Year C / Ordinary Time / 29th Week / Sunday (to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Sr Linda Lizada's life as a Cenacle Sister)
Readings: Exodus 17.8-13/ Psalm 121. 1-8 (R/v cf 2) / 2 Timothy 3.14 - 4.2 / Luke 18.1-8
Sisters and brothers, why have we come to pray today?
It is Sunday, the day of obligation. But oh happy day this Sunday is. We pray in joyful celebration for the 50th anniversary of Sr Linda’s entrance into the Cenacle as a postulant. We pray in thanksgiving too that on this day in 1946 in Espiritu Santo Church, Manila she was baptised.
Today is Mission Sunday, and so we pray that we may live and serve as Sr Linda does – on mission, proclaiming Jesus because Baptism calls all of us to do this, to fill the world with love.
Such must be our prayer today.
Prayer that ordinarily we petition God for this or that, for more, for better, for ourselves and others. Prayer that is sometimes our complaint and grumble to God. Prayer that is in the best of times our thanksgiving, praise, and reverence to God.
In her poem, “Praying”, the American poet Mary Oliver envisions prayer as “the doorway into…which another voice may speak”.
Indeed, all of us desire to hear God’s voice. Comforting and assuring us; forgiving us and guiding us. And if we dare to hear God’s voice, challenging and correcting us.
But most of all, don’t we really want to hear God’s love for us? “Here I am, Lord”, we cry. “Here, I am too, with you”, says God.
Sometimes, however, and maybe for long periods, we might experience nothing from God. Just utter silence. When this happens, don’t we feel disappointed, frustrated, confused, abandoned?
As tempting as it is to give up on God in these times, we keep on praying. Why?
Today we hear of Moses and the widow persisting in their petitions. Moses petitions God for Israel’s victory over the Amalekites. The widow petitions a corrupt judge for a just ruling against an opponent.
What about you and me: do we persist and persevere in prayer, do we stay the course, trusting that God will answer our petitions and guide us to do the Christian mission?
I believe we do because we keep trying our best to do this well.
Doing this over time brings us into that graced awareness that persisting in prayer is about God and us becoming one. About the two of us persevering for that faithful loving and faith-filled living together.
We all recognise this reality in Linda’s life and ministry, especially in how she embodies it as a woman of prayer.
Hasn’t she in turn gifted so many of us to embody this kind of loving and living in prayerful faithfulness with the Lord? We who are here, we are the answer: her fellow Cenacle sisters and affiliates, her directees and retreatants, friends, all she has ministered to.
Saint Thérèse Couderc the founder of the Cenacles wrote, “when one belongs to the good God, it is not right to belong half-way”. All or nothing.
Isn’t this why we really pray: to belong to God totally?
What enables us to do this as we persevere in prayer? Moses raising his hands gives us a possible answer.
Toddlers raise their hands often. They do this to get attention or to be cared for. This is a hope-filled stance: that mommy will cradle her in an embrace, and daddy will make time for him.
With his hands held up, Moses is like a little child. He opens himself to God and trusts that God will provide. Trusting, even if one doesn’t hear God’s voice or feel God’s presence.
St Thérèse of Lisieux has a wonderful story about child-like trust in God.
A child is at the parade with her father. A crowd surrounds her. They block her view. She hears the parade going by: the marching steps; the band’s rousing music; the cheers and hurrahs of the crowds. She wants to see is the parade. She has her arms up in giggly, gleeful expectation.
Without needing to be asked, her father picks her up, lifts her up with one swoop onto his shoulders, and there, way up high on his shoulders, she delights in the parade.
We all need to have this child’s trust when we pray to God. It empowers us to hope as we persevere.
Indeed, every time we pray, especially when God seems silent, we metaphorically raise our arms and open our hands. This isn’t about giving up. Rather, it echoes Moses with his hands up: it is about praying with trust in God.
Does God respond? Yes, though, not always how we want. Ask and you will receive.
I imagine the baby Linda at Baptism, gurgling, her open hands lifted up. Her parents’ hands are opened to lift her over the baptismal fount. All their hands opened asking the Lord for faith.
Opened hands. Opened palms. Bukas palad. They opened their hands to ask and to receive God’s blessings to begin his good work in Sr Linda
What the parents asked for, we have received as a Cenacle sister for us.
God formed Sr Linda as a religious in the US, and nurtured her for ministry, service and even leadership in the Philippines and Rome.
Then in 1983, God began sending her to us in Singapore. To train priests and religious to become spiritual directors. This effort gave birth to the Life Direction Team. She kept coming to conduct ongoing training for them. Finally, in 2011, God missioned her to live and work amongst us.
If you have prayed for good, holy, selfless religious to come, live and care for us, then Sr Linda’s coming answered your prayer. You trusted God.
Such trust makes us resilient. And we need resilience to do God’s mission, and, more so, to make it home to God.
The world tells us that trust in God is foolhardiness. We don’t need it. For Christians, this foolhardiness is graced; it allows us to persevere in prayer and do God’s mission.
Don’t call it foolhardiness then; call it holy boldness. Every time we keep praying and trusting, trusting and praying to God, we grow in holy boldness.
We will because the Holy Spirit transforms our limited faith into the likeness of Jesus’ unfailing faith in God and his selfless love for the mission. This is what Holy Spirit did in the Cenacle at Pentecost.
Such holy boldness I believe gave Sr Linda the courage to say ‘yes’ when she entered the Cenacle Sisters and eventually pronounced vows, ‘yes’ as she persevered as a religious, and ‘yes’ to different works in varied places she was missioned to.
This holy boldness in prayer reveals this human truth: we are limited; we need God. We pray so that we can be with God, allow God to labor for our good, and let God lead us on the mission.
It is right then that we join the psalmist to sing, “Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth”.
Only trust can empower us to sing that refrain, and, more so, to make it real in our lives. Trust that dares us to believe God’s sure help is the hope Jesus reveals on Cross: never death; always salvation.
Paul’s advice to Timothy we hear today is really meant for us: “You must keep to what you have been taught and know to be true” that we are saved “through faith in Christ Jesus”. His counsel should tilt us into prayer and into God.
Titling towards God: this is the orientation of Sr Linda’s whole life. It is an orientation that she keeps inviting us have too.
This orientation reveals our human heart’s deepest desire. Linda knows it so well and so true to say ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ repeatedly to the Lord.
And it is simply this: that what matters most when we persevere in prayer – as in all of life – is not that we hold God within ourselves, but that we strive to hold ourselves in God.
Such orientation is nothing less than surrendering ourselves to God. A surrender that Saint Thérèse Couderc knows will us lead to true happiness as she describes thus: “It is not about abandoning or devoting ourselves to God. Rather is to die to everything and to self. It means that my concern with self is to keep it always turned toward God.”
Such turning toward God allows us always to delight in his divine providence.
Sr Linda, you have done this with faithfulness, generosity and joy for fifty years. You have helped many of us to do this too, and we are grateful. And so we say: “Napakahusay ang nagawa ng aming mahal na si Sr Linda!”
And so it is right and good that we join you to give thanks for all the Lord has done for you and through you – doing this for no other reason than his love desiring to delight in you always.
Amen.
Preached at St Francis of Assisi Church, Singapore
photo: Internet
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