Hearts that don’t grow old (or weary)

– Have you ever met somebody that made you feel better about growing old? Somebody who made you feel you wish you’d be like them when you reach their age? Maybe you feel old already, but maybe you can remember a time in your youth when that happened to you to meet that kind of person. Maybe you still try to live up to this example…

I met a few people in my life who made me feel better about growing older, and I noticed it was not necessarily people who managed to stay in shape, or who kept really active. Most of the time, it was people who had true goodness in their hearts, yet they weren’t only “Sweet old ladies”. What characterized them is that they managed to keep (or even to develop) their “spark”: playfulness and joy.

The best way I have found to describe them is to say that these people had a sense of wonder in front of existence and an energy to respond to it, even if they were very limited in their bodies or even in their minds.

A sense of wonder:

We often assume that wise people are those who aren’t surprised by anything, who have “seen it all before” and have something clever to say in every situation. But Plato, who was this great philosopher who lived centuries before Jesus, said the other way around: He said that wonder is the basis of wisdom. Wisdom is to see life with new eyes, to not take for granted what we believe or what we are taught. To be curious and rediscover the world everyday. That’s also how you get to know God. If you think about it, it is indeed difficult to find God if you “have already seen it all before”!

– These are the thoughts that come to my mind when I read about Simeon and Anna. They both had this quality of people who age well. They spent their lives in the Temple, and yet God was no routine to them. Although they were very old, they were still on the look to see what God was up to, and even at the brink of the grave, they still expected the best out of life and even out of human History, when they could have been very disabused / bitter with the world / life as they were (Roman occupation, endless widowhood…)

– But Simeon and Anna kept their hearts burning and longing. Although they probably had seen thousands of babies in their lives, they hadn’t “seen it all before”, they looked at this young family coming into the Temple with new eyes, and they saw something wonderful. It is a very good example for us, as we too often assume that to be good Christians, we have to be somewhat resigned, accept things as they are and be satisfied with our lot. Simeon and Anna show us what it is to have faith: We believe that God will bring the best, come into our lives and bring us the comfort and the strength we need.

– Yet, it does not mean that we have to be optimistic in a naive way, like these who believe everything is always fine or will be fine, and remain superficial in the way they lead their lives and are unconcerned by the suffering around them. Simeon and Anna weren’t naive, they saw the struggles of their people, and they had a sense of the difficulties Mary and Jesus would have to go through. Simeon said to Mary that a “sword [would] pierce her soul”, and it’s not only about Jesus’s death. Jesus, and as a consequence Mary, will experience misunderstandings, rejection, hate…Anna and Simeon knew life and they knew that life breaks your heart / Maybe especially when you are a loving person who refuses to be tough, violent and revengeful. You can become a target for other people’s frustration and anger/ Constant criticism or prejudices.

Sometimes we think we suffer b/c we have done something wrong, but sometimes we suffer b/c we have done something right. I heard one day someone saying: “Sometimes we suffer just b/c of who we are”. When you love, you make yourself vulnerable and so often it’s wonderful but sometimes you can get really hurt.

The letter to the Hebrews today talks about “Test” – that Jesus was “tested”. Well, when we are “tested” (“Purified and refined” as Malachi puts it in OT) it is not about God watching us from above to check on how well we do when God sends us trials. “Test” is in this that unavoidable suffering and trials reveal “our inner thoughts”, reveal who we truly are, in the same way that some people will reveal “their inner thoughts” when Jesus is going to oppose them.

A theologian named Ramsey said that you cannot minister to others until God breaks your heart, meaning until you open yourself to suffering by suffering yourself. As Christians, we cannot love if our hearts are not open, if we cannot be touched by others. Mary had her heart broken, but it is believed by many people that, in this, we can see in her a mother to all of God’s people, b/c she knew everything there is to know about suffering b/c the worst happened to her.

Life constantly asks us this question: Are you going to let your heart die / become hardened / weary or are you going to keep on loving no matter what? Paradoxically, a broken heart is a heart that is (still) alive.

The story of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple is a bitter sweet story. Sense of awe/joy and pain/danger in the same time. But it is how life is. Older people know that Life is both beautiful and tragic, wonderful and terrible.

– How do we navigate that with faith?

How can we live with a sense of wonder and joy and be heart broken in the same time?

I discovered a poetess a few weeks ago. Her name is Cleo Wade, and she wrote a book called “Heart talk”. She writes something I find really beautiful. She says we all go through life holding the pieces of our broken hearts but along the way we meet someone and with all the pieces of our broken hearts, we make a new heart. With all the pieces of our broken hearts, we make a new heart.

She mostly talks about romantic relationships, but I think it can be true for all kind of relationships, and especially for us as a Christian community. We bring the pieces of our broken hearts, and together we create a new heart / should create a new heart, find together the ability to love and serve and respond to the suffering of the world. We find joy and purpose again by being together.

This is the sense of our rite of healing this day

Often when we think of healing, we say “We need time to heal”, like it’s something we need to do on our own, hiding. But in a Christian community, we don’t / should not have to hide when we suffer, when we cry…we should be able to heal together, to bring our hearts back together remembering that God is the one who bring our hearts back together and with one another. Who makes us whole and keep our spark going / keep us going...

The Scriptures today are about…The Scriptures! Reading aloud / Reading in public / as a congregation.
*OT: Ezra brings the book and reads to the people as they gather in Jerusalem after having returned from Exile.
* Gospel: Jesus reads the scroll in the synagogue – He is also coming back home in Nazareth after his experience in the wilderness.

It’s not unlike what we do here every Sunday. We share the Scriptures together, in our “home church”. It is said that the Hebrews were deeply moved, they cried when they heard the Scriptures. In the same way, the people in the synagogue in Nazareth were “amazed” (surprised, troubled, for better of for worse). Scriptures can stir in us many kind of reactions: It can bring comfort or on the other side make us upset.

The Bible should not leave us indifferent because it is about God but it is also about us…

Of course, the Bible is about who is God, about God’s love…But the Bible tells a story (The “Law” is actually the 5 books of the Torah/ Five first books our Bible: Story of the covenant and the Story of liberation from Egypt.) The Bible is also the story of Exile with Prophets / Redemption in JC.

It is about what God’s love do for God’s people: Set them free.

In our Gospel today, Isaiah is strangely quoted. Luke puts an emphasis on the liberation part because this is what it is really about. Year of Jubilee: When the slaves were set free.
In Jesus, it’s the continuation of the promise, the fulfillment of the Scriptures – with liberation.

– Liberation from what? From very concrete things: Oppression, injustices. Liberation from jail (Joseph, Peter), from being slaves (Exodus) from captivity in a foreign land (Exile)…But all of that is the material, part is like the top of the iceberg, the visible part of a deeper spiritual reality: We are captives. We need liberation from our sins, our pain, our diseases, our addictions and anxieties, our doubts or maybe we need to be liberated from our certainties, our prejudices.

What do we need to be liberated from? What would it change in our lives? In the world?

– Jesus’s statement understood as the church’s statement. Good reminder since this Sunday is for most churches Annual meeting Sunday. When Jesus says he is bringing liberation, it reminds us that Church is not only about the building (and the issues we may have with it!). The church is not only about the (different) ways we worship. This week is the week of prayers for the unity of Christians… Maybe we can agree that what matters the most in church is our love for Christ and how we carry Christ’s mission / what we actually do for others (MLK), how we bring them liberation.

And so reading Scriptures is transformative: They move us “inside” because they try to move us from the places where we are stuck… They should lead us to question, to change, to act.

Jesus reminds us in the Gospel that it is about doing / participating. When Jesus says that the Scriptures have been “Fulfilled in your hearing”, he does not necessarily mean: “I am the Messiah” (Some passages of the Gospel show that Jesus tried to avoid this kind of publicity). Maybe he says that we are invited to get it done, and he saw himself as called to do it, as directly concerned by the Scriptures. (When some of the Jews at Jesus’s time were dreaming of a Messiah to fix things for them)

What about us? Do we think that it is “on us”? That we need to “fulfill the Scriptures”?

– So, concretely, how do we receive and bring liberation? Can take many different forms but this is my experience this week: If Jesus asks us to bring liberation, visiting prison is part of the things I try to do…Difficult for me to make abstraction of surroundings: walls / locks / uniforms / guns…It makes me feel very powerless b/c maybe the lawyer bring actual freedom from the cell but what kind of liberation could I bring as a Christian?

This week I just sat as I attended a painting workshop. Coloring and painting together with the inmates, a small group of women, we talked about our every day lives: Children, pets, clothes, celebrities…At some point, I realized I didn’t see the walls anymore and felt no more anxiety at all. I think we “forgot” where we were.

As I thought about this experience, I think we had a sense of liberation because of mutual connection. And I think this what Paul is talking about with the image of the body. Isolation makes us sick (psychologically) in different ways, we cannot “function” being isolated, the same way members cannot “function” when they are not connected to the body. But when we are together, we are made whole. We are set free from anxieties, fears, the prison of our own minds and hearts.

The image of the body for the Christian community is a very strong image. An eye cannot be an eye without a body / just a piece of flesh with no function and no life. But it’s not only about function, what we are able to do, the work, it is also about sensitivity: we feel deeply when we are connected. Share pain and joy together. When we don’t share the pain and the joy, life loses all its meaning.

God really created us for one another, as God created each member for the body.

Paul reminds us of our inter-dependence on one another: we rediscover that with ecology / example of Yellowstone: When the wolves were reintroduced in the National Park, it changed the whole ecosystem and even the physical geography. Each one of us has a role and a function for the benefit and the enjoyment of all.

Paradox / Mystery: As we participate in our community, we become better, more fulfilled individuals. We become truly who we are. Each one of us must have something to do and empowered to do it well. Each one of us has a unique place according to their gifts. In the EC, we are “welcome” but more than welcome, we need to be “needed” / to have a part to play. We “liberate” our gifts / our skills / discover and give the best of who we are in serving our community. In the church, there is not one person to “do it all” or one the other side one person to “sit down and enjoy the show”.

Think about the ways we can serve / be connected to each other in ways that “liberate” bring joy and fulfillment to each members and to the whole community…

Once in a while, we find ourselves confronted with difficult readings on a Sunday. This is certainly the case today, as we have just heard this Gospel where Jesus commands his disciples, and therefore commands us, to: “Love [our] enemies, do good to those who hate [us], bless those who curse [us], pray for those who abuse [us]”.

It is a difficult Gospel for two main reasons:

– First of all, it’s not natural. As Jesus notices, we love our friends and those who do good to us. Love thrives in a circle of giving and receiving that increases mutual affection on both ends.

– But thinking about it, it is not the first time Jesus asks something “supernatural” of us so we might be able to fully grow into disciples: Leave your family, sell your possessions, be ready for persecutions…

– What makes this Gospel very difficult is that we know that love for the enemies can be dangerous, individually and as a nation: Should we leave the criminals unpunished? Not respond in case of military aggression? Let people hit us / hurt us?

Is this Gospel an invitation to maintain abusive relationships?

We know about cases of love for the enemies / for those who harm us that exist in human relationships, especially true for women and children (does not mean it does not happen to grown men as well): By a sort of a complicated coping strategy, we can get attached sentimentally or even romantically to those who hurt us: Family members, lovers, friends. Because they hurt us, we think we have done something wrong and so we try to “repair” by pleasing/ loving them even more, but of course the only thing that happens is that we only get hurt again and again. Ever been in that kind of dynamic?

So for all those reasons, when we have a text that promotes the “love for the enemies” and moreover a text understood as the word of God, we really need to be careful because it can lead to dangerous conclusions.

So how can we understand it?

Well, I was taught in school that when confronted to a difficult text there are different ways to deal with that: You can try to understand the culture of the time, you can try to look at the circumstances in which those words have been spoken, you can look up different translations, you can try to find other passages that would bring some perspective to the difficult one and so on…All of those tools to help us to make sense of the difficulties. I used to do flash cards about them, until I had a teacher who told us that the first thing we have to do to understand the Gospel is to understand how Jesus interpreted his words in his own life.

First thing we have to do is to understand how Jesus interpreted what he said with his own life / because when he calls us to be disciples he also calls us to play out, to interpret the Gospel with our own lives and so it can also be helpful to see how all those who have followed Jesus throughout the ages have themselves played out the Gospel with their own lives and, for this reason, I could not be more thankful that today we are invited to understand how MLK interpreted this Gospel with his own life.

The love for the enemies was a central Gospel in the life of MLK. He said he tried to preach this Gospel at least once a year and he would go back to his sermon over and over to bring more depths and perspective based on what he lived personally and in his ministry. And when we look at MLK we certainly don’t see somebody who was shy or weak or who thought you should not stand up for yourself and accept abusive situations! Quite the opposite, MLK is actually well known and beloved because he consecrated all his life fighting for civil rights, end racism and discrimination and bring social justice! Like Jesus, MLK was not afraid of anybody, he was never resigned, he resisted and he said exactly what he had to say to whomever he had to say it! And still, MLK told us over and over in his sermon that he did all of this in the love of his enemies and even more, out of love for his enemies, to redeem his enemies – which is a great mystery.

To explore that, maybe we need to have a look at the OT, and this passage where God calls Moses to deliver the people who are enslaved in Egypt. If you know the book of Exodus, you know that Moses, although a Hebrew, was raised in the house of Pharaoh and so he comes to discover later in life what’s going on with his people and how they are treated. It enrages him so much, that he kills the first taskmaster he sees mistreating one of his people. But then he gets afraid and flees to Midian, where he starts to live a simple life and it is much, much later that God calls him to go back to Egypt to set the people free.

Well, I think this lapse of time is about Moses’ transformation from the natural way of revenge / reciprocated violence to the love for the enemies, when he is finally able to let go of violence and instead talk with Pharaoh and stand firm in front of him. We are able to hear God and we are good leaders for the people when we renounce the cycle of violence. [Violence is not using force (to protect) it is using force to hurt and destroy] MLK said violence does not solve anything. “Hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense and that’s the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate.”

The non violent person, far from being weak, is actually the strongest one. More than that, when you renounce violence, it makes you a man or a woman of God. You cannot do nothing for God out of hate. We can be angry. Jesus was angry sometimes. MLK was angry. But they were not hateful.

We are called to persevere in the way of love – Turn the other cheek – it’s not about letting people hit us, it is about not responding to an insult by another insult. Basically what Jesus tells us about our enemies: Do not imitate them, do not let their ways be your ways, do not let them turn you into someone else. We talked these past weeks of Jesus being a child of God (Christmas) and then us becoming children (baptism) now it’s about persevering in being a child of God by keeping on loving. Besides, as bad as people can be, MLK reminds us that they too are children of God and we have to love them for that.

The good news is that this love Jesus talks about is about doing, not about how we feel, whether we genuinely can’t stand our enemies or whether we are unhealthily attached to them. Maybe we think: Well, I can’t help feeling what I feel. Maybe we can’t, but the kind of love Jesus is talking about is not about feelings, it is about what we do and we can control what we do. MLK tells us that Jesus does not ask us to like our enemies, to be attached to them, but loving is to do what is right. And it is not only by not hitting back, but it is also by positive actions, like in showing/ telling our enemies how they wrong us. How they need to change.

And it is only when we renounce violence that we can communicate that. In doing so, we can redeem bad people. I was amazed to discover that MLK said that his ministry was as much about defending African American’s rights than it was about converting white people. He loved his people so much that he wanted freedom for them but he also loved white people so much he wanted them to turn back to God. True freedom is about social justice and equal rights, but more deeply it is about freedom from sin and finding or maintaining the ability to love.

Love for the enemies: Hardest love but maybe the deepest. Love that points out to another dimension. I visited MLK museum in Memphis and it was very touching to enter his room in the Motel where he was assassinated. And I thought when I left: this is tragic but strangely it does not bring you down. As Jesus’s death. It does not give you a sense that MLK’s enemies won in the end. Even if MLK was killed, his enemies were defeated by the beauty and meaningfulness of his life and by all the hope he brought to the people. I love it that we remember MLK during the Epiphany season / the season of the light because his life was about bringing light to the people. It makes us want to have a life as rich and meaningful. It points towards something that is more important than death/ beyond death.

This week: Not trying to have positive feelings for those who hurt us but how could we do good / bless / pray for them in the way Jesus and MLK showed us?

Read MLK’s sermon: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/loving-your-enemies-sermon-delivered-dexter-avenue-baptist-church

Today is the Baptism of the Lord: One of those very few passages of the Gospel (with the multiplication of the bread and the passion) that we find in each Gospel: Mark, Matthew, John and today’s version, Luke. So we know that it’s very important. Important when the Gospel was written/ to the early church: Eucharist, baptism and the cross.
But what is it that is really central?
I like Luke’s version because we have very few details so it’s more focused.

The only thing we know is, as Jesus was praying, recollecting the event of the baptism / the heavens opens up and he hears this voice: “You are my son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased”. And so, this is the center, you see.

If you open your BCP on p.304/305, you’ll find what we call the “Baptismal Covenant” – Our commitments or “What baptism is about”:

• To continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.
• To persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.
• To proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.
• To seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.
• To strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.

The first time I did a baptism the Rector had to explain to me that it was actually what the ministries of the church were about, I had never realized that before:
Worship, Christian education, Evangelism, Pastoral care and Outreach.

All of that is true and important yet, for Luke this is not the center. There is no baptismal covenant in the Gospel or better, there is only one: “You are my child, you are beloved, with you I am well pleased / I rejoice” or my favorite translation: “In you I put all my love”.

And this it you know. Before breaking the bread, or resisting evil, or proclaiming the word or striving for justice, we are called to live the life of the Beloved. Jesus was baptized with all other people, and so the message is for every one of us. Christmas’ season has just ended. God’s child came into the world and what we learn now is that we are called to be children too / to let ourselves be adopted by God: That’s what baptism is all about. Saying yes to God and letting God come into our lives. Letting ourselves be loved by God.

What does it mean? I don’t know but…my experience reading this beautiful poem of Isaiah is that it’s almost overwhelming to hear those words of love, almost embarrassing. How difficult to make it our own, to accept being loved this way by God. It is difficult to let ourselves loved by God because it is difficult to love ourselves / to accept ourselves. We have those voices inside putting us down. Yes, we all want to be loved, we often try very hard to be accepted but we feel in our hearts that we are not so lovable.

It could be the entire task of our Christian lives to accept to be loved. We hear a lot about being able to “love oneself” today, but being Christian is more about accepting to be loved because most of the time, we don’t like what we see in us and we’re afraid God or people would see it. Curtis/Eldredge: “Most people live with the subtle dread that one day they will be discovered for who they are and the world will be appalled”.

Henri J. M. Nouwen: “As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, “Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.” My dark side says, “I am no good, I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned”. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” It prevents us from living a life of love. Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”

Baptism is about connecting with our true identity. True identity is not sinners. God does not want us in spite of our sinfulness or because he loves sinners. God wants us because we are beautiful and desirable. Our true identity is our beauty and bounty. Sin is our inability to see who we truly are. But God sees who we truly are. Maybe when you know that if you love somebody not so lovable by other people. You love your child in prison, the parent who abandoned you, the spouse who cheats because you still see their true beauty, you see who they used to be or who they could become.

Michelangelo said: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” God sees us as Michelangelo saw the marble. He sees the sculpture in the marble and so do we when we really love somebody. We see people as they are from and for all eternity: Beautiful, desirable and good. As were the “ordinary people” lining up on that day being baptized with Jesus. That’s when the heavens open and we let God come close to do God’s work inside of us.

And so God does the chiseling. The sacrament makes baptism very “domesticated”. But it’s more than pouring water on your head, it’s nearly drowning and being raised from the waters. What John says about baptism expands the sacrament from what we do at church to our whole life. Life as Christian is a baptism.

We are being created, becoming who we truly are. Isaiah: “I have created you” and God creates us as we cross the waters and the fire (Symbols of the baptism). It takes our whole life to be baptized, life is the actual baptism and God does the chiseling. Jesus calls his own passion, suffering and death “his baptism”. On the cross from Jesus of Nazareth, the rabbi, the prophet, the teacher, he is revealed as the Christ. Maybe it would help us through our trials to remember with Isaiah that God is with us and works on us. God is redeeming us / Giving a ransom for us / bringing us back from the pain and brokenness of the world. God will do something beautiful.

Being the beloved is experienced by Jesus in prayer: We need to be connected to the source of love. That’s what we do on Sunday. We plug our phones at night to have enough battery during the day / on Sunday we plug our hearts to the heart of God and get energy to go through the week. Water of baptism: God as the source of life and love. We are called to become the source too. From us can flow the love of God and the different ministries of the church: evangelism, pastoral care etc. “In you I have put all my love”: It means: We have the love of God inside of us. The love that created the world, the stars, the volcanoes , the seas! (Cf Psalm and all what the voice of God can do…)

What do we do with this love God poured inside of us?

The famous Prologue of John’s Gospel we have just heard this morning is read twice during Christmas season: One time on Christmas Day, and one time on the first Sunday after Christmas. Actually, you would even hear it three times if you’d attend a midnight Christmas Eve service, this Gospel would be the last lesson, read right after the celebration of the Eucharist to conclude worship. So we hear it for the last time today, and I think it’s beautiful that it is also a day we’re going to bless a child, as this Gospel reminds us that, in Jesus the Son of God, we are all called to become children of God as well. We may not understand everything about this Prologue the first time we hear it, or maybe not even the second or third time, and maybe we don’t even understand it after having heard it a hundred times, and yet, its truth resonates in our hearts, we think it’s beautiful. And so I would say that even if we don’t understand all of it, as we perceive its beauty, we get it nonetheless. God loves us as parents love, or are meant to, love their children. We are the same joy, the same pride, the same anxiety to God as our children are to us. We are loved with the same love, a love that is extravagant, unconditional and everlasting. I guess we could say that this passage of the Gospel is the Gospel in a nutshell, what the Gospel is all about is telling us we are children of God, and meditating on this simple truth would be enough for today, and maybe it would be enough for a Christmas season, maybe enough for a lifetime, maybe enough for eternity. And yet. Yet, as I was preparing the sermon about this text everybody gets but nobody truly understands, including preachers and including myself, I realized that our lectionary invites us to look more deeply into what it means to be a child of God by offering us another perspective about what being or having a child may be, a perspective that is not our 21st century experience, but the perspective of another author of the First century – Paul, Paul who is believed to have sent his Epistle to the Galatians maybe as much as fifty years before John’s Gospel was completed.

What did it mean to be a child in the first century? Contrarily to what we often assume, I think people loved their children as much at that time as we love them now – Maybe they didn’t dote on them or spoil them the way we sometimes do, but they knew what it meant to love a child unconditionally and extravagantly. Yet at the time, being a child meant also something that we generally don’t think about anymore today, and we can find this meaning in the Letter to the Galatians. In the first century, being a child (in a household) meant that you were not a slave. Being a child meant that you were not a slave. And I think having in mind this understanding shines a new light on John’s Gospel. Jesus came into the world, in a very specific world, the world of the Roman Empire where the people of God had lost their freedom, and Jesus came to set the people free. The law Paul talks about that “imprisons” may be specifically the religious law, but more widely, the law also symbolizes for Paul the way of the world, things that are and cannot be changed, the social order and all the things that oppress people. I think it can still speak to us today each time we find ourselves being only agents of other people’s will and whim and maybe also when we are enslaved by our own fears or addictions. We need to be reminded that Christ came to let us be our own person, the person God created us to be, not the person other people want us to be. In John’s Prologue, we are taught that God breaks through into our world with power and brings us power, but it’s another form of power than the power of this world, it’s not the power to control or dominate things or people, but it’s the power to be God’s child, the power to be free and to live authentically. And so, to be a child means much more than being loved, even if it’s wonderful to be loved, but being loved is not just about being protected and defended at the risk of being doted on or being spoiled. In the New Testament, when we are called a child, we are made an heir as Paul puts it, which means: We have a future, we are part of something bigger; we have hope, we will be rewarded; we have a dignity, we can expect and claim respect. We are not slaves to anyone or anything. Which means also: we have no right to consider any other beings as our slaves. In Christ, we are all children. It’s not about our ability to confess that Jesus is our Savior, it is about what God has shown to us in Jesus: Telling us who we are and what we are made for, and living our lives according to this truth.

So how do we do that? How do we get the “Power to become children of God”? Well, one of the things that really struck me as I was reading maybe for the hundredth time this passage of John is that God’s power is represented by his word, and John insists that the word was there in the beginning. I have a sense that most of the time, we assume that at the beginning of something there is always silence. Silence when our world came into being, silence as the child grows in the womb, silence inside of us when we get hurt, silence when we’re in shock, silence when we hear bad or great news– Well, maybe I see things like that because I am an introvert!

But the assumption for us is that at the beginning, nothing is clear, known or sure, when what the Scriptures tell us is that, from the beginning, there is meaning, there is expression, there is intention. And this is what the power of God is: Not chaos, but meaning, expression and intention. Spirituality today is so much about silence! Everywhere I look, I see spiritual gurus who say we need a break, we need to still ourselves, we need to listen. And I agree this is needed, but it is often just the basis of spirituality for busy people overwhelmed with their crazy lives. The Gospel invites us to a spirituality richer than just being still when, as children of God, we have, as Christ had, the power to break the silence. Jesus came into the world as the word and broke the silence at the time of the Roman Empire. Jesus broke the silence about those we were left out and despised by the authorities. Jesus broke the silence about who God truly was. It’s not that we are all called to become prophets or political activists. Speaking up is not only, not mainly, about being loud on the public square (but more likely just on Facebook). Speaking up is about telling the truth, and that can happen also even if you speak softly. Speaking up is not about being loud, it is about not letting unsaid things that demand to be said.

And so, as children of God, we have the power, and maybe also the duty, to break the silence because silence is not always a spiritual thing, silence can be destructive when we don’t acknowledge the evil that is going on in the world or when we remain confused and lost about what’s going on in our lives because we cannot confront certain realities. As a foreigner, I can tell you that not having the words can make you feel very powerless! More deeply, we know that traumas happen not so much when we have bad experiences, but when we have bad experiences we cannot name or discuss about, that’s when we are crushed by what happens to us, and this is what therapy tries to reverse: By putting words were there were no word, we bring understanding in difficult and sometimes terrible situations. When the word comes to us, we have the power to give meaning, expression, intention, where there were shame, confusion and inertia, we have the power to communicate and as we communicate we are brought back into communion with our deeper self, with God and with one another, and this indeed gives us life and sets us free, moves us from being the slaves, the voiceless, the possessed, to become the beloved children.

So maybe this year, we can think about what needs to be said – not just hoping for things to work themselves out as we sometimes do. It can demand a lot of courage sometimes to say the most simple things. But it’s very interesting and important that John acknowledges that, reminding us that Jesus, as bearer of truth, life and light, was also rejected. It makes us aware of the risks we take and the difficulties we may encounter around us when we become a follower of Christ who chooses to speak the truth, it also can make us aware of our inner resistances to the truth. Most of the time those resistances are difficult to spot because it can be just the way we choose our comfort and our routine over a life lived more authentically. But when New Year shows up, we all long for change and wonder how our lives could be improved. Well, I think the Gospel is here to tell us that it’s only once things have been named, that we can figure them out and discover how we need to act and to change, and that’s only when a new reality can take place and this is really all about the coming of Christ into our world and into our lives: Things can change, we can change. We are not slaves anymore. Being a child of God, being close to the Father’s heart is not mainly about being in God’s good books, it’s about, as Paul puts it, having: “The Spirit of his Son in our hearts crying out”. So may we all bring the Word into our own world this year. Amen.

Good afternoon and Merry Christmas!

It’s a privilege to share this very special time of the year with you today! I hope this Christmas will be as beautiful and happy as you wish it to be; whatever it is that you enjoy the most about Christmas, I hope you will find it! And there is for all a special something we may long for…I was reminded of that a few days ago as I have a friend who, instead of posting family pictures on Facebook, uses to send “conversations starters”. And so a few days ago, he asked all his friends what they loved the best about the Christmas traditions. As you can imagine, he got a lot of responses, very diverse: Some mentioned the carols of course, some mentioned the family meal, others talked about the presents, I talked about the creche, a woman playfully responded: “The best tradition about Christmas? I think it’s Jesus!”. But at any rate, everybody had something to say about what made Christmas special to them.

I am telling you that because I thought it was great to see so many people being excited about the holiday, because the thing is I’ve recently also heard a lot of people saying that this year, it was more difficult for them to be in the spirit of Christmas. I’ve heard a lot of people saying that this year they felt that their hearts were not really in the holiday. And they all had good reasons why. Some of them were going through personal crisis, mainly broken relationships, but I’ve heard also a lot of people, including clergy, saying that it was harder for them to enjoy Christmas because they had a sense that the world is really not doing well and there is a lot of concerns about the future: climate change, economic recession, the way we have been treating one another in our society, you name it… And so actually I thought that maybe my friend asked this question about what we love about Christmas because he too had a sense of general gloom and so, in the midst of all what weigh us down, he would help us be in touch with a little of Christmas’ magic by reminding us how enjoyable it is. He made me think of my dad who told me a long time ago: “There is always something magical about Christmas, always. And it happens no matter what, no matter how much we mess it up”. I think it’s right, there is always something to enjoy about Christmas, no matter what. And as we gather for our service, maybe we can take a few minutes to go deeper and try to understand what this magic is all about.

What is the magic all about? Well, I recently went for the first time to see a performance by a magician. And one thing that I noticed and thought was really fascinating is that the magic always happens in a setting that is very ordinary. Actually, as the show unfolds, the magician keeps on insisting that everything is ordinary. He keeps saying: We stand on an ordinary scene, I am surrounded by ordinary people, I hold in my hand an ordinary box and so on…But suddenly, as the magician moves on the scene, asks questions to the people or opens the box, something incredible happens: The magician starts levitating or he can guess what people are thinking or he opens the formerly empty box and there is a bouquet of roses in it. And that’s what the performance is about. If you go and see the Nutcracker, it’s extraordinary from beginning to end but you cannot say it’s magical. Real magic comes out of the ordinary. Real magic is when something completely unexpected comes out from the most trivial reality. The thing is, this is also true in the world of the Gospel, especially in the Gospel we have today.

We have gotten so used to the Christmas story that it is hard for us sometimes to realize what was really happening on that night, but if we listen closer today, we will realize that it is all very ordinary to start with. Joseph and Mary were heading on a journey they probably didn’t want to take. They had to go to Bethlehem to complete an administrative errand, register for taxes purpose. It is about 100 miles to go from Nazareth to Bethlehem, certainly not something you want to do when you’re nine months pregnant, especially if you have to ride a donkey. Then, they could not find a comfortable place to stay, and if they found shelter, they still had to share with the cattle, which is unlikely the best place to deliver your first born. We can romanticize their poverty, but if you’ve ever had to ride three buses to go wait in line at the DMV or if you’ve ever been stuck overnight in an airport with a sick child, you already have a very good sense of what they were going through. The Gospel today is about ordinary lives with their daily anxieties, and yet, yet in the midst of them, this is where God is manifested. I guess for most of us, we see spirituality and holiness as something far away and difficult to reach. But the Gospel tells us that we don’t have to live in a perfect world to find the divine, we don’t need to abstract ourselves from the stress, the difficulties and sometimes the pain of this life to encounter the divine, this is in the very midst of ordinary life that God comes to us. And to me, this is what the magic is all about.

In the dark days of the Roman Empire, when the people of Israel were oppressed and crushed with taxes: That’s when Jesus decided to be born. And so I think it should give us hope too when our lives are not perfect, and even in those times when our world can seem darker than it used to be. This is the promise of the prophet Isaiah: A great light comes, for those who lived in deep darkness. The great light does not come for those who found their way to the light, if you notice. The light comes for those who live in deep darkness. And so, we can have hope, because the Gospel does not happen in some fantastic scenery that is out of reach. The Gospel happens in the real world with all that’s in it. I read recently something beautiful written by the African theologian Jean-Marc Éla that sounded to me very true. He said: “The world of the Gospel is the world of hunger, of wealthiness and injustice, of disease and exclusion, the world of death and slavery. And yet, this is is this world that God is manifested.” The world of the Gospel is our own world, our very ordinary and sometimes very dark world, and this is in this world that God is manifested. Not in heavens, but here on earth. With us.

So what difference does it make, and how God is manifested in our world today? Well, we often say that Christmas night was very quiet, and some find it amusing because most babies are everything but very quiet. But what we mean when we say it’s quiet is that we have to pay attention. The sign, according to the angels, is a baby wrapped in bands of cloth, laid in a manger. Nothing but very ordinary. And yet, it makes all the difference because it’s about love, and love makes it all worthy. I don’t have any child of my own, but I met a lot of moms in my life and I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of them happy about the process of giving birth and yet, never I have ever heard one of them say that they should never have had their children because delivery was too painful. It would seem absurd to say such a thing, wouldn’t it? Of course, it’s worth it. And so, maybe this journey was the worst for Joseph and Mary and yet it turned into something so wonderful for the love manifested in their baby. If you have ever really loved someone, you know that already. Being with those you love makes it all worth it. It does not mean that suffering is part of the plan. It means that there is something bigger than our suffering that is worth living for, and it is the love of God and the love for each other, and if you think about it, this is all what Jesus’s life and teaching will be about: Showing us the love of God and teaching us to love one another.

So maybe when the times seem more difficult, this is the call we have to answer: loving God and loving each other even more, so we can be brave enough to face the pain, the disappointments and the anxieties. We’re not on our own. God is with us. Jesus came to show us the love of God and to teach us to love one another, he still does and we can rely on him. Christmas means that God is with us and so it’s the end of loneliness as we have always known it. Is it divine irony or sense of humor, I don’t know, but I love it that, as Luke notices, Jesus was born during the first census that ever happened in human history. As the Romans were counting the people, it is as if God said to them: Count me in. Count me in also, I want to be a part of this. Count me in, I want to be part of history and I want to be a part of everyone’s story. So count me in. And as you count me in, they will be able to count on me: to love, to comfort, to strengthen, to liberate. This was at least Isaiah’s promises and we are witnesses of how those promises have been fulfilled in Jesus. As followers of Christ, it is our turn to make them come to life around us. “Do not be dismayed by the brokenness in the world” wrote L.R Knost “All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.”

Amen and Merry Christmas to all!

It’s nice to be here on this 3^rd Sunday of Advent! We’re almost there and, as we come closer to Christmas, our liturgy reminds us to “rejoice”. This Sunday is known as “Gaudete Sunday”, the Sunday of joy, and this is why we light a pink candle instead of a purple one this week. We take a break from the spirit of repentance to remember the joy it is to know that the Savior is coming. I don’t know if there is a specific reason why we chose pink, I am not sure it is widely acknowledged as the color of joy, but of course it makes me think of the song: “La vie en rose”, where Edith Piaf sings that, because she has found love, the whole world around her seems to be colored in pink. It’s interesting because I read recently in an article that “La vie en rose” is not only a romantic idea, but it could be a scientific fact: When you’re in love, the chemistry of your brain is changed and your eyes see colors differently. Of course, you don’t see everything pink, but your vision is somewhat changed and you see the world in a softer light. Well, we know that already, don’t we? We certainly see the world differently whether we’re happy or unhappy. When we have joy inside, everything seems more joyful around us, or at least, we find reasons to hope. When we’re unhappy, the whole world around us can seem like a depressing place. And we can experience that during the holiday season. All the festive activity around us may appear in a sad light as we deal with our own issues with our family, our health, our money, if we feel we lack something or someone to live for.

And so, this is very wise that our liturgy reminds us to rejoice, with the pink candle but also with our readings from the Bible. From Isaiah to Zephaniah to Paul, the same chorus resonate in our church today: “Inhabitants of Zion, ring out your joy”, “Rejoice and exult with all your heart”, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say rejoice”. The theologian Henri Nouwen offers an interesting reflection about joy. He says that happiness is this feeling that comes from the outside: We pursue happiness, because we think happiness is something we can find in the world. This is quite typical of what we do at Christmas: we seek for good food, nice presents, pleasant company. That’s what happiness is about. Joy, on the other side says Nouwen, comes from the inside. It is something that only God can give us, something that shines out of the darkness of our deep self, as the light of this candle shines through the night.

I was reminded of that last week as I attended a baptist funeral. A lady sang a solo, and her voice and the words of the hymn were so full of sorrow, but suddenly it turned into something so beautiful, it was filled with hope and joy, a hope and joy that came out of a deep place of mourning and pain. No matter how dark the world around us, when God gives us joy we can see the world differently, maybe not colored in pink, but we see it in the light of faith, hope and love, and it changes everything. Like the voice of this lady who was singing this hymn, we can find within ourselves something that is stronger than all the pain, something that helps us to carry on living, something that may be stronger than death itself: We find joy.

Now how does this happen? “Rejoice”, you know it can be just a word after all. Is joy something that is really in our power to make happen, especially when we go through depression or mourning or maybe experience sickness, poverty or loneliness? And if it is God who gives us joy, what can we do to receive it?

I must say I had a hard time pondering those questions, until I paid closer attention to our Gospel today. At first, this Gospel seems to be out of place for a Gaudete Sunday. Luke concludes from John the Baptist’s words that he was “proclaiming the good news to the people”, but his calling them a “brood of vipers”, his prophesying a “baptism of fire” and his injunctions to repent and change habits seem hardly good news. And yet. Yet as I think about it, there is a strong correlation between his message and the invitation we have today to rejoice because there is a correlation between joy and action. Joy leads us to action, and action leads us to joy. One of the best definitions of happiness I’ve heard in my life was by the philosopher Spinoza. He wrote centuries ago that happiness is about enjoying to be who we are. True happiness is the joy of being oneself. And he said, it’s not only about human beings. We only have to look at the playfulness of our pets or even of wild animals to know it’s true. The panther knows how to run and therefore she rejoices when she runs. The bird can sing beautifully and rejoices in singing. As human beings, we have many different abilities as a specie but also as individuals and we rejoice when we use our gifts and do what we know how to do: the athlete enjoy exercising, the cook enjoys cooking, the writer enjoys writing.

But it’s not only about physical or intellectual activities, and this is where I think John nails it. It’s about the abilities of our hearts. God has given us extensive abilities to love, God has basically created us for the mere purpose of loving, and we have to use our hearts to be happy. We are sons and daughters of God, not only children of Abraham, and we are made of stone, we have hearts of flesh. So we need to love, concretely, and that’s what John the Baptist encourages the crowds to do. It’s not new to us that we are called to change. We can hear calls to change everyday in our society, changes that will bring us happiness: Buy a new car, find a new love, make a new trip. But not only those changes seem often out of reach, we know also that in the end, we don’t find the happiness they were supposed to bring. With John, it’s much more simple. John invites the people to open themselves to generosity, to live faithfully their daily lives, to not take advantage of the little power they may have over people. John invites the crowd to open their hearts. Our heart is a muscle, we have to use it. By using them, we literally enjoy ourselves, rejoice in being children of God. On the other side, lack of happiness is often paralyzing. When I am sad, there is nothing I want to do. We often say when we have depression that: “Our heart is not in it”, and that’s very true. If we’re depressed in the season, maybe the best way to rejoice would be to find a little something to do, a little something to start with that helps make our hearts feel alive. John does not invite the crowd to linger on their sins, their shame, their guilt. As he invites them to repentance, he asks them to bear fruit, to be active, to do something. And he teaches that we don’t need to do things that are very complicated. I have two friends in a retirement house who are very limited physically, but one of them write cards everyday to the people she knows, and the other one has made it her mission to welcome newcomers in her community and has lunch with each one of them. Maybe these two older ladies cannot do much, but they use their hearts and their hearts are alive and you can tell they rejoice when they talk about their “ministries”. John invites us to give our coat not because we are bad people who need to learn how to behave, John invites us to give our coat because it will bring us more joy than our selfishness – not the joy of being a good person who does the right thing, but the joy of making other people happy.

A few days ago, I was coming back from DC to my home in Arlington and I missed a street where I was supposed to turn to get back on 395, and suddenly I found myself at 5pm stuck in heavy traffic downtown. I was feeling very frustrated and also angry at myself for not having paid closer attention to what I was doing. And then, as I was bitterly sitting through traffic, I saw this homeless lady coming to me. As I handed her a five dollars bill, she said to me: “I am so happy you’re here, it’s been half an hour nobody gave me a dollar, I think I am going to cry”. I thought I was going to cry. Suddenly, I found myself so happy I was on the wrong way, stuck in traffic, so I could help this woman. Her joy made me happy. Meeting one another made both of us happy, we rejoiced in each other over something that was really not much: a five dollar bill. We hear a lot in the Christmas season than the joy should be more in the giving than in the receiving, but to me, the joy is in the sharing. The joy is in the sharing as we care for each other and we experience the goodness of God in the midst of us. And that’s exactly what a church community is supposed to be.

The best definition I’ve ever heard of holiness was by a poet, not by a theologian. And this poet said: Holiness is the ability to be joyful. So let’s train our hearts to give and receive the joy in each other and let us rejoice in God because God, as holiest one, is the first to rejoice and God rejoices in us: “He rejoices in us with gladness” as Zephaniah puts it. Amen.

As I was preparing for this service, it felt difficult to remember that we are still at the beginning of Advent when Christmas seems already just around the corner, in just a little more than two weeks from now! Yet today, we have just lit the second candle, and we are asked not to rush and to take our time with the Scriptures. We are indeed at the beginning: The beginning of our liturgical year, as we start a new cycle, leaving Mark’s Gospel for Luke’s, we’re also at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel (We’re in Chapter 3, but it is believed by most scholars that this is where Luke started his redaction and that he added the nativity later). And so we find ourselves at the beginning of everything, at the root, in the desert with John, who, as he announces the coming of Christ, reminds us of our baptism, the beginning of our Christian journeys.

This past week, I was reading a book interestingly called “The unhappy secrets of Christian life” (I picked it because I was intrigued by the title) and the author, Philip Yancey, tells about his years in college and how he struggled with the Christian faith in different ways and one of the stories that he tells really struck me. One day, he invited one of his non believer friends to a reunion with other Christians, hoping to convince him to join his church. The meeting was actually a discussion about what the Christian faith had best to offer, and everyone shared their points of view. Some of the Christians said that, because of our belief in the resurrection of the dead, only our faith can offer real hope (the response I usually give!), some others talked about happiness, peace, social justice and so on…But Philip Yancey’s friend did not say anything and so, at the end of the meeting, Yancey asked him what he thought. That’s when his friend told him that he was very surprised to hear all those people talking about their faith as if it gave them something that made them superiors to others. He said: “I thought that what makes you a Christian is that you acknowledge that you are a sinner!”

“I thought that what makes you a Christian is that you acknowledge that you are a sinner!”. Not hope, not happiness, not peace, not social justice. The only difference between us and non-Christians is that we admit that we are sinners, not better than anyone else. And that’s it. And it sounds very true to me. The Christian journey starts with a baptism of repentance, an acknowledgment before men and women and before God, that we are all sinners. And that’s exactly where we are today, right there, at the beginning, in the desert with John the Baptist.

So what does it mean, to acknowledge that we are sinners?

Well, I think for most of us, most of the time, we think about sin as a breaking of the rules. From our childhood, we are taught we need to obey our parents, our teachers, to conform to a certain way of behaving in society, to follow the highway code…And there is certainly some breaking of the rules involved when we sin. Yet I think that more deeply, for John the Baptist, the awareness of our sinfulness is something that starts way before, in the desert, where very likely there are few rules one needs to obey since there is no human society. I was actually in the desert recently, I went to see the Grand Canyon for the first time last weekend, and as we were driving in the desert, I could sense growing inside of me a feeling of awe and fear at the same time. I think the desert is a place that is very humbling because it makes us realize how small and dependent we are, how much we need to rely on God to create for us what we need for our lives and how much we depend on others to provide for us what we need for our lives. John the Baptist proclaims that: “Valley are filled and mountains are made low” because the desert brings all of us to level surface, to our basic needs, to our reality as human beings, human bodies in need of water, food and shelter – and bathroom stops…Indeed, nobody is better than any one else! But the thing is, there is so much we take for granted all the time. We forget we are nothing without God, without the generosity of nature and our relationships with one others. We keep forgetting our neediness. When I was a teenager, I thought that, by inviting God into my life, I would make so much progress that at some point I’ll be okay and do all things right! But as you can guess, as I added years to my life, I realized I would never be “fixed” if by that I meant I could do without God’s forgiveness. This is the paradox of religious life: At some point we believe that we can be so religious, and therefore so perfect, that we don’t need anyone, not even God! This is typically what the Pharisees were doing. But if we don’t want to be a Pharisee, we have constantly to go back to the wilderness to realize how incomplete we are without God and without one another.

And so during Advent we are invited to remember. To remember that we need God, and to get ready to receive God in our lives. Now how does it look like?

Well, I don’t know how it is for you but I think that, for most of us, when we prepare to receive a special guest, we spend a lot of time cleaning and cooking. And sometimes it’s nice to make an effort, but sometimes it’s exhausting. It happened to me several times to spend so much energy on the cooking and the cleaning that when my guests finally showed up, the only thing I wanted to do was to go to bed! This is ridiculous because when I am invited by friends I never think: “I hope it’s clean at their place” or “I hope they have prepared this complicated French recipe”. All I wish is that they will be happy to see me, that we will have enough to eat and drink even if it’s not very sophisticated, and all I wish is that we can share stories and have a good time. Well, I think that one thing that the Gospel teaches us is that it is with us as it is with God. Jesus did not come on earth and God does not visit us expecting everything will be clean and we have prepared something very sophisticated. What the Gospel teaches us is that God came among us to eat, drink, and share stories, to be with us and to be one of us, to be in fellowship. The preparation we are asked to do in Advent is not a spring (or a winter) cleaning, remembering all our sins and cultivating a guilty conscience. Our preparation in Advent is the preparation of a joyful heart, like when you start getting excited because you are going to be visited by someone you love. This is true for Advent, but of course it is mostly an image for how we are supposed to live our lives: Like there is something good to be expected, like there is somebody very special to meet with along the way, and to be reunited with in the end.

It’s interesting, if you think about it, that John does not so much ask people to find the way, or to find their way. This is often the thing we wish for though: that we may find our way. But for John, it’s about making a way, making a path, in the desert, where often there is no road at all! It’s a good image for our lives. We can’t wish to know exactly what is good, right, what the perfect life is, but we can all do something, keep going because there is this hope that somebody will meet us on the road and that it will give sense to everything. All of us, we experience things that don’t make sense at all and this is the reality of evil. It should not be, and so there is no good reason for it. Yet, in spite of evil, our lives still have meaning because this is by living our lives, making our ways, that we meet with God. Maybe you have experienced that when meeting your spouse or when you had your children: you experienced you could finally love your life because every step on the way led you to be with those special people.

Well, once again, I think it is the same with God. We look back at what happened to us, and all can or will make sense because our lives are the ways that lead us to God: “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways will be made smooth”. We find in the Scriptures this wonderful promise that our lives are worth it, no matter how twisted or how painful they are, because as Isaiah said a long time ago: “All flesh shall see the salvation of our God”. How much different our perspective on our whole lives would be if this truth really could really sink in: “All flesh will see the salvation of our God”.

Because in the end, of course, the thing is: it is more about God finding us than we finding God. I think that what Luke tells us is mostly that, if the word of God came to John the Baptist in the wilderness, God can find us anywhere. No matter the way we take, there is always a way for God, even when there is no way at all. Maybe today we feel in our hearts that we have been too hurt to believe in God, or maybe we think that we have hurt too many people to interest God. But the Gospel and our service of healing remind us that there is no obstacle for God: valley and mountain are both alike, we are all on our way and we can trust that God’s grace will meet us wherever we are. And this is what accepting our sinfulness and receiving forgiveness could look like. After all, it is only the beginning of our journeys. Amen.

Today is the last Sunday of Pentecost and it’s also known as the feast of Christ the King – which is the reason why I am wearing white, and the reason why we are using white linen on the altar as well. This is the end of our liturgical year, and next Sunday we will start the season of Advent. Not everybody enjoys referring to Christ as a king though, and it’s not only because a lot of people don’t relate to monarchy as a political system. I have a friend who is also a priest who gets very upset with this feast each year because it carries with it an image of God that is, according to her, very “dominant male” oriented. And so, for all those reasons, as we prepared the bulletin, we agreed with Catherine to refer to the feast as the “Reign of Christ” instead of “Christ the King”, the way many churches do now. Yet, if we get nervous when Jesus is referred to as a king, we can see that the Gospel we have just read gives us an understanding of kingship that is very different from the one we have immediately in mind when we generally refer to kingship. In our Gospel, Jesus is standing in front of Pilate after having been arrested and brought to the high priests, his hands are tied and he is waiting to be flogged and condemned to death. We need to know that the feast of Christ the King is actually rather recent and was instituted in 1925 by Pope Pius XI in response to the growing nationalism in Italy and Mussolini’s politics. This passage from the Gospel of John is supposed to embody two different understandings of power: the one claimed by the world, with Pilate, and the one claimed by the church, with Jesus.

This text works indeed as a confrontation, and it is only a short extract of Jesus’s whole interaction with Pilate – an interaction that functions almost like a play. Over the two chapters 18 and 19, Pilate goes back and forth seven times between Jesus held inside the headquarters and the crowd waiting outside with the people and the religious leaders waiting for Jesus’ condemnation. It is very dramatic as we awaits Pilate’s final decision. Sometimes I watch old movies and each time a tragedy happens, I can’t help having a part inside of me kind of hoping that this time, things will turn out differently, although I perfectly know the outcome. You look at the actors and you think; “Don’t do that”, because you know the terrible consequences of their actions. For us Christians, it can be the same feeling when we read the Passion, and maybe you have wondered what would have happened if Pilate had made another decision. If he had decided to release Jesus.

Can you imagine what Christianity would be, if we didn’t have the cross? In John, there is a sense of fate, even if it is divine fate. In his Gospel, John keeps on saying that it was “Jesus’s hour”. Interestingly, I read recently a book by a veteran who explains that on the battle field, soldiers encourage one another by saying their lives are in God’s hands. According to this author, it helps soldiers to cope to believe that the hour of their death is already written. John was very young when Jesus was put to death, and he saw all of it unfold before his eyes, he was at the foot of the cross and saw Jesus’ heart being pierced. It must really have been traumatizing. Maybe there was nothing that could have been done to prevent that, yet we can also wonder: “What if?”. As we see Pilate pacing back and forth from the crowd to Jesus, it his decision that is suspended in the air, and we are all catching our breath. Everything is in Pilate’s hands and he must make up his mind. I can’t help thinking that he could have put Jesus in prison and wait, maybe write to his superiors, ask for advice…But I think that what John wanted to do is to show us Pilate caught with his own conscience. Pilate is lonely and pressured. He seems to believe that Jesus is innocent but he is also very concerned by what people will think of him, by his ability to contain the crowd and to make himself respected. Ironically, he gets so afraid of losing his power that in the end he will cowardly surrender in doing what he does not want to do.

I think we can all recognize ourselves in Pilate. Of course, his experience is one of a kind, but he embodies all our struggles between the loneliness our conscience feels when we must make a decision in spite of the pressure around us, when our desire to please or our desire to stay in control or our desire to preserve our comfort stands in the way of us doing the right thing. We we don’t know what to do and we can’t decide, and like Pilate our mind paces back and forth between possibilities, yet if we are honest with ourselves often we know what to do, it’s just that there is something we don’t want to admit because it bothers us – This is at least my experience. Of course, I was not there the day Jesus was condemned to death but I know that, because I didn’t want to lose my friends at school, I haven’t stood for a few students they used to make fun of. According to Jesus, all we have to do is to witness to the truth but Pilate will ask him: “What’s the truth?”, bringing confusion in a situation that is in fact very clear: the truth is that Jesus is innocent, but it is easier for Pilate to charge him guilty.

Making moral choices is not about getting up early in the morning to go to work or to exercise, sticking to our diet or even to our prayers or not using our neighbor’s parking spot. All those things, this is what nice, healthy or disciplined people do. But this is not what it is about to live as a Christian. Being a Christian is all about the way we treat people, and not so much our friends or family or even people at the other end of the world, it is about how we treat the ones we have in front of us in their powerlessness. Moral life is about how we renounce to our own power to make room for others or how we cling to our power in a destructive way treating others as if they were less than us. I remember this comment I heard once from a woman who was abused by her husband. She said: “When we’re at home, he makes me feel like I am another piece of furniture”. We are not only violent in our acts or in our words, we can be violent in our indifference and in our lack of concern. We have to look at the one standing in front of us, and let our hearts be touched and act according to the truth we believe in that we are all children of the same God and all deserve to be treated well. Kant, who is known as a major philosopher in Ethics, used to summarize all moral rules like this: “Never using another person as a means to an end”. Violence is not about using physical force, sometimes we have to, violence is about using people, diminishing or destroying someone so we can assert our own power. But Jesus shows us another kingdom, another realm than the realm of this world where we try to have dominion over one another: Jesus’ kingship is to renounce all forms of violence once for all. It is in fact interesting that in our Gospel Jesus mentions that his followers won’t fight for him, when in fact he stopped Peter from using his sword towards one of the soldiers who came to arrest him. Jesus does not need any form of coercion, he only invites Pilate to acknowledge what he already knows to be true and to do the right thing he knows he needs to do. But of course, we know what happened. Could Pilate have made another choice, or was everything written from the beginning? We don’t know about that, nobody can tell if Jesus indeed had to die in this terrible way. One thing is sure, is that there can be another end to Pilate’s story, to our stories, because of the forgiveness that is always offered to us. So even if our conscience feel trapped, if we are pressured to do something wrong and if we end up caught in our own mistakes, Jesus’s kingdom is a place where there is always a possibility left to do the right thing whatever bad choices we have previously made. I had fun recently re-reading a book imagining Pilate’s later conversion to Christ. But who knows?

So today is the last Sunday of Pentecost and it’s also known as the feast of Christ the King – which is the reason why I am wearing white, and the reason why we are using white linen on the altar as well. This is the end of our liturgical year, and next Sunday we will start the season of Advent. Not everybody enjoys referring to Christ as a king though, but for me I don’t think of Jesus as carrying any image of God as a dominant and powerful male who rules an army, I think about the king with his hand tied, I think about Jesus’ majesty revealed as he stands in front of Pilate, I think of Jesus’ dignity he kept to the end, in suffering and death – even death on the cross. In a strange reversal of situations, as he clings to power, Pilate becomes powerless, yields to pressure and loses his ability to make decisions, when Jesus as he shows himself so vulnerable seems to be indeed the one in charge of his fate. Even in the worst circumstances, Jesus remains unafraid and free. And that’s why he is the king. May we also, in participating in his kingdom, become unafraid and free. Amen.

Well, thank you for being with us this morning, especially if you are visiting! I am visiting, actually: I am supplying for Rev Strand as he went out of town for the holiday, so thank you for having me. It’s hard to make time on Thanksgiving Day to go to church, isn’t it? We have just heard in our reading not to worry about food and drink and clothing, and yet, sometimes this is exactly, out of our best intentions, where we can get trapped on this day: we worry making sure that we are ready for our guests and family, that we look good, that there will be enough on the table for everybody, that we have made everything right…The Gospel reminds us not to worry because we are not really in charge of all those things, because every good gift comes from God and we know that’s the very spirit of Thanksgiving: to turn to God to thank God for everything God has given us. And yet, ironically, this part of the holiday can get neglected as we try so much to do our best to make things happen. But this is what worry does: worry can spoil everything and makes us oblivious of what matters most.

Now I don’t think the problem is that God is going to be upset if we miss church or if we forget to say thanks. Jesus shows us God working in the silent process of nature. God gives abundantly and generously, no question asked, no condition given. God is present in everything that has life: if we turn around, if we consider the birds of the air or the lilies of the field, we’ll see God at work everywhere. But the thing is, if we start to worry too much, we take the risk of not being able to see that and to enjoy it. I think that’s why Jesus today asks us not to worry, because what worry can do is to rob us of our joy. It is not only about what can happen when we start overthinking a holiday. Worry can rob us of our joy in many other circumstances: When we start a new relationship, when we get promoted, when we expect a child. First of all, we experience with awe this abundance of new life given to us, but then suddenly we start to worry and the joy is gone. We wonder: Will it be enough? Will I be enough? Do I deserve it? Can I control it? It is hard to give, but it is also hard to receive. And sometimes it’s true, it can be tricky with some people, there can be strings attached. But not so in our relationship with God. Jesus wants us to learn to receive from God with undisturbed hearts. Each time in our lives we experience love, reconciliation, hope, each time we see beauty, each time our plates are full, we experience something of God’s will for us and God’s goodness towards us, and we can turn to God without second thoughts to say thanks and let go of the worry.

Now does it mean that our lives should be lived without a single preoccupation? I don’t think so. The Greek translation of Jesus’ injunction “Not to worry” is actually: “Do not care with anxiety” or “Be not anxiously careful”. So we should not worry, but we still have to care. All of us, we still have something to do. To become beautiful the lilies still have to grow and to be fed the birds still have to look for the seeds. If you have squirrels in your backyard you know how it goes. They don’t seem particularly anxious about their lives, but they are always on the look. Nature is always up to something, even the smallest creatures have to work in a way or another to find their food and to be safe: Spiders make webs and birds build nests. Our God is the God of life and of generosity, but not everything falls from the sky. God is present in the process of nature, in the process of life, freely given and abundant. It’s here, but we are also part of the process when we work, and look for all things necessary to our lives. And so we have to care, but we do not need to be anxious. The promise is that we should not have to fight for those things, we don’t have to become obsessed with providing for our own needs.

So why are we anxious then? Well, it seems pretty obvious. We are anxious because everywhere we see people in need. It’s not only in remote places. It is all around us. And it’s not only because we see that some people cannot buy the fancy things we enjoy, we also see people who don’t have anything to eat or who cannot put clothes on their backs. There are actually plenty of people who lack those things Jesus has promised to us. So maybe we can blame those people for not having enough – if they lack something when Jesus promised us that there is plenty for all, well maybe they aren’t in God’s favor, maybe they have done something wrong. Yet if we think deeper about it the thing is: Jesus does not say first that God will provide in the future if we are good people. Jesus says first that God is already providing, we just have to turn around to look for God and we will see God at work– look at the lilies, look at the birds. There is plenty everywhere for everybody. This is at least how things were intended to be, this is how things are meant to be in nature. Now of course, and this is what we experience, things can be very different in our societies, in the world we build as human beings and in the way we have transformed nature around us – Nature, in those times of climate change, is not always very trustworthy. So what’s going on in the world as we know it?

In all this chapter 6 from Matthew, Jesus denounces the power money has over our lives and how we are concerned with stocking up, accumulating, having more than what we truly need. Jesus does not accuse so much people to worship money, but Jesus notices that we are overly concerned with money, and I think it is helpful to realize that because, indeed, most of us aren’t exceedingly greedy but we are worried, and so we cling to money and we cling to stuff – not so much because we love them, but because we are afraid to lack of something. We are afraid because we don’t see the world from a place of abundance but from a place of scarcity, and for this very reason, we stock up and pile up, but the irony is that as we do that we create the scarcity around us, this scarcity we are so worried about. And so it’s like a vicious circle, you see. The more worried we are, the more we need to make savings, to buy the big house, to fill our closets with food and clothes, and in the process not only do we convince ourselves we never have enough to be safe, but we also fail to share natural resources with others and we push needy people away. This is the saddest thing of all, that we create misery being afraid of misery. Anxiety can be very powerful and powerful for the worst. When Jesus asks us not to worry, it is not only so we ourselves can rejoice, but I think it is also so that all can rejoice and enjoy what God is providing for them, without us getting in their way.

So maybe this is what Thanksgiving is all: it’s not only about us giving our thanks and praise but it’s about creating conditions where all people and creatures can give their thanks and praise. By striving for the kingdom of God and its righteousness (or its justice, as some translations go) maybe we can find again what we have lost in our societies and reach this place of abundance originally found in nature. Today more than ever, we need to learn how to share and to get a better sense of what we truly need day by day. It’s not that we need more stuff, it’s that we need to worry less for our lives. If we stop worrying, Jesus promises us there will be plenty because we’ll be more free and generous. Now, it’s hard to convince ourselves to worry less. Each time somebody asks me if I am not worried about something, I start thinking that maybe I should worry about it! Yet perhaps all we need to do is to increase our ability for joy, a joy that tells us that we have enough, that we are enough. That’s the reason we are here at church: To make room for joy so we can also wish to pass on the joy around us and live together the life God has intended for all of us since the beginning. Amen.