confess their faith in Christ. In our days, its seems that anyone can easily learn about Christianity and we will be happy to answer their questions, but doing what Paul did? Do we really have to go overseas to tell foreigners about Christ, or should we really go and speak to this stranger on the side of the road about our beliefs? We may feel some embarrassment…

– What is interesting though is to realize that actually the disciples wondered about that as well, and were confused about what Jesus expected from them, and how they were to carry the mission after him. The passage we read today from the Gospel is part of this long section in John’s caught between the last supper and the washing of the feet and Jesus’ passion: chapters 13 to 17, also called the Farewell discourses, that summarize Jesus’ teachings. It is Jesus’ legacy if you will. All the things Jesus wanted to say to his disciples and also all the questions they wanted to ask before he leaves them. And what is surprising is that the disciples asked him very concrete and practical questions: In those chapters, Thomas says to Jesus: “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, how can we know the way?”, Philip says: “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us”, and today, Jude says: “Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?” (the question has been cut) – in other terms: Why and how are we to carry the message when you could simply make yourself obvious to everyone?

– Well, to all those questions, Jesus does not respond directly. He asks his disciples to trust, to keep his word, to believe and as of today, he asks them to love him. And to me, this is really a key statement. Jesus, as he prepares himself to leave this world and summarize his teaching and his expectations to his disciples, is simply asking them to love him. There is nothing practical or “results oriented” about that. And it seems to me that when we think about mission or evangelism, we too often think about “The purpose driven life” as Rick Warren put it. Why should we follow Christ, what is it that is going to change, what is the gain for us and how would others benefit from it? To what Jesus responds that it is not about life improvement, it is about being with God through him. Being at home with God and dwelling in God’s love.

– Jesus didn’t ask his disciples to evangelize to tell people what to believe, what to think or how to improve their lives or even to make them better people, he asked them to evangelize so they may have a chance to experience the love of God that was shown through his life. To this, there is no more justification than that. Why do we love our God? For the same reasons that we love our spouses, children and friends. Because it is good to love, because we are made to love and love in itself is the ultimate end. We love because that’s what we are meant to do and even more, love is what we are meant to be. We are not complete on our own. Right? That’s often what we hear from people after they meet someone of have their children: I was not complete without them. And it is true as well with God. In his life, death and Resurrection, Jesus shows us that we cannot be complete, cannot be completely human without God.

– We think about that today as we celebrate “Rogation Days”. Honoring the creation, we remember – and we have just heard it in our psalm – that all creatures are made to praise God, to rejoice in God and to be with God. If we are to be made complete, no one is to be excluded. I know this is not always the way we understand things, especially in Revelation, but when we hear today that “Nothing unclean will enter the Holy city, nor anyone who practices abomination and falsehood”, we should consider it’s not about excluding certain types of people, it is about being freed from the evil that prevents us from living a life of love. We think about Revelation as this time of judgment, when the coming down on earth of the city of God is actually the gathering of all people.

– Again and again, and that’s the sense of the book of Acts, we see the Spirit at work to gather all the people. We know now that the universe is perpetually expanding, but so is the love of God. That’s the sense of the book of Acts and of the Christian mission: reaching out, gathering and reconciling what have been divided: creation, people and God. Because we cannot be complete without one another, and maybe, maybe, we also have to consider that God cannot be complete without us. As I was pondering the why of evangelism, mission and the meaning of Paul’s zeal for the Gospel, a quotation from a Saint sent by a friend came in my inbox. This Saint said: “Sometimes it feels like Jesus cannot be really happy without us”.

– “Sometimes it feels like Jesus cannot be really happy without us”, it may be a surprising thought and yet, in those three chapters of the Gospel, as he prepares to go back to his Father, as he keeps comforting and encouraging his disciples, I started wondering at some point if it wasn’t harder for Jesus to leave his disciples than it was for them to be left, not that Jesus needed them, but because of such a great love he had for them.

– What would it change if we’d really believe that God created us because God chose not to be complete without us, not to be fully satisfied / happy w/o each one of God’s creatures? I wonder how we would think about our lives and what we would think about our church, about people around us, and how we would feel about those who are left on the side of the road. Maybe this is how Paul felt too. He came to Macedonia having this big dream of people pleading him to help them, but in the end he just met a small group of women gathered at the river. Yet he reached out to them, maybe because he felt that Christ could not be completely happy without each one of them.

– Yes, this quotation from this Saint seems surprising, but I think it nails it in the sense that, at least, this how we experience love: When we choose to love someone, we cannot be completely happy without them. When we let someone in, we know that we will never be completely happy without them anymore. We make ourselves vulnerable when we open our hearts. Maybe what we are embarrassed about in evangelism is not so much forcing our convictions or sounding judgmental, maybe the hardest part is this vulnerability, reaching out to others, sharing with them what is really meaningful to us, what makes us feel alive. Because in the end, it’s not about sharing our ideas or our certainties, it is about sharing how we experience God’s love, how we see the Spirit at work in Jesus, in the church, in the world, and it’s about showing love in our lives, in the same way that God’s love was shown in Jesus. People won’t learn about God by reading books or even attending services! We get to know God by the love that we share.

– So today, Jesus invites his disciples and invites us to stop being shy. He said to them, as he says to us again today: “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid” but open your hearts. Because Jesus’ legacy is that he gave us the greatest power of all, the power to love. And we see that it is all that it takes: Paul opened his heart to Lydia, and Lydia opened her heart to God, her house to Christ’s followers, experiencing literally Jesus’ promise that God will come to make a home with her. Thinking about the church as our home is also the sense of Rogation Day. Maybe inviting people to our church, to be part of our community should not be more intimidating than inviting them to come to our home and share a meal with us, because this is really what being a Christian is all about. Nothing more, but nothing less. Amen.

How do we know that somebody loves us? What they say and what they do / Words and gestures.

It has to be both! If somebody tells us they love us but acts mean to us, it is going to be hard to believe! If somebody is very nice to us but never say they love us, we might think we’re nothing special to them, maybe they are just nice to everybody…

We really know when people love us by what they say and do but yet what they do is the most important.

Maybe you have heard adults saying that they go to church to hear “God’s word”. And it is true, we’ve already done plenty of reading from the Bible today (4!), yet at church we don’t only listen to what Jesus had to say. We also remember his gestures, what he did.

The bread and the wine he shared with his friends (every Sunday) / washing the feet (Maundy Thursday) / anointing the sick (first Sunday of the month)/ baptism (Today). Jesus did not baptize but was baptized and told his disciples to baptize. Signs of God’s love and God’s presence with us. Something we can touch and see. So we are sure. Today we hear that Jesus took the children up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

We all need proofs that we are loved, no matter how old we are (at some point we all need a hug!)

Love is really the most important thing in the world. Sometimes life is difficult, we can go through disappointments and sorrows, and we hear around us about wars, people who are hungry or lonely. Most of the difficult things that happen in life comes from the fact that we are selfish, we don’t know how to love. We are unfair, we hurt each other. Jesus came to free us from that, so we can be open to others, generous and strong and overcome the bad things that happen to us, that people do to us or the bad things we have done.

Since love is the most important thing in the world, we have to start learning how to love very early.

This is why there is baptism and why we baptize children. Jesus asked people to let children come to him b/c he knew it is the most important moment in life to receive his love so we can learn how to love from him. People around Jesus and even Jesus’s friends thought that God was serious business so it wasn’t for children…But it is the other way around: Because God is serious business, it is for children! All the things super important for life you learn when you are a child: talk, eat, walk, learn to count and to read, you learn to love, be happy…After we get too busy, we don’t pay attention the same way, our heart is already formed. Like now you need to eat healthy food b/c your body is growing. Same with your heart. Now is the time for you to receive Jesus b/c your heart is being formed and this is what’s in our hearts, even more that in our brains, that guide us through life.

We hear in the Scriptures today: A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

So what is going to happen today?

First, we are going to ask you if you want to believe in Jesus’s love and to follow him. Believing in Jesus’s love means that we believe that not only we are loved but also that we believe that only love can really change the world. A lot of people don’t think love is that important, that it is more important to succeed, to be well-known, to have money, or just to not be in trouble and do whatever they want! When we receive the baptism and become christian, we say we turn away from this way of living to start a new one.

It is just the beginning, of course. We have a life to follow Jesus. Baptism is like moving to a new house / God’s house with God’s family. It is very important to move but then we have our whole life to learn how to live with God and God’s family. that’s why we will also ask you if you commit, with your parents and Godparents, to come to church, to read the Bible, to pray, to help other people etc.

Then you will receive the water on your forehead. In the Bible, when they moved from Egypt (the place where they were slaves) to Israel (the land God gave them) the Hebrews had to cross the waters. They had nowhere to go, they were afraid and attacked by the Egyptians but the sea opened up and they could walk towards God’s land. Water of baptism is a symbol, an image of moving, from one life to another. Starting to live and to think about life differently, when we have nowhere to go, God gives us new possibilities. Water washes us: we let go of what is past and start something new. Sometimes we do things that make us feel dirty inside and sad, like when we say something hurtful to somebody, but Jesus promises us that we can be cleansed whatever happens, even if we don’t think we can talk about what we did to anybody. The water of baptism can clean us from everything.

The Bible says: I will sprinkle clean water upon you and you will be cleansed from your uncleanness.
The ceremony of Baptism shows this is what God does to us always.

Then you receive the anointing (=oil)

Important people where anointed. Like kings. Means we are important to God and we receive God’s spirit. God is not just close to us, God is inside of us. We feel God’s presence and we are inspired to do the things that please God. When we love, we are full of energy…to create things, to give, to help people. Love also makes us strong and courageous. It makes us want to be honest and to tell the truth.

When we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

Sign of belonging. Stain with oil on your clothes? It is very hard to wash away. It stays. I remember when I was a child, my mother always told me that she didn’t care if my clothes were dirty unless it was (Olive) oil! Of course it is easy to wash away on your skin, it won’t stay on your forehead but it is a sign to say that we belong to God. God washes away everything with water but then we receive the oil that does not go away. Sign that whatever we do we still belong. Like in a family. You can get very mad, fight, but you will always be sisters right? Impossible for you two not to be sisters anymore even if you decide to. We cannot break up with God. God will always love us and welcome us. (Sometimes relationships are difficult in a family but not so with God). In my life, I saw a lot of people coming back to church later in life as if they were at home.

All Christians receive the baptism – there is nothing more to do to become a Christian, it is not complicated, just receive the baptism and God will take from here! Means that we are part of a family, the Christian family. Life can be difficult but we don’t have to be alone. We can be there for one another, to share our sorrows and to rejoice.

Receive the Bread and the wine: share the meal. When you are members of a family you don’t stay in your room while others have dinner. You share the meal. Happy occasion. Jesus is especially present when we share the bread and the wine. It is a great moment to talk to him…

Happy are they who dwell in your house!

Invitation to rejoice today and we rejoice with you, for you and for ourselves and one another, remembering our own baptism…

– Psalm 23. Heard it a lot recently / often picked at funerals and we had a few. Brings consolation and comfort. But it’s good to hear it in another context b/c it is not only for funerals (although the TM for this Sunday is widely about Resurrection). The psalm is also about the way God is with us in everyday life / sense of Providence. We may think about Providence when something very unexpected happens / money appears from nowhere (we had a few of those miracles here) but Providence is also about the goodness that is right in front of us. We often miss it. I typically had this experience this week. I was for a few days at clergy conference in Adamstown and although we had sessions of work, we also had some time off. And I thought: I need to use my time off to do something /write my sermon. Started thinking about the psalm: “enjoying green pastures and still waters” and wondering what could be the deep meaning of these images, suddenly I realized there were just there: green pastures, still waters. I was in the middle of the countryside and God just wanted me to enjoy goodness, not instead of working I guess, but being able to receive God’s goodness so I could do the work.

– God does the work / helps us do the work – We keep busy busy to please God / to do God’s work and we forget to let God please us and to do good to us. Yet, if we don’t let God fill us with good things, we end up tired and feeling empty and in the worst cases burnt out, bitter, addicted. But often we just need to pause and see what’s right in front of us. Green pastures, still waters, a table set before us. That’s what Sunday should be about too. We come to church and even if church business keeps us busy all week and early Sunday morning, when the service starts we need to sit and relax, to take in the beauty and the peace, receive the word and the music, the bread and the wine, enjoy companionship / conversation around a table with coffee and cookies. Listen to some kind of teaching about the Scriptures or practice a spiritual activity…We often think we do something for God at church, we forget God also wants to do something for us. Jesus said he came to serve us…

– And so we need to learn to rest / to receive from God. Rest for us is often collapsing in front of the TV after a busy day or when we find some ways to treat ourselves / reward ourselves with indulging a little bit (or a lot!). But the rest the psalm talks about is the reviving of the soul. It is rest for the soul. It is not about collapsing or getting busy doing something else than work, it is about slowing down and taking the time to find the goodness in front of us, around us, here and now, knowing that God is in charge.

– Which means of course that the psalm and this image of Jesus as the shepherd is not only about rest / not only about comfort if it’s about reviving the soul. Rest is part of it, yet the shepherd does much more than providing / comforting. His job is to guide us / guide us even through dark times. Not only does he provide, comfort, protect but he does so as as he leads us somewhere. I don’t know a lot about shepherding, but I recently learned something interesting: the shepherd’s staff has two ends, there is a crook for drawing the sheep away from danger but there is also a blunt end for prodding them towards places they would not want to go. God’s job is not always about comforting us…sometimes God let us also experience some discomfort b/c God leads us somewhere, towards unfamiliar places. It is not always about grazing, it is about getting somewhere. Nudging us when we get stuck or complacent or a bit lazy. Often crisis happen in our lives when it’s time for us to move to another level. God wants us to grow.

– Yet as God leads us / is in charge, God does not lord it over us – something that can be hard for us to understand. What today’s Gospel may clarify.

– Today, once again, we have a discussion about the true understanding of who the Messiah is / how he saves us and how religious people at Jesus’ time thought about it. And I don’t know what you think but sometimes we may find the Pharisees a bit stupid when they say something, but sometimes it is much easier to relate to them. When they say: “If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly” – I think we have all been there. Asking Jesus to make himself clear: “Tell me what you want / plan”(and I’ll do it). “If you are the Messiah…certainly you can help me…” The Pharisees wanted to know who was the boss / what God had to say to them. They were looking for authority. At some point, we have to acknowledge that we look for that as well. We want God or somebody sent by God to tell us what to do / who is in charge so we will obey them and won’t be in trouble. But the paradox is that it’s often when we look for authority that we put ourselves in trouble.

• In politics. When we look for someone to tell us what to do and who will solve all our problems. Happened many times in History – but those leaders are tyrants when they don’t acknowledge the complexity of our issues and the need to debate, they just give orders, they make us feel we’re not smart enough to solve our problems, they work on our fears. Fear of lacking / fear of others / welcoming others and sharing with others (Psalm 23 insists we will lack nothing!). It’s not new! There are a lot of stories about “bad shepherds” in the Prophets.

• In the same way, we may also look for spiritual authority. Somebody who tells us who God is and what God wants. We trust blindly religious authorities. I am reading the story of Karen Amstrong, a former nun, and how she was broken by her superiors as they kept pretending obeying them was obeying God (Maybe they truly believed it!) Abuse is the abusers’ fault of course, but it also happens when the church and its members close their eyes and ears and surrender their responsibilities.

– And so Jesus will refuse to play that role of being the boss, the one who is right and give orders. Instead, Jesus says he is the companion on our path, helping us, nudging us, comforting us – it’s very different.

To me, it has two main implications:

– First of all: we have to accept to be free. It can seem evident but it is not. Freedom is very desirable but it is also scary: we can make mistakes, fail, hurt ourselves, we have to accept doubts and uncertainties and also responsibility for our choices. Museum of the Bible presents the Bible as a user guide to life “That tells us what to do to become a good person” but the Bible is mostly about people struggling with God, trying to find their way and how God shepherds them. Leads them from a basic / sinful / mortal kind of life to life abundant, joyful and fruitful. Jesus’s resurrection models ours (Cf Acts / Resurrection is given to the disciples) Jesus is the shepherd leading us to life…through our life! Their is no ready made model to apply to that, we figure it out with him as we go!

Jesus helps us change our hearts and we can become the best version of ourselves. Worst things in life: not so much what happens to us but the way we react to it (fear, anguish) we have to go through our broken selves and it can be very dark…God cannot spare that, but walks with us towards our healed and whole selves so we can receive God’s love!

– 2^nd point (and consequence): God comes to us not through obedience to authority but through trust. Belonging. We first have to trust not b/c we are compelled but b/c we love, we experience God’s goodness and God’s companionship, God’s humility: Jesus is the shepherd but he is also the lamb (cf Revelation) as he is our companion, he does not fake it – He knows exactly what it is to be us b/c he has been there, he has been powerless on the cross and also at many times during his life. He understands what it is to be one of us / with us. The problem with the Pharisees, those who ask for proofs is that they don’t love Jesus. (It doesn’t mean we cannot question, but we need to do it from a place of trust, not like a trial (what actually religious people will end up doing)). I think that what Jesus tells them is: “You can’t understand who I am b/c you don’t love me” and isn’t it true that we don’t understand people when we don’t love them? We don’t see who they are, what they mean, we are just defensive – The Pharisees are so afraid Jesus is going to lead them in a dangerous place.

– Back to our first point. We can rest / need to rest / rest our souls b/c our first job is to love God or maybe even more: to let ourselves be loved by God: guided, comforted and nudged. As the shepherd, God gathers us together as a community / we walk together to discern his voice. If we let God love us, we’ll love God and then we’ll understand. Do we come at church thinking the most important thing we can do is to let God love us?