Sunday, September 07, 2014

Homily: The Spark of God

Year A / Ordinary Time / 23rd Sunday
Readings: Ezekiel 33.7-9 / Responsorial Psalm: 95 (R/v 8) / Romans 13.8-10 / Matthew 18.15-20


A family. A band of friends. An estate of neighbors. A school of students and teachers. A group of working colleagues. A parish of believers.  A nation of citizens.

Each of us inhabits several of these spaces everyday. In these spaces, we are not just individuals, distinct and separate from each other. Rather, we are individuals always in relationship. We are bound together by blood, race, language, religion, shared experiences, common history and citizenship. The word “community” best describes these relationships. 

You and I know the benefits of living in community. It roots us. It gives us an identity. It nurtures our growth and supports our everyday life. It enables us to interact and to enjoy life. And it helps us to fulfill our aspirations. 

But you and I also know how much living in community can be a struggle. We labour to overcome differences so as to be united in fellowship. We endeavor to value difference, to forgive hurts and to build up all. We strive for commonsense and common understanding. We seek to share our commonwealth so that no one is left behind. Sometimes we do these well and sometimes we fail miserably.

Community life is a theme in our mass readings in September. This is a challenging theme: it demands we make an honest evaluation of how we are living in community as Christians. These readings provide contrasting sets of virtues and vices for us to consider this question: “Are you fostering or destroying relationships?” This is why they will encourage us to build up the community by being more willing to communicate and to forgive. They will also warn us of how jealousy and envy, pride and lust will tear the community apart. 

"Why is it important to make an honest evaluation of the quality of our communal life with one another?" you may ask.

Paul provides an explanation in his letter to the Romans: it has to do with how we love as Christians. The lack of love causes us to sin against each other. The abundance of love empowers us to build up each other. When we withhold our love, we deny another life. When we generously share our love, we enrich another’s life. How we love determines the richness of community life we have with one another.

If Christian love—the kind of love we profess we have because God loves us—is the fulfillment of the law, then, you and I would do well to make an honest assessment of how we are practicing it in community. Doing this allows us to let God perfect us even more to love one another as God loves us in Jesus.  

But don’t we already know this lesson about love? Haven’t we learnt this in catechism as a child and as an adult? Don’t we hear it in the many homilies about modeling ourselves on Jesus’ love of God and love for neighbor? Aren’t we challenged so often to live this kind of love by caring for the poorer amongst us?

I believe that we know what Christian loving is all about. And so it would be natural for us, as we hear this morning's readings, to ask: “What else can we learn about how to love as Christians in community?”

I’d like to suggest that Jesus wants to remind us today that to love to not just about doing. Rather, it is first and always about being--being present to and being with another. We hear this reminder in these words with which Jesus closes our gospel reading: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in your midst.” The following story can help us appreciate the reason behind Jesus' reminder.
There was once monastery on a mountain. It was famous for the 101 monks and their holiness. For many years the people on the plains looked up and said, “Ahh, there God dwells.” Visitors sought out the monastery to heal their wearied souls. 
Because of the monastery’s fame, the monks grew jealous and petty with one another. Many visitors felt their animosity. Over time, many monks left. The people on the plains looked up and lamented, “Ohhh. The light of God is dying.” 
The Abbot of the monastery was distressed. He didn’t know what to do. So, he sought the advice of the wise hermit who lived at the foot the mountain. After listening to the Abbot’s woes, the hermit said, “Go back and looked for the Messiah; he dwells among you." Then, he closed his door.
The Abbot was flabbergasted: what kind of an answer is that, he muttered to himself as he climbed back up.  
When the few remaining monks heard the hermit’s words, they grew silent as they began to look into each other’s faces. Is this one the Messiah? Is that one the Messiah? Who really is the Messiah amongst us? 
From that day on the mood in the monastery changed. The monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect, on the off chance that one of them might be the Messiah.  
They began serving each other, looking out for opportunities to assist. They began seeking healing and forgiveness where offence had been given. They began loving again. 
As one traveler, then another, visited the monastery word soon spread about the remarkable spirit of the place. People once again sought out the monastery and found themselves renewed and transformed. Now the people on the plains looked and exclaimed, “Ahh, yes, see how they love one another: God has come home.” 
And all this came to be because those monks knew the Messiah was among them.
“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in your midst.” The monks enfleshed this communion with Jesus by being in communion with one another.

The monks discovered this promise of communion by learning to be in loving relationship with one another. The people observed this in the monks. This morning, you and I also learn from the monks that the way of loving communion is indeed our path to salvation. Their way is indeed Jesus’ way for Christians to live and move and have our being in community by being with God. 

Why then is this a hope-filled lesson that we can take home today to live and to share with our various communities? In the words of the Brazilian author Paul Coelho this is why: 
“One does not love in order to do what is good or to help or to protect someone. If we act in that way, we are perceiving the other as a simple object, and we are seeing ourselves as wise and generous persons. This has nothing to do with love. To love is to be communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God” (By the River Piedra, I Sat Down and Wept).
The spark of God and communion. This is why we love the way we do as Christians in community. It is Jesus’ way of loving because in each one he met in gospels and in each one of us here whom he meets daily he does not judge the bad. Instead,  he always looks for the spark of God in each of us, that spark that draws him into communion with us and with us into union with God.

How then can we not love as Jesus did by being more attentive to the spark of God in one another in the various communities we inhabit, and so savour God’s life-giving love in our midst?




Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
Photo: courtesy of St Joseph’s Institution

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