1. Year B / Feast of the Holy Family
    Readings: Genesis 15.1-6, 21.1-3 / Responsorial Psalm 104.1-6, 8-9 (R/v 7a, 8a) / Hebrews 11.8, 11-12, 17-19/ Luke 2.22-40


    It’s a Wonderful Life is my favourite Christmas film. 

    It's a story about George Bailey. He gives up his dreams to help others own affordable housing. His plans are sabotaged by an enemy; his housing project faces bankruptcy and he faces imprisonment. In desperation, George attempts suicide. But his guardian angel, Clarence, saves George by showing him how much good he has done for others, and how different his town would be had he not been born. Seeing this, George chooses life and returns home to family and friends. Clarence leaves him with this parting advice: "Remember no man is a failure who has friends.” And I will add, no one is a failure when she has family.

    Today’s celebration of the Holy Family invites us to reflect on why we need to be part of a family. 

    Perhaps like me, you might have come to this feast in the past, heard the readings and the homilies, and said, “We can never be like the Holy Family; we’re such an unholy family.” I think we say this because we’ve all experienced the tensions of family life: those messy, difficult, painful and unChristian experiences.

    The good news is that the Church does not expect our families to be as perfect as the Holy Family to celebrate today’s feast. 

    Our families are probably like George’s family in It’s a Wonderful Life. We might have some frustration, resentment, anger and depression towards our family, as George had towards his. Like him, we might sometimes feel trapped, manipulated and offended by what our immediate and extended family say and do. We might also be disappointed and ashamed that we have divorced, remarried and gay family members or family who have criminal records and skeletons in their closets; and we struggle as a Christian family to love them because we don’t know how to do this well enough.

    But isn’t it true that our families also make a positive difference in our lives? Don’t our family interactions, responsibilities, relationships give us joy, comfort and hope? Don’t they save us from sadness, loneliness and despair? Don’t they redeem us from the sin of selfishness and greed by drawing us into the grace of selflessness and generosity? And yes, don’t our love in and for our families—no matter the amount we give and receive—always bless us into life?

    I believe George achieves holiness at end of the film. It is his bonds and responsibilities as a family member that save him into holiness. They save him from self-centeredness by teaching him generosity towards others. They save him from death by helping him choose life. Yes, it is George’s family that schools him into holiness: they teach him to be more giving, more trusting, more thankful, more disposed towards life, even as he struggles with his daily duties as husband, father, family member and friend. 

    Don’t our families do the same for you and me? Don’t they school us to become more Christian in our attitudes and behaviors, in our words and deeds towards one another? Aren’t those disagreements, conflicts, discomforts with family really teachable moments for us to become more loving, more forgiving, more accepting, more caring, more family? 

    I’d like to suggest that family life is indeed the most important school to learn holiness and to grow up more Christian.

    Learning to grow in holiness is in fact what the Holy Family models for us. They are not holy because of the presence of the historical Jesus. They are holy because they strove in their family life to find God’s grace and to grow in God’s ways. This is why we have the families we do: to help us to grow into holiness. 

    From the angel’s announcement to Mary and then to Joseph, this couple lived amidst the tensions of life to follow God more faithfully. A pregnant and unmarried Mary, a still faithful Joseph, Jewish laws that questioned their union, puzzled kinsfolk: these made up the tensions they faced initially. But Mary and Joseph kept on walking, journeying, fleeing and trusting God. 

    Indeed, from the finding of Jesus in the temple to the finding of Jesus at the foot of the cross, from the flight into Egypt to his leaving home, this family struggled with the tensions of mystery, uncertainty and letting go as they followed and fulfilled God’s plan faithfully.

    For many of us, these tensions are evils to be resolved or overcome. But the Holy Family teaches us that these tensions are the very spaces for God’s grace to enter into our family lives, and to perfect us in holiness. 

    What we have to learn to do is to live in these tensions like the Holy Family did: by seeking God; by trusting God; by letting God lead. 

    I believe that Holy Family could live in the tensions of family life and still find God because they practiced obedience. We hear about obedience in today's readings, especially in our gospel story. Mary and Joseph obey the Law of Moses that Mary purifies herself after childbirth, that they present their first born to God, and that they thank God with sacrificial offerings. And Jesus’ obedience growing up found favor with God.

    Obedience is what allows God to fulfill God’s great and wonderful mystery of salvation in our lives. And it is writ large in the life of the Holy Family. Joseph obeyed the angel no matter what, and so obeyed God; and he obeyed the wisdom of his wife. Mary emptied herself for God at the word of the angel, and she obeyed the protective initiatives of her husband. 

    This mutual obedience of husband and wife, first to God and then to one another, is an image of the obedience that Jesus would give, first to His Father and then to His parents in Nazareth. Indeed, obedience to God and one another as it is practice in family is how Jesus, Mary and Joseph grow into a family filled with holiness.

    Perhaps, our present-day crisis in the family has to do with how we have forgotten, if not devalued, it as the graced place and source of our holiness in God.  Society often thinks of the family as an economic shelter or a baby-making machine or a restriction upon our freedom, peace and pleasure. As Christians, we must value the family otherwise. The family is a communion of persons God brings together to help us grow in holiness, and by this life of holiness, for us to enter into our salvation.

    Growing into holiness is indeed the Christian promise of God meeting and perfecting us in the tensions of family life. If this is what we celebrate in the life of the Holy Family, this morning, shouldn’t we learn to value our own families a lot more, not just today but always? After all, our family might just be the most wondrous life we’ll ever have with God and with one another. 



    (inspired by Kurt Engel)

    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    Photo: from the Internet (www.tripology.com)



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  2. Year B / Christmas Day
    Readings: Isaiah 52.7-10 / Responsorial Psalm 98.1-6 (R/v 3c) / Hebrews 1.1-6 / John 1.1-18


    I can see her face still, after all these years. It is Sunday morning. We are on the 17th floor, in the psychiatric ward where I am training as a hospital chaplain. Outside, the downtown skyscrapers of New York City glistened in the sunlight. Inside, the Catholic patients are gathering for a Communion service I’m about to conduct. 

    She is twenty-six years old, an African-American, a veteran of the Iraq war. She is recovering from a failed suicide attempt. She had tried to end her life because of guilt: she had accidentally killed a 16 year old whom she mistook for an Iraqi insurgent. She comes up to me, her eyes tearing. In a voice pregnant with longing, she asks, “Where were you?” 

    Every time I remember her haunting question, I am reminded poignantly of another question we all struggle with from time to time: “Where are you, God?” “Where are you, God, in my pain and suffering?” “In our illnesses and deaths?” “When my expectations are unfulfilled and our love is unrequited?” “When our plans are laid to waste and my future looks bleak?” 

    Whether we cry out “Where are you, God?” or “How long, Lord, how long?” we do so thinking that God is absent, remote, distant, apart from us. Yet, we believe that God is “always and everywhere present.” And today, more than any other day, we celebrate that God is with us: “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” What then?

    Not for us anymore the “what ifs” of who God is, or what God does, or where God is. What the Word made flesh, in Jesus, offers as the correct answer to this question are these truths: God is here with us; that God is here for us; and God is here because God loves us. This is why the outstretched arms of the baby Jesus is God’s invitation to you and me to enter the embrace of Emmanuel, God-with-us.

    How can we do this? By surrendering ourselves to our God who is “always and everywhere present.” But our surrender must be as childlike, as God is childlike in coming to us in Jesus.

    The final stanza of John Shea’s poem, “Sharon’s Christmas Prayer,” gives us a glimpse of the form this childlike surrender ought to have. When asked who the newborn baby is, Sharon said, “God.” Then “she jumped in the air / whirled around, dove into the sofa /and buried her head under the cushion / which is the only proper response / to the Good News of the Incarnation” (The Hour of the Unexpected). Sharon’s delightful response is to throw herself in trusting abandonment into the Good News God is. 

    Isn’t this how the shepherds and the wise men in the Christmas narratives of Luke and Matthew come to Jesus too? Don’t they surrender themselves in confident submission to the joyful Good News that God is amongst us? 

    Like Sharon, the shepherds and the magi show us that there is no only other way to savor the wonder of Jesus, God’s gift, but to surrender. When God bids us come to God, be it through angels singing “peace on earth” or a bright star that leads all to Bethlehem, how can we not come?

    And so, surrendering ourselves we must, and we can. For as the poet, W. H. Auden explains “Because of God’s visitation in Jesus, we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking; our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present” (For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio). 

    Yes, God has come and God continues to come, to answer our question “Where are you?” with the gentleness of Jesus’ gurgle; his is a little noisy din that resounds loudly as the Word of God breaking into our lives to console, accompany and uplift us, saint and sinner alike. 

    Perhaps, this is why we have come to worship the child Jesus today: he is God-with-us. We know the joyful song the angels sang and we recollect how the shepherds proclaimed God’s glory after visiting this child in the manger. And we know – no, we believe – that we too are called to come, to see and to go forth singing the same angel song and announcing the same shepherd testimony to the world.

    So, let us come to the Christmas Crib to look for Jesus who we must never lose sight of amidst life’s attractions and distractions. Finding him, let us kneel before Jesus who comes as our Saviour not just today but always. Then, let us go forth to announce this Good News.

    Only when we dare to do this will the world and we experience God’s immediacy and intimacy in each other’s words and actions. In another’s warm embrace in your disappointment. In the family’s thanksgiving for your kindness. In the forgiveness of others for mistakes made. In a faraway friend who emails to celebrate “Merry Christmas” this morning. In a mother’s delight for a child’s success. In hands clasped as a father passes on. In the first “I love you” a couple clumsily utters to each other. In the honest challenge to one’s vocation. In our care for one another as we journey through life and faith.

    These are our human ways of expressing why God became human: so that God can be with us. As we become more and more aware of these God moments, we should be more enlightened that in Jesus God’s embrace is wider, broader, and deeper than any sin committed, any evil done, any refusal of God made. 

    Surrendering ourselves with an “Amen” is the Christian way to better hear God’s answer that God has come to our question, “Where are you, God?” 

    But what if “Amen” is the very response God hopes to hear from us who come to Jesus today? Our “Amen” as the most appropriate human response to God who is asking us through the child Jesus, “Where are you?” “Where are you, Barney?” “Where are you, Audrey?” “Where are you, Therese and you, Philip?" "Where are you, and you, and you?” “Where are you, Adrian?”

    I can still remember this female veteran sitting with the others around an ordinary table that Sunday morning. I can see their expectant faces. The consecrated hosts rests in a ciborium on a hand towel that is laid out like a corporal. We pray the Our Father. 

    Then, all receive Holy Communion, including this young lady who has not had communion for the longest of time. She receives the Body of Christ, in the littleness of a host, once again. As it is placed into the cradle of her hands, she responds, “Amen.” And so it is: God has come, and God will be here, always. 



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore.
    artwork: Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerard van Honthorst

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  3. Year B / Advent / 4th Sunday
    Readings: 2 Samuel 7.1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16 / Responsorial Psalm 89 (R/v 2a) / Romans 16.25-27 / Luke 1.26-38


    Many of us have been playing it on our iPods and car stereos this Advent. Some of us are probably singing it now and again. I know I have dreamt it for the past 5 years in Boston. What this is is the song “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

    Whether it is sung by Diana Krall or the Carpenters or Bing Crosby, “I’ll be home for Christmas” is more than a Christmas standard; it sings of a most deep-seated longing we all have: to be at home.

    A theme in today’s readings is “home,” in particular about God wanting to come to us and to be at home with us.

    Our 1st reading describes where for God home is. For David, the tent over God's ark is not a suitable home; God deserves a better and more permanent dwelling. But God politely turns down David’s offer not because it is unworthy but because God wants to freely choose where he will dwell in: with his people. “I will fix a place for my people, and it will endure in my presence,” God says in this reading. God’s announcement situates God’s people geographically in Israel. More importantly, it proclaims the truly good news that God’s people should live in no other place but in God’s space. 

    Our gospel reading about the Annunciation tells us how God comes to dwell with God’s people: by entering into our lives. Mary’s ‘yes’ is the doorway for God to enter human form and to take it on. Jesus is the human embodiment of God in our midst. This is how we come to know that our human form is where God wishes to dwell in.

    Why the human form?  Not because it is perfect for will decay and die. Not because it is holy for its condition is scared by original sin. Not because it is strong or rich for it is prone to frailty and weakness, to impoverishment and want. 

    But because it is poor. Not poor in the economic sense of lacking, but poor in that richer theological sense of hoping. Yes, our human form is poor because God has formed it to necessarily hope. And to hope is to do what God always does: to hope in us.

    God hopes for us to become like God. And, we hope in God to actualize God’s hope in us: that we become more divine by becoming a lot more human. That Jesus inhabited human form in all ways but sin, and showed us how to be fully human and so more divine, testifies to this. 

    Isn't this why God comes to dwell in human form? To show us in Jesus -- in him who inhabits our human form -- how to realize God's hope for our eternal happiness.  If you, like me, agree with this truth of who Jesus must be for all humankind, then, how can our human form to be intrinsically bad and sinful, as some in Church condemn it to be? In Jesus we see how our human form must be fundamentally good, good enough for it to be God’s choicest dwelling space to live in, so as to be one like us and one with us. 

    More importantly, God dwells in human form as Jesus, the one human being who does show us the way, the truth and life of how God loves us into our salvation. Yes, God comes amongst us by inhabiting no other space but our human form.

    In these final Advent days, the Church offers us readings that proclaim the immediacy of Jesus’ coming. As we read or hear them, I believe, we cannot help but acknowledge the need to make a place for Jesus, a place where hope can grow as he did in the virgin womb of Mary. 

    For the Trappist monks of Spencer in Massachusetts, this space is our very being. Here is where our hope in Jesus will grow. But it begins when each one of us honestly admits to the fear and helplessness we experience in our lives.  This is how we can open the creaky, low door of our imperfections to the Child Jesus to come into our lives and to mature in us for mission, just like Jesus did in Mary who bore him not only within her but to the world. 

    This is how “our fears and sorrow become a great open place to welcome him,” the monks point out. They add, “From this most unlikely of places—as smelly as the straw of a Bethlehem stall—from this of all places, a tiny hand will reach out toward us. God is crying a message that ‘we need not be afraid.’ We can be unafraid for we are dearly loved by a God who dares to become a little Child.” 

    In my opinion, God does this in the only way God must do as the hope our God is: by coming home to each one of us.

    "I will be home for Christmas." We are all familiar with this first line from the chorus of the song. It ends with these words: "you can count on me." 

    What if God is singing this whole line to you and me, gently and softly, with a love beyond all telling, in this early morning quiet to just say this: “yes, I will be coming home to you, and yes, you can count on me"? 

    How now shall you and I receive God’s homecoming in Jesus this Christmas day? 


    (with inputs from the Trappist monks at Spencer Monastery)

     Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: april hoeller (christmasmagician.blogspot.com)


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  4. Year B / Advent / 3rd Sunday
    Readings: Isaiah 61.1-2a, 10-11/ Canticle from Luke 1.46-48,49-50, 53-54 (R/v Is 61.10b) / 1 Thessalonians 5.16-24 / John 1.6-8, 19-28


    It’s the morning of your posting to your secondary school. You wonder what’s in store for you: What will the new school be like? How will the teachers teach? Who will be my friends? Everything’s going to be different. You’re excited and anxious.

    With Mom and Dad, you head off early to school. So do the other new and eager Secondary 1 students. As you walk up the school’s driveway, morning light is peeling back the darkness of the night. Then, you see what you’d never expect to find in school: a Christmas tree, all-aglow with twinkling lights. Mom lets out a “wow”; Dad smiles; and you say to yourself, “It’s probably going to be just fine.” 

    We hope this is the experience our new students will have when they join us in St Joseph’s Institution. An 8-foot tall Christmas Tree, all awash with lights and trinkets, will indeed welcome them. And we do hope this will gladden them as they experience the joy of Christmas.

    Our generous benefactors have made this possible. Their gift of the tree speaks of the Christmas joy they cannot help but share with many, not hoard for themselves. I believe their joy is rooted in and inspired by the joy of God, a joy so movingly expressed by God’s prodigious sharing of divine love with us. Jesus is the name God has given to describe the goodness being shared.

    Sharing Jesus is God’s plan to fill our world with joy. But we cannot make this our true joy unless we let it be the kind of joy God wishes for us in Jesus. A joy that originates in another’s love for us. A joy that is alive, spontaneous, excessive, infectious. A joy that moves us to share it generously with others, especially the unhappy, the desolate, the despairing. 

    In Jesus, this joy is never self-seeking but truly self-giving. This is the joy God has and shares. And God wishes that we make this joy our own so that we can truly live in love with God and in selflessness for neighbor. 

    Any other kind of joy is selfish. When we decide what joy should be, when we determine how it should meet our expectations, and when we choose who deserves it, what we have is fake joy. It is superficial, wanting and short-lived. 

    In contrast, true joy surprises, transforms and gives life. True joy is ours when someone bestows it on us when we least expect it.  True joy comes alive in us when another draws it out of us to share, especially when we think we have nothing to share. True joy becomes life-giving for us when we realize that its origin and goal lies in another’s love for us. Such joy inevitably refocuses our gaze onto the love of God whose singular joy is to be with us.

    John the Baptist points us once again to the source of this kind of joy in today’s gospel reading. Jesus. Jesus is the light John came to testify to. 

    But what kind of light is Jesus? How does Jesus shed light on God’s goodness in our midst? Why is the light of Jesus joyful? Perhaps this story can give us an answer.
    A rabbi gathered his students just before dawn. He asked them to distinguish between day and night. As the first morning rays pierced the fading formless darkness in the distant east, a cock crowed. “Ah! Rabbi,” said one, “When the cock crows day has come and night is spent.” The rabbi shook his head.  
    “Rabbi, is it when we can see and name the animals in the dawning light?” asked another tentatively. “It is not,” replied the rabbi. “Then, it must be when we can look out to the brightening horizon and see much more than the faint illumination our lamps give off in the dark.” The rabbi raised his head, looked steely but lovingly into the faces of each bewildering disciple.  
    Then, he said: “There is light when we can look at each person we meet and recognize in the distinctive face of a brother and a sister, one like you and me, the image of God. Now, that is light.”
    Light that enables us to look at another’s face and to behold in our shared human visage the promised divinity we share in as God’s children. This is the kind of the light Jesus brings into our world.

    In Jesus’ light you and I can see the divine lines etched into our human faces more clearly: this is how we come to know that we are truly God’s beloved. More beautifully, I'd like to imagine Jesus’ light flooding God’s memory with the truth of who we must always be to God: God’s own, never to be forgotten but to be lovingly saved into eternity. 

    This is our joy in Jesus. We have every right to celebrate this joy because it is already ours with Jesus’ birth. And we have every right to hope in this joy because Jesus will come into each new day of our lives. 

    The 3rd Sunday of Advent invites us to remember, to celebrate and to believe in this joy we have in Jesus. It also calls us to let this joy resound in each of us so that we can proclaim it to one and another and to all. This is how we can help each other to better keep our gaze firmly on the reason for the season, as we busy ourselves with Christmas shopping, cooking and merrymaking in these last weeks of Advent. 

    “The joy of the gospel, the joy of the good news,” Pope Francis observes, “fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus” (Evangelii Gaudium). Jesus encounters us daily; and isn't this good enough reason for us to herald the joy of Christmas?

    The authors of our readings also speak about this joy in their writings. Isaiah rejoices in a Messiah who will make justice and praise spring up before all the nations. The Psalmist sings joyfully of the great things the Lord has done for him in God’s mercy. And Paul instructs us to rejoice always because God’s faithfulness in Jesus will accomplish the goodness God wishes for us not just in heaven but on earth too.

    What about us? What about God’s goodness will we announce in these remaining Advent days? How can we be like the authors of our readings and the benefactors of the tree when we do this?

    I believe we can: we all have something joyful to proclaim about God and God’s actions in our lives. Whether this be like the many small, twinkling lights on a Christmas tree or the radiant light of a new dawn, words and actions of care and consolation, of forgiveness and reconciliation, of sharing love or giving life that we have experienced will reflect something of the light of Jesus in whom we better see God’s love in one  another.

    Then this announcement of joy we make might possibly be a far better gift to someone we love or we have hurt or we know needs some happiness than an expensive present purchased from Robinsons, Metro or Amazon. Sharing the joy of God’s presence this Christmas might indeed be good enough for him or her or them all to say, “This feels like Jesus has come, and I’m going to be just fine!” Let us not delay then in sharing this joy; after all, the Lord himself never delays in coming to us!



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: april hoeller (christmasmagician.blogspot.com)

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  5. Year B / Advent / 2nd Sunday
    Readings: Isaiah 40.1-5, 9-11/ Psalm 85 (R/v 8) / 2 Peter 3.8-14 / Mark 1.1-8


    It's Wednesday, August 4. It's unbearably hot in Pesaro, Italy. Michele Ferris' phone rings. He answers it. He hears a voice saying, "Ciao, Michele, è Papà Francesco." At first he thinks it is a joke, then, he begins to realize it's for real. Pope Francis has called to console Michele after reading his letter about the painful loss of his brother criminals gunned down.

    This is how Elisabetta Piqué ends her biography of Francis: with a description of loving care. This image of Francis lovingly caring for Michele that I read about this past week remained with me as I prayed the readings of this 2nd Sunday of Advent; they too speak of loving care—of God’s loving care for humankind.

    This reality of God’s immense love that cares for us into our salvation is the base note in today's readings. To hear it is to remember that God so loved the world that he gave us his only son (John 3.16). Advent encourages us to focus more attentively on this truth of our Christian faith.

    Some of us might hear today’s readings and miss this truth because we’ve been taught that they focus only on human sinfulness. Others, upon hearing this truth, might lament “Really?” because they have encountered some in our Church who insists that God will never truly welcome the remarried, the divorced, the homosexual. Still a few of us hearing today’s readings may feel unworthy because of how we have sinfully squandered away our lives this year. 

    Yet, at the heart of our readings today is God's love for us—always faithful, always enduring, always saving.

    By using today’s readings to focus our Advent preparations on repentance, the Church, like a good mother, assures us again that God's love in Jesus is the divine balm—the holy medication, if you like—that will redeem us from sinfulness. We would be so, so wrong to misinterpret today’s readings as permission to continue fixating ourselves on our unworthiness because of sin. 

    Advent exists to redirect our gaze again onto the singular Christian truth that God's redemption comes to us in no other form than in Jesus who incarnates God's love with his birth. A graced way we can more fully experience this truth in Advent is to practice stillness at this time.

    Being still in order to be mindful of God is how Jesus lived his life. Recall the many times in the gospels when Jesus stilled himself in prayer to more be aware of God’s presence and action in his life: before he heals and when his day is done are just two examples. Jesus calls us to do likewise because being still to be mindful of God is his way of shaping us to better live in God's love and to more wholeheartedly experience God’s forgiveness. 

    The Jesuit Larry Gallick once described this practice of Advent stillness as holding "our breaths as God does a fantastic athletic act of leaping from eternity into time, from heaven to earth, from Spirit to Flesh, and from mystery to history, for this is how we can begin to see God, the Divine Artist painting and sculpturing our image within His." 

    This mindfulness of God’s incarnation is really what Christmas is about. Knowing this can help us to answer this Advent question better: ''What will Jesus' birth once in history and even now in my life story, mean to me especially, if not differently, this coming Christmas?"

    As a time of grace, Advent stillness affords us the space to answer this question by reexamining the quality of our Christian life as we prepare for Christmas. And isn't such a reexamination before God in order to align our lives with God’s life what repentance is all about? 

    “Never pass up an opportunity to shut up.” I like this phrase because I think it is an apt description of how Advent stillness is a necessary disposition we can adopt to better prepare for Christmas. Shutting up helps us to really listen to our hearts’ desire for Christmas. Shutting up also helps us to still ourselves before God; this enables us to open ourselves to consider more honestly the response we are making to God with our live—both to the mystery of God's action at the first Christmas and to each day as Jesus comes to birth into our lives anew and always.

    Shutting up and being still in Advent does not mean that nothing is going on; rather, something is in fact going on. This something is like two friends who have come to that remarkably beautiful point of not needing to say much because they intimately know each other, and now have the opportunity to deepen their honesty, trust, ease and commitment together in the silence. Advent stillness invites us into this same experience with no other but God. Then, we can be truly mindful of God and God’s loving actions in our lives, particularly of God’s mercy.

    In our first reading, the prophet Isaiah reminds the exiled Israelites that God will always come to console all that await God. But he also reminds them elsewhere in his writings that as long as their inner voices of self-recrimination keep shouting their guilt and shame, words of Gods “comfort” cannot be heard. 

    And isn't this also true for us if all we are concerned with, even obsessed about, in repentance is our sins? What gets lost is the good tidings of God’s peace on earth that comes with Jesus forgiving us.

    In fact, aren’t we in danger of forgoing this good news whenever we lose ourselves to the unrestrained commercialism of Christmas gift-giving and festivity, or whenever we busy ourselves too much with the minutiae of Christmas preparations only to miss its true spirit?

    This is why John the Baptist's cry to "repent, prepare the way for the Lord, and make straight his paths" this evening must jolt us out of our year-in, year-out way of living Advent time. Nothing good can come out if we indulge ourselves once again this year in our complacent familiarity with John's message of repentance. 

    Much of God’s good will however be ours if we but dare to heed his call, and to make the only truly human response we can to the excessive goodness of God’s mercy: that we repent out of love for God and not because we have to settle accounts with God.

    The hope our readings offer today is that repentance rooted in love of God will lead us into living more gently with God. Who amongst us here does not like sitting by a quiet stream or to be close to a person who has a gentle stream within them? Perhaps the best gift each of us can receive through repentance at Advent time is “a quieter-inside self whose mountains of resistance have been leveled, whose valleys of inferiority have been filled in and whose roughness has been smoothed by God’s gentle presence” (Larry Gallick). 

    If this gentleness with God is what you truly desire for Christmas, then don’t hesitate to imitate what Michele did by sharing his life with Francis. Share with God in your Advent prayer about your life and, more so, about your heartfelt desire for forgiveness to live with God gently. 

    Then, be open to God’s reply: whether in prayer, in someone’s words, in a consoling experience, God will respond because God comes to us as Immanuel, God-with-us and God-for-us, always.




    Drawn in parts from Larry Gallick, SJ


    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: april hoeller (christmasmagician.blogspot.com)




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  6. Graduation Mass for the Class of 2014 of St Joseph’s Institution International (SJII)
    Readings: Jeremiah 1.4-10 / Song of Praise: Exodus 15 / 1 Timothy 1.3-4, 6-10 / Luke 4.16-21


    Today is your happy day: you’re graduating. Congratulations, graduates! And congratulations too to the parents and to the teachers!

    As graduates, you probably have a few things to say today. But I think “Yes, I’ve made it!" and, "Look out world; here I come!” sum it all up. I believe you are also asking questions like: “Where shall I go to next? Oxford? Stanford? Harvard? NUS?” And, “What shall I become? Doctor? Scholar? Social Worker? World class musician or adventurer?”

    But here you are, here we are, before God on graduation morning. What would God want to say to you? What would God want to ask of you?

    I’d like to think that the theme chosen for our Eucharist—“Fan into a flame the gift of God”—is God’s message for you right here, right now. Let me suggest that God’s message is both a gift and a task.

    The Gift of Remembering
    In our 2nd reading a letter, Paul writes to his friend Timothy. Here is Paul writing at the end of his life; he is a prisoner awaiting his death. Here is Paul the apostle preached the Good News—that God is love—to one and all around the Mediterranean.

    Paul's letter reminded Timothy, as it should remind us, that what should matter in our lives is this: that we should be thankful for the gifts we have from God and for God’s invitation for us to use these gifts, however big or small, to proclaim the same Good News that God is love and we are God’s beloved. For Paul, giving thanks for the gift of faith and salvation is the reason that he became an apostle proclaiming the Good News.

    What about you? Haven’t you been gifted too in these years of studying at SJI International? What are you remembering with gratitude as you sit here? Perhaps these:

    Lessons learnt. Experiences had. Care received. Friendship forged. Growing up accomplished.  Family love continuing. Students, teachers who’ve walked with you. Teachers, students who challenged you to give your best. And parents, your children growing up and your hopes answered.

    And for the rest of us who've come to celebrate with our graduates, we can all give thanks for relationships that matter in our life, and for simple, everyday things that sustain us, as well as the extra-ordinary events that have uplifted or challenged us to become better.

    Yes, there is much to be thankful for as you look back on your SJII days, and as we come to be with you.

    But I believe thanking God for the gifts you have been blessed with is only half of what you’ve learnt well in this school: learning how to learn to be thankful and expressing this thanks as men and women of integrity.

    The other half of what you've learnt has to do with how you've learnt to live by being men and women for others. We can appreciate the significance of this when we reflect on the image of the prophet Jeremiah in our first reading. Jeremiah was chosen to go forth and to proclaim the Good News by using his gift to speak prophetically about God. Like Jeremiah, you are being invited to the task of sharing your gifts. 

    The Task Ahead of You
    Today, God is challenging you to go forth from this school bearing your gifts to the world: bearing them to transform the world, as SJII has transformed you. Your graduation ceremony is about your school sending you sent forth into the world to make a difference. And this is also part of God’s message for you.

    I’d like to believe that your learning in SJII has taught you to live, not for yourselves but for others to have life. I believe that you have learnt through your studies and your interaction with the community in these SJII day about how to use your gifts of knowledge, energy, enthusiasm, compassion and care to bring about change, to better the world, and to uplift, transform and enliven others. This is what it means to be a person for others.

    Yes, good to know God’s gift and God’s task on graduation day.

    One More Thing
    But I think God does have one more thing to say to you as you graduate from this Catholic Lasallian school. And it is this: that all that you have and all that you are from these years of learning, of interacting, of playing, of growing, of becoming more the person you are is meant to be wasted. Yes, wasted. 

    Your education, indeed your life, will only really be worth its value, its fullest, truest, value when you dare, really dare, to waste it away for another.

    What do I mean by wasting? Let’s go back to your theme: “To fan into a flame the gift of God.” For there to be a flame, wood has to burn till nothing but ashes is left.

    This is the kind of life Jesus lived. In our gospel reading, Jesus speaks of his public ministry. He charts out his roadmap of what he will be doing and who he will become. He will heal the afflicted. He will free the burdened. He proclaim God’s goodness for all, whether saint or sinner. He will do nothing less than to lay down his life for another. He does this because love of God is only truly and fully love when it is love for others. This is how Jesus show us how to live as God’s beloved.

    You and I are God’s beloved.  As his beloved, God has blessed you with gifts, including a Josephian education, to do what Jesus: to lay it all down for another to have life. This is how you can—like burning wood turning into ashes—fan into a flame the gift of God in your life. There is no other Christ-like way to do this than to die like Jesus did. In death, he gave life to all. Wasting our education and our life away is like death; it is a giving of ourselves selflessly for another.  

    We would be wrong to see such wasting as loss. Rather, it is wasting in that richer sense of being prodigal, that is, of being generous, of being selfless, of really being self-giving in what we do with all our abundance to another, with all our riches for others. 

    This is what a Josephian education is truly meant for: that it be given to someone else as blessing and gift so that another may have life to the full, and so come to know the love of God in his life. And this kind of giving to another, this kind of wasting, is indeed how we can fan into a flame the gift of God.

    I believe we cannot really give thanks or share gifts unless we dare to die to ourselves—die to what we have, to what we hoard and to what we want—so that we can be prodigal towards others, to be wasteful for them. When you dare to do this then the knowledge, faith, life you have received here in SJII can kindle other fires that will light up the world.

    Waste your education for another’s life. It sounds illogical, stupid, dumb, I know. "What can I gain by doing this?" you may ask.  

    Jesus’ public ministry (which he proclaimed in today’s gospel) didn’t end in death or nothingness. It ended in resurrected life so that in everything else there is fullness of life.  You can say that he wasted his life away for life to abound.

    Could God be asking you who are graduating from SJII today, and yes asking us all too: "Will you waste your education for another?  Will you waste it so that you might find life? Yes, will you waste it so that you can fan your flame brightly in the world, so brightly so that when others see you, they will say, 'See how they shine with God’s love!' and then they will smile with delight?"



    Preached at the Graduation Mass at SJII, Singapore
    Photo: from the Internet (stockproject1)


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  7. Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 33 / Sunday 
    Readings: Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31 / Psalm 128:1-5 / 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6 / Matthew 25:14-30


    Our family gathers for dinner on Sunday evenings. Now and then, one of us brings little Daniel, my 2 year old nephew, a gift. It could be toy or a t-shirt. I’m always amused by how Daniel—after playing with his gift for awhile with some ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ and a giggle or two—marches up to another person, the gift in two hands, and gifts it to her saying, ‘ta-dah.’ We all laugh; and some of us (often my sister) say, ‘Good boy, Daniel!’

    A happy scene. And happier too if we but could see how Daniel is giving us a much richer gift in each of these moments: the wisdom of receiving and multiplying gifts. 

    Wisdom and gifts. An odd combination. We usually associate gifts with words like: gift-giver; generosity; birthdays and Christmas; shopping; wrapping paper; thanking; storing. But wisdom and gifts? 

    Our first reading focuses on wisdom. Our gospel reading invites us to consider gifting and gifts.

    Our first reading pictures wisdom as a "worthy wife."  She takes ordinary things, like wool and flax, and remakes these to care for her husband and the poor. Our gospel reading presents Jesus’ parable about a rich man who entrusts three persons varied amounts of money each. Each of them then does something with amount given to them.

    What is the connection between these readings? Between wisdom and gifts, these seemingly unconnected ideas? Why would such a connection, if any, be good news for Christian life? 

    Two of the persons in Jesus’ parable multiply the money entrusted to them. One does not; he keeps what was given so as not to lose it. This morning Jesus teaches that even the little this third person has, which he buried for fear of the giver, will be taken away and given to the one who was given more. “For everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away,” says Jesus in our parable.  

    This doesn’t sound just, merciful, or even Christian? How are we to make sense of Jesus’ harsh and challenging teaching?

    By recalling another teaching of Jesus: "Where your heart is, there also is your treasure" (Luke 12.34). Wisdom is not about knowing all things. Rather, wisdom is about knowing all things truthfully: knowing where things come from, what they are for and where they can take us to when we use them.

    Upon receiving a gift, we might think that we know exactly what it is and how to use it.  A wise person, on the other hand, takes time to reverence the gift; she approaches it with humility, openness and a generous heart to receive and to share. She never assumes full knowledge of what the gift is or how to use it, nor why it was given in the first place. 

    Reading Jesus’ teaching through the lens of wisdom can help us better focus on what really matters in Jesus’ parable: that we honestly locate the real treasures of our lives.  What persons center our imaginations, plans, activities and hopes?  What personal gifts have been given and which ones, as of yet, have not been fully unwrapped?  What material objects clutter our lives?  Which spiritual practices are truly gifts that lead us to God, and which ones entrap us like the man who buries his gift because we fear God?

    When—and if—we dare locate the real treasures in our lives, we might begin to answer the why, what and how questions about the gifts we have.  This is wisdom that opens us up to better sense God’s labor and love through these gifts in our lives: we receive God with love. This is wisdom that re-orientates our understanding of what these gifts are for in our lives: we share God in love for others more willingly. 

    Wisdom teaches us that what should matter is that we really do something with God’s gift of faith to us: like Jesus, we should receive God into our lives with gratitude and we should share God with others in generosity. 

    The men who multiplied their given amounts had faith in their master. And so, they opened themselves to what more his gifts offered. The man who had little faith in his master did nothing with his gift; he entombed himself from its promise of more. This morning, you and I are invited to be like the men who multiplied their gifts. Is our faith like these, a faith in God that’s open and trusting of God's abundance? Or, is our faith like the man who feared, feared because he was too secure, too certain that faith in God is always about obeying rules and laws? Which one are you?

    I believe Jesus’ teaching is harsh because he wants to wake us up. The fear of God is not what should keep us in good standing with God. Rather, what keeps us in good standing with God is holy boldness, that is, the daringness we have to trust God and to risk our faith so that God can bless us with more. This is the kind of wisdom that can embolden us to trust God in, through and with our many gifts. We can then begin to glimpse and to savor just a little bit more of the mystery of God’s goodness in these gifts for us, and, through us and our sharing, for others. 

    This trust is what risking our faith is all about: to dare to see a little more than meets the eye what is of God in the gifts we have and to so let God multiply our faith. 

    Hence, Jesus’ parable is not about fairness or justice. It is about receptivity, about how we receive God’s gifts and how we use them. Those of us who pretend that there’s no need to be wise about the gifts we receive don't really understand what faith is about, and so we let it be. But those of us who truly do have faith will dare to risk it because we know we need even more of it. Which one are you?

    Daniel comes running to my Mother and trusts his gift of Elmo into her hands. ‘Ta-dah,’ he says. Grandma takes it and wiggles it about. ‘Ta-dah,’ she replies, handing it to back to him with a hug and a kiss. And Daniel snuggles up in the warm embrace of Mama’s love. ‘Yay,’ he chuckles.

    Love received; love shared; love multiplied abundantly. 

    And this is true of God too, only magnified a hundred fold, even more, when we dare to multiply our faith by sharing it with God and with one another. 



    Preached at St Ignatius Church
    photo: from the internet (iStock.com)


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  8. Dedication of the Lateran Basilica (Feast)
    Readings: Ezekiel 47.1-2,8-9,12 / Psalm 46 (R/v 5) / 1 Corinthians 3.9c-11, 16-17 / John  2.13-22


    You’ve seen him, that man at the fair or the bazaar calling out, “Step right up, step right up.” Calling us to dare try a throw to win a prize. Calling us not to be part of the crowd but to come forward and try something new. Step right up.

    Yes, step right up now and try your hand at this question about today’s feast:

    Is the Lateran Basilica: (a) The Pope’s church as the Bishop of Rome?; or (b) The main cathedral of the diocese of Rome?; or (c) the Mother cathedral of the Universal Church?  By show of hands, how many say (a)?  (b)?   (c)? 

    And the answer is: all of the above.

    The Basilica we remember today is named after a Roman palace, the Lateran, which the converted Emperor Constantine gifted for Christian worship. His gesture marked Christianity becoming the official religion in his Empire. This basilica is sometimes called St John because it is dedicated to St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist. In 324 AD, it became the Cathedral of Rome. It remained the pope’s residence until 1308. Yes, a short lesson in Church history.

    “But why are we celebrating a church building?” you may ask. What’s the significance of this church, or any temple of God as the Church is imaged in our readings? Why should we care about a church building? Because our readings should disturb us about how we understand "Church." This is exactly what Jesus did when he bothered the moneychangers and merchants doing commerce in God’s temple in today’s gospel.

    Today’s readings should disturb us with this question: “What’s our attitude towards Church? Towards this holy place where God invites us to meet God, this place which is never our possession, nor our entitlement but God’s? The quality of our zeal for God is really what Jesus is challenging us to consider this morning. His challenge should bother us because how we respond will determine the quality of our participation in Church.

    Today’s readings can help us think about our answers to this question. Ezekiel describes the temple as life-giving in the first reading: water flows out of this place of God and makes the “salt waters” fresh.  Paul describes the church in Corinth as “God’s building” in the second reading: this Christian community is “the temple of God” and “holy.” And in today’s gospel reading, Jesus refers to his body as the temple that cannot die: it is ordained to be the risen body through whom God’s saving glory shines forth on us all.

    Our readings offer two themes for reflection. First, that the temple of God, the Church, is meant to give life, and life that flourishes. Second, that we, the Church, the Body of Christ, cannot be kept down.

    But what does any of this have to do with us who celebrate the dedication of the Lateran Basilica?

    Consider how our readings encourage us to live like the first Roman Christians who started worshipping in this building. Their life and love for one another in Jesus finally moved Christianity out of the shadows and into the light of the world. Their lives transformed Christianity. From a religion on the periphery, a religion hidden behind household doors to a religion at the heart of the world, a religion practiced publicly amidst the world. This is how Jesus’ disciples enfleshed his instruction, become the light of the world.

    These early Christians could do this because they cooperated with God’s Spirit dwelling in them. This is the truth Paul proclaims today. God’s Spirit empowered these disciples to share God’s life with one another in community and to evangelize about the good life in the God of Jesus Christ to the world.

    You and I are also filled with God’s Spirit. Our readings call us once again to let God’s Spirit lead us onward. More significantly, following Paul, we are to let God’s Spirit flow out of us. Then, we can become, as Ezekiel envisions, life-giving water to nourish another, to enliven others, to raise up the downtrodden, the lesser and the forgotten in our midst.

    But there is one more message our readings suggest as we reflect on the Lateran Basilica. This has to do with improving our participation in Church and as Church. This is summed up in these two phrases: stepping up and standing up.

    The Lateran Basilica has had its ups and downs: it has experienced fires, wars, earthquakes, and even bad popes. It has had to be renovated and restored. But it still stands. And as an embodiment of Church, it continues standing up for the Good News: that in Jesus, God redeems all of us, saint or sinner alike, into his own house forever. Like the Church, you and I are called to step up and stand up for the Good News; this is the Christian way to transform the world anew.

    This is why it is our Christian duty to step up and stand up to remind others about faith and to offer hope to them. This is what we can offer others when life seems dark and despairing at times, or when things in our parish or school or work place, even in our Church and nation don’t seem to be going as God’s reign should look like. This is why our Christian mission as God’s temples is to be the Christ-like source of renewing the world.  This is why stepping up and standing up are non-negotiable if we want our Christian lives to matter and to be salvific.

    So, if something is not the way it should be in the world, why not step up and stand up?

    If we worry about the widening economic gap and don’t think the poor are cared for well enough, then why not step up to do something about it, rather than wait for the government or an NGO to act?

    If we think that the Church is confused and divided after the Synod on the Family because traditionalists are policing those who cannot receive communion while progressives are welcoming all to communion, then why not stand up for God's mercy that unites all in God's love?

    If we feel that world is saturated with too much violence, hate and prejudice, then why not step up, stand up and get involved in the lives of those suffering in the world?

    Whatever the issues we face, individually and collectively as Church, I believe Jesus calls us to step up, stand up and be His presence in the world.  He calls us to take our worship of him inside this building, into the world, to go outside of this building and make God's love alive in the world!

    This is what we really celebrate today: God’s ongoing invitation to us to let God’s Spirit flow out from us into the world as Christ’s life-giving presence.

    Isn’t it time then for us to not just come to Mass and be passive spectators or passive worshippers, but to let God bless and break us as his daily bread that he will sent forth from this building to the hungry and the thirsty, the hurt and the broken, the discarded and the lost?

    If you agree with me that God will transform us here into the Body of Christ so that God can send us forth to renew and lift up the world, can you and I just be quiet for a bit in the next few moments….quiet enough to hear him, this Jesus calling out to you and me right here, right now: “Step right up, step right up; step up and come stand up with me"?

    Yes, will you, will I, will we together step right up to Jesus and stand up with him now to love the world as he does?




    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

    photo: internet (planetware.com)
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  9. Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 30 / Sunday
    Readings: Exodus 22.2-26 / Psalm 18 (R/v 2) / 1 Thessalonians 1.5c-10 / Matthew 22.34-40
    Every Halloween I look forward to seeing what my nephew Glenn would dress himself up in. He has worn Spiderman, Batman and pirate costumes. When I’ve asked him about his costume choices, his replies go something like this: “I want to be like them!”

    “I want to be like them.” Don’t we sometimes say or think like this when we look at the saints or at saintly Christians we admire? Who amongst us here hasn’t wanted to emulate the selfless self-giving of a Mother Teresa when we reached out to the needy? Who amongst us here is not challenged by Pope Francis’ open-hearted compassion to want to say like him “Who am I to judge?” to gay or divorced or remarried men and women—among them our friends, our siblings, our children—whom we may have discriminated against, gossiped about or even written-off because we—not God—have adjudicated them to be less Christian? And who amongst us here is not inspired by the steadfast faithfulness of our elderly parishioners who come, rain or shine, to pray and worship in our church no matter how difficult it is to walk to church, to climb the stairs or to kneel during mass? Don’t we want to be like these good Christian men and women in some way?

    To be like them; this is what imitation is about. 

     The goodness of imitation for Christian living is a theme in our second reading. Paul praises the Thessalonians for their good Christian lives that model to other believers God’s salvation in Jesus. They are able to do this, Paul points out, because they imitate him and his collaborators who preach Jesus, God’s Good News. But Paul and his companions can only inspire and enliven the Thessalonians to imitate their Christian living because their lives and ministry are first and foremost an imitation of Jesus’ life and ministry. 

    The grace of imitating those who live good Christian lives is Christ-like transformation. That is, by imitating them imitating Jesus, one takes on a resemblance to Jesus. This is what the Christian calling is about: that we become more like Jesus in whom we see God’s image. This is why we shouldn’t be surprised that the ultimate hope of Christian imitation is to share in the family resemblance that Jesus has with the Father: “to see me is to see the Father,” Jesus says. Hence, to resemble Jesus is to resemble God. 

    Paul suggests two ways to imitate Jesus so as to resemble God: by receiving and by sharing. He reminds the Thessalonians—and us—that living a Christ-like life begins by receiving God’s word with joy in the Spirit and it flourishes when we share this life generously with others. Joy humbles us to thank to God and generosity enlivens us to announce the Good News; these are Jesus’ way of serving the living and true God in life and ministry.

    But aren’t you and I already trying to live the Christ-like life, as best as we can? Don’t we come to Mass weekly to thank God and we pray daily for God’s daily bread? And don’t we share the cash, the kind, the time we have with all in community, especially the poor? I suspect we do this, and we try to do it better when we don’t, because the good Christian role models we encounter keep on encouraging us to imitate them and to live our faith better. 

    So, why should we bother about Christian imitation this morning? Because what we choose to imitate will make all the difference in our Christian life. 

    We have one Lord; we profess one faith; and we share one baptism. Yet, for so many of us we see two ways to interpret religion, two ways to live it. At every moment, each one of us, however religious we are, is choosing between them. One is the way of Being Correct. The other is the way of Being in Love.

    The way of Being Correct involves imitating by action. That is, we ought to do that something that makes us Christian. Often, this is phrased as “Do the right thing,” “Follow the teachings,” “Observe the rules.” This imitation is rooted in, motivated by and conformed to this way of thinking about faith that we often hear in Catechism classes, in homilies and recently by some rigorists at the Synod on the Family: “Be good, do the correct thing and you’ll go to heaven.” Doesn’t this sound like the way the Israelites are to live holy lives in our first reading: “you shall not do this but you shall do that”? 

    The Way of Being in Love, on the other hand, involves imitating with the heart. That is, we ought to be like that someone who makes us more Christian. This is imitation is based on the person of Jesus and on his love for God and neighbor. Jesus is pure love, intimately present as well as transcendent, always willing to break rules that do not lead us to God, to lose, to surrender power and to take a “lower” position in order to love. His life and ministry was to give and receive love, and his practice required vulnerability, relationship, wonder, and self-giving. 

    Through him, we experience God’s overflowing love for us, and in our response to this, we fall in love with God and grow to be more like God. As Christians, we don’t imitate just by doing; we imitate by being like Jesus in love with God and by being in love for others like Jesus. 

    Love is God’s greatest law; it is the greatest value, the greatest practice and the greatest result we find in Jesus. Jesus teaches this truth of love in today’s gospel story. Love must be the source, the reason and the goal of imitating by action. The way of Being Correct makes no sense without the way of Being in Love. 

    Being in Love so as to Be Correct is the kind of imitation of Jesus that Pope Francis invited the Synod on the Family to live. He called the bishops, the laity and the experts at the Synod to speak openly about God’s loving response to the family—especially to the family of all Christians, regardless of saintliness. He challenged them to listen to God’s love attentively in their conversation and discernment. And he encouraged them to express God’s love as honestly as God would do to one and all, no matter our degree of holiness. This is the kind of imitation Francis is challenging the Synod—and us—to embrace pastorally (not just doctrinally) so that the truth of God’s mercy will be life for one and all, without reservation or hesitation. 

    Today Jesus calls you and me to imitate this same kind of love, his love for God and neighbor always and in every circumstance. He is asking us to be pastors of each other’s lives and souls. We can only do this when we make the way of Being in Love our imitation of his heart of love. Then, what will spring forth from our lives and ministry to each and everyone, and especially, to our gay, divorced and remarried sisters and brothers, will truly be welcome, fellowship, non-violence, forgiveness, generosity, and justice. Such imitation is the way of heaven. 

    Sooner or later God will ask you and I will have to choose one way over another as the basis of living our Christian life: either to be correct or to be in love, to keep a rule that protects or to break a rule to care, to impress God or to trust God, to be obedient but unforgiving or to be forgiving and just, to be restricted and or to be free, to be anxious or to be happy, to be ruled-bound or to be Spirit-led.

    Halloween is a few days away. I’m eager to see what costume Glenn will don this year. Whatever it might be, I am praying for him, as I am for us, that what we will always dress ourselves up in the love of Jesus. Yes, let us let Jesus’ love be the garment we cloak ourselves in. Then, as we imitate Jesus more faithfully, we might hear others say of us, “Yes, we know they are Christians: see how they love one another like Jesus loves God and loves them.”



    with insights from Steve Garnaas-Holmes

    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: from Internet (gde-fon.com)

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  10. Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 29 / Sunday
    Readings: Isaiah 45.1, 4-6 / Psalm 95 (R/v 7b) / 1 Thessalonians 1.1-5 / Matthew 22.15-21


    Have you taken a good look at the contents of your wallet or handbag lately? If you did, you might find dollar bills and coins, credit cards, membership cards, and shopping receipts. If you dig deeper, a photograph or two of family members and friends and a scribbled love-note or a few thank you lines on a post-it might surface. And if you burrow even deeper, you might be surprised to find a Mother Mary holy card, or a prayer card for healing or generosity.

    Our wallets and handbags express the struggle of daily life: of earning enough to live and of remembering significant people and events to cherish life. If we had paused to examine the contents of our wallets and handbags, we might have asked, “How am I using these things they contain?” But these contents can also invite us to reflect more deeply on another question my friend, Josh, jokingly phrases this way, “Who belongs to these things?” 

    “Who belongs to these things?” or “To whom do these belong to?” is the hidden question in the trick question the Pharisees ask Jesus in today’s gospel story. They aim to trap Jesus in a political bind; whatever his answer, he would be either a tax evader or a disloyal Jew against Caesar. 

    Instead of being tested, Jesus tests them—and us—with this reply: "Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."  For Jose Villarin, a Filipino Jesuit,  Jesus’ answer is a great escape; but it is also a cryptic answer. The crux of the matter in Jesus’ answer is not about paying tribute to rulers or taxes for the common good, or about separating church and state, God and government. Rather, according to Villarin, Jesus’ cryptic answer is a code for know-first-what-is yours-and-what–is-God’s.

    I believe Jesus wants to turn the Pharisees’ question upside down with his response. He does this to challenge and to reorientate all who listen to him—ourselves included today—to see more clearly that everything we have belongs to God. 

    And this includes, our hard earned money. Jesus reminds us that the money we pay our taxes with, that we buy and sell things with, that we invest our future with, is always and already imprinted with God's "image' and "inscription" within and upon it. The coins and dollar bills bearing images of Caesar or Abraham Lincoln or Yusof Ishak we have are first and always only ours because of a provident God. And God fills the wallets of our lives with much more than money; God fills it excessively with the riches of life like love and laughter and the wealth of faith like spiritual consolation and enduring hope.

    We should therefore heed Isaiah’s prophesizing about God. He reminds us in our first reading that God not only calls us by name but always provides for us and protects us. This is how God reveals to us that there is no other lord in our lives but God. 

    If this is who God is, and if this is how we ought to know God, how then are we to follow Jesus’ instruction in today’s gospel story that we repay God? How do we love this God from whom we have received everything and to whom belongs all that we have? 

    Exchange is one way humankind repays God. It has the form of quid-pro-quo bartering, of transacting something for something else. As Christians, this is however a dangerous way of repaying God because it is reductive. This bartering reduces our relationship with God to a tit-for-tat interaction. This exchange reduces God to a mean, narrow-minded judge who dispenses love only to those who do not break the commandments. This transaction reduces the human potential to love God freely and to love one’s neighbor fully to that myopic act of check-listing the do’s and don’ts some in our Church insists is the dutiful way to Christian holiness.

    If not by exchange, by bartering or by transaction, how then are we to repay God? The Psalmist sings, "how can I repay the Lord for His goodness to me, the cup of salvation I will take and call on the Lord's name” (Psalm 116.12). We "repay" God by living eucharistic lives.

    Eucharist is thanksgiving. We offer bread and wine, fruits of the earth and the vine, back to God. We offer these believing they will become for us the Body and Blood of Christ when we consecrate them to God.  What we really offer in bread and wine is the gift of Jesus, who redeems us for God and who shows us how to properly give thanks to God--eucharistically.

    If the proper form to repay God is eucharistic, it makes sense for us to pause before the Eucharistic Prayer and to add to this Church's prayer of thanksgiving our gratitude for the people, events and things in our lives. To do this is to praise and thank God for everything we have because this celebrates God in ourselves, in our sisters and brothers, in our happy photographs and our sad memories, in our love-notes and our work-lists—yes, in all the ways God has already come to us for us to see who we are in God's eyes, beloved.

    Paul teaches the Thessalonians—and us—in our second reading that we can see, appreciate and repay God’s goodness because of the Holy Spirit. This Spirit gifts us with gratitude, that attitude of being blest so as to be a blessing by giving back to God what God first gave us and by sharing God’s goodness with others. Indeed, this capacity to offer thanks and to bless is God’s gift to us. 

    Hence, our eucharistic celebration would be incomplete if we only offered to God on this altar bread and wine and our moneyed offerings. What we must also offer up is ourselves. Like Jesus who offers himself to God on the Cross, we offer ourselves, however broken we may be, back to God. And like Jesus, we do so believing that God will make real our hope in God's love: that we are destined to be transfigured into the Body of Christ we are called to truly become, and not death.

    As we prepare to be nourished at the Lord’s table, let’s pause for a moment or two. Let’s look back on this week. Let’s consider how much we have experienced this past week. The people, the events and the things that filled our week give us a sense of place and proportion. They allow us to confess how each is God’s gift to bless us and our lives today. Yet, none of these, even if ties of love and life bind them to us as, are ours. 

    When you open your wallet and your handbags in a few minutes to make your offerings, just pause and take another, slightly longer look at their contents. Are these really yours, your possessions and your own? 

    If your answer is no, then, yes, nothing we have is ours and everything we have is God’s. What we really are is therefore what we return to God who has already given everything to us. Yes, self-offering is the appropriate thanksgiving you and I can make today. And isn’t this then the right and just repayment we ought to make to God here and now, at this Eucharist, and together?



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo from the Internet (by dyobmit on flickr)

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"Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute way final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything."

Pedro Arrupe, sj, Superior General, 1965 - 1983

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