1. Year C / Ordinary Time / Week 17/ Sunday
    Readings: Genesis 18.20-32 / Ps 137.1-2, 2-3, 6-7, 7-8  (R/v 3a) / Colossians 2.12-14 / Luke 11.1-13


    Sisters and brothers, how important is prayer in your life? 

    Many of us pray because we need God’s help. We do because we are often anxious about many things, including God’s approval. We hope to receive God’s care and goodness. So, it’s easy to identify with the refrain in today’s responsorial psalm:  “Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me”. 

    For Jesus, prayer is at the heart of his relationship with God. Throughout the Gospels, we hear of Jesus praying, of his teachings about prayer, and of him calling his followers to pray. 

    I believe prayer is the way Jesus relates to God and how he deepens this relationship. He shows us that prayer is first about getting to know God and growing in relationship with God. Is this how we pray – to first know God and grow in relationship with God?

    Genuine prayer is always God’s work: God draws us into prayer and labors to help us make our prayer. Our role is to cooperate with God.

    What kind of a God should we expect to meet in prayer? Today’s readings provide us with three glimpses into who God is and what God does.

    First, God is tender. In our gospel reading, Jesus speaks about God who is in heaven, and also about God who wants to be very near to every person. “Father, may your name be held holy, your kingdom come, give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our sins”. Here, Jesus reminds us that God wants to be involved in our lives by being with us daily to feed us and forgives us.

    Second, God is merciful. Our first reading is about Abraham interceding for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. God wants to punish these cities because of the wicked among them. He bargains with God to spare them because of the righteous few, even if it is only ten. Mercy, Abraham reminds God, is just when it saves every individual. God hears this, relents and does not destroy. Here is God caring to save in mercy.

    Third, God is providential. In our Responsorial Psalm, the psalmist sings of how God fulfills God’s saving purpose in his life. His song invites Israel, and all of us, to trust in God. We can by having faith that God’s singular purpose is to redeem us to be with God. Here is God whose goodness and providence is never-ending and always for our salvation.

    God is tender. God is merciful. God is providential. Our readings remind us of these three facets of the one, true God we pray to, like Jesus did to God while he was on earth.

    In the gospel, Jesus teaches us to pray: “Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us, and do not subject us to the final test”. What gives you and me the confidence to pray like this? Simply this: that God already has a relationship with us, even if we think we are unworthy of this.

    This is why Jesus teaches us to call God, Abba in our prayers. Abba: that intimate word of the relationship between child and father. 

    Such intimacy and relationship are also how he brings to Abba God the people he prays for – his disciples, the people he ministered to, the people he encountered, the people in need, and yes, us too. He brings all to Abba God who created each of us by our name. Why? Because Abba God wants to answer the prayers of each individual because we are unique and special, each of us with our own particular pains and joys, our particular regrets and hopes. 

    No matter our state of grace, Abba God cares for every single human person. Abraham could change God’s mind about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah because he appealed to God’s concern for each one’s salvation.

    Such action is scandalous. Scandalous because God’s way of loving saves every person. Scandalous because he challenges us who think that God only saves those who are dutiful Christians, religiously obedient, morally upright, pious and devotional. This scandalous love of God then saves us; it makes us stumble in our self-righteousness and self-arrogance that we are the chosen and saved. It, therefore, keeps us humble before God who loves and bighearted to others to serve.

    For the Christian writer Nora Gallagher, this scandal is expressed best in how the all-powerful and almighty God stoops down to be with each one of us in the mundane details of our own everyday lives to save us. God acts like this to save all, no matter whether we are Christian by faith or unchristian in our deeds as the baptized.*  

    Haven’t you and I experienced this scandal of God loving and saving us in prayer? In prayer, when God loves us still in our unworthiness, God’s mercy forgives still in our sinfulness, and God’s life is poured out still in our despair? 

    Yes, it would do us good to pray: when we do will encounter our loving God who wants to save us. 

    All too often, our prayer is noisy: we talk too much to God. We need to shut up and be silent. Then, we can prayerfully listen to God. What would we hear?  God telling us he wants us to be better and happier by living more like Jesus.

    Perhaps, the right disposition to pray in silence is that of a child resting on her father’s chest, secure in his embrace. Her eyes are closed. She is still. She breathes in tandem with her father. She hears his breath. She feels his heartbeat. It reassures. It gives hope. It tells all is well and her life can go on. Only by being in silence and resting in silence can she experience these. 

    Maybe, this is why we all ache to be held intimately by God in the silence of prayer. We want to experience what we once had when we were children when our parents' love embraced us. To hear words of care by our fathers speaking their concern. To listen to words of love by our mothers singing their heartfelt lullabies. 

    Love. Forgiveness. Hope. Delight. Don’t we strain to hear these words too from God in our prayerful silence? Words to live as better Christians each day?

    I want you to know that we can experience all this in prayer because God is already having a relationship with us. This relationship draws us into prayer, and, more so, into the steady deepening of our relationship with God and one another.

    God’s relationship with us then always consoles. In prayer, this relationship allows us to hear God’s life-giving words to live. 

    This is why Jesus teaches his disciples and us today that prayer can empower us to keep on seeking God, to keep on asking to receive love from God, and to keep on knocking to enter into God’s life. 

    To pray like this is to pray with hope. This is how you and I can meet no other than God in our prayer — Abba God whose only desire is to give us, his children, so much more than we can ever imagine whenever we pray.




    * Nora Gallagher, "The Scandal of the Particular", guest essay for Trinity Church, Santa Barbara, CA.


    Preached at Church of the Transfiguration
    photo: www.crosswalk.com 
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  2. Year C / Ordinary Time / Week 16 / Sunday
    Readings: Genesis 18.1-10a / Ps 14.2-3ab, 3cd-4ab, 5 (R/v 1a) / Colossians 1.24-28 / Luke 10.38-42


    Sisters and brothers, have heard the saying ‘know thyself’?

    When I was studying philosophy, our professors challenged us to answer questions like “Who are you?”, “Where did you come from?”, “Where are you headed to?”, “What is your life for?” They taught us that only an honest reflection on ourselves can help us answer the questions satisfactorily.

    Today’s gospel reading is challenging us to do the same. To know ourselves. To know ourselves as Christians.

    We are familiar with the account of Jesus visiting Mary and Martha. Much has been said and written about it. 

    Martha is the doer. She is concerned about being the “proper host”. She is the busy, active worker, caring to get things done well for their guest.  Mary is the contemplative. She is concerned about being with Jesus. She is the welcoming host, sitting to listen to their guest.  

    All too often, this contrast leads us to value Mary and chastise Martha. 

    Mary is the model of the spiritual Christian. Her way of relating to Jesus is exemplary. She has chosen the better part, Jesus says. Martha is a model of worldly distraction. Her worries and concerns take her away from Jesus. She has forgotten the better part, the one thing needed, Jesus says. 

    Such an interpretation is too simplistic. It forgets that you and I have a bit of Mary and a bit of Martha in the ways we live our Christian lives.

    Aren’t we Mary-like whenever we desire to be with Jesus and listen to his teaching? Don’t we do this when we pray or come to Mass? 

    But aren’t we also Martha-like whenever we busy ourselves to serve like Jesus, and always preoccupied with the right thing by striving to care for the needy, build up the parish community and live the commandments well?

    Indeed, the Christian life is about being contemplative as it is about serving actively. And it is in the Lord’s presence that we do both these actions. Life with Jesus is, therefore, more honestly and often a both/and kind of life. We are like Mary as we are like Martha. Our lives are never either/or one of these ways. 

    What matters as we live our Christian life is to do the best we can, to the fullest of our abilities and with spiritual zeal. To live like this, we must know ourselves, and our purpose. 

    This is why Jesus points out that Mary has ‘chosen the better part’. Martha’s way – which I think many of us identify with – is not innately bad. Jesus does not condemn her. It is just that Mary’s way is better! 

    How so? Let me answer this by way of this short reflection Herman Melville writes on self-awareness. It is from this scene in the novel, Moby Dick. 

    Captain Ahab is leading his men out to catch and harpoon the Great White whale, Moby Dick. They row their whaleboat through rough seas and winds. Ahab's sailors are laboring fiercely, rowing the oars. He shouts and encourages, he threatens and berates them to row faster and faster to chase the whale.

    Amidst all the crashing and cursing in this scene, there sits one man in the front of the boat doing nothing. He is just sitting there. He holds no oar no matter how much the captain yells. Neither does he pitch in to help no matter how much the rowers are exhausted.  He remains completely silent, still and alone.  This man is the harpooner. He is quiet, poised, waiting.  

    Then, Melville writes this sentence: “To ensure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must rise to their feet out of idleness, and not out of toil.” 

    What a great insight. It helps us to understand the saying ‘know thyself’.  This harpooner knows who he is, what he must do and when to do it. He knows the essential action that is his mission.  He does not get entangled in anything that can distract from accomplishing the mission. This is why he sits, waits, and prepares himself. Indeed, it is this sitting, waiting, preparing that allows him to rise at the right time, harpoon the whale with a single throw and do all that he must thereafter.

    Mary and the harpooner are alike: they know themselves and what they have to do.  

    This is why Jesus says Mary has chosen the better part. She knows what she must do with Jesus who has come to her — simply this: be with him. This is how she lets him save her.  What about us? Are we doing the same?

    Maybe you and I are more like Martha. We can easily miss Jesus in our midst because our busyness to welcome him sometimes makes us lazy. Too lazy to choose the better part at the right time. Lazy because we’ve become too familiar with how we want to relate to Jesus. Lazy because we might even be too smug to honestly re-consider how we ought to relate to Jesus each time. Yes, just to lazy to meet Jesus on his own terms at his chosen place for us to meet.

    The better part Mary chooses is to tend to Jesus and his word. Hers is that humble act of waiting on another like a waiter does at a café. 

    We glimpse this image of waiting on another in our first reading. The story of the three angels at the Oak of Mamre is about God inviting Abraham and Sarah to wait on God. It is only by waiting on God’s angels, serving them with food, drink, and hospitality that they discover how God is, in fact, waiting on them: God has come to Sarah and Abraham with the gift of pregnancy and new life to come. 

    Indeed, to wait on God who waits on us is what Christian hospitality entails: this is what serving another is all about. This is why Jesus says, “Mary has chosen the better part”: she welcomes God in Jesus who comes to be with her and save her. Know thyself. Yes, Mary knows herself and what she must do in Jesus’ presence.

    Here we are, you and I, coming into Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist. I don’t believe we are here on our own accord. We are here because Jesus calls us. He draws us to be with him. 

    Here, some of us are focussed on Jesus. Some are distracted by earthly concerns. Some others may be physically present but our hearts are elsewhere. However we are present now, we are here. Jesus has called, and we have come. 

    Jesus has moved our hearts to come from places where we may be “worried and distracted by many things” to this holy space, this sacred time. Here Jesus is not waiting for us to come as much as he desires to serve us, to nourish us, to wait on us. 

    Here he will let you and I will touch the one thing we all need in Communion. The one that will not be taken away from us. That better part that allows us to receive God’s peace and God’s life into all our undertakings. That one and better who is Jesus himself.

    Will you and I let go, like Mary, and let ourselves enter more fully into Jesus in the Eucharist? If we do, we give God permission to do to us what he will – that in receiving Jesus we together become the Body of Christ that God himself will send forth at the end of Mass to serve and care for others, to wait on them as Jesus does to us here. Can we let God do this to us? 

    I think we can. We can because here in Jesus’ presence, we will know ourselves as God knows us: beloved. And wouldn’t you agree that this is God’s very good identity of who you and I always are – his own?




    The reading of Moby Dick is drawn from Kylie Childress, Knowing the One Thing

    Preached at St Ignatius Parish, Singapore
    photo: still from mumford & sons' video “Beloved” by charlotte regan 

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  3. Year C / Ordinary Time  / Week 15 / Sunday
    Readings: Deuteronomy 30.10-14 / Ps 68.14, 17, 30-31, 33-34, 36 and 37,  (R/v cf 33) / Colossians 1.15-20 / Luke 10.25-27

    Sisters and brothers, how do we make sense of God who we believe in yet cannot see? 

    I think Christians from the earliest times struggled to answer this question. Even with all the advancements today, many of us, myself included, are still trying to make sense of the mystery God is.

    St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians gives us a way to begin making sense. After Jesus’ death, the early Christians tried to work out what they should and should not say about Jesus.  In this letter, Paul expresses, in a poetic way, who Jesus Christ is for him.  

    Jesus is both human and divine: “He is the image of the invisible God”.  Jesus himself tells us so: “To see me is to see the Father”. In all the stories we read of Jesus Christ throughout the gospels, something of God is revealed to us.  

    How did Jesus do this while on earth? In what he said and did, he revealed God’s love and faithfulness for us. In how he prayed, forgave and healed, he revealed God’s mercy and compassion.  In how he attended to all, especially, the lesser and the least, he revealed God’s closeness and care. In everything, Jesus made God visible, present, and alive. Isn’t this why the Advent readings direct us to look out for the one called God-with-us – Jesus?

    If this is how Jesus lived and served, interacted with many and cared for them, prayed and played, what about you and me who bear the name ‘Christian’ and follow Jesus? Do our lives imitate Jesus and so reveal God to each other? 

    Today is Bible Awareness Sunday. This is an occasion to remember that we should read our Bibles more often, enthrone our Bibles more prominently at home, make the Bible more a part of our lives, and use the Bible as the foundation of our prayer. 

    I want to challenge all of us, you and me, to consider how the Bible cannot just be for us to read, pray or display. It is also for us to take God’s Word that the Bible announces more seriously – to take it to heart, make it our own, and so live our lives as God wishes. Bible Awareness Sunday, I want to suggest, invites us to open our hearts even more to the power of the Bible to transform us and make us more like Jesus.

    This is why I am convinced our gospel reading today is providential. Here is Jesus teaching us not just to do the right thing – to care for another who is wounded and in need of care – but to do the right thing by living out our faith fully, like the Samaritan did.  

    Jesus tells this story to challenge us to embody what we believe in our lives – that God’s love and life, God’s mercy and compassion are true, good and beautiful because this is who God is and what God does.

    “Who is my neighbour?” The lawyer asked Jesus this question. I suspect we also ask this question of ourselves often. When we argue with our spouse or with our parents. When we disagree with our classmate or are angry with our bosses. When a friend or stranger asks for help. When the old, blind tissue aunty approaches or the dark skinned, foreign-speaking construction workers come too close. When we are asked to give to the homeless, the refugees, the imprisoned overseas. When the divorced or the homosexual come to church. 

    Yes, who really is my neighbour? More importantly, what should I do for him, for her, for them?

    Jesus teaches us throughout the gospels that God calls each and every one of our neighbours to salvation and to a place in his kingdom. He does this by giving us two lessons to live our Christian life better. First, that God gives everyone the same dignity as we have – all are made in the image and likeness of God.  Second, that everything God has, including Jesus his son, God gives to all, including salvation. God does not deny anyone God’s goodness. 

    No matter how different we are in race, language or religion, in education or fortune, in sexual orientation or health, we are all God’s own. In truth, God created us to be neighbours for each other.

    “Who is my neighbour?” Jesus helps the lawyer to realise that it is the Samaritan. He is the neighbour. The one who serves another in need.  He is the good neighbour.  This is an important lesson: unless we recognise that we too are neighbours to someone else, we cannot really know and help those around us.

    Today Jesus is challenging us to be good neigbours by embodying our faith for someone else. Embody it in deeds, more than in words. Jesus shows us how the Samaritan does this in four actions he makes as the good neighbour.

    First, the Samaritan acts out of compassion for the other. He does not just see a victim; he recognizes a human person. The priest and Levite see the victim’s bloody body as a source of ritual impurity that would make them unclean. The Samaritan sees more than the wounds. He sees the violence against the man’s dignity. And so he helps. Are we compassionate enough to help another whose dignity is put down?

    Second, the Samaritan attends to the victim’s right to live. By cleaning the wounds and caring for the victim, the Samaritan reminds us to be pro-life. Pro-life is not only about safeguarding the unborn. It is about protecting and caring for all to have life to the full, whether it be in war or justice, against euthanasia, or even bullying. How often do we attend to others ask who want to live fully and ask for our help?

    Third, the Samaritan acts justly to lift the victim out of his pain and suffering and restore him to life. Christians are called to justice, that is, to challenge persons, systems and cultures that victimize and oppress. They are to free people from injustices and exploitation and to restore all to life. Do we act justly to give life to others?

    Fourth, the Samaritan invites another, the innkeeper, to do what he does for the victim. Together they care for the injured man better. Christians are called to care for those in need as a community, never alone only. Jesus modeled the way: he sent his disciples in pairs and the apostles as a community to continue his mission. Can we invite others to care for the needy with us? 

    Be compassionate. Attend to those in need. Act justly. Care together. The Samaritan cares for another in need in these four ways. Together they make real in his life that God is compassionate, attentive, just and caring. Together, through his actions. God is real and alive for another. 

    Jesus tells this story because he wants us to be Samaritans too. To put into action what we believe about God – that God is love and that God loves. This is the best way to make sense of what we believe – not teachings or rules, not spirituality or theology, but God.

    Isn’t this how Jesus himself lived and loved to be the true and living image of the invisible God in our midst?  He embodied God’s love and life, God’s mercy and compassion when interacting with many, when caring for all and when dying on the Cross for the whole world and for you and me.  

    If we say we are Christian and we follow Jesus, should we not go and do as Jesus did: embody God's love in our lives for all?



    Preached at Church of the Transfiguration, Singapore
    photo from the guardian (photographer: karam al-masri)

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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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