1. Year B / Lent / Palm Sunday
    Readings: Isaiah 50.4-7 / Psalm 21.8-9, 17-18a,19-20, 23-24 (R/v 2a) / Philippians 2.6-11 / Mark 14.1-15.47


    What a week it has been. Mr Lee Kuan Yew passed on. A family grieves and a nation mourns. Ordinary citizens tear and thank him. Nations praise his achievements. Political rivals acknowledge his life’s work: a metropolis Singapore from the mudflats. (Some still nitpick the aged old criticisms.) The media broadcast his humanity: love for wife; concern for family; care for the poor and ordinary; and zeal for country.

    Tens of thousands stoically and slowly marched in the hot sun and through the humid night toward Parliament House to pay their heartfelt respects to Mr Lee. And I see something I had not expected to see.  You have seen it too. 

    The sight of overflowing generosity: of hotels and shops giving out free water and food; of volunteers helping the aged, handicap and young along the way; of strangers shielding each other from the heat; of our army and police personnel attending them with care; of a concern for one another as one united people walking not in grief but for life. Perhaps, these express Singaporeans being the best we can be.

    For me, these surprising gestures of charity are about a self-giving of one to another. 

    Our Palm Sunday and Holy Week readings also speak about one like us, Jesus, who gives of himself for us and our salvation. 

    Jesus did this by reaching out in care to save us from sin and death; he did this by an act of self-giving on the Cross. All his healing, preaching, teaching and being in friendship with his disciples prepared him for this moment: they expressed his continuous and bounteous self-giving of his love of God and love for neighbor. 

    Paul captures this truth of Jesus’ self-giving nature with these lines from our second reading from Philippians:
    Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
    Our Holy Week readings echo Paul’s lines: they remind us that Christian hope in Jesus is rooted in a self-giving action. In Jesus its form is complete self-emptying of oneself for another. This form has a divine origin: it is rooted in God’s compassion that moves God to give us God’s only son. And it has a divine destination: it is meant for God’s delight that in Jesus’ “yes” to the Cross humankind is saved from sin and death.

    Jesus’ self-emptying is the Christ-like compassion all humankind is called to embody when interacting with one another. He shows us how to do this: by keeping the proper Christian- perspective on what self-emptying is really for. Not only for care and share, or for support and lifting up. Not even for forgiveness and. But simply this: self-emptying for another’s salvation. 

    Compassionate self-emptying is the most Christ-like of all human actions we can do. 

    Isn’t self-emptying however about giving up, putting aside, letting go, going down? But where can we go after going down but up? Indeed, there is no other way to eternal life but through death, as there is no other way to be raised into Easter life than by self-emptying.

    Self-emptying ourselves completely for the love of God for another’s salvation: this is how you and I can reclaim our rightful name, “Christian.” This name expresses the truth that we are made in God’s image, as it also calls us to the work of attaining God’s likeness in Jesus. This is why following Jesus’ action of compassionate self-emptying, especially on the Cross, is how you and I can let Jesus lift us up with him into eternal life. 

    For many, self-emptying is about giving themselves to others. Singaporeans have been doing this for one another these sad days. Mr Lee did this for us all his life: “At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.”

    As Christians however we have to give something more to others than ourselves: we are to give them God’s love and life. Jesus’ self-emptying on the Cross teaches us how to do this: by imitating God’s total compassion for others to the very end.  

    The week ahead will be as momentous, as this past week was. We will watch the unfolding drama of Jesus’ self-emptying: his faithfulness to God’s will; his sacrifice, suffering and death for us; the grief of his mother and his disciples. And we will experience the goodness of Jesus’ self-emptying: the glory of eternal life in him whom God raised from the dead.

    Let us enter Holy Week then as we have passed through this past week mourning Mr Lee’s death and celebrating his life. What binds both weeks? The invitation to self-empty ourselves for others. 

    When we can recognize this invitation to be God’s gift for us to be a lot more human by acting a little bit more divine, we will then better enter Holy Week, like Jesus did when he entered Jerusalem: to stay the course to the Cross where God awaits to meet us and redeem us.

    Yes, the week ahead will be far more significant for our Christian life and faith. But we can only experience this if we but empty ourselves to be with Jesus in whose self-emptying all of us have eternal life. 



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: from the internet (indianarepublicmedia.org)

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  2. Year B / Lent / 5th Sunday
    Readings: Jeremiah 31.31-34 / Psalm 51.3-4,12-13, 14-15 (R/v 12a) / Hebrews 5.7-9 / John 12.20-33


    If you attend the Novena devotion the Redemptorists conduct on Saturdays, you would hear of letters thanking Mother Mary for interceding to God who granted the faithful’s petitions. Exams are passed. Health is restored. Marriages are saved. A baby is born. A job is secured. A life is turned around. These attest to God’s goodness in the histories of our lives. They also speak about a new chance at life.

    "Another chance at life" is a theme in our responsorial psalm on this 5th Sunday of Lent. Another chance to make right what is wrong. A second chance to live in God’s ways. A new chance to be in friendship with God and one another. A chance not to ignore God again. We hear all these when the psalmist’s cries out for such a chance: “Create in me a clean heart O God and renew a right spirit within me.”

    Tradition identifies the psalmist as King David. He is begging God to forgive his sins of adultery and of killing the husband of the woman he slept with to cover up his wrongdoing. Realizing that his sinfulness cuts him off from God, he humbles himself and reaches out for God’s mercy. His cry voices his desire for a cleansed heart, a renewed spirit, a second chance. He longs to be reconciled and to be in right relationship with God again that his sins damaged. And so he cries out, “Create in me a clean heart O God and renew a right spirit within me.”

    The character Ian in Anne Tyler’s novel Saint Maybe also bears a terrible burden of guilt. Angry with his brother and sister-in-law, he accuses the wife of cheating on the husband. His unfounded allegation leads to their deaths, leaving behind their three children. “It’s my fault,” he confesses. Ian longs for a second chance to be set free from guilt. He hopes to earn his forgiveness by taking care for the three orphaned children. He cuts himself off from others, including himself, to do this. But after a few years of doing this work, of “atoning and atoning” for his sins, he still does not feel God’s forgiveness. So, he focuses even more on avoiding risks and mistakes so that he can do what he thinks are the right things to appease God. He is indeed “King Careful. Mr. Look-Both-Ways. Saint Maybe” that a child nicknames him. 

    What would Jesus do if he meets David and Ian? What would Jesus do when he meets us whose Lenten cries have also been to ask God to cleanse and renew us who have sinned?

    Jesus tells us in today’s gospel story that he will draw all people to himself when he is lifted up on the Cross. This is how Jesus will set in motion God’s reconciliation with humankind. Where sin divides us from God, from one another and from ourselves, God’s love in Jesus mercifully bridges and compassionately unites us all in God’s life.

    Our gospel story is a reminder that we cannot earn forgiveness like Ian thought he had to. Instead, it proclaims that God in Jesus, through Jesus and with Jesus will indeed cleanse and renew us. Why? Because it is in God’s very nature to love freely and to mercifully give us a second chance, and also a third, and a fourth, and so on for life. This is why God always forgives. And this is why Jesus through his prayers and supplications to a forgiving God, Paul reminds us in the second reading, is the perfect source for our salvation.

    So the question we have to answer is not, “What would we do with a second chance?” It must be instead: “What will you and I do with God’s chance to start over again, and again, and again?”

    Our gospel story begins with a request: some Greeks approach Philip and ask him,  “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” Haven’t others also ask us to see Jesus, to point them to Jesus, to show them Jesus? Jesus’ mission was to show the world the face of God. This is also the same mission Jesus calls us to. Aren’t we who have experienced God’s chance to start over again and again the best witnesses of God’s loving face to others? Won’t our words and actions help them see, experience and know God?

    How can we do this? By doing what Jesus did on the Cross: reveal God’s glory to the world. Like a grain of wheat that must fall to the ground and die so that it produces food for many, so did Jesus’ death brought forth eternal life. This moment also revealed the glory of God’s saving love. What was “within” the Jesus was “outed” for us: the love of God. 

    I once read about how the assistants at the L’Arche Community in Toronto show the love of God: by caring for the dignity and well-being of the mentally-challenged members. These assistants serve from their insides and die to the worldly way of being paid very much in words or money. Their insides, their “within,” comes out in gestures of faithful patience, selfless love, generous care. They would love to hear a “thank you” or “love you” from the mentally challenged, but they don’t. Yet, these assistants continue to care for them. 

    If we can care like these assistants by dying to ourselves for others, then we will reveal to them what is within us: the grace of God’s chance to start over again. When they observe how God’s chances help us to live better and transformed lives, they can begin to know that this truth is also God’s promise for them. 

    This weekend Pope Francis visits Naples. He will be meeting and eating with prisoners, including those who are gay and transgendered. This act is life-giving; it assures the prisoners that they are God’s own, and that they do have another chance at life. More importantly, Francis’ act should challenge us who can be smug because we live the Christian life to ask ourselves how merciful we really are towards those we push away because they are in our eyes always criminal, degenerate, disgusting.

    Ian in Saint Maybe eventually becomes a sign to those around him that second chances are real and possible. By opening himself to the possibilities of risk and fulfillment, of relationship and marriage, of healing and new life, Ian testifies to what Jesus models for us on the Cross: it is when we make ourselves vulnerable to live, love and hope again that we can always die and rise again and again in God, and finally in our death and resurrection into eternal life with God. This is how we can let God’s gift of another chance cleanse us and renew us again and again in our everyday lives.

    What then should you and I do in these final days of Lent to give God a chance to help us start over again?




    (inspired in part by the writings of Joseph S Pagano)

    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: from the internet (sport-kid.net)

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  3. Year B / Lent / 4th Sunday
    Readings: 2 Chronicles 36.14-16, 19-23 / Psalm 137.1-2,3,4-5, 6 (R/v 6b) / Ephesians 2.4-10 / John 3.14-21


    A man, crying, announces a nation’s separation from Federation. Vast tracts of swampland are developed for economic growth. Hundreds of housing blocks are built for a growing population. Schools mushroom and bilingualism becomes a way of life. National Service transforms boys to men. Racial riots lead to inter-racial and inter-religious harmony. The Singapore Girl charms the world. Campaigns proliferate to make us good, better, best. Train lines snake the island to speed us from A to B. The economy thrives. The arts blossom. A financial crisis threatens. SARs pains us all. Local politics diversifies. Society matures and differing people find their voices. 

    Fifty years on: these are some memories of Singapore changing, transforming and becoming a nation and home. Our SG50 (Singapore50) celebrations are about counting our blessings, naming our regrets, asking the what-ifs, strengthening our belonging and looking ahead with hope. But to do these, we need to remember.

    And “to remember” is a theme in our readings on this 4th Sunday of Lent. 

    We hear of how Israel remembers the great things God has done in their past in our first reading. The Israelites were exiled for their infidelities against God and against one another. But at the anointed time, God in compassion gathered them as nation again and restored their temple through King Cyrus, their enemy. 

    God’s mercy sets right what is wrong. This is Jesus’ message to Nicodemus in the gospel story. He speaks about God sending God’s only Son to save the world from sin. Jesus’ words invite Nicodemus -- and us -- to embrace this truth that gives us life to the full. 

    How can we do this? By remembering the constancy of God’s faithfulness to humankind. The Cross is the sign of God’s strong and constant faithfulness:  as Jesus is lifted up to save the world, so did God save when Moses lifted up the serpent to heal the sick in the desert. Paul challenges Christians to remember God’s faithfulness to save in the second reading. We are never to forget that the goodness of God’s love saves us, not our efforts or merits. 

    Yes, our readings invite us to recall and to marvel at how blest we are. But are we constantly aware of how grateful we ought to be? And do we always practice thanksgiving to God who in Jesus on the Cross has already saved us, and, not as some us teach, yet to save us?

    Today, we are fifty years removed from the founding events of independent Singapore. Some of us will never really know the anxiety, concerns and pains many pioneers felt at Separation. Nor, will we know their efforts and struggles to build our nation with very few resources, and I think a “do or die” determination to succeed. Though we, especially the young, do enjoy the fruits of their labor, we also find ourselves criticising their shortcomings. We might even disdain what they have achieved because this little red dot is not good enough to be home. Time has indeed distanced us from those historic events and dulled the sense of being freed. What we might forget in all this is having a generosity to give thanks. 

    Could this also be how we are as we approach Lent this year? Just another Lent; same old, same old. If this is our disposition, then, what we have forgotten is that God’s gift of Lent is “to remember.” 

     To remember that you and I have been saved and liberated from sin, and we loved into God’s merciful union. More significantly, we forget that Lent affords us time to reflect upon our present personal histories of rebelling, of being enslaved, of being unfree, so that we can experience again God's saving love.

    The names of Ahmad Ibrahim, Goh Keng Siew, S Rajaratnam, and K.M Byrne might mean very little to most Singaporeans today, unless we read up and remember. We can forget them, as we can also forget the name and person of Jesus. 

    Unless we make the effort to remember Jesus and his saving actions, we might find ourselves wondering what all the fuss about Lent is: “after all, we’re saved, so what’s new about that?” we can ask ourselves. Forgetfulness of Jesus and his redeeming actions can make us strangers to the central mystery of our faith, God saving us in Jesus.

    This is why our gathering in faith as a family to pray, as a community to worship, as disciples to go on mission is how we remember that God saves us in Jesus, not individually but together. In our second reading, Paul mentions a "you" who are saved by God's mercy.  Is that a "we" or "me?"  The answer is to be found in the gospel story: Jesus talks to Nicodemus as a person, as he also addresses all humanity.  Yes, God so loved the "world,” that God sent God’s only Son to save not just Nicodemus, but all of us.

    I’d like to suggest that today’s readings and liturgy "gets us in touch" once again with God’s universal salvation for all by helping us to remember. To remember who Jesus is and how Jesus saved us once in history into God’s love and life, and why he continues to do this today. For Pope Francis this is how we can draw near to God in certain and hope-filled confidence that we will be pardoned (Homily, Penance Service, 13 March 2015).

    But it is not always easy to be grateful, is it? Grateful or the ordinary in our lives, like being born, being loved in our families, being given so many simple things in life? And don’t we especially struggle to say “thank you” for being personally saved by Jesus when sinfulness overwhelms us?

    This is why the Cross is not meant to make us feel guilty and unworthy. Rather, it is meant to really comfort and console us. For Paul, Jesus lifted up on the Cross should assure us that "God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ" (Ephesians 2.4-5).  

    Yes, Jesus saved us a long time ago by lifting us up with him to God. But this saving event -- the death and resurrection of Jesus -- can remain just a distant event in history and not our living reality if we forget it. Today, you and I are being asked to draw nearer to this God event so that we will always recall it. As we do so -- and we should -- we might begin to not only remember God’s saving love in Jesus yesterday but really savor God’s goodness in Jesus today and forever. Shall we not come closer to the Cross then and remember God’s goodness for us?




    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    Photo: from the Internet (swsnapshortsandnotes)

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  4. Year B / Lent / 3rd Sunday
    Readings: Exodus 20.1-17 / Psalm 19.8,9,10,11 (R/v John 6.68c) / I Corinthians 1.22-25 / John 2.13-25


    Cleaning up and clearing out. 

    My Jesuit community in Boston would do this twice a year. After the trees have shed their autumn leaves and after the mounds of snow have melted, we would clean up our house and garden more thoroughly and clear it out more intentionally. We cleaned up and cleared out to spruce up our home, and to rearrange it so that we could live happily. We also threw out what we no longer used, what was passed the expiry date, and what was potentially harmful to our wellbeing, like overdue food cans and drinks.

    Some of us called these actions “spring-cleaning.” Others called them “makeovers.” But everyone agreed it was a necessary chore for our wellbeing. Perhaps, “cleansing” is a better word to describe the intention behind our cleaning up and clearing out.

    On this 3rd Sunday of Lent, we find Jesus cleansing God’s Temple that had become a market place. He cleaned up the Temple by driving out the sheep, oxen and doves that were being sold. He cleared it up by chasing the moneychangers and merchants out of this holy place. 

    Jesus’ cleansing action invites us to reflect on what these weeks of Lent can be for our own Christian lives.  

    The Apostle Paul teaches us that we are God’s temples (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). We are to be holy for God’s holiness to dwell in. Yet, because we are so human, and so surrounded and penetrated by the “things” of this world, don’t we find ourselves distracted by, and attracted to, the inappropriate? 

    This is why Lent is a good time for us to ask God for the zeal for the “holy” within and around us. And the Lenten practices of prayer, almsgiving and penance are good Christian exercises for us to focus on “appropriate” relationships, involvements, attractions that come from God and that can lead us back to God.

    The Ten Commandments that we hear about in our first reading come from God. They are God’s ways for Moses and the Israelites to be in covenant relationship with God. By themselves, the commandments seem law-like: they are cold, rigid and severe. But when we begin to appreciate these commandments within the context of covenant relationship, we can see how they are God’s invitation to the Israelites to share in God’s holiness. The commandments then express God’s desire to be in relationship with them. So these commandments are not laws one must dutifully follow, as they are graced ways to live the holy lives God calls all to.

    The Ten Commandments have been handed down to us in faith. Like the Israelites, they invite us to live holy lives with God in Jesus. This is how we can enjoy our covenant relationship with God. What Lent offers us is time to examine how we are living out the Ten Commandments. Are we simply obeying them as laws? Or, are we living them as part of a relationship? Do we obey because we have to? Or, are we living them to help us remember and reverence God? 

    If Lent is a challenging time, it is because it forces you and me to ask, “Am I going through the motion of living my Christian life?” If our answer is “yes,” then we have to honestly admit that our obedience to God is hypocritical.

    As human beings we struggle to live this covenant relationship with God faithfully. Many a time we fail, we fall, and we regret. We come to confession to say “sorry” and to ask God for forgiveness. And God never condemns us. In fact, God’s loving mercy forgives us. God embraces us back, again and again, into God’s love because God knows that we’re not yet quite there, not yet quite grown up as Christians.  

    This is why Jesus’ coming is our salvation: Jesus shows us how to live in God’s ways, ways that the Ten Commandments teach. This is how God frees us from sinfulness for salvation. In Jesus' action of cleansing the Temple, you and I have the promise of how Jesus will cleanse us who are God’s temples too. 

    Often we fail to be God’s temples because we are playing games that make our obedience to God’s commandments a sham. We’ve all heard the expression, “games people play.” It comes from Transactional Analysis (TA), which is a form of psychotherapy. TA focuses on personal growth and change through the games people play when interacting with one another. These games are the scripts we craft so that we can play out how our lives should be, or how we want others to see us, or what we want our interactions to be like.

    Isn’t this true of how we sometimes act in the family, at work, in school, and even here in the parish? Aren’t we sometimes playing games in these moments?  And aren’t these interactions empty of intimacy, of a heart that loves, of our whole being in relationship with another?

    Jesus cleansed the Temple to teach the Jews the importance of cleansing themselves for intimacy with God. He wanted them to stop playing those games of buying and selling sacrifices, of going through the motion of worship and ritual, of making their prayer a sham and their lives a hypocrisy of love for God and neighbour. By cleansing the Temple, Jesus challenged the Jews to enter more intimately into relationship with God: not by playing by playing games, but by reverencing, praising and serving God in intimate relationship. 

    Today, Jesus is inviting you and I to do the same: to stop playing games and to enter more intimately into relationship with God. Relational intimacy is what TA discounts. In fact, growing in our relational intimacy with one another and with God is what makes us more human and a lot more Christ-like.

    Jesus came into the temple not so much in anger, but to say, “The game is over.”  No, he says, to more “scripted” behavior, that is, no more performing just for the sake of doing something. Yes, he says, to doing things as loving responses to God. This is why our practices of fasting, praying, almsgiving in Lent must be joy-filled: they bring us more intimately into God’s love and more fully into God’s life. 

    If Lent is indeed our “coming-to-life” again as Christians and as the Church, then, you and I must open the doors of our lives. We must throw them open to clean up and to clear out what we have to in order to let the holiness of God enter. 

    What kind of cleansing then must you and I do to make our relationship with God and others more intimate and more personal not only in Lent but always?



    (Inspired by L. Gillick)

    Preached at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Singapore
    Photo: from the Internet 




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  5. Year B / Lent / 2nd Sunday
    Readings: Genesis 22.1-2, 91, 10-13, 15-18 / Psalm 116.10, 15, 16-17, 18-19 (R/v 116.9) / Romans 8.31b-34 / Mark 9.2-10


    Have you had an “A-ha” moment? That moment when what you saw, heard or experienced changed your outlook on life or faith? That life-changing moment that altered your sense of identity and purpose?  

    The “A-ha” moment in Francis of Assisi’s life was when he encountered a leper whom he reached out to in compassion. In this moment, he realized that Jesus was calling him to serve the poor, and not to be rich like his father, a merchant of fine textiles.  

    The “A-ha” moment in Ignatius of Loyola’s life was when he reflected on the saints as he recuperated from a cannonball injury. In this moment, he realized that Jesus was calling him to be God’s solider to save souls, and not one to win wars for a Spanish duke. 

    What about you? Can you remember an “A-ha” moment when Jesus met you, and called you to more Christ-like action?

    Our gospel story on this 2nd Sunday of Lent is about an “A-ha” moment in the life of the disciples. 

    We are all familiar with the story of the Transfiguration: Jesus takes Peter, James and John up the mountain; they see Jesus transfigured; they observe him conversing with Moses and Elijah; Peter offers to build them tents; and they hear God’s voice. Yes, in this moment, Jesus’ three disciples witness his transfiguration. 

    More significantly, these disciples themselves undergo a transfiguration. They experience a change within themselves that enables them to hear God's voice announcing Jesus' identity as God’s ''beloved Son." Their own transfiguration also allows them to hear more clearly the terms of their own discipleship; God asks them to "listen to Jesus." 

    Their “A-ha” moment is about glimpsing the divine—that God is indeed with them—and learning the truth about being human—that in Jesus they are God’s chosen.

    Today, we are not just reading about the Transfiguration. We experiencing the scene unfolding before us; we are witnessing Jesus’ being transfigured; we are hearing God’s delight in his Son and God’s command that we listen to him. Yes, you and I are part of this moment; we are the silent, unmentioned participants in the Transfiguration. And like the disciples, we should be letting God transfigure us in this moment. But are we?

    This is the question we must ask ourselves in Lent because Lent is the time for transformation. To answer it, we need to pause and look honestly at the state of our Christian discipleship. How Christ-like is our living and our loving, our praying and our playing, our being in friendship with God and in relationship with one another? If we are honest, I think we will both confess that we can do better.

    If the grace of Lent is the promise of being transformed and so transfigured, it calls us to enter more fully into this liturgical moment. Like the Transfiguration called the disciples, so Lent calls us into it not as a calendar time of 40 days but as God’s time to redeem and renew us.

    The right disposition to enter Lent then cannot be that which we’ve come to associate with the phrase “carpe diem” (seize the day). All too often we think of Lent as that time we must seize for our conversion. But what use is this attitude if we don't have the deeper disposition to let God change us?

    This deeper disposition is described by the main character at the end of Richard Linklater's film, Boyhood: it is “to let the day seize us, and move us on its ebb and flow.” I see Peter, James and John in today’s gospel story having and practicing this disposition in their lives: they opened themselves to Jesus’ Transfiguration and allowed God to lead them into it and, more importantly, into their own transfiguration. This is the kind of disposition we need to let God transfigure us.

    But are you and I open to this moment of Lent and God's plan to transfigure us? Or, are we insisting that we alone must take charge of Lent, and control and manipulate how it must fit our plans and our goals?

    If we want to let God transfigure us, then, we have to seriously consider our response to the conversion Lent beckons us to. 

    In last Sunday’s gospel story, Jesus proclaimed that the time of fulfillment is now. Our present time can be one of conversion and fulfilment if we understand that being repentant is about opening ourselves up to God who  wishes to set our lives right again. But to open ourselves to God we need honesty to identify the necessary changes we must make, so that we can better cooperate with God’s plan to make us better disciples. I believe this can begin when we say yes to God’s command to “listen to Jesus.” What changes then must you and I make this Lent to truly listen to Jesus?

    Becoming more humble is one way. In our first reading, Abraham’s humility to listen to and obey God’s command transfigures his life. It does not lead to Isaac’s death in Abraham’s life but to the perpetuity of life for him through countless descendants. 

    Today, we are being called to humble ourselves so that we can really listen to Jesus who shows us how to do God’s will, not just for ourselves but also for the community we live in and serve

    And why should we bother to listen to Jesus?  Because God wants to bless us through Jesus. This blessing will transfigure us more and more into the fullness of God’s image and likeness that Jesus is. Christian discipleship is about growing into Christ-like fullness

    And listening to Jesus in humility is the way God instructs us on how best we can be saved, and so realize our truest identity as God’s own. This is why God taught the disciples at the Transfiguration to listen to Jesus.

    You and I know that the pressures of life will often keep us from taking the time to stop and listen—to each other, to ourselves, and to God. We are so distracted by so many things in our lives. Yet Lent offers us time to stop and listen to God. It invites us into possibility of being caught up in an “A-ha” moment, or two, each day, and in them, of finding God instructing us to live better and holier lives.

    It would be good for us then as each Lenten day closes to name these moments, and to recall God’s instruction in them. And let us also give thanks for them. Why? Because  these “A-ha” moments are God’s ways of transfiguring us to better celebrate the coming Easter joy. 

    My sisters and brothers, dare we miss the goodness of these “A-ha” moments this Lent?



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    Photo: littlemissmomma.com (internet)

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Fall in Love, Stay in Love
Fall in Love, Stay in Love

"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

About Me
About Me
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is a 50something Catholic who resides in Singapore and works for the Church. He is a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.
Disclaimer
Disclaimer
©adrian.danker.sj, 2006-2018

The views I express in these pages are personal. They do not speak for the Society of Jesus or the Catholic Church.
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