bukas palad: March 2013

Mar

29

Good Friday: some thoughts about the Cross

This winter I took a walk
through Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.
Its undulating lawns were covered with snow
and its many leafless trees and its tombs and memorials
were encased in a cold, haunting white silence.

Yet, amidst its stillness and death-like nothingness,
there was a hint of life.
The stick-like trees harbored tiny buds awaiting to burst forth.
Some families paying their respects taught me
that painful separation gives way to thankful remembrances.
And the faith of those buried into God’s embrace,
reminded me of the promise of everlasting life.

Indeed, in the face of death,
it is not just nothingness we see but the promise of life.
This is the ‘good’ we gather to remember,
to celebrate and to believe in
as we turn to the contemplate the Cross this evening.

We remember the Cross
and the evil born of human sin that scourges Jesus,
crowns him with thorns and nails him painfully to his death.
But our eyes of faith see more;
we see Love hanging on this Cross.
Jesus’ boundless love for humankind
moved him to lay down his life
so that we can have life to the full in God.
The real scandal of the Cross
is that it is Jesus’ love for God and neighbor, and only this love,
--for you and me, really--
that moves him to do this. No
No greater love has a friend than to lay down his life.
And it is this kind of love that saves us for God.

We celebrate the Cross,
not with joyful acclamations
but with a quiet and sobering gratitude
that this is our way to salvation.
Jesus on the Cross reveals that our redemption
comes through his total, free and loving self-giving.
His faithfulness to God and his mercy
for others allowed him to do this.
Even as we struggle
with our own fidelity to God and our compassion for our neighbors, Jesus’ Cross must be our guide to salvation.
When God calls us, he bids us to come and die to ourselves
in order to have life to the full;
the way to do this is Jesus’ way of the Cross.

We believe in the Cross
because here is where God
transforms distorted human love that sins and does evil
and perfects it through Jesus.
The Cross is where we are saved,
where we are redeemed into the beauty of who we are to God.
Not worthless sinners meant for judgment and condemnation
but as God’s beloved, worthy to be redeemed for eternal life.
Indeed, the Cross is where we come to know more fully
that our God created us to save us as God’s own.
This is our Christian belief, and today we experience it most fully.

Death, then, cannot be the last word in our lives.
Rather, like the spring to come,
the death of Jesus on the Cross,
breaks open the truth of our faith:
with Jesus, there is indeed fullness of life with God.

Preached at the Good Friday Service Celebrating the Passion of the Lord at Blessed Mother Teresa, Dorchester, Boston
photo: from thehomeschoolroadtrip.com

Posted 29th March 2013 by adrian danker

Labels: Lent

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Mar

25

Homily: Laying Down Our Cloaks

Year C / Palm Sunday / Lent

Gospel Reading at the Commemoration of the Lord’s Entrance into Jerusalem: Luke 19.28-40

On Palm Sunday
we recall Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.
More significantly, we remember his self-giving actions
that make real God’s love to redeem us
through his death and resurrection.

Besides the palms we wave,
there is another image associated with Palm Sunday.
It is the image of the cloak.
We hear about it in Luke’s gospel
that was proclaimed before we processed into church.

Luke describes the crowds
taking off their cloaks and spreading them on the road
to welcome Jesus as he entered the city on a colt.

For the poor in Jesus' time,
a cloak would have been an expensive item to own.
If they had one, it would probably have been a prized possession;
it clothed and protected them in their poverty and vulnerability.
But their cloaks are expensive in another sense:
it gave them wellbeing and dignity.

The action of taking off their own cloaks
and spreading them on the ground to welcome Jesus
speaks to me of their generosity to give of their best:
no, not just these garments
but their whole selves to Jesus who is coming
to give them his most prized possession, his own life,
so that they -- and us -- will have life in God.

And so, I ask myself, “What about me?
What cloak have I offered this Lent to welcome Jesus
who saved you and me once, and still saves us all,
from sin and death?”

Looking back on Lent, I’ve to confess
that as much as I have tried my best to fast, to pray and to share,
I could have done better.
I have selfishly held back a part of myself,
cocooning it in the self-centered, self-assured
and self-serving folds of my cloak.
Yes, my Lenten practice could have been better.

May be this is how you feel too on this last Sunday of Lent,
as you perhaps hold fast to your own cloak,
stitched with those threads coloured, 'me', 'I', and 'myself'.

But if the beauty of this holy week we are about to celebrate
is the affirmation that Jesus still comes for us and for our salvation
in spite of our wrong doings, our Lenten shortcomings,
then this last week must also be graced,
and Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter, truly blessed,
because these days reminds us more hopefully
of God’s undying love for us in Jesus on the Cross.

This holy week then is still a good enough time
for you and me to unfasten our cloaks,
those we hoard, preserve and indulge ourselves in
and to lay them down more freely, more completely,
before Jesus, like the poor challenge us to today.

And as we lay our cloaks down,
do not be surprised that in our nakedness
God will cloak us anew,
enfolding us as he did his Son, Jesus
who he raised from the dead,
into that holy, radiant, splendor of resurrected life.

preached at Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta parish, Dorchester, Boston
artwork: palm sunday by giotto

Posted 25th March 2013 by adrian danker

Labels: Breaking Open God's Word Lent

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Mar

16

Homily: Handing Over and Receiving Back

Year C / 4th Week/ Saturday

Readings: Jeremiah 11.18-20 / Ps 7 (R/v 2a) / John 7.40-53

"This is truly the Prophet," some say.

"This is the Christ," others announce.

"Ah, the Christ, will not come from Galilee," some others protest.

And the Pharisees? They know him not as the Christ

but as the trouble maker, the rebel, the blasphemer.

Today’s gospel reading

presents us with people talking about Jesus

-- giving him titles, figuring him out, describing him, doubting him.

Yet, Jesus is nowhere to be seen:

he does not appear in our gospel reading today.

All we have are people reacting to Jesus.

Don’t we do the same?

We talk about Jesus in faith sharing and spiritual direction;

we preach about him in our homilies;

we teach about who he is and what he does

at the STM or Sunday school.

And sometimes, if not often enough, we have questions about him,

about his humanity and his divinity.

Yes, we too talk about him,

about him who is also not with us.

And yet talk about him, we must:

we must because our Christian faith

compels us to give an account for the hope we have in Jesus

not just to one another, or to our teachers

in school and in their assignments,

nor to the converted in the pews,

or to the least, the less and the forgotten we care for.

Indeed, our faith turns us outwards

to talk about Jesus to one and all.

But who or what are we really talking about

when we talk about “Jesus”?

The Jesus we read about in the Church's teachings?

The Jesus who has been theologized about that we teach?

The Jesus that another shares with us in joy or sorrow?

We are in a time of

more sincere prayer before God,

more penance to purify ourselves,

more selfless giving of ourselves to others.

We are in a time of Lent.

And Lent, I’d like to believe, also invites us

to more honestly consider, in our repentance,

the question Jesus asked Peter,

and always asks you and me,

"Who do say I am?"

The guards in today’s gospel reading offer us

a way to answer Jesus’ question

so that we can more authentically talk about Jesus.

When questioned by the Pharisees

for not arresting Jesus at the temple,

they answered, "Never before has anyone spoken like this man."

Their answer betrays not just an encounter with Jesus

but a handing over and a receiving back.

A handing over of themselves into his presence,

so as to listen to what he was really saying to them about himself.

and not what others had told them about him.

And in a receiving back

they would have experienced

not the Jesus others had identified, described,

made him out to be

but Jesus as he was to and for them.

A handing over and a receiving back.

Handing ourselves over to Jesus and receiving Jesus back:

I’d like to think that this is what Lenten repentance also calls us to.

For in this handing over of ourselves,

as we are in our lights and shadows,

and in receiving back Jesus ,

as he is to and for us,

we will better come to know him

more intimately, more genuinely, more confidently

as the living bread for our hunger,

as the light in our blindness,

as the good shepherd in our forsakenness,

and in our sinfulness and death-like unfreedoms,

as God’s forgiveness and saving grace.

It is intimacy that will inform us,

even as it transforms us,

to talk about Jesus in a truly knowledgeable manner

but, more so, to walk like Jesus in faithful imitatio.

Intimacy will also give us

that authentic form to account for our faith,

that form that is more than hearsay, more than another’s story,

more than a tradition handed down

or a community’s memory of one who was.

This form is belief, personal belief.

And if we dare to believe in this way of knowing Jesus,

of following Jesus,

if we really dare to more fully embrace him

in the handing over

of our soiled and stained but always potentially good selves to him

so as receive him back in faith

as he truly is, our Christ who saves,

we might be surprised.

Even more surprised to also receive back,

-- dare I hope, even before we formally seek reconciliation --

the gift of ourselves already forgiven,

always reconciled,

and truly loved into Godself by Jesus.

preached this day at Faber Jesuit Community, Brighton, Boston

Posted 16th March 2013 by adrian danker

Labels: Breaking Open God's Word Lent

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Mar

10

Homily: Thinking Differently

Year C / 4th Sunday / Lent

Readings: Joshua 5.9a,10-12 / Ps 34 (R/v 9a) / 2 Corinthians 5.17-21 / Luke, 15-1-3, 11-32

My father was a teacher and a school principal.
He was at his best when he was teaching
in the classroom, on the playing field
or at home with the four of us, his children.
What I learnt about life and faith, about loving and forgiving,
about valuing another and believing in myself,
I learnt from Dad.

But the most priceless lesson he taught us
- the lesson to recognize our limitations and to ask another for help -
only came in his final years,
when he finally put aside his pride, his need to be in-charge,
his teacher mode,
to let my Mom and us feed him in his illness,
to dress him in his weakness, to care for him to his death.

I have often thought about this change in him,
about this transformation from being father who knows best
to “please, give me a hand because I can’t but you can, my son.”

I’d like to think he made this turn around
because he began to think differently.

To think differently is also what today’s gospel reading
challenges us to consider
about repentance in this Lenten time.

The young man who squandered the inheritance his father gave him
returns to him seeking only to be hired as an employee,
not welcomed back as the son,
only to be fed enough,
not to be toasted with a feast.

Yet, his father embraces him in a forgiving love
that knows no bounds,
that cloaks him in the finest robe,
that returns his stature as son with a ring and sandals,
and that confirms his return to the family with celebration.

The father’s reception in the gospel reading should give you and me
confident hope in the boundless forgiving mercy of God
as we continue in our Lenten journey of repentance.
And this prodigal son,
who comes to his senses, gets up and goes back to the father,
can teach us that
one repents, not by feeling bad, but by thinking differently.

What prompts such thinking?
I’d like to suggest that it is the grace of God working
in those sometimes painful, often times uncomfortable
experiences of emptiness in our lives.

For the prodigal son,
it was the empty reality of his selfish, self-centered actions.

Perhaps, you like me
would have had similar experiences of emptiness.
The emptiness of a wrong we have not asked forgiveness for,
of a hypocrisy of who we are not,
of an infidelity to a commitment made,
of hoarding what we should share,
of wasting what we should nurture.

And may be, you like me also
recoil from entering this emptiness.
We recoil because we know that entering it forces us
to acknowledge our regrets and faults,
to admit parts of ourselves that are disappointing and unChristian,
to confess our sinfulness.
And this is so painful, so embarrassing before God
and to ourselves and another, isn’t it?

Yet, Lent invites us, through the example of the prodigal son today,
to embrace and enter these places of emptiness in our lives,
these spaces of our sinfulness,
and there to realize that we are more than a sinner to God:
we are God’s creation, God’s own, God’s beloved.

Like the prodigal son, then,
we will not enter into emptiness when we honestly admit our sins.
Rather, we will step into a space
where God’s Spirit moves us to think differently
about ourselves and about God who always forgives.
And God’s Spirit will also enable us to think differently
about our dependence on God.
It is not a relationship that limits us our freedom.

Rather, it liberates us
from a self-centered preoccupation with ourselves.
It frees us into another’s love
like the prodigal son who wasted away his inheritance,
into reconciliation with his family, and
like my father in his illness,
into the uplifting care of his wife and children.

Lent, then, does not call us to meditate on our sinfulness
to be crushed by its barrenness.
No, Lent draws us to focus on our sins
so that we can hear more clearly God’s life-giving forgiveness
calling us to conversion.

And God’s call is our hope-filled assurance,
as we reach the middle of our Lenten journey
for it invites us to think differently about repentance:
to think about it anew as
the humility of letting another into our lives to show us the way to salvation.

For the prodigal son, it was his father;
For my father, it was his family.

And for us here, it could be what we are already doing
or will want to do in the this Lenten time:
to let Jesus be more the center of our lives, or
to welcome another in greater need into our care, or even
to follow the Church more faithfully in our Lenten prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Each of these actions invites us
to really open up our self-centered hearts
to the slow but certain action of God's Spirit
who moves us to repent and to come home.
To come home to that space of our Father’s love,
that mantle he will cloak us with as he whispers in our ears,
“You have been and you are always mine.”

preached at Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta Parish, Dorchester, Boston
photo: improveyourconsciousnesscontact.blogspot.com

Posted 10th March 2013 by adrian danker

Labels: Breaking Open God's Word Lent

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bukas palad

with open hands, we give what we have first received. and with open hands, we receive what we will divest, once again. this is blessing itself: the giving and receiving of life and love, the sharing of faith and God.

Good Friday: some thoughts about the Cross

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Homily: Laying Down Our Cloaks

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Homily: Handing Over and Receiving Back

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Homily: Thinking Differently

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