Homily @ Christmastide: Break Open

Year C / Christmas Season / Feast of the Holy Family

Readings: 1 Samuel 1:20-22,24-28 / Psalm 83.2-3,5-6, 9-10 (R/v cf 5a) / 1 John 3:1-2, 21-24 / Luke 2:41-52

Sisters and brothers, have you ever savoured how good it is to break open an egg? And see its silky texture, the richness of the yellow egg yolk, the goodness it promises?  I think most of us don’t. Those who cook and bake do.

This image of breaking open is a surprisingly odd image to consider for the Feast of the Holy Family. I think it is most apt, however. It invites us to ‘break open’ the Holy Family’s life together and consider how it offers us wisdom to live better as Christian families. 

To do this, allow me to use three characteristics Pope Paul VI described the Holy Family in Nazareth to have in a homily from 1964. They are silence, love and work. 

Silence

Today’s gospel breaks open the hidden life of Jesus. We hear nothing of Jesus from his birth until this moment when he is twelve years old, lost and found in the temple. The gospels are silent about his childhood.

Yet we believe that growing up with Mary and Joseph, Jesus deepened his love for God and practised a love for others because this is how they lived their life and faith as a family. Yet all this happened in silence – a silence that nurtures one’s soul and spirit.

For Pope Paul VI, “The silence of Nazareth should teach us how to meditate in peace and quiet, to reflect on the deeply spiritual and the value of a well-ordered personal spiritual life, and of silent prayer that is known only to God.” The fruit of silence spent with God is love. 

I cannot help but imagine that Mary and Joseph taught Jesus to love God and to share God’s love with neighbour took place in this nurturing silence of family love. We believe and we know the family is the origin of Jesus’ holiness with God and selfless for all. Can we say the same of our families? Do we nurture each other to become holy?

Our world is noisy. We need silence. Silence not just to be with God but the silence to be together as family. The kind of silence that lets me stand by my brother and sister as they struggle with being loved as they are? The kind of silence that helps me know how much my parents have labored in love for me? The kind of silence that opens me up to the secrets my children need to share for me to love as they are?

We need this silence. Our families should be spaces where we find it and we are nurtured into the fullness of life like Jesus was in his family.

Love

The Holy Family reminds us of the love they shared as a family. It is a love rooted in God and shared with one another. This is what we really celebrate: the love of God in the life of the family. 

Do we appreciate God’s love in our families? Celebrating this, do we share God’s love with one another generously?

If we agree that God’s love must the heart of family love and that God is indeed our Father, then, we not just children of our parents. We are God’s children. St John expresses this well in our second reading: “Beloved: See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. And so we are.”  

As God’s children, we share in God’s family life. This is why we bear the name Christian by our baptism. It calls us to embody God’s life and love like Jesus did when he walked and preached, healed and reconciled, lived and loved, played and prayed.  

Christian discipleship is God’s invitation for us to become more like Jesus who reveals God’s life and love to all. Our discipleship is therefore really about sharing in the family resemblance that God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit have. 

It therefore makes complete sense that family life on earth should always be directed towards heaven. For example, we can give many gifts to our children and to one another in the family. But wouldn’t the best gift we can give to each other – as parents to children, as children to parents, as siblings to each other – is the gift of God’s love? 

Did we do this at Christmas, instead of some expensive gift bought from the stores? Like forgiveness and reconciliation? Like a second chance to start over? Like hope for a brighter future? Like an embrace that simply loves, no words needed?  In fact, do we share this gift of God’s familial love and life that we have with one another and many others, daily?

Work

There are many beautiful images of the Holy Family with halos around their heads and bright smiles. They are consoling to look at.

This is however not the holiness of real life. Holiness in real life is found amidst the realities of everyday life, especially family life, with all its tensions and struggles, its differences and disappointments

In today’s gospel, Mary and Joseph have lost their child Jesus. For some, this is bad parenting; they were careless. For others, it revealed their love; they anxiously looked for him for three days. They finally found him in the temple.

We too can lose Jesus. We too can anxiously seek for him.  Losing and seeking are in fact how we can become holy. Consider how our mediocrity and complacency leads us to lose Jesus because we forget about him. In such moments, we miss him or we need him even more.  Consider how we then anxiously look for him through prayer, conversion, good acts. 

We have all had such moments. They are grace-filled opportunities to grow, to move on in faith – otherwise, we stagnate, we forget and in time we lose Jesus.  Jesus said “Seek me and you will find me,” if you seek me with all your heart. The problem is that sometimes we don’t search with all our heart, only part of it.

These moments of losing and seeking, of laziness and restless searching, of forgetting and remembering are indeed blessings. They make us work a little more on improving our spiritual lives.

Isn’t family life the same? When we take the family for granted or we don’t work to strengthen family ties, we forget what binds us together. When we focus too much on the petty differences, hurtful disappointments, broken promises, we break apart as a family because love can no longer forgive, heal and reconcile. Then we lament and work hard to seek out and rebuild our family.

It takes hard work to build a family, be family and stay as a family.

I am convinced that Mary and Joseph taught Jesus this. By practising faithfulness, trust and hope in God and others, they laboured to become God’s holy family – not for themselves but for others to see God at work in their family. Their holiness as a family is the fruit of their hard work of working with God to live as the family God wished them to be. Do others see God's love and life alive in our families?

For Pope Paul VI, Nazareth, the home of a craftsman’s son, is indeed where we can learn about work, the discipline it entails and its value – demanding yet redeeming – to help us grow in holiness no matter the work be material or spiritual. All this is work happens in the family.

Silence. Love. Work. Each is integral to how the Holy Family lived. Each can also help us live better family lives today. We simply need to break open each characteristic as we experience them in our families to help us do this.

And what will we find if we do this? Today’s gospel tells us: “Not finding him, they returned to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days they found him in the temple.” 

If we feel we have lost Jesus be reassured that we can find him in the experiences of silence, love and work in our families. It may take us “three days” to find him, like the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection, but the good news is that we will find Jesus in no other place but our families. And when we do, he will say to us, “I am here in your family: this is my Father’s house; it is yours too.”

Based on the writings of James McTavish, FMVD

Preached at St Ignatius Church and Church of the Transfiguration

photo: Internet (britanica.com)

Homily @ Christmas: Simple

Year C / Christmas / The Nativity of the Lord

Readings: Isaiah 9.1-7 / Responsorial Psalm 95.1-2a, 2b-3, 11-12, 13  (R/v Lk 2-11) / Titus 1.11-14 / Luke 2.1-14

It is simple. The reason for Christmas. The meaning of Christmas. The message of Christmas. It is very simple.

We have however forgotten how simple it is every now and then, and especially on Christmas Day. We have made Christmas complicated. 

Theologians theologise and philosophers philosophise what Christmas must be about. The self-righteous and the do-gooders give instructions on the do’s and don’ts of celebrating Christmas because of pious devotion. Families fret anxiously about how to spend Christmas together, whether at home and church or somewhere far away. Musicians confuse the meaning of Christmas with tunes about happy holidays, Santa Baby and Rudolph the red nose reindeer. Shops, supermarkets and all kinds of eateries sell out Christmas as they hawk presents, food, drink, and more presents. Some cities around the world light up their streets for Christmas cheer but they take mickey out of the season.

Truth be told Christmas can be complex, complicated and confusing these days. We make it so. We forget how simple it was that first holy night.

In this respect, I feel that we are like the people walking in darkness that our first reading describes. Wandering in the darkness of our familiarity of what Christmas must be as society, tradition and past habits describe, explain, expect. Sadly, our familiarity has led us, now and again, to forgetting how simple the first Christmas was that holy night, and how simple it must really be tonight.

As simple as how the crowd on the pier at the seaside town of Weymouth clapped and cheered when the coloured lights came on one evening as Kazuo Ishiguro describes in his novel, The Remains of the Day. 

Here are lights that come on. Lights switched on that uplift the people. Lights that put things in perspective for the main character Stevens who appreciates himself and his life better.  Indeed, the simplicity of this scene – of lights being switched on and giving life to others should remind us how important this Christmas night must be. 

For tonight we believe a far greater light comes and dispels the darkness. And we proclaim this is God’s radiant light. It shines by cutting through the darkness of our lives and the world. It is a light that uplifts us and gives us hope. There is indeed light because a child is born for us. His name is Jesus the Christ.

This light of Christ comes into our lives to brighten. It also enlightens us. It illumines us again on how simple the first Christmas was and why it must still be for us.

A reporter once asked Basil Cardinal Hume “What does Christmas mean to you?” He answered with this first thought that came into his mind: “The great and awesome God became man for me, that’s what Christmas means to me”. The reporter smiled, nodded his head, thanked him and was off.  

A few minutes later, the Cardinal realised that he said what he did because it was the familiar answer. It was what he had learned in catechism and theology, what he had heard from homilies and in retreats, and what he taught students and parishioners. Aware now, he said, “the simple truth that God had become man seemed to me quite staggering, and I realized that I was looking at this familiar truth in a new way”.

Can you and I see Christmas in a new way? In its simplicity? In the truth of what happened so silently, so surely, so simply as we heard proclaimed in Luke’s Gospel?

What happened is this: that the God who shows up in our world and who makes His way into our lives is a God who is love.  

Isn’t this reason simple enough for us to treasure this Christmas and each Christmas? And isn’t this truth about God simple enough for us to celebrate without so much theology and philosophy, so many traditions and practices, so myriad songs and clever homilies?

Simple then must be our reason for believing in Christmas and loving it as God’s gift. 

For it is in the simplicity of the birth of Jesus in that stable in Bethlehem that we will begin to find the answers to the many questions we ask. What does love look like? What does love do? Why is there a God? Why am I here? What is life about?  We only have to take ourselves to the Christmas crib and look at Jesus lying in the manger, and we will find our answers.

Jesus is the face of God and God’s love for us. He is “Emmanuel” – “God with us” – as the Christmas angel told Joseph the baby miraculously conceived in Mary would be called. Indeed God gets focused for us in Jesus Christ.  

In the face of this simple baby, we see the face of God for the very first time. If you agree with me about this, then no one can insist that we will not know about divine love and compassion. We really cannot because the truth of Christmas is simply this: in Jesus God shows up in our world and in our lives, and what we learn from that encounter is that God is love.

We have encountered Jesus in varied ways and at various times. In all of these, there is a prevailing simplicity. And it is this: in Jesus God is with us, God sees us as we are and God loves us still. Bro Manny, a 75 year old Lasallian Brother shared this with me recently as we reflected on Christmas. 

Indeed, every encounter we have had with Jesus has often been through the simple everyday encounters we have with one another. Encounters of living and loving, forgiving and reconciling. Encounters that challenge and uplift. Encounters that encourage or disappoint. Encounters that care and share. Encounters where we are loved and we love.

“We love,” the Apostle John explained in his first letter, “because He first loved us” (I John 4:19).  And how we know that He “first loved us” is because He came to us in Jesus Christ, born in a manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes. Tonight we learn again this simple lesson for a meaningful life and a happier world.

We hear that “today in the town of Bethlehem a saviour has been both to you; he is Christ the Lord”. This simple reality, unknown to many at the time, enveloped in the stillness of a winter’s night, is what we celebrate it tonight. 

Not just the event but really Jesus. We must therefore not be afraid to claim Jesus repeatedly as the Christmas hope for us and the world. Indeed, “Be not afraid” is how the angels begin their proclamation to the shepherds and to us of God’s coming, not to visit but to stay with us till the end of time.

Christmas challenges all of us to be simple – simple like the shepherds who come to Jesus. Simple in how one trusts God. This is the only way we can begin to understand the majesty of God’s love at work at Christmas.

We should beg God for this simplicity, especially at Christmas. Simplicity opens us to welcoming the mystery of God’s love, and, more so, to savour its goodness. My former spiritual director, the Jesuit Fr Gerard Keane, wrote about the importance of being simple in our hearts so that we can be with God who comes as a simple child to us.  Listen:

We are not at home with the complex. We belong in the world of the simplicity of Bethlehem. This is why the Christmas crib is so much our home. All are welcome. Everything seems resolved as we kneel before the stable in silent and tranquil unquestioning. All are welcome. All are at home – at home in the one spot in life and history that makes us feel we belong. And this is Christmas – simple, uncomplicated, friendly and homely.

Indeed, this is Christmas as it was that holy night, as must be for us now this evening in SJI, and as should always be for all the years to come. 

Christina Rosetti once penned these lines to celebrate Christmas:

Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, Love Divine,Love was born at Christmas, Star and Angels gave the sign*.

This is Christmas because God has come to us in Jesus. Yes, it is truly this simple.

A Blessed Christmas, everyone!

* Christina Rosetti, Love Came Down at Christmas.

Preached at St Joseph’s Institution, Singapore.

photo: internet (mormonchannel)

Homily @Advent: To Come And To Embrace

Year C / Advent / Week 4 / Sunday

Readings: Micah 5.1-4a / Ps 80 (R/v 4) / Hebrew 10.5-10 / Luke 1.39-45

Lord, make us turn to you,

Let us see your face and we shall be saved.

These words are our response in today’s Psalm. I believe they echo how many of us feel right now. 

All Advent we have waited. Expectantly. Now, we are just two days away from Christmas. More significantly, we are just two days away from coming to the manger and standing before Jesus. We want to see the baby Jesus. We really want to experience Jesus being born in our hearts again.

Doesn’t our anticipation echo our everyday hope to see God’s face? To look for this face amidst our everyday life and interactions? To look for this face of God in the pressing concerns our families and friends have and the never-ending suffering and strife our world still faces? To look for God’s face in the best, the brightest, the many blessed moments we live in?

Yes, we all look for God in the realities that make up our living and loving, our working and studying, our praying and playing. And when we cannot see God, don’t we cry out, "Lord, let us see your face”?

No matter how we have prepared ourselves during Advent, the 4th Sunday of Advent always demands that we turn ourselves more decisively toward God. Toward a God who will come into our lives. Come to be one like us. Come to be with us. Come for our salvation. 

We have every right then to be expectant, eager and enthusiastic today. 

This God come will come in the person of Jesus. The gurgling, smiling face of baby Jesus in the manger is how we will first see him. And he will grow up to serve us and to die for us so that we may love. This is why Jesus is the Christ – God’s Saviour for the world. Indeed, we can believe that Jesus is truly Emmanuel, God-is-with-us.

Today’s gospel story about the Visitation helps us to see more clearly this face of God.

A pregnant Mary travels with urgent haste, and some discomfort, to visit Elizabeth who is unexpectedly pregnant in her old age. Mary visits to care for her cousin. They greet each other with an embrace.

In visiting, two women experience care and concern for one another. In embracing, their love consoles and binds them together. These images of visiting and embracing reveal the depth of God’s mercy for us. It comes through Jesus, with Jesus, in Jesus. Elizabeth recognised this when Mary visited and embraced her. John the Baptist also recognised this when he lept for joy at Jesus’ coming in Mary’s visit.

The Visitation story should remind us of similar visits in our lives. Of a friend who assures us in our loneliness. Of a parent who lovingly cradles us into life again when we are despairing. Of a colleague encouraging us with hope-filled words. Even of a stranger who kindly offers us her MRT seat. 

Don’t we find ourselves like Elizabeth in these moments – surprised by God visiting us? God visits us because God always remembers us, counts us worthy and loves us beyond all telling. God simply wants to be with us. 

The Visitation helps us to see more clearly how God will always turn and come to us – come simply and truly to care for our wellbeing and us. Come really to love us.

Christmas morning sharpens this focus even more: God did not just come; God stayed among us and continues to stay with us.  

Have you and I considered how remarkable God’s choice is? Our world is soiled, broken and messy so often and in so many ways and places by sin. Yet God chooses to dwell with us in our imperfect world to love us into the fullness of life.

We have all felt God’s love concretely in life and we continue to feel it profoundly every day. And when we do, I believe we all know how God's love is even more merciful and abundant than we can ever imagine.  

The most palpable way humans experience this is when we embrace each other like Mary and Elizabeth did. This is the most intimate deed to connect with one another. 

We all have a deep longing to touch and be touched, to hold and be held. We yearn for this from another, especially from those we love because this action makes their love and concern, their friendship real for us. In an embrace, we become alive to one another. 

This is why a mother cuddling her baby girl warms our hearts. Why a man cradling his dying brother moves us to tears. Why a couple’s forgiving embrace makes us smile. Why the hearty hug of friends and a strong handshake among churchgoers at the sign of peace make us smile.

We have all experienced something of God in such embraces. Of God coming to birth in us and caring for us. Of God forgiving us and laughing with us. Of God loving us to no end. In these moments, God’s love is far more real than any catechism, hymn or book can convey.

These embraces have nothing to do with satisfying our physical wants or gratifying our emotional longings for someone. Instead, they have everything to do with experiencing God’s love through another’s loving embrace.

God’s visitation and God’s embrace. These come alive because God chooses to come into human lives through the people in our lives.

Often times, God comes to us through the lives of the small, the insignificant, the ones we ignore. Like Mary, a young girl in a culture where men dominate. Like Elizabeth, a barren woman in a community that prizes fertility as God’s favour. And like lowly shepherds who live and work on the margins of society. 

All of them small. All of us are small too in the eyes of others who judge us for our faults and condemn us for our sinfulness. Yet each one of them and each one of us is more than small in God’s eyes. 

In God's eyes, we are in fact worthy for God to come to us in Jesus. We are invited to bear Jesus in us by letting him dwell in us and to bear Jesus to the world by presenting him like Mary did. 

But we can bear Jesus only when we allow God to come to us. This is why we must always do as Mary did: to say ‘yes’ to God’s coming. When we do this, we will learn how Jesus is indeed the face of a God who is madly in love with us because his singular obsession is to be with us and through us to save everyone, ourselves included. In Jesus, moreover, we can amazingly make a loving return of ourselves to God: by turning our lives to God and embracing God wholeheartedly.

Indeed, in Jesus, we learn the truth about God’s act of Creation. God created us to be in touch with Him because God always desired to touch us first. Mary proclaimed this truth as she bore Jesus to Elizabeth and Elizabeth celebrated it by welcoming Jesus. 

So, let us do likewise: let us bear Jesus to the many people in our lives, and even to those God is yet to send into our lives. Let us make this our Christmas prayer, but, more so, our Christmas gift to one and all.  Then, having met Jesus in us, they can say: 

Lord, you have turned to us, 

we have seen your face and we rejoice for we are saved.

Preached at Church of the Transfiguration, Singapore

photo: organiclifestylemagazine.com

Homily @ Advent: Receiving (Re-run)

Year C / Advent / Week 3 / Sunday

Readings: Zephaniah 3.14-18a  / Psalm: Isaiah 12.2-3, 4, 5-66  (R/v 6) / Philippians 4.4-7 / Luke 3.10-18

“I want, I want,” cried Daniel, my two-year-old nephew. He stretched out his hands, eager to receive his birthday presents. Receiving them, he ran excitedly to Mommy and Daddy. Then, he gleefully tore the wrapping paper apart, letting out an “Oh” and a “Wow” with each unwrapped gift.

Who amongst us here have not witnessed our own children or our nephews and nieces doing the same at their birthdays and Christmas? We note their good cheer. We see their attention on the gifts. We hear parents and grandparents instructing them on opening their gifts. 

Today we hear John the Baptist instructing the crowds who have come to him seeking their own deliverance. He instructs them to be charitable and just and to live by God’s commandments. Listening to him, they are excited; he appears to be the Messiah they have long awaited to save them. But John announces that there is another to come who is mightier than he is. He directs them to look beyond him to the coming Messiah, Jesus. 

Don’t we sometimes find ourselves like the crowd at Advent time? Caught up as we are with checking off on the To Do List all the material preparations needed for Christmas—as well as all the Advent prayers, retreats and rituals that we feel obligated and rule-bound to complete—only to realize sadly that Jesus is absent in our hearts and in our minds as God-with-us, coming to stay for us? Aren’t we like the little children so fixated on our presents that we forget that presence of the ones who gifted them to us?

We receive more than a present at birthdays, Christmas or Lunar New Year. What we hold in our hands is another’s love and care for us, even her interest. Indeed, what I am really being gifted with is the presence of a family member or a friend. Long after I have torn apart the wrapping paper and found the gift, Mom’s presence will remain. And after the birthday guests have departed, the gift of the book I now read will remind me of my friend. Indeed, at the heart of all the presents we receive is the gift of another’s presence.

And so it must be with God at Christmastime: that through Jesus, with Jesus and in Jesus, God’s present to us, we have the presence of God, no longer just in heaven but on earth with us. Today, we focus on this truth by looking ahead more expectantly to our coming celebration of the Incarnation.

We call today “Gaudete” Sunday. We have rose-colored liturgical vestments; they remind us that we can look ahead joyfully. We sing more upbeat Advent hymns; they prepare us for the coming Christmas cheer. Our readings explain why we can rejoice: God is truly coming to dwell amongst us.

Zephaniah tells a timid, disheartened people: “Fear not, be not discouraged...God will rejoice over you with gladness”. The psalmist calls us to cry out with joy and gladness for God is among us; no matter our fears, weaknesses, and sinfulness, this good news should make us confident and unafraid. Paul instructs the Philippians who squabbling among themselves and fearing communal division: “Be unselfish. Dismiss anxiety from your minds. Just trust our God and present your needs.” This is how God’s peace and harmony will come into their lives and prevail in community. And with John, we hear this joyful news, pregnant with expectancy: the Messiah is very close. 

And didn’t this hope come to pass with the angels' glad tidings that first Christmas: that God has come and is with us, one like us, and for us and our salvation? Don’t we echo this refrain of God’s goodness each Christmas in liturgies, prayers, songs and even in gifts exchanged? Peace on earth and goodwill to all peoples—this, the Advent promise.

Peace and goodwill, you say?  How can that be when so much of our world is in pain and suffering? How can the Advent messages of happiness and hope lift us up when many are still hungry, still in poverty, still imprisoned unjustly, still gunned down senselessly, and still marginalized cruelly for race, gender, sexuality? What if Advent just doesn’t work for some of us because the holier-than-thou among our community have judged who can and who cannot receive God’s mercy in communion and confession?

How are we—the ones hurt by the Church, disappointed with the world, betrayed by others—to reconcile ourselves with the Advent promise and prepare meaningfully for Christmas? Can we find that joyful reason to consider ourselves worthy to come before Jesus in the manger?

So much of our Advent preparation should challenge us. No matter how well our preparations are proceeding, or if we are just beginning to prepare, even now, Advent can help us confront the stark truths of who we are as we prepare to come to Jesus. The individual burdened by anxiety. The self weighed down by ego. The troubled person. The small-minded man. The self-serving woman. The self-righteous believer. All of these—us, really—faithful Christians struggling with repeated sins and bad habits we want so much to stop but keep failing because of our human condition.

But it is precisely in this confrontation and struggle with our diminished selves, our losses, our sadness, and our weight of sin that Advent is most gracious and merciful. It affords us time and strength, hope and reason to take those first steps, once again, to move out of this darkness and to journey into God’s radiant light that dawns with Jesus’ coming.  

It is in this movement into God’s light that God will burn off those dark and shadowy, melancholic and burdened parts of us. God will do this with the fire of love. And who else is this fire of love but Jesus? “I am baptizing you with water, but there is one to come who is mightier than I”, John declares today. “He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn in unquenchable fire”.

John’s words are not meant to scare us about who is saved and who is lost. Instead, they are to encourage us to welcome Jesus who redeems with fire. “Fire is not the fate of the lost, but the refining of the blessed. We all have our chaff, our dross, our waste”. We need to winnow out these parts of ourselves, and with God’s help.  “And it is the fire of Christ that will burn them away. The burdens we carry do not make us unfit for Advent’s message. They qualify us as prime candidates”*. Who amongst us then cannot rejoice in God who finds us worthy for salvation in Jesus? 

Today, you and I are being invited to look more deeply into John’s announcement so that we can better discern Jesus’ imminent coming and the redemption he brings. This is how our joy of receiving Jesus can be more complete at Christmas. 

Maybe our joy, then, will be a lot like the joy I believe my nephew Daniel has come to know growing up: that it’s in giving love that the giver is the true cause of joy and the reason for smiles. Now, wouldn’t receiving God in Jesus like a child help us to better grow up, smile and rejoice at Christmas time?

This homily was first written  on 12 December 2015

* John Kavanaugh, SJ  

Penned whilst on retreat at De La Salle Brothers’ Residence, St Patrick’s, Singapore

photo: huffingtonpost.com

Homily @Advent: To Discern God's Best

Year C / Advent / Week 2 / Sunday

Readings: Baruch 5.1-9 / Ps 126.1-2, 2-3, 4-5, 6  (R/v 3) / Philippians 1.4-6, 8-11 / Luke 3.1-6

Sisters and brothers, have you ever waited expectantly? Expectantly as you struggled with that gamut of excitement, maybe with some anxiety and certainly with much hope?

It could have been when you looked forward to that big birthday party as a child. Or, for your PSLE or O Levels results that you studied hard for. It might have been when you waited and waited for the wedding day that you had planned for a year or two, or for that promotion you had worked hard to achieve.

What did you do as you waited?  Perhaps, you kept looking out for that moment. You might have prepared for it with much effort, patience, and hope. You might have even prayed much more.

Advent is our time to wait expectantly for the coming of Jesus like the Jews did once before. Last week’s gospel reading challenged us to prepare well to stand with confidence before Jesus. Not just to stand for judgment in death but daily in life. Standing before Jesus in the manger on Christmas morning ought to give us confidence that we can do this because Jesus' birth is God’s gracious way of saying, “I’ve come to stand with you, amongst you and for you”.  

For Christians, Advent waiting must be about spiritual preparation. Today we hear John Baptist’s cry, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths”. His call to repentance is God’s invitation for all peoples to turn away from sin so that we can stand before Jesus and welcome him into our lives and the world.  

We ought to make this preparation. Are we, really? Or, are we distracted by the worldly calls to celebrate Christmas with presents to exchange, Christmas trees and lights to put up, the never-ending feasting and merrymaking to attend, Christmas songs of happy holidays, Santa Baby and Rudolf the Red Nose Deer to carol repeatedly? I think it is harder each year to stay focus on the reason for the season when so much of the world interprets Christmas differently, as the Orchard Road Light Up does with its Disney Christmas theme this year.

Today’s readings are providential. They help us to discern what must truly matter in our preparation for Christmas, and how we can do this.

Advent and discernment. It seems odd to pair them together. Yet, we can if we think of Advent as helping us to recognise what is God’s best for us. St Paul invites the Philippians and us to do just this in the second reading: “My prayer is that your love for each other may increase more and more and never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception so that you can always recognise what is best. This will help you to become pure and blameless, and prepare you for the Day of Christ”.

“Deepening our perception to recognise what is best”. This is what discernment is about. It helps us become more aware of God’s presence and actions in our lives. Discernment then helps us to recognise the very best God wishes to give us. Advent helps us to discern this more clearly: God’s best is Jesus. And Jesus is God-with-us.  And we discern this so that we can “become pure and blameless, and prepare…for the day of Christ”. 

So, how can we practice Advent discernment to learn the truth about Jesus? By quieting ourselves more, and paying attention to God’s faithful presence and saving actions in the lives of people and events around us. 

In the first reading, Barauch helps the Israelites do this. They are mourning and in misery. Their enemies have defeated them. Many kinsfolk are exiled. Their land is ravaged. God seems absent. Barauch teaches them not to find God by looking but by looking to the promised return of their exiled kin. God is not above; God is with the people.

I’d like to suggest we do the same this Advent. Let us practice looking at the people we know and love, interact and live with, play and pray with. Let us do this to discern God’s faithful presence in our midst. Then, we will be able to better understand how Jesus who is indeed God-with-us is with us, amongst us and for us.

Our three readings today teach us how to do this.

With Baruch, we hear how God will not abandon the deprived, desperate or disappointed. God will come to them with mercy and justice, and take off the mourning robes. God will then show all the earth how splendid they are as his beloved. 

So, let us look at all the people we know who are suffering, and discern how God is faithfully labouring for everyone's wellbeing. Then, let us remember how Jesus who came once in history but now daily into our lives is truly God’s hope for us.

With Paul, we hear how God will always complete the good work he begins in every Christian community. God acted similarly in Paul’s life: he died a martyr but only after proclaiming Jesus Christ. God acted likewise among the Philippians: external forces and internal divisions besieged them but God drew them into one Christian community.  

So, let us look at our families, schools, workplaces, and parish and discern how God never gives up on us, even there are divisions, difficulties, and despair. Then, let us celebrate how our faith in Jesus who came once in history and now daily in our lives is our joy in God.

Finally, with Luke, we hear of how God sends John the Baptist to care for the Jews and everyone. God wants all to receive salvation in Jesus. What humankind had hoped for generations and thought impossible, God makes possible and real. 

So, let us look at how God continues to accompany, care and uplift many, ourselves too, and let us discern how God’s actions truly save everyone. Then, let us believe how in Jesus who came once in history and now daily in our lives we enjoy the peace God wishes for the world.

These readings offer us three ways to practice Advent discernment, and so help us better prepare for Jesus’ coming. In all of this, we need to hear God’s voice. It speaks simply and honestly. It is prophetic.

It is telling that our gospel begins by listing the names of the mighty and important, of those in power and with authority. Yet God did not choose them to proclaim Jesus’ coming and call people to prepare for him. Instead, hidden amidst all their earthly domination and dominion is John the Baptist’s voice. He alone preaches Jesus’ coming and God’s mercy for all by calling for our repentance. God chose someone least expected. 

The Jews heard this voice and converted. Today, we are being challenged to hear God’s voice calling us to conversion through all the people in our lives who act like John the Baptist. Who is calling you to conversion? Can you hear God inviting you to the fullness of life with Jesus through them? Will you hear and change?

Advent discernment allows us to hear, to believe, to follow John’s voice that leads us to the most important, most enduring, most lasting truth. And it is this: that before Jesus, empires fall, achievements fade, religious self-righteousness errs, pride is humbled, justice and peace will reign, sin is forgiven and death is defeated.

This truth gives us life. Life to call God, Abba, Father. Life with Jesus as Messiah and friend. Life in each other's company, however different we might be but equal and one in Christ. And yes, life to the full because Jesus has saved us and will continue to save us.

So, let us be wise and prepare ourselves well to welcome Jesus. For foolish is he who cannot discern that Jesus comes from God to save us and give us life to the full. Yes, let us not wait but discern right now to do this because Jesus is God's best. And as we do this, let our prayer be “Come, Lord, Jesus, come”. 

Preached at Church of the Transfiguration, Singapore

photo: from the Internet. Times Magazine

Homily @Advent: To Stand Watchful

Year C / Advent / Week 1 / Sunday

Readings: Jeremiah 33.14-16 / Ps 24. 4-5ab, 8-9, 10, 14 (R/v 1b) / Thessalonians 3.12-4.2 / Luke 21.25-28, 34-36.

Sisters and brothers, I wonder if we are really excited about the coming Christmas and thankful for the Advent season to prepare for it?

Excited and thankful that we might have already decorated the house, been listening to Christmas carols or even singing them, like this one:

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the Lord.

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the Lord.

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the Lord.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, we are going to see the Lord.

For me, this song echoes the expectant promise in the opening line of today’s readings: “The days are surely coming”.

These are Advent days. Days of anticipation. Days we should be focused on promised beginnings. There is something mysterious about the promises in our first reading. Something good is coming. Something to do with justice and righteousness. Something or someone who will make these promises real.

Advent invites us to be watchful for this coming, to prepare for it, to welcome it.

And the final line of our readings today in the gospel tells us who we are to look out for and how to welcome him. “To stand with confidence before the Son of Man”.

We often think of standing before the Son of Man as a future reality: in death, when God will judge us. But “To stand with confidence before the Son of Man” is also a most appropriate image to begin our Advent preparations with. After all, shouldn’t everything we do in Advent lead us to stand before the infant Jesus in the manger on Christmas morning? Stand to adore him?

The reality of standing before the baby Jesus invites us to consider if this is not how we as Christians ought to live daily. To daily stand before God with the honestly that this is who we are, with all that is good, saintly and bright and all that is bad, sinful and dark about us. More significantly, to stand like this so as to give God permission to stand before us and to love us even more?

If your answer is ‘yes’ then you know why this call to stand with confidence is indeed an Advent grace.

It is because Advent time helps us again to stand erect, to stand watchful, to keep a look out for, indeed to look ahead to the Son of Man who will come. Surely come to us in our difficult, painful, trying times, even if they are the end times, because he is our redemption, as the gospel proclaims.

This is why Advent invites us to look forward by looking back to God’s promised saviour. In the first reading, Jeremiah reminds us that he will come from David’s line. He will come to do what is right and just in the land so he can secure us and make us safe.

The prophet Isaiah tells us the many names by which we will know this child: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” The evangelist Matthew calls him Emmanuel to remind us that he is indeed God-with-us.

All of us call him simply and truly, Jesus.

In faith, we know Jesus has already come. He has lived amongst us and loved us onto death to save us. In rising from the dead, he has given us his Spirit to live fully in love with God and with neighbour. His story is the history of our salvation. Our salvation is however not complete; it awaits our fulfillment in the here and now, even as we await Jesus’ second coming. 

Today Jesus is calling us to do this in the gospel. We are to be vigilant, to pray, and not to be drowsy from carousing and drunkenness. We are to prepare ourselves to stand before Jesus, not only with confidence but with the honesty of who we are for him to love us in judgment.

And he will judge us not only as God but as one who has lived like us in all ways but sin. One who knows what and how it is to be fully human, fully living, fully loving. One who is truly concerned about us, as only a fellow human being can be—loving what is human and life-giving in each of us, even if our failings, faults, and flaws make us less human in our sinfulness.

All of our Christian life is to prepare us to stand with confidence before him whose face reveals God and mercy that is God’s name. 

Aren’t we blessed that this is the kind of judge we have?

Advent teaches us how to stand in the present as we await Jesus’ coming. We learn to stand now so that we can stand confidently on that day when we have to stand at our judgment. Then, we can stand as we are before Jesus who is our saviour. This is the hope Advent calls us to celebrate. 

To welcome this Jesus is indeed the reason for our Advent preparations.

In the next four weeks, many of us will busy ourselves. We will shop for presents. We will bake our cookies and sweets. The children will trim the Christmas tree with friends and family.  So many of us will even bring Christmas cheer to the lesser among us.

But let us also make these Advent weeks more of a graced time for our spiritual conversion and renewal. A time to right the wrongs in our lives, and to make room – within us and amongst us – for Jesus at Christmas. 

I believe we can do all these if we but let the grace of Advent work in us. This grace that teaches us once again to how we can stand before God daily so that we can better stand before Jesus who is God-with-us at Christmas.

And why would we want to stand before Jesus? Because of what we will see and hear.

We long to look at Jesus’ face to see how he has first gazed upon us and loved us from sin into life. And in doing so, we will know that Jesus has done this through every human face we have encountered. The face of an innocent babe gurgling at us. The weary, anxious faces of the poor thanking us for our help. The tear-streaked faces of sinners we’ve embraced. Even the surprised faces of enemies we’ve forgiven. 

Indeed, Jesus continues to love us through the countless faces we live and work with, we play and pray with, we love and are loved by.

And in Jesus’ countenance, we shall also see the faces of everyone who has been good and kind and gracious to us, and all whom we have done likewise too, looking back at us, and loving us even more too.

Then, if we quietened ourselves as we stand to look at Jesus’ comely face, we might  hear him say, “because you forgave your spouse, you loved your children, you consoled your friend, you uplifted a stranger, you welcome another in need, you reached out to your enemy, you mercifully cared for the least of my sisters and my brothers – you did all these to me.” 

Indeed, his voice, rich in love and tender in mercy, will come from a face like yours and mine. And his words will not fade away: they will simply fill our very being, giving us life, again and again, and empowering us to love selflessly always. This is St Paul’s prayer in the second reading for all who see and know Jesus: “may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all”.

Indeed, how can we not lift up our faces this Advent towards that face of Jesus, Son of Man and beloved Son of God? 

We can with the confidence of being the forgiven, of being of the living God has chosen in love, and of being the blessed who God wants us to look ahead to Jesus, our redemption.

Maybe when we embrace this confidence, we will come to that lowly manger on Christmas morning, and we stand gratefully before the infant Jesus lying in it. Stand to adore Jesus, but, more so, to stand with greater wonder and much more gladness, to say to our God, “Thank you” for Jesus.

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

photo: REUTERS/Stephanie Keith, 7 Jan 2017

Homily: King

Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 34 / Sunday: Solemnity of Christ the King

Readings: Daniel 7.13-14 / Psalm 92. 1ab, 1c-5, 5 (R/v 1a) / Revelations 1.5-8 / John 18.33b-37

Sisters and brothers, I wonder how many of us appreciate the Church’s presentation of Jesus as Christ the King today as we end the liturgical year and before we begin Advent and Christmas.

For many of us, today may be another Christ the King mass like every other year. Followed by another Advent, another Christmas, and another year of feasts and celebrations. The same old, same old. 

I’d like to propose that today’s solemnity is offering us something more for our Christian life. And it has everything to do with how Jesus is King.

We associate many images with kingliness. Opulence and riches, power and might are words we associate with kingliness. Kings are distant, unapproachable, high and mighty, surrounded by flatterers and jesters. They wear too much finery. Their lives have too many trappings and trimmings of grandeur and tradition. Rare is a king who lives and acts otherwise.

Our readings today begin with similar imagery of kingliness. The first reading is filled with grand associations of kingship. Daniel envisions an eternal lord who comes from on high to receive dominion, glory, and kingship. All the peoples, nations and languages serve this king. Our psalm sings of regal splendour. Of a lord and king robed in majesty whose throne is great, immovable and mighty, and whose decrees are worthy of trust. Even the words of the Book of Revelation in our second reading, portray an absolute ruler. He is a faithful witness of God’s lordship and power. This king is “the Alpha and the Omega, the One who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” 

But this king is unlike the kings we know. He comes with love – with love for us and with love to liberate us. He stands before the throne of God not because he is powerful like a lion. He stands because of us; he is the meek lamb sacrificed for our salvation. He is indeed the Lamb of God.  This is a strange king to be sure. 

Indeed, this is how the Passion narrative in John’s Gospel portrays Jesus as king. Here, all our expectations of kingliness turned upside down. Jesus is the king-servant who washes his disciples’ feet. Jesus’ action is strangely kingly, not because it is grand but it is noble, both in his quiet vulnerability but, more so, in the utter truth of his being – kingly in his service to others and in his servitude to God. 

And he calls us to go and do likewise: to go and wash another’s feet. To go and serve, not as an army for war but as friends to accompany him on his mission. This king just invites, trusting in nothing else but our heart’s desire to follow him.

In answering Pilate, Jesus says that his kingdom is not of this world. It is a kingdom not forged by warfare. Rather, it testifies to the truth. It will not kill for the truth. Rather, it will die for it. Jesus modelled this truth: he suffered and died. He did not demand ransom for his freedom, nor win it, by spilling the blood of others. He died for the truth to save all and won for us God’s kingdom by offering himself as a sacrifice – as the Lamb of God.

Many of us today, like Christians in centuries past, struggle with Jesus’ kingship and the kingdom he announces. It is too radical to envision, too difficult to comprehend, too challenging to live out. Maybe many of us express our struggles silently within our hearts like this: “Jesus’ way is too holy; I can’t do as he did; I’m never going to be Christian enough.”

But it is equally true that thousands of Christians throughout history recognized in Jesus a kingliness that summoned nothing less than the loyalty of their free human hearts, however little or much it was. Something was unlocked in them when they encountered Jesus and discovered a “lord of life” who came not to dominate humanity but to save and serve it. For them, Jesus was indeed the king of their lives.

The saints teach us how possible this is: they encountered Jesus as king of their lives; they fell in love with him; they stayed with him to the end, as best as they could. Have we discovered Jesus as the king of our lives?

Jesus is the king St Ignatius of Loyola invites every retreatant to follow in the meditation on “The Call of an Earthly King” in the Spiritual Exercises. In this meditation, Ignatius contrasts Jesus to an earthly king who calls all to join him in conquering all the lands of the infidels. And by doing so, they are to share in both the toil and the victories.

For Ignatius, Jesus is the eternal king whose call to all is not to earthly gain but to the glory of God. He calls each and everyone in a unique way to the enterprise of God’s mission. It will involve labour and there will be suffering. But following Jesus will lead to glory. Only those with a greater love for God will not just hear Jesus’ call; they will follow him, not the earthly king.

Here in this meditation, before the meditations on Advent and Christmas in the Spiritual Exercises, Jesus is asking the retreatant and all of us to join him. He wants to be in union with us. He wants us to enter into his life, as he desires to enter ours. He has come to be with us so that we might be with him. 

Jesus as our king only asks us to love him with the simplicity and earnestness of our desire to want to be together with him, no matter what. 

Today, we are reminded that all Jesus desires as the king is for the union of our hearts – his and ours. Yes, union of hearts. Nothing more, nothing less.

Hasn’t this been Jesus’ message to us throughout this past year? Hasn’t it been constant and faithful in the endless times Jesus has been with us and for us in all these different ways and more: in a family member’s love and forgiveness, a friend’s faithful care, a colleague’s unexpected support, a classmates’ enduring companionship, an acquaintance’s total selflessness, and even a stranger’s painful challenge that made us more Christian?

It is therefore good and right for us to acknowledge today how our thanksgiving in such moments speak of this truth: that our hearts will never outgrow that human longing for such a promised friend and ruler in Jesus.

And if we profess this is true, then we must embrace that growing ache to love selflessly, to give everything away for the greater good ofof all, just like Jesus whom we follow.  This is how Jesus' kingship forms us to live in service for all and to live in servitude to God alone.

Today we are not being asked to appreciate the images of lord and king. Rather, we are to celebrate the kingdom of God that Jesus as Christ the King stirs in all our hearts to bring about. In this kingdom, God’s love abounds and God’s truth reigns. Yes, this kingdom is not of this earth, yet Jesus brings this about by his coming as king. 

We are being invited to ponder such a kingdom today before we imagine the mystery of the Incarnation at Christmas. Yes, Christmas is coming. We are looking ahead to it from a distance in time and from our fragile world of broken promises and broken hearts. We behold sin, our own included, before us. And so we yearn for the manifold glimmers of grace breaking through the darkness on that silent, holy night. 

This is why we must ponder Jesus as king today: so that we can look ahead with sure hope. Yes, Jesus will come as king – king of our lives. Indeed, it is good that today’s celebration of Christ the King reminds us that we will always be ready for Advent.

Inspired by a homily by Fr J Benitez

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

photo: from internet: united church of god