1. Year C / Ordinary Time / Week 3 / Sunday
    Readings: Nehemiah 8.2-4a,5-6, 8-10 / Ps 18.8,9.10, 15 (cf John 6.63c) / 1 Corinthians 12.12-30 / Luke 1.1-4; 4.14-21


    We’ve all seen those “Keep Calm” memes in red and white. “Keep Calm and Carry On”, “Keep Calm and Stay Positive”, “Keep Calm and Study Hard”. There’s even one for Star Wars fans: “Keep Calm and Use the Force.” 

    A favorite of mine reads: “Keep Calm Because Today’s the Day!” The day something special will happen. The day we will experience love. The day we’ll make a difference by forgiving. The day we’ll rise to the occasion and become better. Yes, it insists that today’s the day of grace.

    This is the good news Jesus announces in today’s gospel reading.

    We are all too familiar with our Gospel story. It is the Sabbath. Jesus is worshipping in a synagogue. From the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, he reads out loud about the Lord’s Spirit anointing one to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom to the captives and sight to the blind, to free the oppressed and to announce the year of the Lord’s favor. He rolls up the scroll, hands it back and sits. 

    For some, this scene records the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. For others, it is about Jesus announcing God’s plan.

    But notice that all in the synagogue now fix their eyes on Jesus. They are waiting for him to interpret Isaiah’s words. What would Jesus say? 

    Jesus could have preached on the wisdom of past prophets: that God would bring Israel into the promised land where they would live in justice, freedom, and healing. Jesus could have elaborated on the future Isaiah prophesized: that God’s promised glory would come when the poor, lowly and despised are saved and uplifted.

    But Jesus does neither. He does not reach back to a past the Jews long for, nor does he look ahead to God’s future coming they hope for. Instead, he simply says, “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing”.

    Imagine the shock of the Jews upon hearing Jesus say, “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing”. These words must have rocked their faith—their scripture in not fulfilled in a past event, nor, will it be fulfilled in a future advent. Their scripture, God’s word, is being fulfilled, right here and now, at this time, in their midst.

    “What do you mean that the Spirit of the Lord is here?” they probably asked. “Now? Today? That the poor can hear good news, prisoners are being released, the blind see, and the oppressed receive justice?”

    “How can it be?” we’d also probably say. “Yes, how can it be when there is even more inequality, more people unjustly treated, more suffering illnesses, more violently hurt and maimed today? “Really, is this God’s kingdom alive?” we ask our parents and partners, our catechism teachers and priests?

    “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing”. Not yesterday; not tomorrow. Today. Yes, keep calm for today’s the day. 

    What day? The day of the Lord that is our day too, our every day. 

    How many of us really celebrate each day as God’s day with us and for us? Often, our struggles, frustrations and disappointments color how we see our days: “bad” is that sad word we use. Sadly, I think we grumble and complain about our days more than we count them as our blessings.

    If we should think of each day as God’s day, we tend to do so through the lenses of “past” and “future”. A past when we were more Christ-like and responded so freely and lovingly to God. A future we fear we cannot live well because we are sinners, never good enough for God’s mercy and salvation. If we mourn our past intimacy with God, we’ll live in regret and grief. If we’re fearful of a future without God, we’ll live with anxiety and doubt.

    As a result, today is lost, and its gift of God’s grace forgotten. But if today is indeed God’s day—especially because God’s Word is being fulfilled as we live—then "today" is a deeply dangerous spiritual reality. 

    It insists that we put aside both our memories of the past and our dreams for the future in order to be free to embrace fully the now, the time of this day, the grace of God being with us today.

    Then, we will discover that we are actors in the most important drama we will ever be part of—God’s sacred drama that our lives are. 

    What is our role? To speak of God's desire unfolding in our varied lives and to enact it for the world with the different gifts we have, as Paul describes in our second reading. This is how we must be in accomplishing God’s mission: one body in Christ.

    We will know this two-fold role when we begin to see that the most radical thing Jesus announces in our gospel is “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing”. Radical because Jesus is challenging us to return to the essence of Christian life.

    An essence best discovered best through the Latin word vocātiō—meaning a call. Today Jesus is calling us to see that the Spirit of God is always at work in our midst. This is how we will know that what God says, “I will be with you”, is more than a promise: it is our reality.  

    This is why today’s gospel passage must matter for our Christian life. For Jesus is asking us to open our eyes, to see God’s labor in our lives, to become more attentive to God present with us and for us, no matter how difficult and disappointing our circumstances may be. It would be a pity if today’s gospel went through one ear and out the other; we will be shortchanging ourselves.

    “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing”. This is how Jesus challenged the Jews then, as he challenges us now, to see the grace of each day we live in more clearly. 

    He is calling us to go pass our disappointment and despair with our immediate sins, family trials, society’s injustices, and human evil. He is in fact calling us to recognize and embrace the ever-present reality of love—the mercy of God and our compassion for neighbor—upon which everything else profoundly rests.

    This is the foundation of Christian living you and I are being invited once again to see, to experience and to grasp in the course of today and each day we live: for love is God's grace actively at work everyday of our lives. 

    If we do these, I believe that we no longer need to fear so much, hate so uncharitably, and discriminate so hurtfully. We no longer need to because we will recognize that in the midst of all things—not matter how bad, difficult or despairing—God is indeed with us and for us. 

    “Keep calm because today’s the day!” Yes, today’s the day when Jesus’ radical announcement assures us again that God is indeed with us and laboring for us right here, right now. So, let us rejoice, be glad and share this good news!



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: teatime at the museum by adrian danker, sj @new york city, dec 2013


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  2. Year C / Ordinary Time / Week 2 / Sunday
    Readings: Isaiah 62.1-5 / Ps 95.1-2a.2b-3, 7-8a, 9-10a,c (R/v 3) / 1 Corinthians 12.4-11 /John 2.1-11


    Every January students from different primary schools enter St Joseph’s Institution (SJI) where I work at. They come with their varied personalities and histories. They bring different gifts and have differing hopes. Then, over the space of two weeks they become part our SJI community. 

    How do we do this? By encouraging them to use their giftedness not only for themselves but also for growing SJI. By helping them to appreciate one another as uniquely different yet wonderfully the same, a Josephian. By forming them to become one community, signed by the SJI badge they all wear. And we jokingly tell them that the only green that matters is the green, green grass of St Joseph’s.

    Orientation is the name we give to this transformation of individuals into the SJI community, this motley crew into Josephians. 

    And transformation is at the heart of today’s Gospel reading. We know from Catechism learnt, homilies heard, and spiritual books read that today’s Gospel is about a miracle: Jesus turning water into wine. But if we mediate on this miracle long enough, we’ll realize that it is above all about transformation: namely, about how Jesus comes into our midst to transform our lives. This is the effect Jesus can have on people’s lives, if we but let him. Jesus came that we might have life, life in all its fullness. 

    And life to the full is what the embarrassed host must have experienced. His wedding wine ran dry. His guests were thirsting. Jesus filled six empty stone pots with water, and turned it into wine. And the wedding party continued—even merrier now for the better wine lavishly poured out.
               
    Empty pots used for ritual purity now overflow with wine for celebration. This is a miracle of quantity and quality. Quantity, because Jesus turned water into wine in pots that could each hold thirty gallons. Picture 180 gallons of wine: so much more. Quality, because Jesus reversed the pattern of serving the best first. Consider saving the best for last: so much better. Here the prodigious abundance of God solves the trivial problem of running out of wine.  

    Yes, Jesus’ miracle reveals a God who is liberally lavish, generous and extravagant with us. God isn’t stingy or stern. In fact, God is that vineyard owner who pays a worker a full day's wages for one hour of work. God is that father who welcomes home a wayward son with a ring, a robe, and a party. 

    God’s mercy is what transforms. It transforms by offering us excess for our emptiness. Jesus reveals this truth about God by turning water into wine at Cana.

    I believe we have all repeatedly wanted Jesus to make new “wine” to quench our thirst in life. This is to be expected because we’ve all experienced “the wine” in our life running out at one time or another. We tire. We dismay. We fear. We despair. We lose our way. We sin.

    In such moments, we might feel like life is falling apart on us, in ways big and little. We might become bitter when we realize that life is beyond us to recover it, to replenish it, to restore it. 

    How can we move ahead? By recalling Mary’s words to the servers: “Do whatever he tells you.” But what can these words mean for our everyday living? 

    Typically we struggle to live our lives as faithful Christians. Typically, we turn to God through Jesus to ask for help when we do not live our love of God and our love for neighbor in Christ-like ways. Typically, when the going gets tough, we hope for divine directions.

    The honest truth is that we will receive no dramatic directive from heaven on how to remedy a situation. There is no sudden strategic inspiration to turn our lives around. There are no angel voices to say, “do this, not that”. 

    Rather, we will probably experience an assuring sense, a comforting movement, a hopeful consolation deep down in our being of a simple, practical “word” addressed personally to us, such as in today’s Gospel: “Go fill some stone water jars and take them to the steward.” Or, this phrase many of us would have experienced during our trials and tribulations: “Be still, and know that I am God.” 

    I don’t think any of us receives a clearly expressed heavenly directive to fix a specific problem when we experience the divine close to us. Instead we receive that transformative experience of God’s Word wanting to change us.  Will you and I do “whatever” God tells us to do? Do we even have “ears to hear” God’s word to us in the first place?

    For me, Mary illustrates in today’s Gospel how we can listen to God’s word and let God transform us. She knew better than anyone that Jesus never meets us only “from without,” but always from within our deepest selves. Like Mary, we must listen to Jesus as God’s Word dwelling in our hearts, and not as to someone who stands “outside of us”.

    When we receive God’s Word, like Mary did, we give permission for the transforming power of God’s love to burst into our personal world, to set our hearts aflame and to follow Jesus by doing what he does—giving life to others.

    And didn’t Mary do this for the servers, and through them, to the wedding party, when she said: “Do whatever he tells you”? Hearing her instruction, they opened their hearts and let Jesus’ words “Go, fill and serve” guide their actions. This is how they helped accomplish Jesus’ miracle at Cana. Seeing this, the disciples’ belief in Jesus deepened.

    I’d like to suggest that when we follow Mary’s instruction, “Do whatever he tells you”, we will wisely allow God to change us even more than the water was changed into the best of wines. Changed how? Fundamentally—for we will come to know Jesus more truly, as Jesus always and fully knows us as we are. 

    And changed also, like the servers, that we can bring ourselves, however different we are, to Jesus and to let him use us to do great things to witness God’s love for the world. This is Paul’s message in our second reading: no matter how differently we are gifted by the same Spirit, we are all called to serve the one Lord. This is how we can be transformed from individuals with different gifts into one community enriched by shared gifts. Our new Josephians learnt this truth about transformation in Orientation. 

    Today, Mary’s instruction to the servers reminds us, once again, that it is really Jesus who transforms us. He changes us from being receivers of God’s Word to its sharers in a world thirsting for God. And, Jesus does this by transforming our emptiness with God’s excessiveness. 

    Now, shouldn’t it surprise us then—drunk as we are in the rich wine of God’s excessive mercy—to find that we’re indeed standing on that much greener grass called God’s life where Jesus always brings us to live life fully and happily.



    preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: Prezi.com

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  3. Year C / End of the Christmas Season / Baptism of the Lord 
    Readings: Isaiah 40.1-5, 9-11 / Ps 103.1b-2, 3-4, 24-25, 27-28, 29-30 (R/v 1) / Titus 2.11-14,3.4-7 /Luke 3.15-16, 21-22


    “When one door closes, a window opens”.

    It’s a quote we’re familiar with especially when things end. Christmas season ends today. Many of us would have already brought our Christmas trees down, its trimmings and lights boxed up for another year. The manger scene in our Place of Gathering will be dismantled soon, and the angels under that great big tree outside Kingsmead Hall won’t appear again until December.  

    As the door to Christmas closes today, some of us might feel sad. Others are relieved that normal life continues. A few would state the obvious: “let’s get on with the new year!”

    When the door to Christmas closes, what window opens upon us as we now begin Ordinary Time in our liturgical year? One of possibilities? Or, a repeat of the same old, same old ways we have prayed, behaved and cared for last year?

    I’d like to suggest that today’s feast of the Baptism of the Lord is that graced window that opens. It opens to shed light on how we are living our baptismal faith. In doing so, it opens us up to how much more we can better live our Christian faith.

    Every beginning is hard. But it is also exciting: there is an eagerness to start anew; there’s an expectation of change and improvement. If this is how you feel as this year begins, then, you’re quite like the people in our gospel reading: they are eagerly awaiting for the Messiah, the Christ, to come and save them.

    They see the power of John's baptism, and their expectation is that they have found the Christ in John. But John points the people, to Jesus, who will bring an even more powerful baptism. And as John baptizes Jesus, we hear God saying, “this is my beloved Son.”

    Luke’s narration positions Jesus’ baptism after the people’s baptism. Jesus’ true identity as the Christ is revealed amidst a repentant people who want baptism to be in relationship with God. Like them, we too are often repentant of our failings and want so sincerely to be with God. And when we do so in the sacrament of reconciliation, the Holy Spirit descends on us, like it descended on Jesus at his baptism.

    This is why Jesus’ baptism is the right note on which to close our Christmas season. It reminds us that we are always in God’s midst because Jesus has come into our midst. This is why Jesus’ baptism is that graced window for you and me to always live our Christian life better.

    How so? Because Jesus shows us how to practice baptismal living. Such living, Paul tells us in our second reading, looks like this: "rejecting godless ways and worldly desires and living temperately, justly, and devoutly." This is the rebirth to which God calls us to through baptismal living. It however requires us to practice “humility” and “solidarity”.

    Humility
    Jesus humbles himself to be baptized. He models how humility is for living with God. 

    Humility is about honestly knowing who we are and our strengths and weaknesses truthfully. It is not about making ourselves smaller and lesser, or about downplaying our achievements.

    By choosing to be baptized like us, Jesus witnesses to our true identity: we are created by God and meant for eternal life with God. All that we have, and all that we need, come from God: our birth and life; our everyday joys and strengths; our redemption and salvation.

    How can we live such lives of humility to be in honest relationship with God? By being thankful for God’s blessings. If God is love and God loves us, then, God blesses us. To live with humility is to live with gratefulness for God’s blessings and with generosity to share these.

    But it’s very difficult now and again to count our blessings, isn’t it? How much more to share them when we are struggling to feed the family, to keep a job, to care for a sick friend, even to believe in a very difficult world?

    How can we practice gratefulness?  By taking some time at the end of each day and asking ourselves:
    -- Where was God in my life today? 
    -- How did God bless me this day? 
    -- What do these blessings say about who God is to me and who I am to God?

    Solidarity
    By being baptized, Jesus also embodies the way to live in solidarity.

    Solidarity is about sharing in the human condition all of us have for God and for God’s forgiveness. This is how we can share in God’s life by sharing God’s love and living together.

    By choosing to be baptized with others, Jesus reminds us to live in solidarity with others wherever we meet them: be in the family and among friends, in school or at the workplace, in the Church and in the world. We call this being in right relationship with everyone. It involves welcoming and nurturing all we interact with to become more fully God’s beloved.

    How can we live this life of solidarity? By caring for those who lack, by uplifting the hurt and abused, by reconciling those at war with each other, indeed, by making space for both the saintly and the sinful amongst us to gather around the Lord’s table. Whether we are already doing these in small and big ways, in everyday life and at times of communal hardships, or even if we are not doing these enough, Jesus’ baptism calls you and I to live in true solidarity with one another.

    This is the kind of solidarity our own baptism calls us into: not through material giving but through a loving and total self-giving of ourselves to others. It’s about daring to give away all of ourselves for another to have life to the full. When we do this we make real God’s prodigal way to be in solidarity with us: for God so loved the world that God gave us his only son.

    Honest relationship with God through humility. Right relationship with others through solidarity.

    Jesus’ baptism models these two ways for the baptismal living we are called to. Love of God and love for others:  our own baptism in Christ calls us to this love Jesus practiced. And it is this kind of love that will save us as it saved Jesus from death into fullness of life.

    Over time and experience we all grow into maturity as human beings, appreciating more and more fully both our roots and our potential. So, too, with baptism. We grow over time into understanding its meaning and its power.

    But this only begins when we are prepared to let the window of the Lord’s Baptism open onto our baptismal living. Then, when the light of the Lord’s Baptism illuminates our life, helping us to live in humility before God and with solidarity for others, we might hear a little more clearly, and with much more hope, what God once said to Jesus, and says again to us this morning: “You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased.”



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: remvizor.ru



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  4. Year C / Solemnity of the Epiphany
    Readings: Isaiah 60.1-6 / Responsorial Psalm 71.2, 7-8, 20-11, 12-13 (R/v cf 11) / Ephesians 3.2-3a, 5-6 / Matthew 2.1-12


    Here we are at our dawn Mass. It is still dark outside: we needed streetlights to guide our walk and our drive to church. Some daylight is breaking through. But some darkness still envelops us.

    Our situation reminds me of this story. A rabbi gathered his disciples just before dawn and asked them to distinguish between day and night. As the first rays of the new morning pierced the fading darkness of night, a cock crowed. “Ah! Rabbi,” said a disciple, “there is light when the cock crows because day has come and night is spent.” The rabbi shook his head. “Rabbi, is it when we can see the animals in the dawning light and name them?” tentatively asked another. “It is not,” replied the rabbi. “Then, it must be when we can look and see the day beginning”, another chimed. The rabbi raised his head, looked steely but lovingly into the faces of his bewildering disciples and said: “There is light when we look at each person we meet and recognise the distinctive face of my brother and my sister, one like you and me, made in the image of God. That is when there is light.”

    This story about light—about being able to look at another’s face and to behold in it the face of God—is a good image for us to reflect on the Epiphany of the Lord. “Epiphany” which means God’s revelation in the person of Jesus Christ to the whole world.

    But there’s another ancient interpretation of the word “epiphany”. In Greek, “epiphany” describes an experience of sudden and striking realization, a breakthrough in how we think and see. It is about how we understand in a new or very clear way. 

    Both meanings of “epiphany” describe the experience the Magi had in Matthew's gospel story today. They saw Jesus’ star. They followed it to find him. Finding him, they paid him homage. Then, they went home by a different route. But they also went home different. This is the key to unlocking today’s gospel story and to savor its good news.

    It is the key the poet T.S. Eliot focuses on in his poem, 'The Journey of the Magi'. For Eliot, the encounter between the wise men and the infant Jesus is transformative. The eyes and hearts of the Magi are open: they come to know that the newborn king of the Jews they seek is not a man of flesh but God enfleshed in Jesus who comes to be with us and to save us.

    The Magi’s encounter with Jesus is about God’s epiphany to these men from the Orient. They represent the learned, the rich, the foreign that God also reveals Godself to in Jesus, like God did to the shepherds, the lowly ones of Israel. Today’s feast proclaims to all, including us, that Jesus is God’s savior for all peoples, not just to the Jews of long ago or for us Christians today. 

    The Magi’s encounter is moreover that sudden, striking and surprising transformation after encountering Jesus to see the world anew, to go about everyday life anew, to live in the world new. It is a holy gift that is gifted to us when we die to our way of thinking and acting so as to make room for God’s ways to be born in us and to direct us. The Magi did this: they listened to God who led them to Jesus and then guided them home by a different route. 

    This gift of transformation can be ours if we dare to let the grace of Epiphany capture our imagination and seize the way we live. Then, our limited human thought and action can be transfigured, and we can better live our life and faith in the spirit of Christmas joy—that Jesus has come and nothing will ever be the same again. It must be so because with Jesus’ coming we are forever safe in God’s hands. Like the Magi, we learn this by coming to Jesus with more than material gifts like gold, frankincense and myrrh. We bring ourselves and our trust that Jesus will always hold us safe in God’s hands. 

    How confident can you and I be about our trust? John tells us at beginning of his gospel that Jesus is God’s light that shines in the darkness and that the darkness has not overcome it (John 1.4-5). This light is divine and certain; and it will save. There is every reason to trust.

    All too often, we use logic and materialism to achieve our desired life and lifestyle. We rely on reason to set a direction for our lives, for example, when choosing a spouse, a profession, a neighborhood, or a school. From the Magi however we learn that our life-directing choices are instead guided by unexpected in-breakings of wisdom that are God’s light shinning through the darkness and flooding the dark corners of our life.

    This is why we need to be attentive, like the Magi were, to God’s light at work in our lives, be it in the counsel of others, inspiration, insight, and dreams. These are ways God’s light kindly leads us forward by becoming like that guiding star that once led the Magi to Jesus. If we humble ourselves and follow God’s light, it can be our star too. 

    Why should we let God’s light be our guiding star in life and in faith? “To discover who we are” to God, says Pope Francis. God’s light in Jesus is “the true light that has come to illumine our lives so often beset by the darkness of sin” and so reveal our true identity (Christmas Homily, 2015). Yes, we are sinners but we are also God’s beloved, always worthy to receive God’s mercy and be saved.

    But we will never know the depth of this truth, nor the breadth of its reach or the height of its love until we do what the Magi did: seek out Jesus with sincerity; adore him with humility; let him transform us anew with hope. 

    May be then we will appreciate why today’s feast is truly “epiphany”.  For Basil Cardinal Hume, “epiphany” is about discovering the real:
    [by walking] towards the light, to glimpse the morning star, to catch sight from time to time of what is truly real….When vou set yourself to look more closely, you will begin to see some sense in the darkness that surrounds you. Your eyes will begin to pick out the shape of things and persons around you. You will begin to see in them the presence of the one who gives them meaning and purpose and that it is He who is the explanation of them all” (Basil Cardinal Hume, 'Mystery')
    Yes, this is what that “light [which] has come” to Jerusalem and to us as God’s glory can do for us, as Isaiah reminds us today. With this light and in this light, we can see God in “all things visible and invisible” (Nicene Creed). And through this light God gives life to all things and they came to be (John 1.3-4). 

    Let's pause and look outside: see how the day is filling our dawn Mass, suffusing it with light. Yes, the night's darkness is passing away. As certain as the daylight surrounds us now, so will God’s light always dawn and shine in our lives. This light drew the Magi to newborn king; this light transformed them anew; this light guided them on their journey home. Let us let this light do the same for us in our life journeys. 

    So, let us begin then by joining the Magi to adore this light to the nations, this light in our lives—this light whose name is Jesus.  



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: www.cdn-img.fimfiction.net

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I hope you will find in these posts something that speaks to you of the God who loves us all and who always holds us in the palm of his hand. Blessings!
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Fall in Love, Stay in Love
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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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is a 50something Catholic who resides in Singapore and works for the Church. He is a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.
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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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