bukas palad: October 2019

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

Year C / Ordinary Time / Week 27 / Sunday

Readings: Habakkuk 1.2-3;2.2-4 / Psalm 94. 1-2, 6-7, 8-9 (R/v 8) / 2 Timothy 1.6-8, 13-14 / Luke 17.5-10

Sisters and brothers, you have heard the Nike slogan, ‘Just do it!’

Can we ever ‘just do it!’ when it comes to our faith? What does this mean? Should we?

I wonder if it’s like parents teaching their children to ride a bicycle. They begin teaching them to ride on tricycles, with two smaller supporting wheels. In time, they’d graduate them to cycle on only two wheels.

I wonder if it is like this: parents having faith in their children to just do it – to just make that first solo ride after weeks of teaching, supporting, encouraging them that they can indeed ride the bicycle.

Might this be the case when Daddy seats his child down, fixes the safety helmet, gives him a short pep talk to assure the little one, then sends him off with that loud, encouraging shout, “1,2,3, Go! Just ride, buddy. Just do it!”

"Just do it”. Maybe this phrase can help us better appreciate Jesus’ message today. It is about the purpose of faith and the role of duty in their lives.

"Increase our faith," the apostles ask Jesus in today’s gospel. The apostles ask this because they want to live out his teachings well. Teachings like: change your hearts or perish; love God and neighbour; focus on the spirit of the law; put God first before everything including family and self; forgive enemies; share your wealth with all; seek out the lost; lead no one into sin; believe God is good. These are challenging lessons to live. It’s no wonder they ask for more faith.

We know these teachings of Jesus. We read about them. We hear them proclaimed. We pray with them. Like the apostles, we want to live as better Christians. It’s logical for us to also ask Jesus, “increase my faith”.

Jesus would reply to us as he did to his apostles: Were your faith the size of a mustard seed, you would already have the power to perform tremendous feats.

His reply is enlightening: the faith we have is good enough to live as he teaches us to.

The operative word here is “were”. By definition “were” is the simple past tense of the verb “be”, which has to do with the temporary or permanent quality someone has.

When Jesus uses the phrase “were your faith”, he is referring to the faith they already have. He is not questioning the quantity of faith each has or scolding them for a total lack of it. Rather, Jesus recognizes that the disciples’ faith, however minuscule, is good enough to empower them to live out his teachings if only they would use it.

Jesus wants us to also use our faith – no matter how much we have of it – to live in his ways. What’s the best way to do this?

By living it fully. Christian discipleship is about witnessing actively to God’s love in the world as Jesus proclaimed it. Words will not accomplish this mission. What will is action – our self-sacrificing deeds of loving God and loving neighbour, particularly, those in need.

Faith is more than just being in right relationship with God. It is also to help us be in right relationship with one another, and together, for us all to be with God. This is how St Teresa of Calcutta expresses this: “Faith in action is love, and love in action is service. By transforming that faith into living acts of love, we put ourselves in contact with God Himself, with Jesus our Lord.”

Faith is, therefore, the necessary fuel for Christians to enact in service God’s mission and accomplish it with Jesus’ love.

Do we have such faith to do this? In this gospel, Jesus tells us that we already have the faith needed to live in his ways and to carry on God’s mission.

We already have such faith; God gave it to us in baptism. Which is more important? To ask for more faith or to practise the faith we already have so as to nurture and grow it? It matters that we practise our faith. We need to use our faith, or we will lose it.

Jesus teaches us how to do this as the gospel ends. He describes a servant dutifully attending to all his master’s needs, accomplishing them before his own, with no regard to being thanked.

This example is instructive; Jesus is reminding us that our faith increases when we obey what God commands of us.

How do we measure this kind of faith? By measuring one’s faithfulness; the servant continues serving as his master commands.

Today, Jesus our Master is calling us to live our Christian lives in the same way: always serving God and all peoples, and when the task is done, to say, “we are merely servants: we have done no more than our duty.”

The faithful disciple of Jesus is therefore never finished serving. Is this me?

The faith of a disciple who serves never finishes increasing. It will lead him, as the prophet Habakkuk shows us in the First Reading, to the fullness of life. Do I believe this?

We are here because we all want to say “yes” to follow Jesus' call and grow in our Christian faith.

But we struggle, repeatedly, because we want discipleship on our own terms and sometimes for our own wants. Today’s world encourages such actions because individualism and individual rights are what matters, not God nor the common good.

In contrast, the early believers understood that to live the Christian faith is to live in Jesus’ way: dutifully serving all in community and dutifully serving God always. The Christian disciple cannot ever say, “I’m done serving; now I want to be served”.

May be their example of living a lifetime of Christ-like service scares us. But isn’t Jesus expecting this of us too, especially if we want our faith to increase?

God is good. God provides many opportunities in daily life for us to live our faith through service and multiply it. Every time we put our faith in Jesus and serve as he taught us to — by caring and sharing, by forgiving and reconciling, by healing and restoring, by uniting, not dividing, by proclaiming the truth, not lying, by believing and hoping, not despairing — we simply live and love better as Jesus did. Haven’t you and I notice that this is how doing this transforms us and multiplies our faith?

Practicing faith like this is making it come alive in us and the world. This is why the faith we already have — however much or however little it is — is truly good enough for God to grow in us. Paul makes this point in the second reading: with the Spirit’s help, we can fan the gift of faith into a flame that witnesses to God.

Indeed, we have every reason to love the faith we have: it is Jesus’ faith alive in us.

Let us heed the wisdom in today’s psalm: “O that today we would listen to God’s voice! Hardened not our hearts”. For every opportunity in our life to serve others is God’s time and way to increase our faith. So let us cooperate with God who desires to grow our faith.

Grow. Growing. Growing up.

This is how the little ones learn to make their first solo bicycle ride, and thereafter every bicycle ride on their own to go fast, to go far. They might fall and scrape their knees but they get up, ride again and grow stronger and better.

We too can have this same confidence to live our faith through the lives of service we can live in Jesus' way.

This is why we must do better than just ask for more faith. We must practice, practice, practice our faith more. Practice it often and practice it well. Then we can say with Paul as our lives end: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” ( 2 Timothy 4.7).

Today God is urging us to grow our faith. God is encouraging us; he says, “1,2,3, Go!” ‘Just do it!’” Shall we?

Preached at Christ the King, Singapore

photo: www.northstar.church

bukas palad

with open hands, we give what we have first received. and with open hands, we receive what we will divest, once again. this is blessing itself: the giving and receiving of life and love, the sharing of faith and God.

Homily: Lifted Up

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Homily: 'Just Do It'

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