Resurrection Play Set – The story

Easter morning. After the crucifixion, Jesus was laid in a tomb. Different from the tombs we have here at the cemetery. It was more like a cave, with a big stone in front of the entrance. Mary sees the stone has been removed and so she called the other disciples, Peter and John and they go with her and they look inside the tomb see there is nobody in the tomb! John believes that Jesus rose from the dead as he said he would and they leave…But Mary stays there and she cries, and she cannot stop crying. The angels come to comfort her but she still cries. In the end, Jesus appears to her but she cries so much she cannot see him through her tears. At last he calls her name and she realizes it’s him, and she stops crying right away, she is overjoyed and Jesus tells her he had to go again but this time to be with God who is also her God. And Mary knows that Jesus is alive for ever!

My grand father’s death

Have you ever been to a cemetery? Of course, because we have a cemetery right here! But have you ever been to a funeral? The first time it happened to me, I was 12 years old. My granddad died, he was very old – 69 years old. He died at his home, he had a big house, he had 7 children and 14 grandchildren! When they brought down the casket in the stairs, everybody was crying – not only the children but also adults like in the story. Everybody loved him very much, he was so nice he used to make toasts for his puppy for breakfast and it drove my grandmother crazy. But as I was feeling very sad on the day of the funeral, my Dad told me something I’ll never forget. My dad told me: It would be very sad if we did not have faith, but we have faith and we know that now Granddad is happy. And my Dad said: Think about all the people he is going to see in heavens. How many time has it been since he last saw his Dad, and his Mom? And his own grandparents? And his friends from school? And his son? (My grandparents had lost an adult son)? And all the puppy dogs?

Resurrection: Seeing again the ones we love

I think my Dad taught me something very important about Resurrection on that day – what we hear in the story of the Gospel today. The Resurrection, it is not about scary stories, zombies or ghosts stories of people coming back from the dead, the Resurrection, it is about being reunited to all those we love. Do you hear how adults sometimes speak about death? They say that this person is in heavens now and so she does not suffer any more or she is at rest. And we know there is peace and no suffering even for very sick people after they die, but that’s not the most important. The most important is that in heavens we are all reunited with God and with one another. Jesus says to Mary: I am going to see my God who is also your God. To describe what heavens look like, Jesus used to tell stories all the time about banquets, big family meals. Aren’t you happy when all your family shows up for Christmas or Easter and you all have fun together? Well, that’s what it is to be with God and it is the greatest joy we can imagine, it is the joy we are created for.

There is sadness when we are separated…

But since we are meant to be together, we can also be very sad when we are separated…Have you ever been so sad, so sad that you could not stop crying and it doesn’t matter what people tell you to comfort you, you still can’t help crying? This is what happens to Mary today. She is so sad Jesus has gone she can’t stop crying. It does not matter what the disciples and the angels tell her, she has to see Jesus. We can feel very sad when we lose someone we love, and you know that if you have already lost a grandparent, or a friend or maybe a pet…even a teddy bear you really loved! I lost a cuddly bunny when I was little and my parents wanted to buy me a new one, but I didn’t want a new one, I wanted the one I had lost!! It does not matter what people tell you, when you cry because you miss someone you just want to see this person you miss, right? Well, as Christians we can still be sad when we lose someone, but we also know we are separated only for a little while and we will be reunited again and we can live with hope. Even if life is difficult, we know that Jesus has made things right again and people who are meant to be united are not separated for ever, even if they were very old or if they have done what they had to do on earth and so they’re gone and we don’t see them anymore for now.

Sometimes we lose people not because they’re dead but because we are not friends anymore and it can makes us very unhappy too. Sometimes we cry because people are mean to us and we hurt, or sometimes we have a fight and we don’t speak anymore…Ever happen to you? It happens all the time, even for adults. But when we believe that we are meant to be together and to be reunited, it’s not only with the ones it’s easy to be friends with. It’s with everybody, even the one at school who’s mean to you.

So we try to live now as “Resurrected people”

So as Christians, we try to make a special effort to get along with others, it does not mean we can be friends with everybody like that, but we know that we are all on our way to God so we really try to listen each other, to understand each other, to share our stuff, to ask for forgiveness… We do it not only because it is the “right” thing to do, but because we know that in the end that’s what will make us truly happy, when we can be all together. God’s great meal, it’s not just sitting next to one another not talking because God will make us sit together like students at school who must obey, it’s like sitting at a happy family meal when you see your cousins and you’re so excited you get to do all the things you love with them. That’s what happen when we receive communion: we all have a meal together to remember that’s what is going to happen in heavens with Jesus. Communion is a meal but it is also about being together reconciled.

Now I know you all want to know about the eggs and the bunnies right? For centuries, people have offered to one another chocolate and candy on Easter Day to remember the feast, the delicious meal of God. But the egg is also an image to say that we live a new life. Not only a life that will start in heavens, but a life that can start right now, when we choose to love God instead of rejecting God as some people rejected Jesus, when we choose to be friends like Jesus taught us instead of hurting each other. So now we’re going to have communion and after we’ll go egg hunting!

– Thank you Joan for being with us today and stepping up to read this Gospel lesson! The Reading of the Passion can be overwhelming…First of all because it’s long, of course. We’ve read Luke’s version of the Passion on Palm Sunday with different voices. Today we have the Passion according to John – a shorter version but still long. There is so much going on, so many things happen in such a short span of time (Adam Hamilton: “24 hours that changed the world”). But of course, it is not the only reason why the reading is overwhelming. It is mostly overwhelming emotionally, with an intensity of suffering we can barely start to imagine. On top of that, in John’s version at least, the political tension is very palpable with Pilate pacing back and forth in his palace and also in his guilty conscience…choosing with the crowd the Emperor above the king of the Jews…Finally (and mainly) the reading of the Passion raises also a lot of disturbing questions about our faith: Where was God in this? Did Jesus really have to die this way? How does it redeem us?

– And so it can be overwhelming – and we may feel the need to take a step back. As I was preparing for today, this is just what I did, I closed my laptop, my books, my articles and I just sat to listen to the wonderful St John’s Passion by Bach. And suddenly I remembered the first time I heard this music knowing what it was about. And this is the strange thing that happened the first time I heard it: I was shocked. Delighted, but shocked. Shocked that the music was so beautiful when it was about something so tragic and so confusing as the crucifixion, the suffering and the death of the Lord. And I remember wondering: Does it make sense to create so much beauty out of it? Is it even “morally right” to do a masterpiece about betrayal, torture and execution? Shouldn’t we just be overwhelmed and horrified and mourning at the whole thing – instead of singing? Since then, Mel Gibson realized his movie about the Passion. I haven’t seen it and do not plan to, but one could wonders: isn’t it more accurate, more “real” to describe the horror, violence and suffering the Passion of Jesus was, instead of turning it into something beautiful?

– Well, as we think about this, it’s interesting to look at John’s understanding of the Passion because it somewhat differs from the stories of the Passion in the three other Gospels. In John’s, from the beginning, Jesus seems to know what is going to happen, to anticipate it and to accept it. It is his “hour” and Jesus seems to be completely in control of what’s happening. A lot of people don’t like this version of the Passion b/c they don’t think it’s real. If the reading of the Passion is overwhelming for us, then we should assume that Jesus himself, at the center of the whole drama, was overwhelmed and not in control of the events, of his emotions and of his pain…But I would like to share with you a conversation we had recently during our Lenten study that could make us think differently about it. We shared recently stories of terrible events that happened to us / we all had our own “Good Friday stories”, times of loss, pain and despair in our lives. And yet in the midst of that, some of us shared that, as they went through their own “Good Friday”, they also experienced a sense of peace. I thought it was something very brave to acknowledge those feelings that at first don’t seem to make sense. Because it does not really make sense to feel peace in the midst of tragic events and yet, a lot of us could testify that this was what happened. Peace was not present all the time of course, but looking back some of us could see how the grace of God was present / how they felt being held by God. Well, maybe those experiences can make us differently about Jesus’s Passion. I am not so sure that John is showing a Jesus who is in control, rather than a Jesus who is at peace. A Jesus who is at peace throughout it all.

– This could mean that Bach has it right over Mel Gibson because Good Friday is so much more than torture and execution. Although Good Friday is terrible; because there is this sense of beauty and peace, Good Friday it is still good and part of the good news of the Gospel and we are drawn to it. I don’t think it is a fascination or curiosity about violence and pain that draws us to it. I think it is is more because we can see peace in all this pain, and yes beauty – dignity and majesty and also goodness, forgiveness and even tenderness (like when Jesus says to Mary:“this is your son”) – all those things still present in the midst of hell.

– And maybe this is how it redeems us / it redeems everything. We have made Redemption with a capital R a big word, but maybe we can just look at the cross and see how the beauty, tenderness and peace Jesus sends us from the cross redeem us from our own sufferings. Because we can see how much Christ loves us in being with us even through hell, and we can see ourselves in Christ. When we suffer, we are not only this person crushed by evil, adversity, disease, rejection, trauma. Our world often looks at people who suffer as if they were a failure, or at least it looks at suffering as if it was a failure. But the Gospel looks at those who suffer as if they were Christ, and it changes everything. The Gospel shows us that we still have dignity and majesty in the midst of sufferings: We are capable of tenderness, forgiveness, sometimes even capable of this sense of irony very present in John’s Gospel that enables us to distance ourselves. We are more than our tragedies. It does not mean we can always be “strong” or “in control” or that we should act indifferent…But in the midst of suffering, we can learn how to be still, to bend in the storm and have an enduring love for who we are, for others, for God, for life. A friend with depression told me a few days ago that Life was a wonderful gift, in spite of her sorrows. Because of the cross, we are not defeated by the powers of death and evil. There is so much more to reality than what meets the eye. When it’s hell outside, there can still be moments of peace inside.

– And so, if we can find peace in those moments, then it means we don’t have to run from suffering. And it’s good news. We live in a world that wants to avoid suffering at all cost, but sometimes running away from suffering can be exhausting and in the long run creates more suffering than anything else because it numbs us and isolates us from reality. As we look at the cross, maybe we can start accepting suffering as a part of our lives and, even more, as a holy part of our lives, in the same way that suffering was a holy part of Jesus’ life. Maybe, as Jesus did, we can learn how to “receive” suffering, believing it is not going to destroy who we are. On the other side, it could be part of the process of becoming. We all have our Good Friday stories, we all have stories of our own undoing and we all have our stories of peace, how we came to realize that suffering was part of the doing, of the becoming, becoming children of God or just simply becoming more human. Suffering is a mystery, but it’s a mystery we can sit with.

– It’s Good Friday. Resurrection is not there yet. Resurrection is above the doing and the undoing intermingled in this life, above the suffering. And yet, the story of the Passion tells us that it is possible for us to sit w/ the pain / to sit with the absence of God, to sit with the absence of the God who rescues us, because in the absence of God, God is still here, Jesus brought God in all our places of darkness, there is no hell that we cannot look at thinking of the cross. So today, instead of receiving communion, instead of receiving the risen Lord as we do each Sunday,we are invited to look at the crucified one and to adore the cross. We are invited to come closer, look at the cross, bow down, touch the cross, kiss the cross (as you feel moved to) and, as we do that, we are invited to remember our own Good Fridays but also to remember our stories of peace. We are invited to ask that Christ give us the grace to look at the cross as a reflection of our suffering selves where we’re able to see beauty, dignity and goodness whatever we’re going through. Amen.

– We’re doing this Lenten study – our theme last Wednesday was hospitality. One of the participants shared a compelling story. Volunteered to serve a meal for people in need, but when she showed up she was asked to first have dinner with everybody and just talk with them – she would serve later. Felt a bit frustrated, after all she was there to serve, but she still did what she was told. Sat next to a woman and started to have a nice talk with her. Talked with everybody and actually enjoyed herself so much that she stayed the whole time just sitting and chatting with everybody / there were enough volunteers to serve the meal. When the woman she first talked to left she said to her something that brought tears to her eyes: “I came just to have food but you gave me much more, you made me feel loved.”

– I could not help but thinking about this story as I read the Gospel / how Mary made Jesus feel loved and special…and it also made me sad to realize that I could not think of any other place in the Gospel where there is mention of somebody giving something to Jesus or doing something for Jesus (Except the Magis when Jesus is a baby and Joseph of Arimathea giving his tomb, after Jesus’s death but nothing in between except for Mary’s gift of perfume). Most of the time, even among the disciples, everybody was waiting for Jesus to give them something but nobody gave him anything. Another thing that made me sad when I read comments about this Gospel, is that nobody seems to be able to make sense of the story: Why does Mary do that? What is the meaning hidden behind such a gesture? Well…there is no hidden meaning! Mary does something for free, out of thankfulness, out of love – not expecting anything in return, just to honor Jesus. But it seems that it is something not that simple to understand…

– We know we live in a world of competition and need for efficiency, but maybe we don’t always realize the subtle ways this culture is already present in us, the “disciples”, and how this culture is present in the church and in the way we sometimes do ministry, serve and relate to God. Culture summed up by Judas when he says: “We could have saved this money to give to the poor” (other versions of Gospel even mention: “instead of wasting it” – which is not very nice for Jesus, if you think about it!). But it’s economics reasoning and this is the way we often think, even as a church. It’s not that there is a conflict between what we believe in and do or fail to do. We believe in God and we do good in God’s name, but the way we do good sometimes goes wrong because we forget the most important, we forget to make people feel loved. We do good but there is no (room/ time for) deeper love in our goodness. It generally does not occur out of bad will, we are full of good will, but we participate in a culture of calculation / cost effectiveness. We want to be efficient or as we say “to make a difference” and so we hope to see results.

– Recently I heard a priest telling this story. She sat at a clergy conference where the speaker asked: “Why the church, why are we the church?” And all those clergy people were like: “We have to do something, the world is such a hard place, so many social issues etc…”But this priest noticed, at the conference, nobody said we are the church b/c of the love of Christ. And she observed: Of course we need to do good, yes, but there are non profits to do that as well! Our unique role as the church / as Christians is to make people feel loved / enable them to receive the love of God and to learn how love God in return. Receive the love of God and love God in return – that’s our mission and that’s huge. It’s not enough to be a good doer. The Gospel tells us today: Even Judas was a good doer! Which can be scary if you think about it…

– We should not be contented with being good doers. Christianity is not about transforming us in good doers for different reasons:

*The boasting (Like Paul had all the reason to think of himself “zealous, righteous and blameless”)
*The burning out (Compassion exhaustion is a real thing! We cannot do it all…Indeed Jesus says: “the poor will always be among us” – there is no end to the work)
*Missing the whole point: We serve but never take time to make people feel loved / if we spend too much time fixing somebody’s problem, we see (only) their problems but we don’t engage in a relationships. We feed the poor but we don’t sit with them. People don’t just need to be fed with food / they need to be fed with love – that includes those who serve too.
Beauty of Eucharist: food for the body as well as for the heart and for the soul.

– Being a Christian is about inward transformation / Changing our hearts / Entering the relationships with God and with one another.

– That’s the hardest! Why? Judas points it out in other versions of this story in the Gospel: This woman is wasting what could be a good source of income, and we are all afraid of waste. What kind of waste? There is the material waste of course / obviously this expensive perfume was luxury and I hate to preach about the need to be able to waste at a time when we should be very mindful of our resources, not so much financially but mostly ecologically…Yet, I think the Gospel invites us not so much to be able to waste materially but it invites to contemplate how afraid we can be of wasting our time, our energy. Again, we want to be efficient / to see objective results…have a return on investment…

– But even deeper, we may be afraid of opening up and wasting feelings and emotions. Giving w/o receiving in return:
“Feelings bring the possibility of rejection that is something everyone wants to avoid at all costs. If feelings are not involved, no one can get hurt. The biggest risk someone can take is to develop feelings and express them.” I am not saying that – a college student named Emma. Found this quotation in an article by a college chaplain reflecting on how it is hard for young people to live in a culture where, the chaplain says: “Social influences make us ashamed of our most basic needs for genuine affirmation, emotional intimacy and support”. This chaplain tries to address in her ministry the “casual sex” culture that exists in college that prevents students from forming deeper relationships. But it is true in different ways, not only in romantic/ sexual encounters. We shy away from creating deeper relationships. We serve the poor but it’s hard to really engage with them, talk with them. We worship God but we don’t really come close to God. The disciples like to listen to Jesus but they don’t understand when Mary respectfully touch and kiss him. They are shocked. Judas criticizes her.

– Having feelings and expressing love is taking a risk, today as it was at Jesus’ time: We risk being hurt, disappointed, rejected, mocked, taken advantage of. Young people know it well and it’s very sad that like this Emma, they may come to the conclusion it is safest to choose not to get involved.

– Our challenge as Christians is to promote a counter culture where it is okay to engage in meaningful relationships/ okay to love. Doesn’t have to be emotional / but where we allow our hearts to be touched, where we can express how we feel and who we are without shame, where we are able to make mistakes and ask for forgiveness without feeling threatened, where we can work on issues and relationships instead of ignoring people, where we can show weaknesses w/o having someone making fun of us or abuse us, where we can be willing to give but also be willing to receive…

– How do we practice that?Maybe, like Mary, we need to do things for no reason – just for the sake of love. Just like that. Rediscover gratuity. Stores that sell cards there is a section for very occasion and then there is the “Thinking of you” section, when you want to show your love to somebody for no reason. Maybe that’s where we need to go! Because the wonder for me is that the gospel shows us that it is the less important that actually is what matters the most (Last will be the first). Jesus is about to die, that’s when Mary needs to let him know how much she loves him by doing something apparently completely useless!

Strange reversal of situations: What seems completely useless, wasteful is what will last for eternity (“Wherever the Gospel is proclaimed, her gesture will be remembered”). Funeral I attended recently: What these people remembered from their grandmother was holding hands, have an ice cream, sitting together to watch the sun rise.

– Gestures only to be enjoyed like the fragrance of the perfume that will fade away. Lenten study: It is all about joy. Joy felt in her heart for this volunteer. What’s the point if what we do don’t make us happy, don’t make anyone happy? It probably don’t make God happy either. Pb with Judas: he is sad!! As we enter Holy week: Where there is love, there may be suffering but there is always joy.

Interesting how sometimes we can feel far away from the world of the Gospel. Stories sound like stories that happened in an ancient time and we have to make a real effort to be able to relate to them…Yet, we have to acknowledge that, on the other side, sometimes, stories seem almost unbearably close to us…That could be the case today.

The story of Pilate executing the Galileans as an act of worship and the story of those killed by the falling of the tower of Siloam, it feels like these two stories happened last week with the people shot at the mosque in NZ and the reports of natural disasters and wide destruction both in the Midwest and in South Africa. In Jesus’s time as today, we see people being killed out of hate for who they are, people dying because the natural/physical world is not reliable in the way we wish it would be…Yet mainly these stories hit home b/c we react the same to those kind of catastrophes: We don’t know what to do, we don’t know what to say, we don’t know what to think. We try hard to find a reason to make sense of them, but we generally fail at it.

In biblical times, people very often explained suffering by assuming the victims of tragedy had done something wrong to provoke a disaster, they had brought on themselves God’s anger because of their sins. But today we see Jesus did not support this explanation – and it is not the first time he does that in the Gospel…so I think it’s really a message we need to hear, a message he repeats twice in the passage we have just heard: “Do you think these people were worse sinners? No, I tell you”.

Of course, thankfully, most of us don’t think anymore that God punishes people with trials and disasters and all sort of calamities…yet, if we search our hearts, we have to acknowledge that very often there is still a tendency in us to think that those who suffer have problems b/c they have done something (wrong) / or not done something (right), and there is often a temptation to dismiss their suffering by telling them what they should do or not and how they should feel. It can be made even worse when on top of that, it is assumed that their trials are there because God wants to teach them something, correcting them from their mistakes.

“Everything happens for a reason”: Who haven’t heard this kind of things, or professed them? I know I did, several times. But each time I hear someone saying that or when I catch myself thinking that, I realize we’re closer than we think of the people surrounding Jesus who assumed disasters hit sinners. We know that God does not “punish”, yet how hard it is for us to respond to suffering without explaining it away by finding a good reason for it.

Yet, if we look closer today, we’ll realize that Jesus not only said loud and clear that people don’t suffer because they are sinners, but we’ll also see that it is never said that God sends us sufferings to “teach us”. In the letter to the Corinthians, we read: “God will not let you be tested beyond your strengths” which we often translate as “God won’t give you more that you can handle”. But Paul never said that God “gives us” things hard to handle, Paul never said that God sends us sufferings for a greater purpose, to fix something in our lives and to teach us to be better people. At some point, we all have to deal with much more than we can handle! What Paul promises us is that God will walk with us so we can keep our faith, and God will give us strength and comfort in the midst of pain and confusion.

And so, as Christians, this is really what we are called to do: To respond to pain not by explaining it away in finding a good reason for it, but we are called to respond to pain by trusting God and by being present with those who suffer, in the same way that we believe that God is present with those who suffer. Paul is actually talking to a community, not to individuals, and what he says is that we can make it trough times of suffering when we are together as a community, when we support each other and take care of one another, not when we find good explanations / justifications for people’s suffering and advise them to just deal with it because what happens to them is God’s will.

I remember a comment I read in an exhibition about 9/11. A journalist marveled that: “Really, when there is a disaster everybody flee in the opposite direction, except for the firefighters and the reporters”. And I thought to myself: Well, not only the firefighters and the reporters, Christians also should run towards the places where suffering happen. We know that at least this is the example Moses gives us in our first reading. After all those years spent away from the oppression in Egypt, he will go back, right there in the midst of pain and confusion to bring healing and liberation to his people.

This is what repentance is all about I think. After Jesus dismissed the arguments of the crowd about God’s punishments, he asked them to “Repent” if they didn’t want to “Perish”. Repentance is often translated as “return” and indeed it is about changing directions. Not fleeing from the bad by explaining it away, but addressing it by doing good.

We need to address the bad by acting instead of finding good explanations when something happens to somebody. Yet it does not mean that we should not question why there is suffering in the world. To this global suffering, Jesus actually gave a very good explanation: the reason for suffering is our absence of repentance. It’s not that some people endure personal tragedies God send them as a punishment for their own private sins. But sin creates suffering. B/c of everybody’s sin, we have made the world a place of “pain and confusion” where a lot of bad things can happen to anyone because of our collective greed, because of our violence, or even just because of our lack of concern and our apathy. We live in a world that produces mass shooters, terrorists, natural disasters aggravated by climate change, buildings falling apart b/c they are made with haste at the lower cost. And those who suffer from the consequences of collective sins are not necessarily those who sinned- actually, most of the time, they are the innocent, the innocent who perish b/c of other people’s aggression, negligence or indifference.

Victims of tragedies don’t “perish” b/c they are “cursed”! If you were cursed when you die young or unexpectedly, it would not make sense that Jesus himself died young in a tragic way. But we see people perish because the way they die don’t make any sense. They are destroyed by the violence, the injustice and the absurdity our sins bring into the world. It’s not death that takes away the meaning of life, it’s sin! There are two ways of dying in the OT: Either you have your name perish, either you lie with your ancestors filled with years and children. What Jesus was saying is that we need to live lives that bear fruit instead of bringing destruction – barrenness being this very fate that threatens the fig tree in the parable.

Today Jesus calls us to refuse the absurdity, the injustice and the violence of the world and the best way we can respond to that is to tend our own garden, “to bear the fruit of repentance” as JB called the people to do at the beginning of the Gospel. We don’t have control over tragedies, but we have control over our own lives, we can choose to just sit there and criticize what’s going on and how people mess up everything or we can choose to live a fruitful life that brings healing and liberation, as did Moses.

And so maybe there are different ways to hear the parable of the fig tree. We generally assume that God is this man angry at the barren tree we are who wants to punish us by cutting us down, and Jesus is the gardener who tries to buy us a little more time. But maybe in the parable this man sadden by his tree is us and the tree is our world and the gardener shows us how, instead of despairing, we are called to look after it. Maybe we are tempted to give up b/c of all the violence and absurdity, but maybe Jesus calls us to look at the tree that is our world with compassion and hope and Jesus asks us to give our best to take care of it. If Jesus is the gardener of our world, maybe as disciples of Christ we can work with Christ to be the manure. The manure is just dust – as we were reminded on Ash Wednesday – but we are promised today that our dust can also bring life and renewal if we collaborate with him. Amen.

– I wrote the sermon I am about to give before the attack on the NZ Mosque…As I was re-reading the Gospel for today, this image of the hen gathering her chicks under her wings hit me. When God gathers us under God’s wings, it’s not about us standing under the same banner, it is about how God wants us to be close to God’s heart and close to one another. How much our divisions, the hate we have and the violence we use against each other must grieve God! Let’s keep in our prayers all the victims and families of victims – along with all those who are victims of discrimination. Pray also for the repentance and conversion of their attackers.

– Suffering is on our minds these weeks…If our readings in Lent were a movie, we would see the cross at the horizon coming into clearer focus as we make our way through the season / “forward tracking effect”. Last week, we were told that Satan departed Jesus “until an opportune time”, today we are clearly informed that Herod wanted to kill Jesus (Herod Antipas / son of Herod the great – who also wanted to kill Jesus as a baby). Here again, it’s like in a movie, or in a tragedy = the main character is in danger and the danger is coming closer, the trap tightens and we start seeing that there would be no escape possible for Jesus, there were very powerful people who wanted him dead.

– We sometimes hear this saying that if you make someone mad, you probably have done something right…Not so sure about that!! If someone is mad at us, it is more likely that we have done something wrong! But in Jesus’s case, if you upset somebody who has more power than you, it probably means that you start being powerful too!…Jesus was powerful as a preacher and a miracle doer but he also gave power to powerless people. He said to the Pharisees: “I am casting out demons and performing cures” (and will continue to do so…). It’s interesting to notice that Jesus wasn’t just “doing good”, he did not only helped the poor, by helping them he gave them power, Jesus brought power back into balance in his society, and so he was doing something disturbing (Herod hated it to the point of wanting him dead).

– In the way we generally imagine things though, we often see Jesus only as somebody meek and humble who loved everybody, and we don’t understand why suddenly very bad people crucified him out of the blue. Well, I read recently an article by a professor at a seminary who challenges his students to think about Jesus as not being “innocent” / as having actually done something (even if it was something right). This professor says that there was a reason for Jesus to be put to death. Jesus’s condemnation is something we should see coming in the Gospel!

– If we’re honest reading Scriptures, we have to admit that Jesus was certainly meek and humble, but he was not a people pleaser, and actually, he was trouble! Good trouble, but trouble nonetheless. He was not an activist / an agitator (unlike the zealots he never affiliated with) but he put into question and disturbed the political and religious powers: Herod of course, but we know that the Pharisees didn’t like Jesus either. In our story today, it is unclear if the Pharisees were really trying to help Jesus or if they were accomplices with Herod – trying to trick Jesus, pushing him away from Galilee to send him to Jerusalem where the Romans had the actual power to put him to death. (Or maybe it was Herod manipulating everybody? – it could be the reason why Jesus called him “a fox”)

– At any rate, the question is for us today: As followers of Jesus, are we looking to be “good Christians”, to “do good” or, beyond that, are we also good trouble / trouble for those who abuse their power? We think about Christians as needing to stay away from politics / not mixing religion and politics, but in the Gospel, Jesus clashes with politics and religion. Our faith is incarnated, our faith happens in the real world. In our society, we have the freedom to worship (or to not worship) but it does not mean faith is to be kept behind close doors. Jesus is an outdoorsy kind of God / very public God. We cannot use the non establishment of religion as an excuse to remain silent, our faith should question society and the choices we make as a society. Jesus was non violent and welcomed everyone, but his way of living, what he preached and his care for the powerless shined light on the injustices of his time. We are called to do the same. It’s not about being partisan, thinking we need to belong to this or that party to be “the real Christians”…Actually, if we belong to a political party, maybe we are not so called to spend our time criticizing the other side of the aisle…maybe we are called to remind our own party of what we believe in…As Christians, what we are are called to do is ask questions (in words and deeds) in the name of our faith / question our country but also our family, our friends, even our church!

– We have to remember that Jesus was not neutral…He was on the side of the poor, vulnerable. His life was not only about being kind and loving (as we often would like to think), his life was about giving power to those who had none and so, as we see today in the Gospel, Jesus also had to resist and show courage, he had to be faithful to what he believed in, continuing to do the work, being on his way even if he could see the cross at the horizon…

– It’s interesting that Jesus compared himself to a mother hen. The mother hen can protect her chicks when she is attacked, but ultimately she is defeated by the fox. This image tells us that there is more to life than individual survival, even animals can give their lives for others in a protective and sacrificial love. Unlike “the Herods” whose goal in life was only to assert their power,Jesus gave his life to defend the defenseless. We also are called to live beyond our own survival. It’s not only about “physical” survival, it’s about living beyond our selfishness. But do we wake up in the morning thinking about our own goals or do we think about how we can help others, even at “some cost to ourselves” as we say in the Sunday school prayer? Jesus constantly showed the example of sacrificial love…

– How do we do that? Sacrificial love? Does not sound like a very exciting kind of love. But I think Abraham in our 1^st reading shows us a good example of what sacrifices are. For Abraham, it is not about renouncing to his desires – it is about puttinghis desires into God’s hands. The animal sacrifice he offers is just a symbol of the sacrifice of his heart: he abandons his desire of a child to God, instead of trying to “cut corners” with his servant. And so, we too are called to let God do God’s work trusting that, like the mother hen, God has our best interests at heart. God knows that Abraham’s deepest desire is for a legitimate heir with his wife and God will give him this child. Our sacrifice is not bargaining (I give you something so you give me something in return), it is about renouncing to think we know better. Foxes like Herod try to trick their way into getting what they want, manipulating their own little worlds, but we are called to step back and to let God act. It’s the most difficult sacrifice: Renouncing to be God…This is what the cross is all about.

When we love sacrificially, we acknowledge that there is only so much suffering God can spare us. The cross cannot be avoided when we renounce the fox’s ways: We are vulnerable in this world when we refuse tricks, violence, lies…Yet, God’s way is to do the right thing – as Jesus did – in spite of the consequences. We will suffer inevitably. But Jesus never promised us to be winners in this world. We are not asked to win in this world, we are asked to question and change our world(s) (big and small), as Jesus did: to make room for God and for God’s kingdom.

– Because indeed, sacrifice is necessary but the cross is not an end – it’s not because the cross is the horizon that it is ultimate. Jesus’s ultimate goal has never been the cross! The goal is communion, joy and abundant life. Sacrifices open doors to abundant life (leave room for God to act / often we stand in God’s way). Paul: “Don’t live as an enemy of the cross and you will receive glory”. Resurrection is the goal, not death!

– Lent: What do I need to sacrifice? Not to bargain with God, but to enable God to fill us and to use so we can do God’s work in this world / bring a change in the world as Jesus did?

Jesus’s meeting with Satan in the wilderness is a well-known passage of the Gospel, and it is often with this story that we start Lent, this time of the year when we are invited to reflect on the things that tempt us and how we may be led into surrendering to those temptations and sin, or, on the other side, how we could resist and overcome temptations to lead a godly life. What is interesting today is to notice that we often speak about temptations in the church to denounce them as bad – we should avoid them, and if we manage to avoid them, then we can preserve ourselves and be the perfect sons and daughters of God – yet, looking closer at our Gospel, we may hear another story. For me, what I find surprising, almost shocking and yet amazing – is to realize that all those things Jesus was tempted with, God gave them to Jesus in the end.

1 – Jesus was tempted with turning stones into bread – Well, all the four Gospels report that one day, Jesus will turn five loaves of bread into enough bread to feed five thousands. And not only Jesus will share this earthly bread, but he will be identified with the bread. John’s Gospel: “I am the bread of life”. To this very day, Jesus is present to us in the form of the Eucharistic bread.

2 – Jesus was tempted with the desire to rule the earth, and be given by Satan “all glory and all authority”. Christ to this day is praised in all the world by Christians as the King of kings and Son of God / but he is also acknowledged as an important figure by others believers and non believers. The Roman Empire has passed away since long, but Jesus is still honored.

3 – Jesus is tempted with throwing himself down the temple to see if God cares enough to rescue him. Well, we know that, in the end, Jesus will not be just caught as he falls but, after he is crucified, he will come back from the dead to be raised up to a new life with God.

And so, I really find it amazing that not only Jesus was given by God what he was tempted with, but God gave him even more, even better. Things so great and wonderful, Jesus could not even imagine.

What does it mean about Jesus?

We need to realize that if Jesus was tempted with these things: food, ruling the world and being God’s favorite, and if in the end God gave all of this to him – it means that Jesus really desired these things, and God thought they were good and wanted to give them to him as well!!

So what does it mean about our own temptations?

Well, maybe it means that the things we are tempted with aren’t necessarily bad. Jesus desired to feed people, to rule the world, and to be God’s only son because he knew deep down this is who he was. In the same way, it seems to me that we also want the things that we are created for. It’s true for our bodily desires of course (We crave food b/c we are meant to eat!), but it is also true for our desires to be acknowledged, to be praised…If we are meant for God and eternal life, we are meant for glory and so it’s natural we long for it!

In the end, very few of us desire bad things, or if we desire bad things it is still in believing they can be good / do us good (like drugs for example). Unlike the demons, we generally don’t want evil for evil. An ex member of the CIA testified one day that, as she got to know a lot of terrorists, she realized they did not want to do evil, they thought they were the good guys, heroes and God’s chosen…even if they were criminals in the sight of many, in their own eyes they fought for justice!

So what happens? How can things can go so wrong if we desire the very things we are meant for? I think this passage of the Gospel shows us three reasons. What goes wrong with our desires is that:

1 – We are impatient. We try to cut corners and we don’t think very deeply, “We want what we see”. We’re so hungry, we would eat stones! Our desire get stuck on what is right in front of us (David with Bathsheba). Yet generally this very thing / person won’t in the end fulfill our needs. This is what Jesus will teach the Samaritan woman: If you drink this water, you’ll be thirsty again. We don’t want to wait for God to bring what we really long for into our lives / to work to find it, we often try to get quick fixes by means that can be harmful to us or to others: We all want peace (good desire) but then to have peace, some will juts to numb themselves with alcohol instead of changing their lifestyle! Our quick fixes are a lack of efforts and also a lack of imagination! We want the first thing we can think of (“Money will solve all our problems!”)

2 – We are selfish: we want things for ourselves instead of thinking on how it can be a benefit to all. Satan offers to give the world to Jesus so Jesus can be glorified, but Jesus realizes that glory is not for himself, Jesus wants to bring the whole world into God’s glory. We may want good things, like for example a promotion at work, but we may be tempted to think only about how it would serve our interests (better salary, a nice title, a corner office) without thinking of the way we could use our promotion to collaborate with others/ to make a real change.

3 – The real problem with temptation: When we desire from a place of brokenness, instead of desiring from a place of abundance. We want to fill a void inside of us. That’s the reason why a lot of people have affairs / it’s mostly b/c they are lonely, they don’t share real intimacy (body, heart, spirit) with their close ones. Need to find this person who could fill their lives. But the idea is to love from a place of abundance- where you can give, instead of doing it from a place of neediness!

So we are tempted….But through temptations, we learn. As Jesus learned before starting his ministry, moving from a place of neediness to a place of abundance. Like Jesus, we are not asked to forsake desire, but to find a greater and deeper desire – a desire to give instead of a desire to take.

Temptations are often desires that are not mature, God does not want us to stop desiring, God wants us to desire better and deeper so God can give us what he created us for and we can give it to the world. For example, artistic people have often a desire for fame. And it is good b/c seeking fame they can touch a lot of people by sharing their emotions! Energetic people often have a desire for power, and it is good when they can be leaders who guide others…“Vocation: where deepest longing and the need of the world meet”. What will disappoint and deceive us is not desiring, it is desiring too little / too narrow. Desire to have right away / for our own benefit.

Conclusion: We could wonder…. Does God tempt us? (Lord’s prayer:“Lead us not into temptation” re-translated ) Yes and no. Not sure God tempts us, but as the Spirit led Jesus in the wilderness, we are certainly led in places of wilderness, when we are feeling empty, needy, – and yes that’s often when temptations show up. There are two ways to react to that:

– a lot of Christians live their life holding their breath, just trying to resist to temptations.

– but maybe, we can also realize that God is trying to tell us something when we are tempted. God talks to us about what’s deep inside of us. And by engaging the dialogue (As Jesus does with the Scriptures) we may gain something dealing with temptations instead of just fleeing from them, transforming our desires to bring the best out of us. Addicts who manage to recover aren’t those who just avoid situations where they are tempted, but as they think about the reasons why they are addicted, they learn something about themselves and learn how to lead healed lives that don’t leave them with a void to fill with whatever is available.

So maybe this Lent, as Jesus, we may want to think not only about how we can just shut out our temptations, but also face the wilderness they come from, to be in touch with our brokenness, to find what we are really called to do, called to be and to find the many ways in which God can save us. Amen.

We mark today the start of Lent with a concrete / bodily sign (as we often do in the church). Today, the sign of the ashes on our foreheads, a sign associated with mourning. The ashes do not hold a special / magical power, but they mark the opening of this period of Lent – a time were we are invited (as we will read in a few minutes) to “self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting, self-denial, reading and meditating God’s holy Word”.

It’s often misunderstood. I like to say that Lent can give us “Spiritual anxiety”. This time of the year when we are supposed to be super holy, to give up a lot of bad habits and take on many religious practices…We often think of Lent as a time of privation / when we are supposed to do many efforts. Yet I think that if we really listen to the Scriptures today, we will realize that it’s not what it is about. Actually, Isaiah, and after him Jesus, seem to be tired and even a bit angry w/ people acting super religious. Because, they say, this is not what God expects from us.

So what does God expect from us? Well, as I was meditating those texts I thought that it is probably less about doing a lot of religious activities than about putting our whole heart in what we do / the efforts we make.

The Gospel today is often read as a denunciation of hypocrisy, and it’s right, one of the things Jesus hated the most in the world was hypocrisy. But I also think Jesus didn’t spend a lot of time making moral judgments with lists of do’s and don’ts. Indeed, Jesus does not want us to put on a show when we practice our religion. But it’s probably not so much because b/c God “does not like hypocrites” but b/c Jesus wants us to be authentic and invested. The way we give alms, fast, pray, these are the examples Jesus uses but more deeply, I think that what he is trying to say is that we cannot find God if we remain superficial, if we don’t have deep motives to do what we do, and just follow what others expect us to do – as did the Pharisees with those religious practices – sometimes b/c they were hypocrites / but sometimes maybe just b/c they didn’t know better, they didn’t look for more to religion than external practices.

And I think at some level, we can all identify with them. At some point, we can all end up doing things w/o really knowing why we are doing them, not only in religion but also in every day life. We spend a lot of time trying to be praised by others or maybe just trying to please them. We want them to see us, notice us so they will accept us and make us feel loved and important. We lose the sense of who we are deep down, we believe we are what others think of us.

But listening to the Gospel, we may want to think about Lent as a process where we can reconnect to our souls / to find what’s deep inside of us. Instead of acting all on the outside, Jesus asks us to do things “in secret”. He does not asks us to hide! He talks about being authentic. Instead of pretending to be something else / or just trying to follow w/o understanding what we are doing, Jesus asks us to open a space within ourselves so we can be intimate with God / close to God’s heart. Paradoxically, those who are hiding may be those who put on a show as they practice their piety, they put on a show for others, maybe even for God, maybe even for themselves – They’re like: “We are these people who have it all together and live perfect lives…”

In the Gospel today, Jesus asks us to not act like hypocrites, but more deeply he wants to protect us from exhausting ourselves in doing things (including religion) trying to find validation in the way people look at us. Trying to be accepted, to fit in, to be rewarded – waiting for people to praise us / return our love / the interest we have in them. Interestingly, Fat Tuesday is often celebrated in the world by wearing masks. Does it mean that we need to take off our masks on Ash Wednesday? The symbol we have on our foreheads make me want to believe so. I read an article about a guy who said he happened to visit a church on Ash Wednesday, and when he saw the priest putting ashes on the parishioners’ foreheads he thought to himself: Well, this is a place where we say the truth!

On Ash Wednesday, we take off the masks to remember that we are dust. It does not mean we are garbage. The whole earth is dust – start dust / all life around us comes from the explosion of a big star. It’s wonderful and precious and fragile in the same time. In our world, we need more than ever to remember that our earth, each living creature and each one of us is wonderful and precious and fragile at the same time – each one of us is a miracle. How would we live if we had this inner conviction? How would we treat each other? And how would we relate to God?

Lent is not about beating ourselves up. Isaiah and after him Jesus make it clear that God does not want us to beat ourselves up. Lent is an invitation to stop putting on a show / running from who we are / it’s an invitation to be more authentic, more compassionate, more attentive. Unfortunately, Isaiah is often read as a way to say: “We should do less religious activities and more social justice”. But I think there can be as much misunderstood “good deeds” as false piety. In piety as in outreach and social justice, what God expects from us is to be real, to act out of our own heart, to act out of love. Isaiah does not ask us to be “good people”, he asks us to be loving and compassionate: “Share your bread, welcome those in need into your house. Enjoy fellowship, take care of one another”.

So maybe during this Lent, instead of trying to do to much, maybe we could think of just one or two things that connect us to ourselves, to others and to God and to do them with all our hearts, to be really in them. And maybe even: to savor them, to savor God in them.

I invite this Lent to think about joy – In the Gospel today, Jesus speaks about those things that steal from us our treasure, and trying to live up to people’s expectations is certainly something that robs us of the treasure of our joy. We have joy when we have pleasure in doing the things we do (This what play is all about / work is the opposite). If we do the things we do only for obtaining something else (a salary, a reward, consideration), joy is always postponed. Our relationship with God and our neighbor should be about enjoying each other presence / real intimacy / not playing a part for one another. Makes us feel vulnerable = dust. Yet if you can be truly yourself and discover in the process that you are loved for yourself, what biggest joy could there be? From this starting point, we can accept who we are and do all the things we’re supposed to do in repentance: ask for forgiveness, mend, change our behavior, grow and move on. Ashes: sign of mourning only to ask to be reborn into our authentic, true and eternal selves. Because during Lent, we mustn’t forget that where we’re headed is Resurrection. Amen.

There is this thing with the Gospel is that often we start reading a passage, and as we read this passage, we find the story so beautiful and well, so extraordinary that we may start doubting it really happened / or at least we wonder if it really happened this way – like Jesus feeding 5000, the water turning into wine or maybe like today the Transfiguration: Jesus is up on the mountain and as he starts praying, his face and clothes become dazzling white and Moses and Elijah show up.

If you find it hard to believe, you are in good company. A lot of theologians like to think that the whole thing is maybe just “symbolic”, told as an image, an illustration to make us understand something deeper – here: that Jesus is indeed the Son of God, so his glory must be shown in a dramatic vision.

But to me, what is interesting is that, each time there is one of those extraordinary stories in the Gospel – stories that seem really hard to believe – there are also always a few details that are so grounded in everyday life, so real, that I want to believe the whole story is true and this is exactly how it happened. Certainly the case today: The Transfiguration is an extraordinary story and yet, Luke reports little details that make you think he sticks to the facts. (Matthew and Mark tell the story as well, but they don’t notice what Luke notices.).
And this what Luke notices:

– Jesus and the disciples are praying

– The disciples feel sleepy.

And well, I think Luke is very candid, because Christians don’t always like to admit it, but we know that for a fact: Prayer can make us feel sleepy… I looked up in a dictionary the definition of “dozing off” and it reads: “to fall into a light sleep unintentionally” and then the example they give you is: He dozed off during the sermon! So this is well acknowledged this is how worship goes sometimes!! We certainly experience some “dozing off” here at Christ Church with a service at 9:00am. It will be worse next week with daylight saving time!

So what about that? Well, there are actually quite a few times in the Gospel when Jesus asks his disciples to stay awake: to pray with him, as in the garden of Gethsemane, but also Jesus tells parables about staying awake, and it’s like he is always worried about his disciples falling asleep. And I always wondered about that until this week when I read an article about a church in Washington that manages to attract a lot of young people (so the newspaper made an article out of it!). A young man who was interviewed said he decided to stay after attending a Bible study because: “The word of God woke up something in [him] that was asleep for a while”

He said: The word of God woke up something in me that was asleep for a while.

And I thought: Well, that’s it, that’s what it’s all about. Jesus does not care if we fall asleep when we are tired. Jesus was worried about people being hungry – no doubt he had compassion on those who were tired / fall asleep even if it was during prayer or his sermons. But Jesus was still worried his disciples let some important things fall asleep inside of them / become numb / forgotten and so Jesus tried very hard / went out of his way to capture their attention, to remind them of who they were / meant to be.

Actually, the Transfiguration story concludes the cycle of Epiphany and it is a parallel to the beginning of the season when we read about Jesus’s baptism: We hear the same words: “This is my Son, my chosen”. The voice of God asks to look at Jesus and listen to him/ The Gospel wants to remind us that we are sons and daughters of God too and warns us that we should not let that go numb.

But maybe we have a feeling that we are not sleepy. We are for sure a busy generation. According to a recent study: we never had gotten so little sleep and it puts us into troubles: health problems, depression, accidents. Yet, we are sleepy, in the sense that we can all numb ourselves:

– With different things: TV shows, addictions, work…
– In different ways: Parts of ourselves, part of our lives that have fallen asleep…

Jesus wants us to be full people / alive / to use all that we have, all that we are. And we may make this experience that God wants to wake us up – like the disciples on that day of the Transfiguration, like this young man in this church in DC. I know I could relate to the story of the man because that happened to me. When I was in my late twenties, I stopped going to church for a while, and then one day I went to a prayer group and they were singing Taizé songs and it was so moving it’s like it reminded me I had a soul.

But being reminded of our soul, it’s not only about religion. Maybe you have been woken up to your soul in other ways, like you read a book and it made you curious / you wanted to think more deeply. Or you started a painting class and you discovered you could use your hands, become a more creative person. Or maybe you met somebody who touched your heart, or you discovered a cause you wanted to fight for…

We all fall asleep at some point and we all need to wake up: It’s true for us as individuals, as couples, as churches… This week, our church had to take the Diocesan survey: “Unstuck church assessment”: The purpose is to identify whether congregations have fallen asleep! (We’re not doing too bad, but we could do better…).

It’s wonderful to know we are accepted as we are / loved by God but we are made to grow: grow fully into our possibilities. Isn’t it heart breaking when you see that your children don’t use their gifts? You love them but if they spend their time staring at a screen, you probably want them to raise their heads, to participate in the conversation…Well, maybe this how God sees us to! God wants us to mature! We are made for so much more…In his letter today, Paul says that we are made to be transformed in the image of Christ, from one glory to another.

And indeed the Gospel story does not end with the Transfiguration: Jesus walks down the mountain and he cures this young man – why is there such an extended description of his affliction? Well, the description insists on the fact that the young man is distorted and disfigured by his crisis / it’s like he is a counterpoint to Jesus whose face is radiant. But Jesus does not condemn him. On the other way around, we see Jesus restoring the man to his true face and true beauty…Satan’s work is to disfigure who we are. But more often, we may just don’t work hard enough to be our most beautiful selves!

Of course, it’s not about the way we look like…It’s about – as Paul notices – being fully ourselves: bold / confident disciples (even bolder than Moses!). Jesus gets mad at the end of the story because his disciples don’t act as if they were empowered. They are shy, they don’t think they can do the healing. How often is it that we also think we cannot help people / do something for God and we just try to get by. We do that as individuals / as a church. Jesus wants us to we have power (=the power to act/serve), in the same way you would want your children to be able to take care of themselves…and to take care of others too!

It’s not easy to grow, to change, it can be painful…We are also woken up in suffering: Like when you start exercising and it makes you hurt in muscles you didn’t know you had in you. There is a reason why we fall asleep during worship: Sometimes it’s boring of course, but also it’s demanding. To really look, listen and make a change in us…Dozing off / numbing is a good way out sometimes…And yet, how much do we need to stay awake if we don’t want to miss the important stuff. Had the disciples fallen asleep on that day, they would have missed this incredible vision.

We see that Jesus is transformed as he prays / we too are transformed as we work on our relationship with God…Let God work on ourselves / transform us so like Jesus we can “shine God’s glory”, not to hide but to transform the world. Luke mentions a time range of “Eight days”, some think it points to the new creation. God renews us and transforms us to mirror Christ. Maybe Lent is this time to let God “re-create us” and awaken us to our true selves. Amen.

– Famous Gospel of the Beatitudes…Yet not that famous. Since we are in Year C “Luke’s year”, we have heard this morning Luke’s version of the Beatitudes which is quite different from Matthew’s, the best loved one: “Blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the meek…”

Luke’s beatitudes are shorter, more straightforward / there is more density and focus and it seems to concentrate on very concrete issues (poverty, hunger, depression/sadness and rejection). Luke’s version is “down to earth” (if you will) whereas Matthew’s is more “spiritual”.

There are two reasons for that I think:

– Luke’s Gospel is known as the Gospel of the poor and the despised (the women, the sick) / when Matthew is more oriented towards building a Christian community.

– Luke was believed to be a doctor, so he was used to deal with concrete issues and people’s bodies: Hungry bodies, bodies suffering from sickness (He openly mentions some taboos of his time, like women’s bleeding for example), bodies suffering from exposure and depression (even if the term was not invented yet!), bodies suffering from torture and mistreatment…

And so Luke’s Gospel puts us in touch with the concrete suffering that’s going on in our world!
Which asks us to be very concrete in return with our faith and in the way we practice it…

Luke assures that all those who suffer in their bodies, would it be from hunger, sickness, depression or rejection are seen by God and, more than that, that God blesses them.

What does it mean? Well, blessedness is not necessarily about winning the lottery, or even giving birth to beautiful children or having a great job. We often make of the fact of being blessed a synonymous of being lucky/ successful. But blessedness can be very different from being lucky/successful – and this is maybe the reason why Luke chooses those examples of people who are obviously not lucky/successful. Blessedness is about our ability to experience God’s presence with us, to be made part of the kingdom, to be used for God’s purpose. A few weeks ago, we blessed our cars on the parking lot. We may see it as a protection against accidents but mostly, when we bless a person, an animal or a thing, it is about asking God to use it to God’s purpose. It does not mean – as some may believe – that it makes us God’s little soldiers. More deeply, being blessed mean that we are where God is to be found and experienced. – and that is the deep meaning and true joy in life. The Greek authorizes to translate blessedness as “True joy” / We read in some translations “Happy are the poor”…

Happiness is not to be found in poverty, hunger, sorrow and rejection themselves, but in the way God can visit us in those experiences. God is not to be found by looking up at the sky. God is present with the people who suffer and struggle.

Why? How comes that in those difficult experiences God can be found?

I think, once again, it has something to do with our bodies. Two weeks ago, I attended a retreat based on yoga, and our instructor who is also a priest, told us we need to listen to what our bodies tell us because: “Our heads can talk us in and out of basically anything, when our bodies cannot lie”.
Jeremiah puts it like this today, he says: “The heart is devious above all else” / We keep telling ourselves the stories we want to believe. But if we pay attention, our bodies will tell us what is really going on. Like sometimes when we think we’re fine with something, except our stomach is filled with knots.

– The blessedness in the experiences of hunger, sickness, sorrow and rejection, when we are in touch in the materiality and fragility of our bodies, is that we can learn who we are / how to be real. We realize our poverty and our inability to have control over our destiny, and yet, this is when we can make room for God, feel our need for God. It is not that God is happy if we realize that we are miserable because God wants to be God and desires us to stay at our place, it is because God indeed created us for God and for one another and if we want to lead our lives ignoring that, we are heading to a very dark place / we will lose true happiness.

This is also the sense of the curses.

I love it that Luke adds curses (Matthew does not do that!), because the curses really explain what it is all about. When we are detached from our hunger, the uncertainty of our life, when we think everybody approves what we do and we can live selfishly in an ignorant bliss, we miss out on God because we don’t live in the truth. We live in an illusion – pursuing happiness where it is not to be found, trying to fill our lives in an exhausting quest.

The more I think about Christian life, the more I think the only thing God asks of us is to be real.

Jesus often calls Satan the “Father of lies”. Satan wants us to believe our illusions when God wants us to experience what is real. To be real with our hunger, with our deepest longings, to be real with seeing the limits of the things we possess and the false security money gives us, to be real in the feelings we experience and in the way we express our emotions (not pretending to laugh when we want to cry) we need to be real in our human relationships and in the way we testify about what we truly believe in. Jeremiah uses the image of a tree that is well grounded, and this is what a Christian should look like: Grounded in reality. It does not mean we don’t have dreams! It means we don’t lie to ourselves, to one another or to God and so we can be really present / in each other’s presence. (And maybe to make these dreams happen, instead of just dreaming them).

Interestingly, Luke mentions that as Jesus preached those things, he healed people. Well, we know that lies, secrets and illusions can make us really sick, it’s not only about knots in our stomach. Hiding who we are is not God’s will for us, we are meant to live truly and fully.

So what about the curse? Well, yes, if we refuse to be real – we are cursed. But it does not mean that God is going to punish us because God will be unhappy that we misbehaved! God does not punish us, but as Jeremiah points out with this example of the tree, is that there is a law to life! And the law of life is that, if we live in selfishness with the illusion of being alone in the world and not needing anything, we are like a tree without water and we are going to die inside! It’s not a punishment, it’s just the consequence of our actions because indeed we are meant for each other and for God, as a tree is meant for water and reasonable heat! When I moved in my office here, I got a palm tree because I love plants. But a few days ago, I realized that I clearly underestimated how much water it needed, I noticed it was all drying up. Yet I don’t believe God is punishing me because I have not been good at watering the tree…The tree is dying because it needed water is all!

Jesus often says in John’s Gospel that he is the living water. Isn’t it a beautiful way to say that Jesus is exactly what we need so we can grow and thrive and give glory to God by the beauty of our lives? Jesus is God’s blessing among struggles and sufferings, looking at Jesus, following Jesus and giving our hearts to Jesus leads us to be those wonderful human beings – not because they’re perfect, not because they look good – wonderful human beings because by being fully engaged / present, they too can become blessings to others and to the world. Amen.

“Epiphany” = Manifestation. Encounters with God. What our readings are all about today. What I love is that we go from very solemn to very casual…From the Temple, a vision of the Lord sitting on the throne surrounded by angels in Isaiah, to an encounter with Jesus on the shore of the sea of Galilee (=Gennesaret). You may have experienced God’s presence on a vacation, contemplating the beauty and vastness of the horizon by the seaside but it’s not really what it is about today. What it means is that Jesus shows up on Simon Peter’s and his partners’ workplace! Jesus is not interested in visiting kings or religious leaders as prophets used to do…Jesus is happy in the presence of everyday people busy doing their everyday activities.

Now think about how it would be for you to have Jesus showing up at your work place –hanging out with your colleagues, talking with them – maybe giving you a hand with what you’re doing…Because this is exactly what is happening today in our Gospel! A rabbi was teaching at the seminary when I was a student there, and we asked him what he liked about Christianity: He said what he liked is that we have a religion where God just shows up! And it’s so true…

Yet, it took me a while to figure what it really means that God shows up…Of course, I can go with the fact that we can meet God in various places, with different kind of people. But I have a sense I need to be ready for it, to be in a certain state of mind. Spirituality today is much about quietening ourselves / reaching inner peace…If we feel holy, then we think we are ready to meet God. Unfortunately, with this belief a lot of people think they cannot be close to God: They are too busy, too preoccupied. A lot of people think they can’t afford to be spiritual / religious people.

Yet, Simon Peter gave me something to think about this week. I wondered what state of mind he was in when he met Jesus on that day? I bet it wasn’t good. One commentary suggests that there was probably some editing going on when he says to Jesus: “Master, we have worked all night and we have caught nothing. Yet if you say so…” The commentary says that Simon Peter probably used a more colorful language, because he was very tired and discouraged, maybe he felt like a failure for not being able to do his job…

Well, who can’t relate to that? Those men have been working hard, they gave their best efforts and it led to nothing. They were weary and disappointed…worried too: How were they going to feed their families? Because we’re not talking about leisure fishing here / these people fished for a living. No fish, no food. Well, you may have had one of those days and maybe you felt you had no time / no room for God when you felt like that. That’s probably what happened to Simon Peter. We notice indeed that he was not listening as Jesus was teaching to the crowds. Simon Peter was busy with his partners “cleaning their nets”, packing up after a fruitless day. Bitter. Anxious. Ashamed maybe.

And yet. Yet that’s when Jesus comes to meet with him. In the midst of bitterness and anxiety.

Made me think differently about meeting God in everyday life. I know I won’t meet God only in the Temple or at church. I know I may meet God at the groceries store: I would help this person, or give a dollar to the homeless, or maybe somebody will smile to me and I’ll have a sense of God’s presence. But is it possible that I have a genuine encounter with God on one of those days when I am worried? Disappointed? Bitter? Cynical? Not paying attention? Well, it seems that the Gospel says to us today that it is possible. And moreover, that may be precisely the times when God comes closer. Because this is what happens today, Simon Peter is not paying attention to Jesus, but Jesus pays attention to him. Jesus goes to Simon Peter, and Jesus does not ask him what the sermon he preached to the crowd was about. Jesus knows what is on Simon Peter’s mind (his anxiety for food) without even asking. And he says to him: Go back, throw your nets.

And so it looks like we don’t have to reach the perfect state of mind to let God touch us and change our lives. Spirituality today is indeed a lot about inner peace. And it is great to achieve inner peace, to be able to sit a whole hour to pray, but it is not a condition for God to be close to us. God comes to us first, though we are sinners: It means not only that God forgives us our wrong doings, it means also, more simply, that God comes to us in the midst of our brokenness, of our limits, of our business, in spite of our inattentiveness, our fatigue, our fears and worries.

Maybe we want to remember that the next time we have a bad day at work, an argument with a friend, or when we suffer in our hearts or in our bodies. Maybe the whole world expects us to be fine or great, but God does not expect us to be fine to come to us and to work in us, with us and through us.

So how does God work in us, with us, through us? Look at the way Jesus helps Simon Peter. Read closely: Jesus does nothing, really! We say Jesus does a miracle in this Gospel, but basically all he does is to go talk to Simon Peter and tell him to throw his net in deeper waters. He does not do it for him / He is not patronizing: “Let me help you b/c obviously you have no idea how to do that” (Like some of us can do with their spouses or children!). Jesus knows Simon Peter can do his job, is up to the task. He is just there giving support and encouragement and the miracle takes place.

It reminded me of those words by Thomas Kempis: “WHEN Jesus is near, all is well and nothing seems difficult. When He is absent, all is hard.”

Maybe on that day Simon Peter was willing to do things a little differently, take an extra risk, try another time, go a little deeper (People in Israel were quite afraid of the sea, even fishermen!) because he had this friend standing by him / encouraging him. It’s not about “cheering up” in a “you got this” kind of way or coaching someone to their limits– it’s about having somebody who sees you, who cares, who think you’re important and what you do is valuable. Did it change a little something in your life when you had somebody who believed (or, on the other side, did not believe) in you? Everything.

We have here a table full of the pictures of our sweethearts – We know how their love helped us carry us through hard times. They did not wait for us to be perfect or to feel wonderful. They just saw the goodness and the possibilities in us. And b/c we loved them, we listened to them…Maybe today the risk Simon Peter took was the risk to believe that Jesus believed in him. That it did not matter what he believed / felt about himself, but what mattered was what Jesus believed about him. “But if you say so…” Feeling the love / trust from Jesus led Simon Peter to act /try one last time in spite of all.

The Gospel presents us in Jesus a God not so much preoccupied of us believing in God – but a God showing us that God believes in us: Think we are good, able / even when we feel like a mess or a failure. B/c this is how Simon Peter felt and yet from catching fish, Simon Peter will catch people – and we are all witness of the extraordinary destiny of this simple man. Because he realized that Jesus could come to him wherever he was, work in him, with him and through him. No. Matter. What.

Good Gospel to meditate on as we install our new vestry and acknowledge our faithful and good servants. We are all invited to turn to God and ask God to be with us and use us as we are. We have no excuse! God can really work in us, with us and through us, that God believes in us and empower us to spread his love and serve others…We know how much this world needs the miracle of faith, justice and hope. May with Isaiah today just answer: “Here I am, send me!”