Month: May 2021

As always when I prepare a sermon, I have a look at different commentaries, and it’s often quite helpful, yet this week I felt a little saddened by the fact that I read a lot about Trinity Sunday being the Sunday in the church where we don’t focus that much on Scriptures, rather we talk about an “idea” – The Trinity.

It made me feel sad because of course the Trinity isn’t an idea, the Trinity is our God – and today we are called to celebrate our God in the fullness of God’s revelation to us through Jesus-Christ. Our readings, in fact, are quite powerful, and they don’t deal with a lot of theological disputes, rather, they express a sense of awe and amazement, whether with the story of the call of Isaiah who has this glorious vision from heaven, or with the psalmist who finds the glory of God expressed in every earthly creature – and if, true, Nicodemus comes to see Jesus to inquire about his God, he does so compelled by the wonderful signs Jesus has manifested to the people.

If you have noticed, we have, at last, finished with our cycle of readings through the Farewell Discourse in John’s and we are back in the beginning of the Gospel (Chapter 3), and it’s a good place to start again – and this is actually what our Gospel deals with: starting again, being re-born. We celebrate today the Trinity and indeed, in this cycle of readings in John, we have had an overview of the way we understand God – or better – of the way God has been revealed to us: With the Father as the source of life and love, with the Son who comes to reconcile us to the Father through teaching, healing and mainly forgiveness of sins, and with the Spirit whose presence among us continues the work of the Son bringing us sanctification.

And so you see, the Trinity, it has little to do with an idea, it’s not an abstraction, on the other way around, it’s very concrete! It expresses the way God is in the process of manifesting who God is, giving us life, making God known and drawing us closer to God. The amazement for us, as believers in Christ, is not so much that God is remote for us and so different than we are, being so perfect and holy, although God certainly is, rather, the amazement is that God, being all of the above, is present to us, for us and among us.

Now, of course it calls for a response on our behalf, and to me this is what our Gospel today deals with – Jesus tells Nicodemus that he has to be re-born to see the kingdom of God. Now what does it mean exactly?

Well, let’s first have a look at Nicodemus – who he is at the beginning of the story and what is it in his character that Jesus would call him to a second birth. I actually really like that, after spending so much time on Jesus’s discourse, we are back meeting actual people in our readings, because I think it helps us greatly to make a connection with the texts – and the truth is, the more time I’ve spent looking at Nicodemus, the more I found the many ways we can relate to him.

Nicodemus is not an outsider, you see. He knows about Jesus, and he actually quite likes him and approves of his work and teachings. We see that he is curious, and he is a bit skeptic too – he has questions and he wants to have answers to his questions, he is brave enough, and he is a little scared too. He does not want to judge, and he does not want to be judged. He is full of good will and good intentions, and he also lacks real flame and passion.

Nicodemus is disciple material, if you will, and he isn’t yet a real disciple.

And so, Jesus calls him to conversion – to be reborn, as the text puts it – a well known expression in Christian churches.

And well, I find it interesting to put this expression back into context, because I don’t know what you think but to me, we have used this expression so much we don’t really know what it means anymore. Most us would think it means to give our life to Jesus, to abandon a life of sin and addictions, start attending church and read the Bible and be a good person. And there is certainly some of that, but it does not cover it all, far from that. This understanding of conversion can also make us think that it’s not something we are concerned with, being already Christians, when in fact, as I said, Nicodemus looks so much like us – It may very well still means something for each one of us – To be reborn.

The thing is, being “born again” is often understood as referring to conversion that happens once in a time, quickly and quite painlessly. But if we’re honest, yes, birth certainly occurs once in a life time, yet most of the times it’s far from being a quick and painless process. I preached last week about how Jesus calls us to make ourselves available, and sure, we cannot give new life to ourselves as surely as the baby in the womb cannot give life to themselves – the best we can do is to allow the process to take place, to not resist the Spirit of God that wants to bring us the life of the Spirit. Yet, if we have to make ourselves available, it’s not just about showing up, more deeply we have to be willing to change and to not hold on to what is old. Can you imagine a baby resisting natural birth because they are so happy in the womb? It would feel ridiculous, as Nicodemus observes. And yet, this is where we may find ourselves spiritually. We are quite happy where we are and we are not quite interested in growing, meaning mainly: interested in changing. It does not mean so much “becoming a good person” – although it can mean that too – but as I said, change is about letting go of the old – sins, anger, resentment but also despair, resignation, apathy. Jesus insists that it is a spiritual conversion, not just a moral one. In this, “good people” needs conversion too: To believe that a new life is possible, that is not cluttered by the hurt and failures of our past.

I wonder if it’s one of the reasons churches have difficulties. We’re full of good will and yet so often paralyzed because we cannot let go of what has grown old, and we don’t really believe that God calls us to a new life and that God is up to something new. We’re often more focused on traditions, filling the pews, rather than on blessing our communities and being out there in the world.

You see, one of the things that we learn when we consider the Trinity, is how much God was willing to change to meet us, by God’s incarnation in Jesus, by God’s presence in our world. God constantly discloses God’s being to meet us, in spite of the risks and the suffering. In the same way, we have to be willing to change to meet God. We have to be willing to reconsider the way we think, behave and relate to one another – This is our response to God.

And so being re-born is a much more complex process than declaring that we “give our life to Jesus” – although we need to say it quite often. But it takes a life time to give our life to Jesus. If you think about it though, isn’t it wonderful to think about our lives as a process of being born, rather than a process of growing old and dying? When I think of Nicodemus, I can’t help thinking how humbling it must have been for him, a teacher, a leader of the Jews, someone who was “somebody”, to be invited to be born anew, to let go of who he though he was to become who God knew him to be. Maybe that’s the key for us. Jesus, again and again in the Gospel, not only in John’s, asks us to become child like, to make ourselves small – and so maybe the key is humility. To be willing to receive again, to learn again and to allow this to change us. To be willing to meet God as God has been willing to meet us. In short, we have to continue to being willing to become disciples, being taught and transformed.

So, yes, on this Trinity Sunday, we need to be amazed at God’s being, but we should also be amazed at God’s works and what God wants to do with us and through us. That God calls us again and again to be disciples – and this is on what we will focus in the weeks to come.

Good morning and Happy Pentecost Sunday!

A few weeks ago, when we started our Bible study, we first listened to this powerful (if a little strange) story we have just heard from the book of Acts, and we started to share a bit about our own experiences of the Holy Spirit – the way we have felt the Holy Spirit coming in our own lives. As you can probably imagine, those experiences weren’t quite as dramatic as the experience the Apostles had on that day – although some of us agreed easily that they were quite powerful and a little strange too. Our stories of encountering the Holy Spirit were quite different for each one of us, but one of the things we all noticed is that we got pretty emotional remembering these experiences and telling them to one another. Because we experienced that God was here. God was here, even if we couldn’t explain how or why.

Theologians say that the Holy Spirit is “the one who mediates the presence of the Lord” – The one who enables the Risen Christ to come among us – and it is certainly what they can conclude when studying closely the passage of John we have just heard. We are, once again, back in the Farewell Discourse (Our last Sunday with it). Last Sunday we were in Chapter 17, but today we go back one chapter to spend time on the promise of the Holy Spirit – A reading appropriate for Pentecost, even though the passage of Acts is probably much more well-known.

Jesus is about to depart but he promises his disciples that he won’t leave them on their own, and that he will send them the “Advocate”, the one who testifies on his behalf. The Holy Spirit will take what his Jesus’s (and we have to understand: his teaching, his miracles but also the story of his life, death and Resurrection) and the Spirit will reveal the truth about Jesus. Now that’s a lot of words, isn’t it? And we got a bit used to that after 4 weeks in this passage of John’s, but still: What does it mean, in the end?

Well, I was wondering about that when I was reminded on those stories we shared about the Holy Spirit during our Bible study. As I have just said, one of the things we all noticed is how emotional we got as we remembered those stories because what they all had in common is that we had experienced God’s presence – God was there for us – God, as we came to know him revealed in Jesus. And so, theologians will say to us that the Holy Spirit is the one who mediates the presence of the Lord, John will say the Holy Spirit reveals the truth about Jesus after Jesus has physically left the disciples – and I would put it with even more simple words, as I remember the expression on your faces as when we shared our stories:

The Holy Spirit is the one who makes it real. The Holy Spirit is the one making God, God revealed in Jesus, real for us – in our day and age, in our particular life condition. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes the story of Jesus’s life and everything you’ve ever been taught about God, and every question you have ever asked and prayer you prayed – and the Holy Spirit makes it alive, real and present before you.

The Holy Spirit comes and then you know it’s real – you know it not so much in your head or even in your heart but in the depths of your being and yes sometimes you can get pretty emotional about that. And it might not be a powerful feeling everyday – but you can go back to it again and again and something settles in you and you know it’s true.

I really like it that we read from John’s today. Maybe you’ve learned about the Holy Spirit at church, at Sunday school and if you’re like me, you’ve learned about all the gifts of the Holy Spirit – Wisdom. Self control. Kindness. – and this is all what the Holy Spirit does according to Paul. But John, John does not talk about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, in Jesus’s mouth the Holy Spirit is in himself the gift.

The Holy Spirit is the gift and the gift among all gifts. A gift you don’t put on a shelf, but a gift that keeps on giving – who continually brings to us the presence of the Lord and renews the presence of the Lord among us (and we pray the Holy Spirit in our Eucharistic prayer, don’t we?). The Holy Spirit is the Present. The Presence.

In John’s Gospel, there are no complicated Sunday school lessons about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is simply the one that makes it real. After Jesus is gone, the disciples afflicted by sorrow will suddenly wake up from their mourning because they will receive the gift, the gift that makes the Lord present, and at their turn, they will have to make the Lord present for others. The Holy Spirit mediates the presence of the Lord, but he also mediates through the disciples. And this is, to me, the heart of our Christian calling. Experiencing the presence of the Lord, we have to make God real for each other. And we know that after they have had this extraordinary experience, that’s all that the disciples are going to do: Making God real for people. In words and actions, and also just in being the persons they have become. They will bear testimony. And they don’t necessarily bear witness with some mind blowing experiences, they bear witness by their patience and kindness, their faithfulness and their hope, their attention to the little ones, their readiness to tell the story of Jesus, to share what they have, to rejoice in goodness – and these are after all the gifts of the Spirit.

It does not mean that the Apostles had it all figured out – And we see that a lot in the book of Acts, they also had time of doubt, discouragement and conflict. From John’s Gospel it does not seem that we are meant to experience the Holy Spirit on our own. It’s a communal experience. We get to know God when we gather together. We make God real for others and we make God real for each other. As Christians we are meant to support and comfort each other and to continue to seek together how the life of Jesus speaks to us and how we want to live it out in our Christian community, in our families, in our neighborhood. Together, we are to be witnesses of the Lord’s presence. As a church.

Today, we will receive John Richard as a novice in the Community of the Gospel and we will also commission our new vestry. And I would like to remind you that this root of our call, before leading liturgy or conducting meeting, or making decision about the church. Our call is, experiencing the presence of the Lord, to make it real, to make it manifest and express it in the way we worship and pray, in the way we involve ourselves in our communities and serve them, in the way we relate to each other and in the way we live – and I would add,even in the way we can disagree with each other or be in conflict, or hurt or disappointed with each other. When Jesus say to the disciples that the Holy Spirit will come to reveal the truth, it’s also a warning: It means Christians will have to deal with what’s broken in themselves, in their community and in the world.

Now how do we do that? Where do we start? Well, that’s the sense of our ceremony today. You will all be making a step towards the altar (a traditional way of doing things in the church). There is no Sunday school exam – and you don’t have to be a special people. Disciples certainly weren’t – the evangelists actually insisted a lot about how ordinary the disciples were. But there were present. Present. Given to God. At that’s what we do at the altar. We give to God. The bread, the wine but mostly: we make ourselves present, gift. We give ourselves and what we have and allow God to use us. I read one day a beautiful quotation that I never forgot: God uses our availability rather than our ability. We’re obsessed with our abilities (or lack thereof), but we forget we first need to be available and receptive. Of course we need abilities. But the first thing is to allow God to use us to mediate God’s presence.

So will you take the first step?

Unsurprisingly this Sunday, we are still in this portion of John’s Gospel scholars call “The Farewell Discourse” – Jesus’s last instructions to the disciples before his passion, death and Resurrection. As I mentioned before, it’s a long discourse, almost four chapters and it may sound a bit repetitive…Yet if you pay attention, you will realize that the Farewell Discourse is a bit like a spiral, slowly folding us in and dragging us closer to the center, drawing us closer to the point. And I guess this is where we land today – to the center, to the heart of Jesus’s will for his disciples, to the heart of Jesus’s heart.

If you remember from last week and the week before that, we have been learning about what Jesus has to say to his disciples before he leaves them:

– The first thing Jesus asks his disciples to do is to abide in his love. He does not ask them to save the world, or to build a church or to go on a mission. He asks them to receive the Father’s love through him, him being the vine, the Father being the vine grower and the disciples being the branches.

– The second thing Jesus asks his disciples is to love one another, and if you remember from last week, Jesus asks his disciples to love with a certain kind of love: The love of God Jesus himself has given testimony to by laying down his life. The disciples are called to lay down their lives for one another, to give the love they have received, an unselfish love that seeks the best for others.

Those two commandments Jesus gives to his disciples in the Farewell Discourse are of course pretty close to all of his teachings as we found them throughout the Gospel: Love God with all you heart, all your mind and all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.

And so now you would expect that we are going to wrap it up – and yet, there is more, and this is what we discover in the passage we have heard today. As I have just noticed, today we are drawn to the center of Jesus’s will, to Jesus’s desire – a desire so deep that actually Jesus doesn’t speak these words to the disciples, those words are addressed to the Father, in what the scholars call “The Final Prayer” – the climax of the Farewell discourse. And so it’s wonderful because as Jesus addresses the Father, we get a peak into Jesus’s heart and we learn about Jesus’s secret agenda for his disciples:

Yes, Jesus wants the disciples to receive the love of God and he wants them to love one another, but in the end he wants them to be sanctified. Jesus wants his disciples to be sanctified by “knowing / experiencing the truth”

And well, I was wondering how we react to that exactly? How do we react to that? If Jesus wants his disciples to be sanctified, I guess this is still true for us today – Jesus wants us to have the love of God, to have love for our neighbors and Jesus wants us to be sanctified. Well, I don’t know about you but I am fine with receiving God’s love, loving God and loving neighbor, but I have mixed feelings about sanctification – and I guess I am not alone in that, and for two reasons:

– The first reason why I don’t really like to think about sanctification is that it automatically makes me think about the “holier than thou” issue that is so common place for Christians. Thinking that God’s will is to sanctify myself raises a lot of questions in my mind, the main one being: Isn’t it at odd with Christian’s humility? Am I supposed to believe that I am better than others? Moreover, aren’t we supposed to interact with each others as equal? We want to be welcoming and non judgmental and inclusive Christians, right?

(Now the second reason why I don’t really like to think about sanctification is that it does not sound like a lot of fun. But I’ll come back to it.)

It is a legitimate concern for us to wonder what it means for us Christians to be sanctified – and if it means that we have to establish an “us” versus “them”, if we are to cut ourselves from the world. Throughout the ages, certainly, a lot of Christians have thought this is what they needed to do in order to become holy. Some have lived as Hermits, some in monasteries, some have even created their own cults and sects to feel closer to God, to reach a purer degree of living and not be contaminated with what we used to call “the century” – the society of men, the world.

Now, it’s interesting to realize that John struggled with this question as well. In his Gospel, John mentions the “world” 78 times (11 times in our passage) and “the world” is almost always in opposition with God – The world does not know God or refuses to receive Jesus.

Yet one of the things that is remarkable in our passage today, is to notice that Jesus’s will – and he expresses that very clearly – Jesus’s will is not for his disciples to be cut off from the world. Jesus only asks God to protect them from the evil as long as they are in the world. Which makes me think that the “world” in John’s way of speaking is not so much a physical space, the space that is not the church, it’s not even a social entity, that we could oppose to the Christian community, rather it is the spiritual realm, or if you prefer the mind orientation, where we are not connected to God, where our view is limited to earthly concern – it is if you will the mundane (mundane having its etymological root in “world”). Jesus does not wish for his disciples to hide away from human society or to distance themselves from the sinners (all his ministry was about welcoming the sinners), but Jesus prays for his disciples that they will be protected by God from what is evil, and it sounds like what is evil is to get caught in the “worldly”, where the world becomes the ultimate horizon and one loses sight of God.

We’re fine being in the world – really. What Jesus fears for his disciples is that they will lose sight of God when they’re in it. And we know there are many ways that can happen: We can fall in love too much with this world, wanting the good, earthly things it can provide: wealth, success, entertainment. But it can also happen that we lose sight of God if we are too angry with this world too. We are overwhelmed with its pain, or maybe with its absurdity, and we lose hope, or we just end up being terrified. What Jesus wants for his disciples is that they will be able to live in the world while not losing sight of God – and this is what I think is meant by being sanctified.

Throughout the ages, we have often imagined sanctification as a solitary endeavor of becoming perfect. But in John’s Gospel, it looks like being a Saint does not mean to be perfect, to think all the right things and to do all the good things – being a Saint means to know the Truth, that is the love of the Father – a living truth and not an “intellectual truth”. Being a Saint means to bring into the world a wider perspective and to live into the world with a bigger heart because of this hope and this love we have received from the Father in Jesus (And this is the testimony John talks about in his first letter we have just read)

Jesus says that this deep, intimate knowledge of God and of being united to God will bring us joy, perfect joy – a joy that we can’t keep to ourselves, a joy that we have to share with the world. And this is why sanctification is probably more fun that what we thought it would be.

Being a Saint isn’t about ourselves and our ability to become perfect, or even good. Being a Saint means to be filled with a holy Spirit – generous, daring and resilient – the Holy Spirit, the very Spirit of God inside of us. But about that, we’ll talk next week for the feast of Pentecost.

As I have mentioned previously, scholars call this part of John’s Gospel we’re reading after Easter the “Farewell Discourse”. To me, “discourse” is a formal way to put it, because if you listen a bit closer, it sounds more like a love letter. Again, as mentioned previously, there is something very personal and intimate in John’s Gospel, and even more as we reach this point where Jesus is about to leave his disciples. We read Jesus’s “testament” and it sounds like a love letter.

To say the truth, this passage always makes me think of my grand-mother…When we opened her “testament”, her “will”, we found with her legal dispositions a love letter to her children (she had six!) and I don’t know if it was because she was so familiar with the Scriptures that what she wrote sounded so much like John’s Gospel, maybe it was because Jesus’s words are themselves so human and universal…At any rate, this was what she wrote to her children: She told them that she loved them and she asked them to love one another. Because really that was her last (and ultimate) will as a mother who dedicated her life to them. In the same way, Jesus has loved his disciples so much, after he’s gone, he wants them to love each other…

As Christians we are called to love…and we know that already don’t we? The thing we don’t know though, often, is how to do that. How are we supposed to love? If you think about it, most of our life is about figuring out how to navigate relationships: with family, friends, co-workers, and also: with people from other cultures, race, education, political views, sexual orientation. And relationships bring us a lot of joy and in the same time, it’s so hard. Relationships are the hardest thing we have to do in life and we don’t know how to do them right.

So what can we learn from the Gospel? Jesus says that he has given commandments to his disciples so they may love one another. He has made known to them everything that he had heard from the Father. Jesus’s life is about showing us what it means to love. If you remember from last week, I said that Jesus tells us to abide in God’s love because we cannot give what we haven’t received. It’s true in quantity, but also in quality. We need to learn from Jesus what kind of love is this love. Jesus asks his disciples to love “as” he has loved them, in the same way he has loved them.

We don’t know what love is because love can be many things – on a spectrum: from being nice/polite to sacrifice and even ultimate sacrifice. So, as Christians, how are we to love, following Jesus’s example?

First of all, we have to acknowledge that being nice / polite is not enough. Actually, Jesus wasn’t always nice and polite (although it’s safe to assume he was always kind). He told people things they didn’t like or didn’t want to hear. And he said these things not only to his enemies but even to his disciples (remember how he rebukes Peter?). Sometimes Jesus withdrew from people (left the crowds to go in a place on his own), he even got angry (in the Temple, or when talking with the Pharisees)…

So how does Jesus’s love look like? We have a cue when Jesus tells us love is about laying down one’s life. But we don’t know what to do with it because we assume that it is only about sacrifice / ultimate sacrifice and we don’t see how it fits in our daily lives as Christians.

Jesus talks about “laying down his life” and its a recurring theme in John’s Gospel (Remember the Good Shepherd we read two weeks ago). Well, it’s interesting because if we often assume it’s all about Jesus’s death, yet Franciscan spirituality does not see understand that Jesus lays down his life only in his death, but in in all that Jesus did for us. Jesus’s life is “laid down”, offered to us in his incarnation: birth, ministry of healing and teaching, suffering, death of course and Resurrection.

And to me, thinking about it this way, it makes us much more easy for us to imitate Jesus.

Jesus came to be with us. In total humility. In a life of service. In Jesus, God renounced divine power. And so when Jesus asks us to love “as he loves” it means that we are also called to love by renouncing our power. I know it may sometimes feel like we don’t have a lot of power already. Given our wealth, our social status, education, race, sex and so on…we have very likely plus or less power in this world. Yet we all have power in certain situations, because power is the ability we have to use people, to influence them to fulfill our own goals and our own needs, and so there are many different forms of power: the power to seduce, to convince, to make other feel guilty, to manipulate them by flattery, or lies etc. It does not matter who we are, we all have means to use others to our fulfill our own goals / satisfy our needs…

And so if we are to lay down our life like Jesus, it means we have to lay down this power. Being a moral person is not about being nice, it’s about refusing to use others, to never treat them as a means to en end. Jesus wants equality between him and the disciples, and between the disciples themselves. He tells them that they are his friends and that they have to be friends to one another.

So this is what love requires but of course that’s the minimum we can do, not to use others to our own ends. There is more than that. By laying down our power, we also want to enable others to flourish. (Jesus wanted his disciples to bear fruit). When you love someone, you want what’s good for them, what brings them joy (Jesus promises joy), you want to support them so they can be their best selves. A theologian said that love is wanting someone’s spiritual maturity. By laying down your life, you make room so others can thrive. And you support them in the process. And that’s what all Jesus’s ministry is about.

Sometimes of course we use this idea to want “what’s best for others” to justify “tough love”. It can be needed, but Jesus by “laying down his life” mostly invites us to practice a love that is life giving, that set people free, that enables them to be who they really are. A few years ago, I had a friend who was really not doing well. I tried again and again to help her by giving all sorts of advice, but it didn’t help. Actually, I understood at some point I had to withdraw because she needed to figure out things on her own, and it actually helped! This kind of love can be counter intuitive, right? It was life giving to love her by just letting her be instead of trying to rescue…Love is as diverse as relationships. It’s always different. Maybe the right question we have to ask ourselves is: is our love life giving? Does it bring fulfillment? Joy? Because that’s the way Jesus loved.

Now we need to say something about sacrifice. Jesus says that he is giving his life “for his friends” / he didn’t give his life “for his enemies” – although we understand he wanted to save all beings and gave his life for all. Jesus made a sacrifice in the sense that he remained faithful in his death / not using his divine power (He could have asked angels to come and rescue him) His sacrifice had a meaning. John’s Gospel always insists that Jesus chose to give his life. Jesus didn’t let his enemies crush him because he gave up on himself. What it teaches us though is that sacrifice is not about letting people use us and abuse us and sometimes destroy us. Human beings are never a means to en end, including ourselves. We should not accept to be a means to an end to anyone.

In the same way, we are not called to do meaningless sacrifices of ourselves (In the Bible, human sacrifices are wrong). We aren’t asked to sacrifice ourselves by letting other use us, from abusive relationship to suicide bombing…In certain circumstances, we can be called to give our lives to save others, but as Jesus, we are called to do it intentionally, with love, when it’s the only way. For us, us “laying down our life” is more of a daily exercise. We all have to practice it. As friends in Christ, we lay down our life for each others. Love flourishes in reciprocity, mutuality and in community.