Month: August 2021

We’re starting this week a five weeks sermon series on the book of James. You may know that James, the author of this letter, is believed to be “the” James, the brother of Jesus. The picture on the cover of our bulletin today is actually an illustration of this tradition: It’s a portrait of James (in the back) listening to Jesus. We see that Jesus is opening the Scriptures, explaining the scriptures for people, and we see James listening carefully and holding on to his own scroll, as if preparing himself to write about what he has just heard.

I love this icon first of all because it shows the physical resemblance between Jesus and James, which would be the case if we believe they were both born of Mary (some theologians think James was Joseph’s son, from an earlier marriage). But at any rate, beyond the physical resemblance, I would like us to notice the resemblance between Jesus and James in their character. When you read James, you will be surprised to realize how his tone his different from, say, Paul who can be quite defensive and argumentative or even a bit paternalistic. The overall tone of the letter of James is very humble, gentle, it is written with a lot of simplicity, although James is also able to pronounce stern warnings against the rich and the double minded. In this, James is close to Jesus, who was always humble, made his teaching accessible, and who yet could be very bothered by hypocrites and people clinging to their privileges. As a side note, I love it too that James call the members of his congregation “brothers and sisters”. As their leader, James still feels like their equal – probably being Jesus’s sibling in the flesh had taught him how much God is not interested in false hierarchies.

Another resemblance between Jesus and James – and I guess the most important – another resemblance is their teaching. During this time when we will be reading from James, you will notice how accessible James’s teaching is, which does not mean it isn’t profound. Like Jesus, James uses simple words to talk to people, and he also talks a lot about everyday life – he does linger of the theory (another difference with Paul who spends a lot of time explaining theological concepts). For James, our faith is not so much a matter of belief, rather it is something we need to practice in our concrete circumstances and inside our community. To say it simply, James focuses on the way we live, and more specifically, as announced in the title of this sermons series, James focuses on the way we treat each other as the place where our faith is experienced – and often tested.

We are today in the first chapter of the letter, and this chapter could be read as an introduction on what’s to come. The main theme (or the main thread if you prefer) – and we have just heard that in our reading – is that throughout the letter, James is seeking to show what true religion is, “True religion” not as opposed to “No religion at all”, and not as opposed to “a religion with a false teaching”. What James does is that he opposes “True religion” to a religion that would be “shallow religion” – and this is where, the teaching, although very accessible, actually gets very deep!

And so as we start our study today, we will try to understand a little better what James means by “true religion”, how it manifests itself but also, of course, since James is always practical, how it is that we can get there.

First of all, what is true religion? Well, we often defines religion as a matter of belief with a list of articles of faith, or we define religion as a matter of belonging, to an institution or to a community, but to James religion is not so much a matter of belief (at least not in the sense of an adhesion to a set of theoretical ideas) and religion is not about membership. To James, true religion is “a matter of doing” and in “doing”, James does not mean practicing rites but being in a relationship with God by prayer and being in relationship with one another, by treating each other with respect and fairness and, when possible, with affection. For example, James says that true religion is to care for the “orphans and widows” (the poor, the least powerful) or he says that true religion is to “bridle our tongues” (and it’s not about avoiding profanities, it’s about not speaking evil of each other). True religion is all about love but you’ll notice, it’s not about having fuzzy feelings either. James tells us that true religion isn’t about “deceiving our hearts” which is also translated as “indulging our hearts”. True religion isn’t about convincing ourselves that we love everybody, true religion is about loving people in words and action.

To me, this makes this letter very relevant for today. We live in a society where there are a lot of tensions, we are divided, we get emotional and we forget to respect each other or we disrespect people willingly because they don’t think like us, act like us or don’t look like us. Christians communities are not exempt from being contaminated by these divisions, we even have to acknowledge that sometimes we even lead the way.

And so James asks us to take a good look at ourselves – which is actually the very example he uses – with the image in the mirror. James invites us to look at ourselves in the spiritual mirror. We profess to be Christians but how is it that we concretely act? How is it that we treat each other? It is easy to deceive ourselves by thinking that we welcome the poor, or that we have no racial bias for example, but if we look in the spiritual mirror, we will know if our religion is all in our head or if it is real. The spiritual mirror is our everyday life, in the concrete way we treat each other, it’s not who we profess to be or we think we are or what we believe about God. If we look at our actions or if we listen our own words, we will then know the truth about ourselves (and we’ll talk more about that next week because that’s actually an idea that James develops in Chapter 2 and further).

What we need to notice for now is that, for James, true religion is a religion that brings change in the people who practice this religion. The letter of James is actually often considered to be part of what we call “Wisdom writings”. James is inviting us to wisdom and to grow spiritually. Now what does it mean to grow spiritually? It does not mean to grow in number or in activities! Our idea of spiritual growth is often modeled on economical growth, but spiritual growth is about becoming mature Christians, it is about changing, reforming ourselves, becoming more self aware. We have to look into the mirror and discover who we are like and make the changes, so we can become a true image of the God who created us.

There is a comic strip I like. It’s a church meeting and the pastor is talking about how to make spiritual growth happen in the church. The pastor says “Well, if we want to grow spiritually, maybe we need to have more programs”, and then other people start raising their hands and say things like: “Maybe we need to have more people” or “maybe we need to bring in more money”. But then a young guy sitting in the back asks candidly: “If we want to grow spiritually, maybe we need to deal with our own issues and take responsibility for ourselves?”. Of course, the young guy ends up at the door, because the pastor does not like hearing that…Yet maybe the guy has a point, maybe he could even be a disciple of James! For James, spiritual growth is about transforming ourselves and nobody can do the work for us, not even institutionalized religion – James says we have to be doer of the word, and not just hearers – “Doing the work” meaning first working on ourselves. James is very practical indeed, his theology is simple but it’s certainly not easy! It actually can be quite disheartening to take a good look at ourselves and to try to reform ourselves. Who among us is indeed “quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger” as James says we need to be?

The good news is that James does not leave us there. Chapter 1 reminds us that we are to ask God for help because God is the giver of all good gifts. God is generous and will give us wisdom as we ask.

And that’s another thing I really like about James and that makes him very relevant for today. James does not do a lot of speculations on who God is or what God does. The only thing James says about God is that God is good and that God gives good gifts, God’s main gift being how God helps us to mature into the fullness of the people we are called to be. This wisdom God gives us isn’t for our own benefit only, so we become “smart people” or even “good people”, this wisdom – and we’ll talk more about that in the weeks to come – this wisdom is given so we may help and support each other through our trials and enjoy good relationships within our community. Not easy, but probably worth pursuing!

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live for ever.”

This week, we hear again this passage from John Ch 6 that we heard last week. Last week, these words were the concluding words of our reading, this week, these are the opening words and then we get to the end of the Chapter. This isn’t, as you may have noticed, a happy ending. The words Jesus speaks are crude and difficult to hear, the crowd is shocked, a lot of disciples turn away. Peter remains and yet, it seems, almost halfheartedly: he does not like what Jesus says either but he and the eleven have nowhere else to go, and among the eleven, Judas is “a devil” who is going to betray Jesus by handing him over – which is, of course, an even worse thing to do than to just turn away – v70-71, that we’re missing in the lectionary, perhaps because they’re too dark.

This dark tone may be surprising since we have noticed in these past weeks that the feeding of the 5000 is this great miracle that is told in all four Gospels, and maybe one of the most famous miracles Jesus ever did. It should have made for a lot of Jesus’s popularity. Yet we noticed also that the way John tells us the story is different from the other evangelists. John adds this long section after the miracle where Jesus explains the spiritual dimension of the miracle, and we realize that people aren’t on board with this. They come for the physical bread, the good benefits they can obtain from Jesus, but they are not ready to accept who Jesus really is. To say the truth, they are disappointed. Jesus does not want to be their king after all, he is not really going to change life as they know it, although he very well could if only he would. Jesus is asking people for a spiritual transformation. He asks them to work for the bread that does not perish and to do the work God requires: to believe in the one God sent.

Now I said that we were going to talk about the Eucharist in this sermon series, and we could wonder how this relates at all to the Eucharist. Well, if you remember from last Sunday, we talked about Jesus’s presence in the Eucharist. We said than, less important than the rite itself, or the way we perform the rite, we come to the Eucharist to receive the presence of Jesus. The thing is, there is the flip side of the coin, and to me this is what this Gospel leads us to think about. To celebrate the Eucharist, we have to be present too. What is the sacrament worth if Jesus is willing to give himself, but we are unable to show up for him?

We noticed last week that there is much more to be present than sharing the same space. Being present is intentional. We have the means to connect with people on the other side of the world. We may not be present physically in the same room, yet our love or affection is still the same and still as valuable when we meet on line. The thing is: the opposite is possible too. We may very well be in the same room, and yet lack this deep connection. I don’t know about you but often when I read the Gospels, I think how lucky were all these people to be able to meet Jesus “in person”, things should have been so much easier for them! And yet we see that it wasn’t. In this Chapter of John, the crowd and the disciples have just received the bread from Jesus himself (and not from some random minister!) and yet they fail, they fail as much as we do, to understand Jesus, to receive Jesus, to follow Jesus – to be in communion with Jesus – and they also fail to be in communion with one another: They stick together because they have no better option and Judas is going to betray not only Jesus but all of them as a group.

And so indeed those words are hard to hear: We can celebrate the Eucharist, we can be right there in this spot with Jesus, and yet fail to be in communion with God and with one another. I told you last week that the Eucharist isn’t magic, so I guess this is where we are: Contrarily to what we might think, it is not enough to have God’s presence if we are not able to bring to God our own presence, which is just not our physical bodies. We can share the same room, meal or bed with the one we love, if we are not there with them with our hearts and minds, then the rest does not matter. There will be no communion.

So after we have talked about how Jesus was present for us in communion, it could be a good idea for us this week to be thinking about the way we want to be present to Jesus in communion.

– The first thing we have to do to be present is to bring our intention, our desire of being present. This is at least what our liturgy invites us to do when we say the Collect for Purity at the beginning of our service: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and to you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord”.

We start our celebration of the Eucharist by telling God our desire to be with God and how worthy God is to be worshiped (Gloria and Collect of the Day). We acknowledge the things that are on our minds and keep us away from God to recenter on our intention of being here. In the same way that it is sometimes hard to be with our family because there is so much going on at work, or sometimes it is so hard to work because there is so much going on with our family, we have to refocus to be truly present.

– Then to be present, we have to listen, to be attentive and open enough to be curious about the ones we are with – open to what they have to tell us. And that’s the second way we have to be present in the Eucharist too: listening to get to know God better and to hear what God has to say to us as a church but also as individuals. This is why we listen to the Scriptures (four readings!) – the word of God spoken to us in Ancient times – and the sermon – which ideally would explain how these ancient words are relevant for us today.

– Finally, and this is the last part of our worship before we celebrate the Eucharist, to be fully present we have to be repentant. Aware of our limitations we pray for what we need and we also pray for the forgiveness of our sins. It is not about condemning ourselves, but presence, “real presence”, requires self awareness, we’re called to be authentic, not “holding back” – present with our true selves, not the selves we wish we had. This was probably the stumbling block for most people at Jesus’s times – and it is probably the same for us today. People weren’t willing to continue to follow Jesus because they hoped Jesus would fulfill their own agendas, instead of being able to follow Jesus and serve him. In the same way, we often come to God desiring to receive, to be filled, but we are not that willing to change, to be transformed and to receive “Eternal life” – which is not only everlasting life but this very life that comes from God. Godly life, holy life.

In John’s, Jesus presents himself as the Sacrament, his flesh and his blood are the presence of God. There is very possibly this idea in John that, as we drink the wine and share the bread, we are also called to be the Sacrament. To embody Christ for one another in our church, family and in our own communities, each one of us and as a church. We use to think that we come to church to receive communion, but maybe it would be more accurate to say that we come to church to be in communion, with God and with one another. This is what we manifest when we celebrate the Eucharist, as we do so, we become Jesus’s flesh and blood, we become the Sacrament.

Now concretely: How is it that we can be in communion? This is the theme that we are going to study in our next Sermon Series, leaving “mystical John” for the very “down to earth James”. During five weeks starting next week, we will be reading from the Letter of James and James shows us how being Christian is all about the way we treat each other, all about learning how to live with one another – and not just worship. Worship is the manifestation of a communion that takes place in the hearts.

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live for ever.”

We will hear those very verses next week again. Jesus inviting us to “eat his flesh’” and “drink his blood”. This is a rather crude way to put it, and yet these are also the very words the priest pronounces each time the Eucharist is celebrated – when we recall Jesus’s last supper with his disciples with the blessing and sharing of the bread and the wine.

I said earlier I wanted to use the long reading from John we have this season as an opportunity to consecrate time to talk a bit more about what we do when we celebrate the Eucharist – and also to think a bit more about the challenges of celebrating the Eucharist in a time of pandemic and the different questions it has raised in our minds. Of course, as you probably know, there have been two thousands year of conversations and also controversies on the Eucharist, so I would like to be clear that, first of all, my intention is not to cover all that have been said about the subject, even in our own Episcopalian tradition (For example, you may know that the Holy Eucharist has started to be the main service in our church only about 30 years ago, it used to be Morning Prayer). I would also like to be clear on the fact that the teaching I would like to share with you today is mainline Protestant theology and is still a topic in debate. I like to think that I have been formed by many readings, conversations and reflections, yet this teaching is offered from my own limited understanding – an understanding that you are surely invited to analyze for yourself and discuss respectfully with one another and with me. My main references for this sermons series are the books “A guide to The Sacraments” by John Macquarrie and “Sacraments and Sacramentality” by Bernard Cook – both of them being used for the training of clergy and laity as main references in Episcopalian seminaries.

This said, for today, back to our Gospel first and I would like to point out to you how interesting it is that in John’s Gospel, there is no mention of Jesus’s last supper with his disciples – oh, actually there is, when Jesus washes his discipleship’s feet – but there is no mention that Jesus blessed the bread and the wine and asked his disciples to do the same in memory of him. The story is told in Matthew, Mark and Luke, but for most scholars this is this very chapter (Chapter 6) that “replaces” the account of Jesus’s last meal in John’s Gospel. Chapter 6 in John’s is very likely, in Jesus’s mouth, John’s theology on the Eucharist, the way John and John’s community understood what happened when they blessed and shared the bread and wine.

And so to me, this is very important to notice that in the Gospel there is sort of an “interchangeability” between Jesus’s acts and Jesus’s words in regard of the Eucharist, and it is especially important to notice that in a time of pandemic, or whenever we are not able to receive the sacrament (because of disease, travel, lack of an ordained minister and so on). It is also important to notice these things when we are not able to receive the sacrament in full or the way we used to (which is our case these days, receiving the bread only and not the wine). We see here in Chapter 6 that John does not focus so much on the way we celebrate, or on the concrete signs of the celebration, but John focuses on the mystical, or if you prefer, on the spiritual meaning of the Eucharist as a participation in the life of Christ. Theologians define a sacrament as “a visible sign of an invisible grace”. They say that, for example, the water of baptism is a sign of the forgiveness of sins – it is also, more deeply, a sign of the passage (through the water) from death to life (as the Hebrews crossed the red sea from the land of slavery to the promise land). Sacraments are a sign of moving from a place of death (separation from God) to a place of life (union with God through Christ) and to make it concrete, or rather to manifest this reality of grace and salvation, we use signs, yet what really matters, and this is what John reminds us of, is the meaning we put with the sign, not so much the sign in itself.

During this time of pandemic, when we have to worship on line, we have been talking about “spiritual communion” – we say we do “spiritual communion” when we say the prayer but don’t receive the bread and the wine. Well, I don’t really like this term of “spiritual communion” because of course communion is always spiritual, even when we do receive the bread and wine – if it isn’t a spiritual act for us, then it has very little value, it isn’t the small amount of bread we eat, or the small amount of wine we drink that is going to satisfy us. Now those signs are important, but they are important not so much in themselves, rather they are important because of the meaning they carry, the intention that comes with them – we do not just share the bread and wine, we pray over them to manifest our intentions and God’s intentions through Christ’s promises. It is important to manifest our faith in concrete ways, in the same manner that we would manifest our love in a concrete way. When we offer flowers to someone we love, our love isn’t in the flowers themselves and yet our flowers carry the affection we have for that person, and it matters to them that we offer this sign of our affection. . In the same way, when we have the occasion, it is very wonderful to be able to celebrate the Eucharist with bread and wine that can be eaten and drunk, but it is not magical either, the bread and the wine do not contain the grace in itself as surely as a bouquet does not contain our love in itself. Communion with God through Christ is spiritual, and also manifested in concrete signs, sacraments. The bouquet is a way of manifesting love, of making this love present and actual, for the person to whom it is offered. In the same manner, when we celebrate the Eucharist, we ask God to pour God’s spirit on the bread and the wine, so these elements may be, to us, the body and blood of Christ, so they may make Christ present unto us through the bread and the wine.

Bread and the wine are not a mere symbol, of course. Jesus’s insistence on “eating his flesh” and “drinking his blood” reminds us that our faith is embodied, Jesus didn’t just give us teachings and instructions or a moral way of life but gave his body and his blood for us. In the same way, we are to respond to his love with our whole being – it’s not something that just happens in our heads – and that’s why we gather to receive the Eucharist. Spirituality encompasses our whole being, body, heart and mind. Jesus gave himself for us and we have to give ourselves to him, not just send our good thoughts or good intentions! We also have to live out our unity with Christ in our flesh and blood, in our daily life, way beyond what happens at church only. The Eucharist we celebrate at church is a sign that our faith is concrete and requires a commitment of all our being.

Now what happens when we worship on line? I don’t think it annihilates the way Christ becomes present to us. There are many ways of being present, and we all had a lot of opportunities to experience that in the past 18 months. Even when we could not gather in person, calling friends and family has been our way of being with them. Of course, we much prefer meeting in person, but there is no lesser love or value in our affection when we meet this way – it possible that meeting on line only will affect the relationship in the long term because of course meeting on line does not allow us to have the same level of experience than when we meet in person, but when it’s our intention to spend time and relate to people we love, we know that it’s still very valuable to meet on line. I think it is the same with church. When we have the intention to be united with Christ, Christ will come to us. The sacrament isn’t magical, Jesus isn’t “contained” in the host itself. The sacrament of the Eucharist is the vessel in which Jesus comes to us at church, it is a wonderful thing to be able to do the rite in full as we did before the pandemic, but certainly our relationship with Christ does not depend on our ability to perform the rite. Communion is beyond the rite. The rite makes manifest a spiritual communion. John does not describe how the sacrament in supposed to happen for his community, but he wants them to understand what’s going on when they share the bread: They manifest their longing to be wholly united to Christ, and also to one another. If we are all united to Christ, we are also all united to one another.

To me, that’s another aspect of this pandemic: When there is a contagious disease, we are forced to realize that our flesh and blood, our bodies aren’t only our own body and so we can do whatever we want to do with them. Our own body depends on other people’s bodies and the way they treat them, or the way they are affected. Having different bodies, we are united in sharing in the same human flesh. In the same way, there is a deep and invisible unity for Christians that goes beyond what meets the eye. It is nice, enjoyable to be with one another in the same space, but if there is much more to our being together, a deeper unity in the flesh of Christ and we’ll talk more about that next week.

I don’t know if you remember from before I left for vacations, I told you that the feeding of the 5000, and moreover the discourse that follows, are a “test” for Jesus’s disciples – a test not being a pop quiz, a trial or a punishment, but an opportunity to go from one level of faith to another. To me, this is what this pandemic could be to us, an opportunity to go from one level of faith to another, to go, with John’s, beyond the visible, the tangible, what we can see but also touch or eat, to experience a deeper and broader presence of Christ. It could actually be for us one very meaningful thing we could do in a time where there are so many things that we cannot do the way we used to.